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Serah came out of the house carrying a big bag I knew would be packed with plenty of food and changes of clothes to last him the journey. I knew better than to think there’d be anything for me in that bag. She handed it up to him, and the two just exchanged a stiff, stern-faced stare before she backed away and crossed her arms. Her cold eyes flicked to me, her face looking sharper and angrier than usual. Sometimes I got the feeling she blamed me for my own existence, or that she was jealous of any attention Ulric gave me that didn’t involve punishing me for something.
I tried to ignore them. Nothing good would happen if I said anything back, and I didn’t have much of an ego left to defend anyway.
It was a huge, circular room with a dirt floor and a domed ceiling made out of solid steel with big iron cross beams. It had to be at least thirty—maybe even forty—feet tall, lit by torches that filled the room with golden light. I’d never seen a room so big before, and my mouth was hanging open long before I even saw the dragon. He saw me at the same time, and our eyes locked from across the wide arena floor.
“Let’s make a deal, all right? I don’t want to keep living with my father for the rest of my life, and I definitely don’t want to go to a prison camp. I want my life to mean something. And I’m pretty sure you don’t want them to cut your wings so you can’t fly anymore. You want them to let you go, but they’ll force you to stay here one way or another. Alone, neither of us can do anything to change the way things are going for us. But together, we could change both our destinies.” I was standing so close to him, I could smell the musk of his breath. I could feel it, too, hot and humid against my
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A familiar thundering growl made me look back over my shoulder just in time to scramble out of the way as my dragon swooped in low to land. He cupped his leathery wings, and only missed crushing me by a few feet as he touched down. He let out a deep bellowing roar. Under the shining light of the morning sun, he was even more fierce and beautiful than he had been the night before. His blue scales gleamed, and his black horns shone like volcanic glass. “Try not to kill me before we even get started,” I grumbled, turning away to continue on toward the armories.
“Hey,” another, strangely familiar voice spoke up from within the crowd. I watched the other students step aside, making way for the boy who’d stolen bites of my lunch earlier. He was coming straight for us with a canvas bag slung over his shoulder. “I’ll switch with you,” he said “I’ll room with the halfbreed.” My mouth fell open. “Well if it isn’t the local celebrity, Felix Farrow. Come to see how the other half lives?”
“For today, I’ll be taking you up one at a time for a demonstrational ride, then you can get to running those laps. It’d be in your best interest to get over your air sickness now, so you aren’t throwing up on your first day of formal aerial maneuvers.” Sile went on, curling a finger at me to call me forward. “You’re up first, Jaevid.” I didn’t want to go anywhere near him, the saddle, or the snarling white dragon that was swishing her long tail.
“Alowin,”
Getting Mavrik into the saddle was a spectacle. We even had an audience. A few other riders and students started to gather around to watch me trying to put a saddle on my wild dragon. It wasn’t a very big saddle, because I wasn’t a very big person, and I could carry it fairly easily. But when Mavrik saw it, he hissed at me where he was crouched on his belly. He made angry chattering noises, swishing his long tail, and tracking my movements with his bright yellow eyes as I lugged the saddle over toward him. “Come on, it’s not that bad.” I grumbled. He snorted, sending a blast of hot air into my
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“Well, do you like it?” she asked me frankly. “Like what?” “Being a dragonrider?” she asked again. I nodded. Just thinking about it made my heart beat faster. “Yeah. I love it.” She shrugged a little. “Then nothing else matters. Who cares about fitting in with them? If it’s something you really care about, then it shouldn’t matter what anyone else thinks.”
“Jaevid?!” Felix was yelling at me. “Are you nuts? Get down from there!” Beckah was yelling at me too, but I tuned them both out. I closed my eyes, and let my mind go quiet for a moment. I felt a strange sensation in my chest, like pressure, and a tingling of heat in the back of my mind. Then it was my turn to yell, and I screamed as loudly as I could. “Mavrik! I need you!” At first, nothing happened. I started to feel like a real idiot, standing out there on that ledge, yelling for a dragon that couldn’t hear me. Minutes went by, and I started to give up. Then I heard him roar.
“So you’re just fighting for the sake of having a job? Or so you won’t have to go to a prison camp?” His brows were furrowed, and he was frowning at me hard. “No that’s not the reason,” I corrected. “Well, maybe it is a reason, but it’s not the main reason.” “Then what is?” I looked at Felix squarely in the eye. “I’m going to fight for you. You said it yourself, that we’re in this together. We’re partners, right? So I’ll fight to watch your back. It’s the same reason I’m out here trying to save Sile. There aren’t very many people in the world who care what happens to me. You, Sile, Beckah,
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The minute I saw it, I felt like I couldn’t move. It was splattered in burning oil from the jug, and I got this eerie feeling that the stone was looking back at me. My whole body got cold. My hair stood on end. I felt short of breath, and suddenly that pressure in my chest became so intense that it hurt. My head started burning again. But I couldn’t look away. I was caught up in staring at the stone, feeling like I was drowning under its pale green surface.
“Don’t come down here, Mavrik.” I told him. I knew he would hear, and he’d be furious that I was refusing his help again. “We can’t let Beckah get hurt. If you bring her down here, she would be killed with the rest of us. I can’t let that happen, so don’t land. It’s all right.” Then something strange happened, something that had never happened before. Mavrik answered me. It wasn’t with words. I saw a flash of images in my mind, like a dream only I wasn’t sleeping.
Felix and I exchanged a meaningful glance. We both knew Icarus hadn’t really gone mad. I had been the one encouraging the king drake to rebel, although eating the Lord General was entirely the dragon’s idea.
“Bravery is not an immunity to fear, it is rising up to meet it with the hope that nothing is impossible.”
