Dragon Master (16 page)

Even though we were just looking at each other, and even though I had no idea what she was thinking, I still relished the moment. Her hair was glowing a reddish color in the sunlight, and those keen eyes of hers carried such intensity and they were focused entirely on me. I didn’t know how she felt, but I felt all the more certain that I was falling in love. I felt a squeezing sensation in my chest; it was almost painful, but it was also entirely welcome. If I could spend another hour, or a whole day, just standing in silence looking at her as she looked at me, feeling what I was feeling, I would take it.

I heard the door open behind me, saw Daija look up over my head, watched her expression change. Though from what and to what I still didn’t know. There was so much I wanted to learn, and to know about her.

“Boe says they need to tell the rest of the town what he was telling us,” Verrill said to Daija. He rested a hand on my shoulder. “Come on, I’ll go round everyone up for you.”

I wanted to stay, I wanted Verrill and Boe to leave, for the two of us to just be alone like we were. But I knew that I was supposed to stand there with Boe, holding the flag pole, telling parts of the story myself. That the testimony of the two of us would be stronger than his alone, and the colors of Rægena would add additional weight to what we were telling them. But the whole thing seemed useless—nobody believed there was a threat anyway so why did we need to convince them that they were right? That their assumptions were all correct? I sighed and raised my hand in goodbye to Daija before leaving the kitchen. She just watched me go.

***

Daija didn’t show up to hear us tell the town our story. But Laciann did, and I could tell that she was excited to see us. Well, she was excited to see Boe at least. Daija’s mother stood with Verrill and listened to us talk. She seemed to be genuinely concerned whenever we reached parts of the story where Boe was in any danger, even though he was standing in front of her and obviously okay. I just tried to rush through it, and was glad when it was done.

Afterwards, we returned to the Valora’s house. Daija wasn’t around, though Laciann dragged her home when she showed up a short time later. Laciann had changed into a new outfit, very frilly and very yellow.

“Hi Caedan!” she said, brightly. Then, “Hello Boe, welcome home!”

We both rose off the long bench where we were sitting, and I shook Laciann’s hand and Boe gave her a brief hug. She blushed when he touched her. I looked at Daija for some of that commiseration that we’d shared back at the festival, but she was looking intently into the dancing flames in the fireplace. I could watch the reflection of those flames in her eyes forever. They were the prettiest eyes I’d ever seen.

Boe’s parents retreated to their back porch and left the four of us in the common room.

“Your eyes look really pretty tonight,” I said to Daija, just to say something. Laciann tittered and wrapped her arm around Boe’s hand, and then just smiled when I shot her a look. Daija closed her eyes for a moment, then fixed me with her searching gaze. I smiled and shrugged. “Well, they do. I mean, they always do. Not just tonight.”

“My eyes look pretty?” Daija asked, but she wasn’t really asking. “Caedan,” she said but then she didn’t say whatever she was going to say next. Instead she just exhaled sharply then suggested that we all take seats around the fire and warm ourselves.

I sat by the fireplace and Daija sat next to me. Boe and then Laciann completed the little semicircle.

“Your eyes look beautiful tonight too,” Laciann teased Boe, “I guess it’s just a family trait.”

Boe chuckled nervously.

“Dad’s still letting you train?” he finally asked Daija after a few long moments.

“Those aren’t the words I would use.”

“Still letting you play with swords then?” he teased.

“I could beat you in a duel easily,” she responded, sounding like she was seriously challenging him. I felt uneasy about the whole conversation.

Boe didn’t respond and things were descending into that terrible silence phase.

“We’ve got an opening on the team if you want to join our next dragon quest,” I said without thinking. I wasn’t being serious, of course. But bringing up the empty spot on our team made me think of Warley, and thinking of Warley brought a wave of seriousness over me. I saw that Boe felt it too. I didn’t want to think about the academy now, or dragon quests. I just wanted to think about now, this moment, here with Daija.

“There was an impostor on our team,” Boe explained.

“What? And you just turned him in?” Daija asked. She obviously thought that was the last thing we should do.

Boe shook his head. “He didn’t really give us a choice. There were others, and they might have killed him on the spot if Caedan hadn’t drawn his sword to defend Warley.” I thought about that moment.

“Well, I wasn’t really thinking. I wasn’t even really awake,” I explained. “I just saw Bayrd about to attack Warley and reacted, I guess.”

“Probably for the best,” Laciann said. That was that. I began to fear another uncomfortable silence when Laciann asked Daija out of nowhere, “Did you see my shoes? Your mother said that they would go perfectly with this outfit and she was right, I think. Don’t you think?”

“Yeah,” Daija said, but I was watching her and she didn’t even look at the shoes.

The topic of Laciann’s shoes now exhausted, I fished around for something else to talk about.

I finally came up with something. “Boe told me about the time when you were throwing rocks out at a pond and hit a caiman, and then you had to kick it to keep it from biting Boe when he fell down trying to run away. I guess he’s always needed someone to keep him out of trouble.”

“You remembered that?” Daija asked Boe. He shrugged.

“So what stuff do you do now that you don’t need to spend all your time rescuing Boe from distress?”

“She’s preparing,” Laciann said mysteriously. Her eyes got wide and then she burst into laughter.

“I was born from the Stoneflame ceremony you know,” she said, watching the flames again, “I mean, Boe and I both, of course. We’re twins.”

“Right,” I said, “but …” I didn’t finish the sentence. She knew what I was going to say.

“But I’m not a boy,” she finished for me, and then laughed again. It wasn’t an amused laugh. “I knew that’s how you’d be.”

“It’s just that you’re not a Stone Soul,” I said, trying to defend myself, “I mean, that’s not your fault, but it’s a good thing, it means you don’t have to train.”

“And you think that I spend hours every day begging my father to train me because I thought I had to? Have you never thought that some people would do anything to get into that academy you take for granted?” I was afraid she would rip a tear in the rug from how tightly she was gripping it. She refused to look at me.

“Well,” I said, trying to sound apologetic, “I would trade places with you if I could.”

She did look at me then, and there was no confusion as to how she felt about me. Angry. Purely angry. She was burning hotter than Gable when he’d found out about Warley. I didn’t understand how this was happening, how this was going so wrong.

“You know, I used to think you were different, that you had a good heart. That even when you wouldn’t talk to me it was just some macho bravado thing that you didn’t really feel. But the festival ends and then that’s it from you, and then you just show up here with your fancy academy wisdom to tell me that I’m not a Stone Soul?” She stood up and stormed into her room, slamming the door behind her while yelling back, “I don’t even know why Boe’s your friend.”

After a moment, Boe took Laciann’s hand and led her out the front door, leaving me sitting alone in front of the fire. Alone with my thoughts, except they were too jumbled and fuzzy even to keep me any kind of company. I didn’t have any idea what I thought. But I knew what I was feeling. That squeezing sensation inside of me revealed itself for what it really was, a dragon’s talon, and it was digging sharply into me, ripping me apart from the inside. Making it so that I couldn’t even stand up, could barely breathe. I had to fight off tears. I curled on the bench under a blanket that Tahlor had provided and buried my head in case Boe or his parents came in the room, and I tried not to make any noise.

When we returned to the academy, there was only a week of formal training left. Warley’s fate was still officially undecided, but it was clear from whispers in the mess hall or in the rare breaks in training that everyone was sure that he and his family would be found to be guilty of intentionally trying to pass him off as an impostor. We trained with our teams, and Bayrd seemed more determined than ever. I went through the motions without complaining even though I felt numb inside. But if I wasn’t performing up to the expected level, nobody brought it up with me, not even Bayrd or Master Walker. I’d hardly spoken to Boe on the ride back to Rægena, and neither of us seemed interested in changing that once we’d returned. I don’t know what he thought of me, but I couldn’t blame him: I didn’t know what I thought of myself. I decided to give up thinking altogether.

Then, the month of Flame came. After ten years, training was over. Graduation was a simple affair, not even a feast or a chance to invite loved ones to congratulate us. Congratulations would come if we turned out right. If we become Dragon Masters.

The waiting began.

We were encouraged to stay rested and refreshed so that we would be ready once the first reports of a Dragonbirth came in. These were often rumors that didn’t turn out to be completely accurate, so teams would be sent out one at a time to respond and report back when the threat was deemed false or neutralized. As part of what was now a team of four, I expected to be held in reserve to the end. That made me feel restless. The way I was feeling, a dragon seemed like the perfect opponent for me to loose some frustration upon.

Now that training was over, some of the Stone Souls were making plans about what they would do once the dragons had been killed. The ones who didn’t die or kill a dragon would basically be released from the academy until the next Stoneflame ceremony. Some would get jobs in the keep, or in the surrounding city just to stay in Rægena. Others would go back home, or else as far away from their old homes as they could get, and find work. We still qualified for stipends, which would go directly to us now rather than our families, but many of our families were dependent on those funds so plans differed about how to handle that stuff. Some of the Stone Souls would continue to allow their families to receive them, others were planning to move back home and share in them. Some planned to take the full amounts for themselves and let their families worry about supporting themselves. I had no plans. Plans required thinking.

Boe spent the first day of Flame in the study, and while I thought about joining him and grilling Magnilda about the Dragonborn, none of it seemed to matter. I tried just staying in my bunk and sleeping, but I became restless very quickly and ended up gearing up as if for training. When I walked to the training grounds, I saw how tough it was for us Stone Souls to break our habits. Most of the class was there, holding impromptu duels, or having horse races, or just practicing moves against wooden dummies. I didn’t want to use my practice sword, so I took my real sword and ventured deep into the woods. When I was so far in that I could be sure that nobody else was around me, I began to spar with some trees.

I whirled and sliced, stabbed, jabbed, dodged splinters and chopped all around me, as if the surrounding thorny sicklebush and grasping claw trees were an entire brood of dragons, closing in to make a group feast of me. I looked at my blade, spattered with sap and covered in dirt and bark. The trees were getting the better of me.

Involuntarily, I pictured Daija, swinging her sword around. She was good. She was right, she would be able to defeat Boe in a duel. Probably. She could probably defeat me. But what was the point?

I lopped off a low hanging inknut branch that was getting dangerously close.

She had to know that throughout all of history no girl had ever defeated a dragon. Only Stone Souls ever had, for as long as Stone Souls had been training to kill dragons.

I kicked a rock that was giving me a dangerous look, sending it careening satisfyingly off a distant ironwood.

She was wasting her life when she could be doing something more productive with it. Like—like what? Shopping with her mother? Finding matching shoes to go with her dress?

I got my sword wedged into a thick purple-gray tree trunk and had to kick against it to pull my blade free.

Well, what was so wrong with shopping? Wasn’t Boe here training so that Daija could do that if she wanted?

I loosed a battle cry and took a slice at a young sicklebush. I missed.

What Daija wanted was to train. What was wrong with training?

I jumped up and swung wildly at a bird flying far overhead. I didn’t come close to hitting it. I tried flinging my sword into the air when it circled around, then had to dart to safety as the blade came spinning back toward me.

If Daija was good with a sword, there was plenty she could do with one. There were tournaments she could enter in some parts of the Realm, weren’t there? Were there? I didn’t know.

I retrieved my sword and slumped down, out of breath.

I wished I’d been able to write that letter. That I hadn’t passed out from the dragon’s toxin or whatever. That I hadn’t decided to try to get her that tapestry and I’d been there when she had to leave the festival. I wished I said the right things that night at her house. I wished she’d been happy to see me. I wished she didn’t have to make everything so complicated. I wished I could just forget about her. I wished she had just let Boe and I hang out together at the festival and that she just ate her spicy foods alone or that she didn’t bring a friend that insisted on hanging out with Boe. I wished I’d spent more time with her when I had the chance. I wished my insides would stop throbbing like they were. I wished a dragon would just show up already and I’d at least have something to do.