Fire: Tales of Elemental Spirits (29 page)

Some of why I didn't get it at first is that I'd been around Sippy too much, and I'd unconsciously begun thinking of dragons as being a kind of very large foogit with less sense of humour and better posture. I'd maybe forgotten about the awe part. And the honour part.

Hereyta was pretty old, although not all that old for a dragon, and mostly retired. She'd flown for the king in the last border wars and been pretty special. They used her at the Academy now for the practical stuff, when the cadets get out of the classrooms their second year and start working with the dragons, and she was a big success there. If Hereyta liked you it really meant something. He'd mentioned her before so I kind of half recognised her name. They'd also been breeding her but while she'd been bred this year she hadn't settled. ʺI knew she was barren this year,ʺ said Dag, ʺand I've been worried about her because I'm afraid if she doesn't settle next year too. . . .ʺ

There are no romantics on a dragonrider academy staff. They can't afford it. All the dragons used for training in all the academies are rotated back into the income-earning world every few years to make some money, usually including the breeding stock. Nobody could run an academy if they had to feed all their dragons all the time, and nobody but maybe the king could afford to send their kids to an academy if they had to pay total dragon upkeep as part of the tuition. And a young dragon doesn't start earning its living till it's twelve or fifteen years old—some of them don't reach their full strength till they're twenty. Hereyta was very special indeed to have been granted the luxury of even semi-retirement, although coping with a lot of cadets can't be too restful.

ʺBut why humiliate one of their best?ʺ Dag was so wrapped up in Hereyta he kept on leaving the crucial bit of the story out.

ʺHumiliate,ʺ said Dad. ʺI don't understand humiliate. You mean she's too—too injured or arthritic to fly? That sounds . . . cruel.ʺ

ʺIt
is
cruel,ʺ said Dag. ʺShe can still get off the ground, yes. She can fly under the blue sky, yes. She's got one stiff wing—that's another old war wound—but it still works. But no, she can't Fly. She only has two eyes.ʺ

Even so it took a moment for this to sink in. Most people don't get close enough to any dragons to have to think about how they do what they do, and it's pretty eerie besides. You don't really want to think about how your expensive parcel or your more expensive visitor got here—what it or they might be trailing in from the journey. Dragons are too big and heavy to fly like birds fly for long; they do it to get going, and they do some pretty fancy blue-sky flying during courtship (and afterward they've burnt up so much energy they do nothing but eat and sleep for days) but mostly, as soon as they get a few spans up, poof, they aim their three eyes however it is that they do it and zap, they're into the Firespace, or the red sky, or the secret way, or the Endless Fire, or the haven, or the centre of the world, or whatever you choose to call it. And anything they're carrying—back on the ground in its net at the end of its special rope—disappears too. (With a jerk. Careful packing is crucial. Dag says you loop up any parcels while you're in the Firespace, so they come out
with
you and the dragon. Otherwise they'd be liable to brain you coming down.)

Most of the academies, and the companies that use dragons, don't call that other place anything; it's just how dragons get around—
officially
they don't call it anything. But that's because they don't want us ordinary people getting too spooked. A lot of your taxes go to the dragon regiments in the army. I've wondered sometimes how the tradition got started that you want your first son to go to a dragonrider academy. It seems to me a really convenient counterbalance to the uncanniness of Flying. But some of the old magicians could have cast a spell that huge, so maybe one of them did.

Anyway, when your dragon zaps back out of the Firespace again you're a lot closer to where you wanted to be than when you went in—or that's the idea. Depending on how good you are at communicating with your dragon you may be very close to where you want to be or you may not, and if you're not you may have to go back into the Firespace and try again. Every now and again a dragonrider gets really awful vertigo in the Firespace and has to stop being a dragonrider. (Passengers are securely tied in on the dragon with its rider, and a lot of people only do it once, even the ones who can afford it.) Everybody gets some vertigo so aside from needing to be as fast and efficient as possible because that's your job—and because dragons are staggeringly expensive to keep—you want to zap in and out of the Firespace as few times and for as short a stretch each as possible. Except for really short hops, when it's about the same, it's a lot quicker, going from point A to point B through the Firespace. Which is why it's worth it, although time as we know it goes a bit funny in there too, which they think is part of the vertigo.

I had been looking forward to Dag telling us what you could see when the dragon does whatever it does. There are stories that you can see three thin shiny lines like threads or ribbons or tiny lightning beaming out of the dragon's three eyes, and where the lines cross is the way in, somehow—although I wasn't expecting anything too exact since dragons have been Flying through the Firespace for as long as there have been humans to see them disappear and reappear, and still no one knows anything really about how they do it. Except that they need all three eyes. A two-eyed dragon is grounded under the blue sky.

I'd heard him say his dragon—Hereyta—had only two eyes, but I hadn't taken it in. I'd maybe half assumed that First Flight was mostly a ceremonial thing or something. Once I understood what he was telling us I was really upset. No wonder Dag looked haunted. And I didn't even know this (or any) dragon. My mind started flicking through all the stuff Ralas had taught me, because that was what my mind automatically did now whenever there was any hurt or distress around. But nothing I knew could come anywhere near this. I couldn't help wondering if Ralas could do anything, but she was still only an all-sorts wizard, even if she was a good one, and all-sorts wizards don't mess with dragons.

Foogits have three eyes too, by the way, or they did, although it's getting rare. The third one is usually covered up by the topknot, but it's ornamental or vestigial or whatever, and a foogit can't see out of it even if it has a haircut. As I sat there thinking miserably about Dag's dragon it occurred to me to wonder if maybe that's another part of the reason everybody treats foogits like an ugly whining poor relation, because they have the gall to pretend to have three eyes like dragons, like the only creature there is who can get in and out of the Firespace—but the third eye's a fake on foogits. Their habit of silly dancing doesn't do them any favours either. But why do they have something that looks like a third eye? Nothing else does. Maybe they use it really secretly? Maybe the third eye has an extra eyelid that zooms back when nobody else is around and . . . nah. If Sippy was at all typical—and Ralas seemed to think he was—I couldn't see an entire species of Sippys hiding something like being able to get into the Firespace.

At the same time a third eye on a foogit—even though it's not a real eye and the foogit can't see out of it—is considered lucky. Sippy had a third eye.

Mum had been wittering away about how Dag must be mistaken, the Academy staff wouldn't do what he said they were doing, and Dad was making rumbling support-of-Mum noises, and I wasn't listening. I started listening when Dag broke in on this well-meaning clatter. ʺHave I told you how she lost the eye? She was in the war with the Srandems fifteen years ago. She took a spear meant for her partner. They were up in the wild lands, up beyond Ogan, and were ambushed. She still got them home, although Carn says he doesn't know how she did it, since they could only go under the blue sky, and the wound wouldn't stop bleeding, for weeks, he said, the spear was probably poisoned, so that it kept bleeding is probably what saved her life but even a dragon can only lose so much blood, and he was already pretty out of it himself because the spear-thrower had already had a go at him. . . . Carn's a tutor at the Academy now. He introduced me to Hereyta himself. Carn's still pretty lame, and every now and then he turns really grey and has to sit down. You'd think he'd've stopped it, assigning her to First Flight. You'd think he wouldn't care if every Seer ever born stood in a row and told him she had to be assigned to First Flight, after what she did for him, that he'd
find
a way to stop it.ʺ

I woke up really early the next morning, thinking about Dag's dragon and how much she was going to mind what happened, just like Dag said, and eventually thinking about it bothered me so much that I went downstairs to boil some water. I'd decide if I wanted blastweed to wake up or snorewort to put me back to sleep after I had the hot water to do it with.

I found Dag still sitting by the fire where he'd been when the rest of us went to bed. He looked even worse than he had when he arrived. Coming home hadn't helped. Usually when you tell somebody else something that hurts, it hurts less after. ʺWant some blastweed?ʺ I said, making up my mind.

Dag stirred. ʺSure,ʺ he said absently. ʺThanks, Tinhead.ʺ Mum would stop my brothers calling me that if she was around, but since they'd always used it when she wasn't it came out automatically. I was supposed to call him Geezer back but I didn't have the heart. I put the mug by his elbow and sat down opposite him with my own.

The blastweed started exploding through my veins and the silence got too loud to bear. ʺWant to come out to Ralas' with me?ʺ

It took Dag about two minutes to come back from wherever he was and answer me. Was it his life he was looking at being wrecked before it got started—even I knew that if you failed First Flight you were pretty well doomed—or was it the dragon? That took about two seconds to decide. Dag and I don't have much in common but we're both nutty about animals.

ʺOkay,ʺ he said. ʺThanks.ʺ

Sippy always knew when I was coming. Don't ask me how; he usually met me halfway between the village and Ralas' which means he has to have got started almost as soon as I did. Ralas said she always knew when I was coming because Sippy disappeared. He rushed up to us and cavorted like a puppy the way he always did, except unlike puppies foogits are green(ish) and don't wag their tails. If you didn't know about his leg you probably wouldn't guess; he'd adapted really well, although his run was a little strange. But foogits all run a little strangely. Dag actually smiled.

I knew Ralas would take one look at Dag and know something was badly wrong but being Ralas wouldn't ask. She just took him on a tour. There was someone coughing in the back of her house but we all ignored it. I knew it was Moga, the cooper's son, who was allergic to wood dust. Ralas was trying to talk his dad into apprenticing him early to get him away from home, but Gakan was a stubborn old so-and-so, and since Ralas couldn't actually say what she meant outright—including that she'd be happy to do the tricky negotiating for an underage apprentice that didn't include any mention of the crime of illness—poor Moga was still coming out to Ralas' to cough pretty regularly. Ralas would load him up with gil berry tincture and he'd go home and be okay for a few weeks. And then he'd start to wheeze, and then he'd start to cough, and then he'd be back to Ralas' again.

I let the tour get ahead of me. Sippy wanted to play his charging game, which involved running at me full tilt and at the last minute swerving aside and leaping straight into the air. I guess it was some kind of variation on the foogit dance, maybe because Sippy didn't have any other foogits to do it with. Fortunately he'd begun teaching me this game when he was still small and unsteady so I was willing to stand still while he charged me because he didn't go that fast and wasn't big enough to do either of us much damage if the purpose of the game was to slam into me after all, like maybe when I wasn't expecting it. Except it wasn't. So I held my ground as he got older and bigger and cut the last-minute swerve till I almost had to shut my eyes, and the breeze of his turn would hit me instead, and maybe the tickle of the end of a flying ear.

I'd asked Ralas if he ever charged her, or anyone else, or maybe a tree or something, or if he ever just leaped in the air and did his trick out of nowhere, and she said she didn't think he ever did.

So I stood there so Sippy could play his game, and moved around a little to go on facing him when he charged, which seemed to be what he wanted, and thought some more about Dag and his dragon. When Sippy got tired—which didn't take long; this was a very high-energy game—we went off to find Ralas and Dag.

I could tell he was telling her about his dragon. People do tell Ralas things. I suppose we were both secretly hoping that she'd say, ʺOh, your dragon is missing an eye? Why, I had a case like that last month. Apply this night and morning for a week.ʺ But she didn't of course. She just looked really sympathetic. I wondered if maybe she could give a two-eyed dragon a home but she didn't say anything about that either. And a dragon does take up an awful lot of space (and food) and the woodland where Ralas lived isn't that big and Birchhome is on one side and Twobridge on the other side.