Fledgling (The Dragonrider Chronicles) (19 page)

He was talking to Beckah in a soft
voice where she sat in a chair near the doorway. When we came in, they both
looked up. Beckah’s face brightened as she smiled at me. She stood up and threw
her arms around my waist, hugging me tightly, and then doing the same thing to
Felix.
Sile
didn’t seem to approve of that, even
though he didn’t say anything to stop her. I could see his expression stiffen
into a tense frown.

“Beck?” He cleared his throat to get
her attention. “Why don’t you go see about getting us some dinner before we get
on the road back home? I could use a bite to eat.”

She beamed at him before she went
skipping out of the room, her long dark braid trailing behind her. Our eyes met
as she passed, and she winked at me playfully. It made me smirk a little and
blush again in spite of myself.

When I looked back at
Sile
, he was glaring at me like he wanted to hit me. “Would
anyone care to explain to me why you took my little girl on your suicidal
rescue attempt?”

I was getting the feeling he expected
me
to answer that. I opened my mouth to
come up with some kind of excuse, but Felix beat me to it. “She insisted on
coming,” he said. “She refused to let us leave her behind.”

Sile
cut him a murderous look. “She is a
fourteen year old child. You’re nearly a man. Surely you can see how I have a
hard time believing she forced you to do anything.”

I swallowed hard. “Sir, we were afraid
whoever kidnapped you might take her, too.”

“She could have been killed,” he
snapped. I heard him sigh as he started rubbing his forehead with his good
hand. “You all could have been killed, and that would be on my head. I would be
standing before my ancestors with the blood of three children on my hands in
addition to . . .” His voice trailed away, and he just sat there staring
vacantly ahead of him.

“Sir?” I started to ask. There were so
many things I wanted to know that I really didn’t know where to start. “Why
you? If the Lord General needed some kind of a sacrifice for the ritual to
grant him immortality, why did he pick you? Couldn’t he have just picked an
easier victim?”

Sile
met my gaze again, and this time he
looked confused. “Immortality? Is that what they’re saying?”

Felix and I both nodded.

He chuckled hoarsely like that was
ridiculous, shaking his head. “Lies,” he muttered. “Lies, as usual.”

 
“Sir?” I was anxious for him to explain.

Sile
just kept shaking his head while he
ran his fingers over the thick bandaging on his arm. “In this case, knowing too
much can most certainly kill you. Let what happened to me be an example for you
of what happens when you know too much. What I know has almost taken my life
twice. It’s better that you know nothing, for now.”

I didn’t like that answer, and judging
by the sour look on Felix’s face, neither did he. We’d been through a lot just
to be shut down without any idea what was going on with
Sile
.
I felt like he owed us something more than that vague explanation. “But what if
they come for you again? If we don’t know what we’re up against—”

“They won’t,” he interrupted. “I’m not
a threat to them anymore. The medics have said that my arm will heal, but I
have lost almost all sensation in my hand. I cannot grip a fork with out great
effort, much less a sword or a dragon saddle. I am useless in the eyes of the
king now. Valla will be released to join the other dragons in the wild, and I
will go home to my family in retirement.”

Sile
didn’t sound happy about that at all.
His expression was somber as he stared at the floor, and I could see the look
of distress in his eyes. I couldn’t imagine how lost he must have felt,
suddenly having his life’s career ripped out from underneath him. Even so, when
he sighed, I caught his eyes for just a brief second. It made me wonder if he
really was telling us the truth. Was he really safe now?

“And we’re being passed on to someone
else. Lieutenant
Rordin
—whoever that is,” Felix
grumbled.

“
Jace
Rordin
is a good man,”
Sile
said.
“I fought alongside him when I was a younger man. He’s only just now retired
from the front lines. If you’re smart, you’ll listen to what he has to say. He’ll
have valuable information and tactics to share with you that most riders don’t
have, because of his experience.”

He paused then, looking over at me as
though he could sense what I was wondering: Had
Sile
told him that I was a halfbreed? He smirked and gave a small shrug. “I told him
you were unique, but you are the bravest fledgling I’d ever met. Brave to the
point of suicidal, in fact.”

Hearing that made me deflate. “I
wasn’t brave. I was terrified the whole time.”

Sile
gave me a strange look then, as
though what I said disappointed him. “Bravery is not an immunity to fear, it is
rising up to meet it with the hope that nothing is impossible.”

I shifted uneasily where I stood as
Sile
just sat there staring at us. After a few
uncomfortable moments, Beckah came back in carrying two plates piled with food.
She glanced at all of us as she put the plates down on the bedside table. I
could tell she was trying to figure out what was wrong. Finally, she looked at
her father with a worried expression.

Sile
just smiled at her. “Maybe you’d like
to go eat with them in the dining hall, instead?”

Her face lit up suddenly, and she
looked back at us hopefully. “Daddy, are you sure? I already brought something
up here.”

He just waved a hand at her
dismissively, “I can eat both. I haven’t had anything in days. I’ll be fine. Go
on.”

I had a feeling he just wanted to get
rid of us for a while. Despite the way he smiled at her, I could still see
sadness in his dark eyes. This was hard for him; it just had to be. Leaving Blybrig
meant his days as a dragonrider were over forever, and I could imagine how that
would terrify someone who had been doing this since he was our age.

“I’ll come by next year and see how
you two are progressing,”
Sile
called after us on our
way out the door. “So don’t disappoint me.”

I swore right then that I would do my
best not to. Out of every other dragonrider here, his opinion was the one I
valued the most. I wanted his approval more than anyone else’s. I wanted to
make him proud of me.

twenty
-two

Two
days later, Lyon was back, and standing in formation at the call to arms. He
looked pretty horrible—like he hadn’t slept since he’d abandoned us at
the prison camp. There were dark circles under his eyes, and he wouldn’t tell
anyone what had happened or where he’d been. It took me a while to talk Felix
down from wanting to beat the life out of him right then and there. I thought
I’d succeeded, but then I spotted Lyon in the dormitory hallway later that
night and he had a fresh black eye. I didn’t have to wonder who’d given it to
him.

           
I
was relieved when training started up again. It was comforting to be back where
everything made sense, and all my days were planned down to the last minute. I
had a warm bed, three good meals, and I got to train with Mavrik every day. I
didn’t tell anyone about my new ability to communicate with him, or that he
could speak back to me by sending me images in my mind. Considering how most
people were responding to me calling to animals, I decided it was probably best
to keep that to myself, for now.

Felix and I got back into our old
routines like nothing had ever happened, well . . . except for our new
sponsor.
 
Lieutenant
Jace
Rordin
was a lot different
than
Sile
. When he met us for the first time, I got
the impression right away that he wasn’t going to put up with any nonsense. He
looked like he was in his mid thirties, but I would have never thought of him
as old. He was a fairly normal height, with an average build, dark eyes under a
serious brow, and dark brown hair that was beginning to turn gray along his
sideburns and temples. He had a grim, somber look about him just like you would
expect from a man who’d just returned from the battlefront.

When he looked at me, it made my
shoulders seize up instinctively because I was always afraid of what he’d say
to me. He’d just gotten finished killing gray elves, and I knew what I looked
like. But he never said a word about my heritage, which only made me more
anxious.

Jace
may not have looked like anyone
extraordinary, but he was a very good swordfighter. He kept us doing the same
drills every the morning
Sile
had started with us,
only . . . he made us get up even earlier and actually did them with us. He
even ran laps with us. Then he started teaching us more about sparring and
hand-to-had combat techniques, advanced stuff that the other fledglings weren’t
learning yet.

He pushed us to our breaking point
every single day. I could tell that my size and lack of strength were annoying
to him. He was constantly critiquing me, insisting that I needed to work
harder, and shaking his head like I was a big disappointment.

I still wasn’t any good with the
weaponry we were learning to use. Swords were still too big and heavy, and I
could barely pull back a bowstring. It was frustrating, but I muscled through.
I wasn’t going to give up. If
Rordin
was trying to
break me by proving I wasn’t strong enough to stay here, then he’d just have to
toss my body out on the doorstep after I died from doing too many pushups.

“You need to keep up this regimen
during the interlude,”
Jace
growled at my heels as he
ran behind us during morning laps. “Every day you should run, fly drills, and
work on building your strength and stamina.”

I didn’t know what the interlude was.
It seemed to be a pretty big deal though, because the whole academy started
buzzing about it as training went on. Instructors looked more serious and
pushed us even harder. The avian class ahead of us started to look more
stressed and worried. You could practically taste the tension in the air.

On our last week of training before
the interlude, Felix explained that while training for the older students went
year-round, fledglings got a three month break while the class ahead of us, the
avians
, learned ground survival techniques. It all focused
around that final month where all the avian students were put through a
rigorous final test they called the battle scenario.

“That’ll be us next year, you know.
It’s the most intense training we’ll ever do,” he said. “They teach us how to
endure interrogation, torture, and how to survive in
Luntharda
if we get shot down behind enemy lines. Students have died during this
training. It’s no joke. All the instructors have to be present to help out.”

Now I was starting to understand why
Jace
was pushing me so hard. If that training was
difficult, or even deadly, to normal students . . . I could only imagine what
it was going to be like for me.
Jace
must have been
concerned that I was too small to survive, and I couldn’t really blame him for
that.

“We won’t have our dragons to help us.
They’ll have some kind of goal for
us,
usually it’s to
evade capture as long as possible, and you have to survive being eaten by
monsters or starving to death. Then once everyone’s been caught, the
instructor’s start the mock interrogation.”

“Mock interrogation?” I didn’t like
the sound of that.

Felix just shrugged. “Yeah, but we’ll
get specialized training on how to handle it. It’ll be fine.”

I wasn’t so sure. Well, I knew Felix
would probably be all right. He was strong and probably one of the best
hand-to-hand fighters in our class. My own skill set was still questionable,
though. I wasn’t sure talking to animals would do me any good.

When training finally began to wind
down, the other fledglings made preparations to go back home for our
three-month break. Felix was going back to his parents’ estate. He kept asking
me over and over if I wanted to stay with him and train. He insisted his
parents wouldn’t mind, or that they probably wouldn’t even notice I was there
at all.

“They barely notice me and I’m their
only child.” He chuckled as he packed his clothes and uniforms back into his
bags.

“It sounds great,” I said. “It’s not
because I don’t want to. There’s just, well, there’s someone I need to see.”

He turned a sly grin in my direction.
“Your girl, huh?”

I blushed. “I told you, it’s not like
that. But I promised her I’d see her as soon as I could.”

He kept grinning as he went back to
packing. “Sure, sure. You’ve got quite a tale to tell her, huh? You think
she’ll believe any of it?”

“I don’t know. I guess it is kind of a
wild story.” I rubbed my thumb over my mother’s necklace, toying with it while
I sat on the edge of my bed. I’d already packed all of my things up, but I
didn’t want to leave until I absolutely had to.

Going back home was bittersweet. On
the one hand, I was excited to see
Katty
again and
tell her about everything. But then there was my family. I wasn’t looking
forward to seeing them again, and being forced to sleep in the loft, or blamed
for everything by my stepmother and her two little demon daughters. I knew
being a dragonrider wasn’t going to change anything when it came to them.

 
Felix finished packing and picked up his bags, nodding for me
to follow him as we left our room behind. We walked together one last time down
the stairs, out of the dormitory, and across the open grounds toward the Roost.
I took my time putting
Mavrik’s
saddle on. Out of the
corner of my eye, I could see that Felix was doing the same. Neither of us
wanted to leave, I guess.

When we met back outside the Roost, it
was awkward. I didn’t want to admit it to him, but I was going to miss Felix.
He’d become my best friend to replace
Katty
when she
wasn’t around. Not having him there to watch my back, or tease me about my love
life, was going to make it hard to get through three months of dealing with my
family.

“Well, if you need anything, send me a
letter. Or just show up, if you want.” He was looking at me with a worried
expression. “Hey, uh . . . you’re a dragonrider now. So don’t let anyone push
you around. You don’t have to put up with that anymore.”

I smiled at him. “I’ll try to remember
that.”

“And keep training, like Lieutenant
Rordin
said,” he added. “Next year will be twice as hard as
this one. You need to be ready.”

“Right.”

“And, seriously, if you want to come
visit for a few days—”

“Felix?”

He paused. “Yeah?”

I smirked, reared back, and gave him a
punch in the arm as hard as I could. “I’ll be fine. See you in three months.”

He just rolled his eyes because my
punch didn’t even make him flinch. “Says the kid with noodles for arms,” he
mumbled under his breath. Finally, he just gave me one of his sly, crooked
smiles and gave me a swat on the back of the head.

I stood there for a few moments and
watched him walk away. He climbed up onto Nova’s back, fastening down his
luggage before he gave me one last wave and took off into the sky. I watched
them go, climbing higher and higher, until they were nothing more than a tiny
dark speck on the horizon.

Mavrik lowered his head and started
making those curious chirping sounds and blinking his big yellow eyes at me. A
crystal-clear image of Felix and I playing chase through the sky on the backs
of our dragons flashed through my mind. I knew it came from Mavrik.

I turned around to pat his snout.
“Yeah,” I told him. “Don’t worry. We’ll see them again.”