Dragon Mage (The First Dragon Rider Book 3) Read online

  “What’s the baron’s sign?” I asked stupidly.

  Rudie grimaced, putting his hunk of cheese down and instead turning to the wine. It was Neill who answered me instead.

  “The decapitated head of one of the villagers, wearing the baron’s red battle helmets, stuck on a pole in front of the gate.” Neill shivered. “I thought that those days were over.”

  “They’re only just starting,” muttered Rudie, looking around the hall with apparent concern, before finally settling his eyes back on Neill once more. I could sense that these two had a lot of history; Rudie talked to him in the same way that an old colleague talks, one whom had known you all of your life.

  “Neill,” Rudie said gently. “News of what you did here has spread far and wide, it has reached all across the Three Kingdoms. The realms are in uproar. No one knows what it means. They wonder if you are going to try and seize the crown from Prince Vincent, or whether you are mad, or dragon-bewitched….”

  Well, that much is true, I thought.

  “It’s true,” said a new voice at our side. It was Jodreth, nodding slowly. “And, I hate to say this, Neill – but what happens in here, inside these walls, has ramifications out there, outside in the Three Kingdoms. Prince Vincent is already conducting a semi-civil border war with his own brother to the north.”

  Believe me, I know, I thought. I had witnessed my fathers’ troops massing at the borders.

  “People are wondering what happens next. When will all of this bloodshed and unrest end?” Jodreth said quietly. “So, there are going to be many little Blood Barons and other criminal-chiefs who think that they can grab what they can in all the chaos.”

  Neill almost visibly deflated in front of me.

  “Master Torvald?” Rudie got up awkwardly from his seat, taking a step forward towards Neill as both Lila, Terrence and I all stiffened, but, to our surprise the large man merely folded down onto one knee and bowed his head.

  “Master of the Draconis Monastery,” Rudie said formally, although I looked between Lila, Terrence, and Jodreth in alarm. If anyone should be the ‘Master’ or the new ‘Abbot’ here – then surely it should be Jodreth, shouldn’t it? But he had been away, and had taken little or no interest in the everyday running and rebuilding of the monastery at all, as Neill and the rest of us had.

  “Neill,” Rudie continued, “your father has heard of how you rode dragons, and is asking that you come to the aid of your people, your clan, and your family. We need the aid of the Draconis Monastery, and your dragons. Help us, Neill.”

  They’re not our dragons, I thought instantly, and was pleased when Neill answered not even a split second later with, “I can’t speak for the dragons, nor command them, Rudie.” Neill’s voice was heavy but sincere. “And I am not the master here, I can only talk to the people here to see who agrees…” Neill frowned. “But, Master Scout – if I can, I will bring everything that I can to help fight against the Blood Baron.”

  Terence made a loud, exaggerated coughing behind his hand. He clearly wasn’t impressed with this turn of events, but I shushed him with just a look.

  “Maybe we should let the scout here rest, Terence,” I said, throwing him a careful look, “while we all go and discuss matters?”

  “Yes…” Neill said uneasily, biting his lower lip as he weighed matters in his own mind. Suddenly he stood up, as Rudie once again resumed his chair by the fire, his wine, and his hunk of cheese. Neill still looked worried and tense, but he had a light in his eyes now. A passion. “I’m going, Char. I’m going, and I would like you and Paxala to come with me.”

  Beside us, Lila muttered darkly under her breath. “By the stars….” But it seemed that Jodreth was pleased by Neill’s decision, as he was nodding thoughtfully.

  “Char?” Neill’s eyes were still on me. How can you put me in this position, right now? Here? I thought a little angrily, as I nodded to the nearest exit. “Master Torvald?” I said through gritted teeth. “The smaller reading rooms, now.”

  I marched ahead, with Neill the unelected ‘Master of the Draconis Monastery,’ Terence the Southern Prince’s child, Lila the pirate, and Jodreth the only Draconis Monk amongst us following on behind.

  Chapter 3

  Neill, Sure

  “What’s wrong?” I looked at Char in confusion, and it did not escape me that she was looking at me in pretty much the same fashion. We stood in one of the small stone alcove reading rooms which were everywhere in the main building of the monastery. They were little more than rounded cell-like rooms, with a narrow stone bench running around the inside where monks and students were supposed to perch with their latest scrolls and reading materials, or otherwise quietly contemplate the mystery and majesty of dragons.

  It still seemed odd to me that the Draconis Order had so easily believed the Abbot, when he had taught them to understand the dragons through meditation and contemplation, rather than by actually getting out onto the hills and rocks above the crater and, I don’t know, meeting them!

  But I did know why the Abbot had done so, of course – it was so he could feed his followers his specially crafted, hypnotic visualizations and meditations, making an army of fanatics and keeping the ‘real’ power for himself.

  “What’s wrong?” Terence said in mock-alarm. “You’ve gone crazy, that’s what is wrong! I know it’s your family, Torvald, but there is no way we can go help them. I’m sorry, but the monastery just isn’t ready for that yet.”

  Oh.

  Char slapped a hand to her face. Terence, for all of his change of heart recently about the dragons and the value of other people who weren’t princes or prince’s sons, was still one of the most brash, brusque, and arrogant of men that I knew. He was not the one they wanted to start this conversation, I realized. Char, my closest friend here, looked pleadingly over at Lila, but Lila was only nodding in agreement with Terence.

  “I know this is tough, Neill, but Terence is right. The students aren’t ready.” Lila shrugged, as if that was that.

  “Char?” I turned to look at my friend, and I could feel myself glaring at her.

  “I…” Char shrugged. “We have only just managed to get Lila and Dorf matched with dragons – and still, their growing link and friendship seem tenuous in my eyes. One bad argument or stupid mistake could set us back another breeding cycle if we wanted to make bonds between dragons and students,” she said awkwardly, looking down at her feet and then looking up at me again. “I’m worried about how the dragons and the students will cope.”

  “They’ll cope!” I hissed strongly back at them all, and I could see how they were taken aback by the force in my tone. “Can’t you see how important this is? Not just because it’s my father, my brothers, my family – that’s not it at all.” Lila raised a skeptical eyebrow at me but I kept going. “It’s the fact that Rudie rode all the way out here to the monastery and asked for aid. That’s what you’re not seeing. Who would have dreamed to do that in the days of the Abbot Ansall?”

  Char opened her mouth to speak, but I barged ahead. “And Char,” I reasoned. “You know that you, me, and Paxala can do this. We escaped the north after all, didn’t we?” I said. “We fought those wild mountain dragons, didn’t we?” The dynamic between Paxala, Char, and myself was working really well at the moment. When we flew together, it was like Char could second guess the Crimson Red dragon underneath her, and occasionally it even felt like we were no longer two young humans riding a greater, larger dragon at all – but that we were a part of one thing entire: a new sort of creature.

  I tried to remind Char of this, speaking to her and her alone. “We can do this, I know that we can,” I said.

  I saw the spark of excitement in my friend’s eyes. Like all of us still here at the monastery, she had that same love for adventure and excitement, and the sense of wonder every time she saw a dragon. But then the excitement faded a little from Char’s face.

  “But Neill… the other student riders…? Are they ready?” Char said. “
It can’t be just you, me, and Paxala, can it? Against an entire bandit army?”

  “No,” I said. She had a point, just as she always did, even if I didn’t really want to admit it. “We’ll need the other dragons, or some of them, at least...” I sighed. “But the thing is, Char, Terence, Lila, this really is important.” I tried to explain how I felt to them. “We don’t know what we’re doing up here. All we know is that we didn’t like the way that the Abbot and the other monks were abusing and using the dragons of the crater. We’ve put a stop to that.” I saw them all nod in agreement.

  “And now we have to do something else, something different from what the Draconis Order did. We’re not here to just worship the dragons, or study them, or use them. We’re here for a purpose…” I felt my heart leap to my throat. “And Rudie out there showed me what that purpose was.” I looked around my assembled friends in front of me.

  “They came to us. There were those outside the walls who would never normally have dreamed of asking the Draconis Order for help, who are now thinking about what we are doing here, and how the partnership that we have with the dragons might be a good thing,” I said exultantly. “We have to honor that, surely, right?”

  “Right,” Jodreth said with a grim smile. “You always have to honor hope, when you find it. And sometimes you have to put the world before your own concerns. It’s the decent thing to do.”

  “Yes!” I said victoriously. “And we want to be decent, after all, don’t we? That’s what this was all about – getting rid of the old corrupt Ansall and Zaxx because they weren’t decent, and that we were different!”

  I stopped at last, a little breathless and giddy with excitement. It was so close, that I could almost see the future hanging in the air ahead of us. The Draconis Order could be a place where people come to for aid, for help when no other world power, chief, prince or king could help. Teams of dragons and their student riders flying in V-like flights, screaming their way across the sky, keeping everyone safe…

  “I think that Paxala might be able to help with that,” Char said, tapping her lower lip in thought. I felt excited joy start to coil through me. She was seeing it, too.

  “Neill,” she asked me, and turning to include the others in the room, “do you remember how Paxala encouraged the dragons to fly against Zaxx at the end of the battle? Paxala had talked to them – even those ones we haven’t managed to touch or talk…”

  “Yes!” I saw how she was thinking. “You could help the students ride the dragons, I could help with the fighting, and Paxala could help the dragons. She might even be able to call the riderless ones as well.”

  “It might work,” Char said, still looking unsure but breaking into a grin at the suggestion. I knew that she was going to say yes, and I started grinning. The monastery and the dragons had a future, and all we had to do was to encourage it to happen.

  “Well, I’ll tell Rudie the good news. And I want us able to ride out as soon as possible,” I said as I made my way out of the reading chamber.

  “Aye, aye, Master Torvald,” Lila said with a withering dose of sarcasm in her voice. Yeah, I guess I deserved that, I thought. “Please,” I added quickly.

  Chapter 4

  Char, Flight Command

  We flew.

  It’s hard to describe the wonder of those two small words, if you have never experienced dragon flight. All that it contains, all that it encompasses is just too much. We were soaring at what I considered a medium high height over the patchwork blanket of greens, browns, and blues of the Middle Kingdom below. At this height, everything on the ground looked like toys and far away.

  And it was slow! Which was a fact that never ceased to amaze me. When you are flying close to the ground, everything is a blur of roar and speed, but the higher that you go, the world becomes smaller, more indistinct, and slower, as if you are barely crawling along, even though the wind can be whipping through your hair like a gale.

  We flew and it was like riding at the crest of a wave, or the tip of a stormfront. Massive vibrations from the winds behind us and from the dragon body beneath us sent a shiver through our bones, making us feel like we were thrumming with power (which I guess we were). The gigantic, leathery wings of the dragon underneath me occasionally snapped, sighed, and roared as Paxala the Crimson Red made minute changes to her altitude and direction.

  We flew and it wasn’t just the river of sensations from my own skin, eyes, and ears that filled me, but it was also the pulse of information that swam up through Paxala, my dragon sister. Our minds were closer when we were flying than at any other time – even on the odd occasions when I had decided to spend the night curled up, as warm as a bug, under the leather of her wings and against her pyrrhic belly.

  Paxala’s thoughts were only a breath away, and they filled the background of my own conscious mind like a supporting, joyous chatter:

  “Forest, east wind, full-green summer leaves falling into wet mulch; the pink of salmon belly that I can smell in that stream! A cooler patch of northern breeze coming up; distant snows, crisp as crystal and as sharp as blades coming from the top of the world—”

  The litany of things that Paxala recognized and sang about in her mind was endless. At the moment, however, she was happy flying at the head of what Dorf called ‘a squadron’ of the five dragons that we had managed to rouse in Neill’s quest.

  It’s not going to be enough, I thought in alarm (and not for the first time since leaving the monastery, either). Five dragons against a bandit army? How many were in an army, anyway? Were there rules for this sort of thing?

  I wish that I had paid more attention to my father’s strategy, tactics, and logic lessons, I thought – but Wurgan, my brother, had always been the better at that kind of thing. I just lived for the hunt, and the mountains.

  “And the flying, it seems,” purred a bright and fresh reptilian voice in my mind, as I realized that the mental praise-chatter of the dragon had died down to a murmur as Paxala instead spoke directly to my mind with her own.

  “Yes,” I murmured, seeing Neill look up briefly, before nodding and huddling back low down onto the makeshift saddle we had built on Paxala’s shoulders and neck, between her spines. He was used to me half-talking to Paxala, both in my mind and with my words, and it didn’t appear to bother him at all (although I must have looked odd).

  “How are they doing, Pax?” I asked of the other dragons that followed us.

  “Morax is doing well,” Paxala said, a very slight tail twitch towards the Sinuous Blue that both Lila and Terrence rode. Morax was young, very young in fact – but her sharp temperament (and even sharper nips that she gave with her teeth) had seemed to match with Lila Penna’s prickly nature. It was a blessing in some ways that Morax the Blue was indeed so young, as she would play and roughhouse with Lila and Terence, but did not react with outright aggression or fear at the idea of being ridden by a human.

  “Socolia is more nervous,” Paxala said, indicating the stockier Vicious Green that Sigrid Fenn rode, alone. They, too, had appeared to bond on the small forays that we had made into the dragon crater, and they (Sigrid and Lila) had been a part of our original mission to try and liberate the dragon eggs from Zaxx. Perhaps it was because of this early goodwill that the other dragons warmed to them, or perhaps it was because they were women for all I knew – as it seemed that the dragons got on better with us women of the monastery than they did the men! Maybe us women had to listen to our dragons more, as the men always relied on their muscles to yank at the reins, or shouting to get their dragons to hear them…

  “Ha!” Paxala returned into my mind to laugh at my suggestion, but I didn’t know if that was because it was true, or not.

  Behind Morax and Socolia came two more dragons, another green which was always trying to fly next to Socolia, and another Blue on the far side. I did not know their names, and neither did I ask Paxala for them, as it seemed to me that the dragons were very private creatures when it came to their names, and it was
only after they had started to bond, connect, or otherwise communicate with a human did their name get ‘released’ into the wild, as it were. What was it Feodor told me, before? I felt a pang of sadness over that brave souls’ death at the hands of the Abbot. Keep your dragon’s name a secret, as it may grant power.

  But the sight of those other two dragons following along behind us – and even managing to stay in a sort of V-shaped formation flight despite not having any riders at all, filled me with hope. They will be the next to bond with a human, I thought, feeling, right now, almost happy at what we were doing.

  “Char! Smoke!” Paxala invaded my optimistic reverie to inform me, her awareness pushing my mind to the horizon.

  “There’s nothing there,” I said in confusion. All I could see instead were the hazes and smudges of the horizon where the land and woods turned into brown, orange, and green watercolors.

  “Wait for it,” the lizard beneath me counselled. “I forget that you humans don’t have noses. Or eyes.”

  “I do!” I contested. “They’re just a bit smaller than yours, that’s all.”

  A moment or so later, though, and I could see just how right that she was. The horizon’s colors deepened slightly, and out of the haze came a smudge of something darker, and then darker still – a small blot of dark black and grey, that rose into the air before being tugged apart by higher winds.

  “Neill!” I shouted, pointing to the rising column of smoke that rose below and ahead of us.

  I saw Neill nod, and then make a gesture with a hand, sweeping around the smoke and coming across low, like a fish eagle might do. I gave him a thumbs-up sign, and conveyed our intentions to Paxala.

  “Easy!” she reassured me, and then I felt that strange moment of twittering tension in my mind, like hearing a conversation just out of reach, or of suddenly finding yourself walking through pre-storm clouds; a pressure and a heaviness to the air that meant Paxala was talking to the other dragons in whatever strange mental language they shared. I wondered if this was what it was like for Neill all those seasons, hanging around me. Did he ‘almost’ hear my conversations with Paxala, the way that I could ‘almost’ overhear the conversations Paxala was having in her dragon tongue?