Chapter 2: The Chosen Year

Kael Draven.

Black hair, green eyes, jaw set like he'd been born disappointed. He leaned against his doorframe with his arms crossed, looking at me the way you'd look at a stain on your shirt.

Not angry. Not surprised. Just inconvenienced.

"You," I said.

"Me." He glanced at the trunk behind me, then back at my face. "You're next door."

It wasn't a question. He'd already processed it, accepted it, decided it wasn't worth his time, all before I'd remembered how to breathe.

For half a second his eyes stopped on me instead of sliding past.

I could have counted on one hand the times that had happened.

I hated that I had counted.

I hated Kael Draven.

It was the slow kind, the kind you build one afternoon at a time. Mine had a start date.

I was thirteen. A combat theory problem had taken me three days and I still had not cracked it. He had finished it in an afternoon. I swallowed enough pride to walk the length of a practice yard and ask him how.

He looked at me with those flat green eyes and said, "I looked at it."

That was it. Four words, and he'd already gone back to his own paper.

His father and my mother were old friends. We had grown up in the same rooms, at the same tournaments, where the prodigies were paraded in front of the council and I was introduced as Vesper Frost's daughter. Kael was always the prodigy. I was always the comparison.

After that afternoon, I stopped asking anyone for anything. I studied alone and figured things out the slow way, one step at a time.

Whatever else this academy did to me, I wasn't doing that again.

I grabbed my trunk and dragged it through my door without looking back.

"Welcome to Dracoryn, Frost," he said behind me. I couldn't tell if it was mocking.

I shut the door and dropped onto the bed. The room was small: stone walls, a narrow cot, a desk with one drawer, and nothing else. Through the slit window, one strip of sky. Wide enough to see a wing cross it, not wide enough to see whose.

My neighbor was Kael Draven. Of all the rooms in this entire academy.

The opening ceremony was held that afternoon.

Every first-year filed into the great hall, a vaulted stone chamber with dragon-bone arches and war banners hanging from iron chains high above our heads. The headmaster stood on a raised platform at the far end, silver-haired and sharp-eyed, his voice carrying without effort.

"You already know why you're here."

The hall went still.

"Every one of you was born in the prophecy year." He let the silence hold. "Look at the person standing beside you. By the prophecy's measure, they have exactly as much claim to Tharion as you do. So does every other person in this hall."

Murmurs rippled through the rows. Excitement. Nervous energy. A boy behind me whispered that his mother had induced labor two months early just to make sure he'd been born in the right year.

A few rows over, a blonde girl wasn't watching the headmaster at all. She was reading the rows of faces one by one, the way you'd check a list. When she got to mine, she stopped.

I stared straight ahead and said nothing.

Everyone in that hall had the right year. I had the right hour on top of it.

The prophecy had never said my name. It had said a year, and my mother had heard a name in it anyway.

"Three assessments," the headmaster said. "Written. Combat. Dragon affinity. They will decide your placement — and who among you is worth putting in front of Tharion."

Around me, a hundred people who believed they had a real shot straightened their shoulders.

I just needed to pass. Everyone else in that room was doing arithmetic on a crown. I was doing arithmetic on a graduation certificate.

The written exam came the next morning. Two hours in a stone hall, a hundred pens scratching at once, my wrist aching through every line of it.

History, theory, taxonomy, formations — I knew all of it. My mother had put every textbook in Eldoria through my skull before I turned fifteen, and I had not slept more than five hours a night since I was six.

Then I reached question fourteen.

List the observable signs of distress in a resting dragon.

I stopped writing.

The summer I was eleven, Solari caught a barbed hook in her left wing joint. She never made a sound about it where anyone could hear.

She just went quiet. She folded that wing a half-inch tighter than the other one and stopped letting anybody stand on her left side.

My mother noticed on the second day.

I noticed the first afternoon. I had nothing else to do that summer except sit in the yard and watch a dragon breathe, and I had learned the shape of every sound she made when nothing was wrong. So I heard the ones she stopped making.

That wasn't skill. I had just been the only one with nothing better to do.

The textbook listed four signs. Raised crest. Bared teeth. Lashing tail. Vocalization.

Every one of them was a dragon telling you. Solari hadn't told anybody. She had spent two days making sure nobody could see it, and the hiding was the sign.

I looked at the blank line under the question and thought about leaving it alone. Give them what they wanted. Move on.

I didn't.

I wrote: A dragon in pain goes quiet. Not loud.

Then I wrote the four textbook signs underneath it, because I had learned a long time ago that the answer they want and the answer that is true are not always the same one.

I set my pen down. Most of the hall was still writing.

Kael had finished first. I'd watched him stand, hand in his paper, and walk out without glancing at anyone.

For the first time since I'd walked through those gates, I let myself think: maybe I wasn't as far behind as I felt.

Then they announced the second test.

Combat evaluation. One-on-one sparring, single elimination. Every first-year paired against another, fighting until one yielded or couldn't continue. Winners advanced round by round until a champion emerged.

A bracket was posted on the great hall's stone wall, ink still wet. Students crowded around it, jostling for position, scanning for their names. I waited until the press thinned, found my name in the first column, traced the line across to my opponent, and stopped.

Kael Draven.

First round.

I stared at his name until the letters blurred. Twelve years of being measured against him, and the academy had put us in the same box on a wall.

And now I had to fight him.