Chapter 4: Affinity

"Not until the infirmary." Kael's voice was flat. Final.

He set me down on a cot like he was putting down a package, carefully enough not to break it, detached enough not to care. Before I could say anything, he'd already turned and walked out.

I stared at the empty doorway.

In twelve years, Kael Draven had never carried anything heavier than his own superiority. He didn't do favors. And yet he'd just carried me through half the academy without a single word of complaint.

I didn't know what to do with that.

The light through the window had gone orange by the time the doctor came. She was a thin woman with sharp eyes and ink-stained fingers. She handed me a small glass vial. The liquid inside was dark red, almost black, and smelled like copper and burnt sugar.

"Dragon blood," she said. "Drink."

I'd read about it in my mother's books. Dragon blood carried traces of the magic that ran through their veins, enough to knit torn tissue and close wounds in minutes instead of weeks. It was rare and expensive, the kind of thing reserved for knights and nobility.

I had just been handed more money than every jacket I owned put together, because I had lost a fight in under one second.

I drank it. The taste was hot and metallic, sharp enough to make my eyes water. Then warmth spread from my chest outward — slow at first, then faster, rushing into my arms, my ribs, my bruised knees, like sunlight poured directly into my blood.

When I stood five minutes later, the cuts had closed. The bruises still ached, but the sharp edges of the pain were gone.

My pulse still hadn't slowed, and I told myself it was the dragon blood working through my veins. Not him.

The doctor checked my arms and nodded. "You'll do. Results are posted in the main hall."

I read them the next morning, on my way to the last test. A list, ranked by combat performance. I scanned from the bottom.

Dead last. First eliminated.

Kael's name sat at the top. Champion.

I looked at it for three seconds, then kept walking.

The final test was dragon affinity.

The testing ground was a wide stone terrace overlooking the mountain's eastern face, bordered by low walls and scattered with perches. The examiner was a stocky man with a graying beard. He stood at the center with a small dragon on his arm.

A Mungrake. About half the length of my forearm, with dull bronze scales and thin wings folded tight against its body. It wasn't like Solari. Mungrakes had no fire. They were classified as common fauna, barely more than winged lizards with bad attitudes.

But it was still a dragon.

When I arrived, Kael was already finished. He stood off to the side with the Mungrake perched on his wrist, calm and still, like it had decided he was simply not worth the effort of resisting. He held it loosely, barely paying attention, the same grip he'd give anything that had already stopped resisting him.

"Liana Frost."

The examiner didn't look up from his list.

I stepped forward with a flutter of excitement I couldn't quite suppress. This was my first time touching a dragon besides Solari. My first time being near one without my mother standing over my shoulder.

The Mungrake was placed on a stone perch in front of me. It crouched low, wings half-spread, pupils blown wide. I read its body: the tight coil of its tail, the tremor in its hind legs, the way its nostrils flared with each breath.

It was terrified.

Student after student had grabbed at it, pinned it down, forced it into submission. Of course it was terrified.

I crouched to its level.

The Mungrake hissed. Its teeth were tiny and sharp, bared in a snarl that said don't.

I reached out slowly. Palm open, fingers loose. "I'm not going to hurt you," I said. Quiet. Just for it.

It bit me. Hard. Its teeth sank into my index finger and locked there, jaw clamped tight, wings flaring. Blood welled around its mouth.

I didn't pull back.

I stayed perfectly still and let it hold on. The pain was sharp and clean, and nothing at all compared to what Kael had done to me the day before.

Say what you want about that fight. It had lowered the bar.

I kept my breathing even and my hand steady, and after a few seconds, the pressure on my finger eased.

The Mungrake opened its mouth. It stared at me with round bronze eyes, head tilted. It hadn't expected me not to fight back.

I scratched the underside of its chin with my other hand. Gently, with the same slow rhythm I'd used on Solari a hundred times without thinking.

The Mungrake's wings folded. Its body unclenched. It made a small sound halfway between a growl and a purr, and crawled off the perch into my cupped hands. It curled against my palm, warm and unexpectedly light, its tail wrapping around my wrist.

I almost forgot the test.

Then I remembered. I pointed to the nearest tree, a gnarled pine growing out of a crack in the terrace wall, and looked at the Mungrake.

It launched off my hand, snatched a needle-cluster from a low branch, and dropped it neatly into my palm.

Silence.

The examiner stared at me. He didn't speak for a long time.

My stomach tightened. Had I done something wrong? Everyone else had commanded their dragons — wrestled them still, barked orders until the creature obeyed out of exhaustion or fear. I'd just asked.

"A-grade," the examiner said. His voice was uncertain. He hadn't fully decided whether to believe what he'd seen.

The students behind me erupted into whispers. Before I could process what that meant, before I could feel anything at all, a voice cut through the noise.

"That's not a taming." Blonde hair. Blue eyes. A jaw clenched tight enough to make the tendons in her neck stand out. "She didn't control it. She broke protocol. The test should be invalidated."

I knew who she was before her name surfaced in my memory. The shape of her fury was inherited — I'd seen it in her mother's face at every tournament where Vesper Frost had taken the podium.

Kyra Ember.

Our mothers had been rivals for as long as either of us had been alive. And now their war had a second front.