Chapter 5

The examiner dismissed Kyra's protest in three words.

"Affinity is taming." The examiner said it at the same volume he'd used to read my name off his list. "Gaining a dragon's trust is more effective than breaking its will. The grade stands."

Kyra's jaw tightened. She turned and walked away without another word.

I let out a breath I hadn't known I was holding.

The combined results went up an hour later. Four columns: written, combat, affinity, and a final ranking on the far right.

I found Liana Frost near the bottom. Combined: bottom ten. Written: top three. Affinity: the highest score in the class. Combat had eaten both.

Kyra was in the top ten.

I was scanning the rest of the list when a shoulder slammed into mine. Hard enough to knock me sideways into the wall.

"Waste."

Kyra kept walking, her blonde hair swinging behind her, that single word hanging in the corridor like smoke.

I pressed my shoulder blade against the stone and clenched my fists until my knuckles ached.

That night, nobody slept.

The training yard was full — the whole first year out under torchlight, because tomorrow we would meet Tharion.

This was the final evaluation. Anyone who could approach Tharion without being thrown would be considered for the Crown Class.

I wasn't training for that.

I swung my sword at the practice post, again and again. The impact jarred up my arms and into my shoulders, and I kept going because stopping meant thinking, and thinking meant remembering the word Kyra had put on me that morning.

Get a dragon, any dragon, and graduate. That had always been enough.

It had been enough this morning. Before a man with a gray beard wrote A-grade beside my name and didn't sound sure he believed it.

I swung harder.

Around me, students talked about Tharion between sets. They said the golden dragon hadn't accepted a rider in a hundred years — not since the last king died. That he was violent and unpredictable, and turned on anyone who came close. A boy with a crooked nose said his older brother had tried during last year's open trials and been thrown thirty feet into a stone wall.

A sound cut through the night.

Distant. Low. A dragon's cry with something rawer under it, stretched thin with pain.

I lowered my sword.

No one else looked up. The students around me went on drilling. But I'd grown up with Solari. I knew what a dragon sounded like when it was hurting: the way the pitch bent, the way the breath behind it caught wrong. That cry came from the mountains beyond the academy walls, and whatever was making it was in real pain.

I didn't know which dragon it was.

The hours wore on. Students drifted away in ones and twos, yawning, stretching, heading back to the dormitory. By midnight, the yard was almost empty.

I was still there.

I couldn't afford to stop early and trust that tomorrow would take care of itself. If I wanted to survive at this academy, I had to outwork everyone. Every night.

I was mid-swing when I realized I wasn't alone.

Kael stood at the far end of the yard, sleeves rolled to the elbows, working through a drill sequence I didn't recognize. His movements were clean, precise, unhurried, like a machine running through its paces. He wasn't even sweating.

He wasn't counting his sets. That was the part I couldn't stop watching. Every repetition landed in the same place — his front foot dropping into the same two scuffs in the dust, the sword tip stopping at the same height, again and again, like the yard had been measured to fit him.

The torch nearest him had burned down to a stub. He hadn't moved closer to another one.

We were the only two left.

He was first in combat, first in the written, and second in the only thing I'd beaten him at. There was no one left in this yard for him to prove anything to.

So why was he still in it?

I didn't have an answer. What bothered me was that I wanted one.

I didn't stop. If he was still going, I wasn't going to be the one who quit first.

I swung. Reset. Swung again. My arms burned, my wrists ached, and my legs shook with every pivot.

Kael kept going.

I lost.

My arms gave out first — they dropped, the sword tipped forward, and I bent over with my hands on my knees, gasping hard enough to spot my vision. Sweat dripped off my chin onto the stone.

Kael walked past me on his way out and lifted his jacket off the post without breaking stride.

"Kael."

He stopped. Didn't turn around.

"Why did you carry me to the infirmary?"

A beat of silence. Then, without looking back: "Because you were injured."

Something loosened in my chest, just a fraction, just for a second. A warmth I hadn't expected and didn't know what to do with. Maybe he wasn't as cold as—

"Besides." He started walking again. "Explaining your corpse to Headmaster Vance would have ruined my afternoon."

The warmth died.

I stood there, bent over, sweat stinging my eyes, and felt a different kind of heat climb up my neck. Not exhaustion. Humiliation. The sudden, furious realization that I had almost, for one idiotic, pathetic second, thought Kael Draven might actually care.

He didn't. He'd been avoiding paperwork.

I grabbed my sword and walked back to the dormitory without another word. His door was already shut when I passed it.

I washed my face with cold water and sat on the edge of my cot in the dark. My muscles ached. My pride was louder.

But the thing I couldn't stop thinking about wasn't Kael.

It was the dragon's cry.

That sound was raw, deep, pulled from somewhere beneath bone. I'd heard Solari make it once, the summer I was eleven — not when the hook went in, but when she finally twisted around to reach it and found out she couldn't. It was the sound a dragon made when it couldn't fix its own pain.

I lay in the dark, replaying the sound in my head, and made myself a promise: tomorrow, after Tharion, I was going to find that dragon.

Then it came again.

Clearer this time.