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. Unfortunately, my poor score in combat had brought down my total score considerably. If it hadn’t been for that… I might have made it into the top twenty.

Kael was first, of course. As for Kyra, her score was within 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 of space,” Kyra mocked. Her blue eyes flashed with amusement.

Before I could answer, Kyra kept walking, her blonde hair swinging behind her, the words 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, spending the extra hours training, because tomorrow we would meet Tharion.

The headmaster had said that tomorrow’s evaluation was special, only for us freshmen, who were born during the year of the prophecy. Whoever gained Tharion’s approval would become the Dragon King.

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, but I hardly felt it. This had been my daily routine for years. Training hard into the night, trying to become anything more than mediocre. Trying to get a dragon, become a Dragon Rider, and graduate.

That had always been my focus. And it was my focus now, beyond Tharion, beyond the Dragon King. Dragon Rider. That was all I needed to be.

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. Since then, Tharion had remained at the academy, acting as a guardian; but he did not claim anyone.

They also said that Tharion 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.

It was low and keening. Not the mighty roar of a dragon in combat, nor the desperate wail of one in mourning. It was cracked and raw around the edges. The sort of scream you’d only hear on battlefields or in infirmaries or in nightmares, but in dragon form instead of human.

I didn't know which dragon it was coming from, but I knew it was in pain. I lowered my sword, listening. No one else seemed to notice the shape of the sound like I did; they went on training, tuning the sound out into background noise.

Finally, it stopped. I swallowed down the sudden lump in my throat and went back to my training.

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.

“Waste of space.” Kael’s mocking words continued to sink their claws deep into my mind and refused to let go. I refused to be exactly what she said I was. I refused to be what my mother said, too.

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. Every repetition landed in the same place, with his front foot dropping into the same two scuffs in the dust, the sword tip stopping at the same height, again and again and again.

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 shouldn’t have cared what Kael was doing, so I told myself that I was only curious, nothing more, and went back to my own training with renewed fervor. After all, if he was still going, I wasn't going to be the one who quit first.

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

Kael kept going.

In the end, I lost. My arms gave out, shaking too much to lift my sword anymore. My hands cramped and my knees trembled. I shook my head and reracked the training sword, wiping my neck with a towel.

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

"Kael."

He stopped, but didn't turn around.

"Why did you carry me to the infirmary?" I asked.

There was a long moment that he didn’t answer. For a moment, I almost thought he wouldn’t. It wouldn’t exactly be out of character for him to ignore my question. But then, finally, he said in a flat tone, "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, replaced by the dull pain of realization. Kael Draven didn’t care about me. He was only trying to avoid having to do extra paperwork.

I grabbed my things 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, but the sting of my pride hurt even worse. And yet, worse than that, there was something else

It was the dragon's cry.

That sound was raw, deep, and full of pain. 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. Anguished and desperate and utterly alone.

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.

I was just coming to that decision when the cry came again, ringing through the night. The window rattled with it. It was only one howl this time, but it lingered long after it stopped, echoing around the stone walls.

I shuddered, rolled over, and tried my best to sleep after that.