Chapter 6

We walked to the Dragon’s Seasonal Palace—aptly named for Tharion’s yearly occupation of it, although perhaps less apt for the fact that it was also a tomb—at dawn.

The path wound east from the academy through the pines and up a ridge of bare stone. It wasn't far, twenty minutes on foot. The previous Dragon King’s tomb was located there, and for the past hundred years, Tharion came to stay for the autumn months surrounding the anniversary of his death.

The rest of the year, no one knew where Tharion went. Only dragons allowed their riders to know of their whereabouts. Tharion had no rider. Therefore, the only time anyone saw him was in the fall. And even then, approaching without being invited could be dangerous.

“Remember,” Headmaster Vance said, walking backwards ahead of the group as we approached, “do not make direct eye contact unless addressed by Tharion. Do not approach unless directed to, and even then, keep your head down. Show respect at all times. And do not, under any circumstances, touch the tomb.”

The girl beside me shuddered, wrapping her arms around herself. I suppressed a chill as the tomb came into view.

It wasn’t what I expected; rather than a vast marble structure with columns and statues, it was a simple stone plinth in the middle of the clearing, at least twenty feet tall, looking over the cliff. Red banners hung from all sides of it, so old that the fabric had grown tattered from years in the wind and the salt spray from the ocean and the cold rain.

And curled around it, tail wrapped three times around the base of the stone with his eyes shut, was Tharion.

He was enormous. Twice the size of Solari, maybe more. His scales were gold, deep and heavy, the color of sunlight trapped in amber. His wings lay folded against his back, each one wide enough to shade half the courtyard. His eyes were closed.

He looked old. Worn, like something that had been waiting for a very long time and had forgotten what it was waiting for. Nothing about him looked weak.

A hundred years. He'd stayed here a hundred years, guarding the grave of his last rider.

One eye opened. It was like fire, glowing red and orange and yellow depending on which angle you looked at it, sometimes all three at once. The other opened. The pupils narrowed to vertical slits, and the dragon huffed out a breath that made smoke come out of its flaring nostrils. It lowered its head and the smoke billowed toward us.

The headmaster stepped forward and bowed.

"Tharion." His voice carried across the silent court. "The children of the prophecy year have come of age. Your new master is among these students."

Tharion looked around, those fiery eyes sweeping over all of us. Assessing. Then, he snorted with disdain.

The headmaster sighed. "But I thought we agreed.”

Tharion was quiet for some time. The wind howled. The banners flapped. Finally, he bobbed his enormous head. Once.

Vance turned to us. “You may approach. One at a time.”

A tall boy stepped forward first. He'd barely crossed the halfway point when Tharion's wing snapped open and sent him tumbling across the stone.

Two more tried. Same result. One got close enough to touch Tharion's flank before the tail whipped around and sent her sprawling.

Tharion roared.

The sound split the morning, vibrating in my chest, in my teeth, in the soles of my boots. Students flinched. A girl beside me covered her ears.

I didn't flinch. Because I'd heard this sound before. Last night, in the dark, rising from the mountains beyond the academy walls. The same cry. The same ragged edge beneath the fury.

Pain.

It was Tharion, I instantly realized. Tharion who had been crying out in pain. This enormous, ancient, tough-as-nails dragon—he was hurt. But I didn’t see any injuries from where I was standing.

“He seems restless,” I said to the headmaster. “Is he in pain?”

The headmaster didn’t even glance at me. “Pain?” he asked with a scoff. “I highly doubt a dragon like Tharion could have gotten injured.”

“But he’s crying out,” I said. “His call isn’t the normal roar of a dragon. It sounds like—”

“Then it’s emotional pain, perhaps. This is the tomb of his old King.”

Even as Headmaster Vance said it with such certainty, I knew he was wrong. Tharion wasn't just angry. If he had been, then why, every time he beat his left wing, did something in his back seize? And why did he keep turning his head as if to snap at something in that spot?

He wasn't angry, necessarily, about the students who were trying to climb onto his back. Tharion was known for being hard and unyielding, but not violent, not to the students, especially those in the year of the prophecy. He was trying to reach something he couldn't get to. Something behind his wing, perhaps.

More students were thrown in the next two minutes than I could count. Finally, Kael stepped forward. I turned to watch him.

He raced forward, ducking low beneath the swing of Tharion’s tail. Tharion roared, and an enormous wing came down. Even the headmaster’s breath hitched beside me as Kael narrowly ducked beneath the spread of crackled golden leathery wing. Kael rolled, hitting the ground with a thud that I heard even from here. He caught the ridge of Tharion's shoulder and hauled himself up onto the dragon's back in one clean motion.

Tharion bucked. Kael held on fast, gripping the spines along his back with both hands. The dragon twisted, reared, slammed his wings down hard enough to crack the stone beneath him. Kael's body whipped back and forth, but his hands didn't slip.

He lasted twenty seconds before Tharion threw him.

Kael hit the ground and rolled to his feet without missing a beat, too proud to let anyone notice his defeat. He brushed the dust off his sleeve and walked back to the edge of the yard, unbothered.

Everyone commended him on how long he had lasted as he sauntered back to join the group.

But I was not looking at him anymore. My gaze had returned to the dragon. As a new student approached, he was snapping toward his wing once more, giant jaws opening and closing. Another roar of pain split the sky as the student attempted to rush at him, only to get slammed backwards by a giant claw.

"Tharion is injured,” I said.

Kyra snapped her head toward me. “What are you talking about? No one can injure Tharion.”

I shrugged. “He is.” I gestured to him. “He’s been trying to get at the same spot behind his wing this whole time, and his roars—”

“And why,” Kyra said, rolling her eyes, “should we take the word of a bottom-feeder who probably hasn’t stepped within fifty feet of a dragon her entire life?”

A few chuckles rippled around me, but I ignored all of them and kept looking at Tharion, massive, ancient, in pain, and felt my fear shrink beneath something stronger. Pity mixed with recognition.

I'd heard him cry in the dark when no one else was listening. And I knew how that felt. To cry and know that not only was no one coming to help, but no one even noticed.

My mind was made up in an instant. I ran before the next student could.

The crowd shouted behind me. Kael grabbed at my arm and missed.

"Liana—"

I didn't run straight at Tharion. I circled wide, using the knot of students still jostling near his left flank as cover. When his head swung toward a boy who'd stumbled too close, I sprinted for his tail.

I grabbed it with both hands. The scales were hot and rough under my palms. His tail swept upward and I held on, letting the momentum carry me, and scrambled up his back — fingers digging into the ridges between scales, knees scraping against bone plates.

Tharion roared. His wings snapped open and he launched into the sky.

The ground fell away. Wind tore at my face, ripped my hair loose, slammed into my chest hard enough to steal my breath. The academy shrank below me. The sky opened above, vast and blue and terrifying.

I flattened myself against his spine. My hands searched blindly along the groove between his shoulder blades, fingers scraping over scale after scale, until I felt it.

Iron. A shaft of black iron was driven deep between two scales, buried almost to the base. The skin around it was swollen, hot, crusted with old blood.

Someone had driven a spike into his back, and he couldn't reach it to pull it out.

I wrapped both hands around the shaft. My fingers slipped. Tharion bucked and I nearly lost everything.

I pulled.

It didn't move.

Tharion rolled in the air and the sky switched places with the ground. I screamed, locked my legs tighter, arched my back, and pulled again, harder, with every ounce of the stupid, stubborn persistence my mother had spent twelve years beating into me.

The spike came free with a force that tore me backward off his spine. For one second I hung in open air, the spike clutched in my fist.

Until gravity took over.

And then I fell.

The sky tumbled and the mountains went with it. I closed my eyes and thought: this is it. Eighteen years of my mother's drills, and I was going to die as a girl who tried to help a dragon and fell out of the sky for it.

Something caught me.

It pressed up beneath me, hard and solid and warm, and the falling stopped. I heard the steady beat of wings.

I opened my eyes.

Gold scales. A massive claw curled around my body. Tharion descended toward the plinth in a wide spiral, one flaming eye flicking down to look at me.

The dragon who had thrown every rider who ever touched him had just caught me.