Taken (The Brindle Dragon Book 3) Page 4

  “So look at the person next to you. You see them? Either they or you are gonna die, so your job is to be better than them. Got it?”

  The group all nodded, the mood having gone from eager to decidedly worried. Eist only felt her excitement relatively dimmed, though. Her mother and father had been brutally killed in a battle; she knew through and through what the dangers were of being a dragon rider.

  So if she died, at least she would be fulfilling a family tradition.

  “Alright, split into two groups. Part of you will be taken to the archery range outside of the walls, and the other part will be introduced to melee weapons. After three hours, you’ll have a short water and rest break, then you’ll switch.

  “Your muscles will hurt. Your shoulders will scream. Your arms will be bruised and bleed while your hands will be covered in blisters and then they’ll pop, and you’ll get more blisters.”

  Yacrist leaned over, close enough to her ear that she could hear him as he spoke. “Why do you get the feeling that they’re always trying to tell us how awful everything is?”

  But in order for him to be loud enough for Eist to hear, of course the weapons master was going to hear too. “You there, the romantic with the floppy hair. You have something to say?!”

  Yacrist snapped up straight while Eist kept her eyes straight forward as if she hadn’t been involved at all. Thankfully, the weapons master moved right on and went straight to splitting the groups.

  He walked through, switching between one and two, which unfortunately meant that Dille and Yacrist were in the first group while Eist was on her own in the second. She didn’t mind terribly, however, because it would give her more time to concentrate. She loved her friends, but sometimes she let herself be distracted by them.

  After everyone was sorted out, she went with Ale’a toward the weapons rack while the archery group headed out. It took several more moments to get organized, but eventually the weapons group arranged themselves in a semi-circle around the rack while Ale’a stood in the center.

  “So, you’ll see we have several weapons here. All of you riders will be given a short sword when you graduate along with whatever your main weapon is. You will all start with the sword for today, but I might switch you depending on what I observe.

  “Now, keep in mind that me assigning you a weapon isn’t a brand you must carry your whole life. You are merely children now—or at least most of you are.” She gave a nod to one of the older men, who was in his twenties. Apparently, he had fallen ill with a terrible fever and blisters not too unlike Eist’s before he had gotten his dragon in his first year. Having missed the window, he was invited to come back at the next hatching, which he obviously had. He wasn’t the only one in that boat, with maybe three or four of the older students along with him, but it certainly wasn’t the norm.

  “Most likely you will grow, and your preferences will change. And that is fine. But for now, I want you all on the same, even playing field.”

  “Now, go up and grab one of the wooden swords so I can take you through some basic forms.”

  They all rushed to do so and soon they were in a wobbly sort of formation with Ale’a in the center. She took them through several basic holds, thrusts, and blocks. It was seven moves in total, but they went through them again.

  And again.

  And again.

  The weapons master was right. By the time their water break rolled around, her entire upper half was aching. Even her neck was protesting angrily, squeezing the base of her skull like a vice.

  She flopped on the ground, Fior happily climbing over her chest and middle. Of course, he was fine, he wasn’t the one who had gone through hundreds of weapon swings in such a short amount of time.

  A few breaths later, she felt several sets of labored steps then two bodies flopped down on either side of her. She didn’t need to open her eyes to know that it was Yacrist and Dille.

  “Ow?” she murmured questioningly.

  “Ow,” they both groaned.

  Eist let out the weakest laugh she had probably ever uttered and the three of them laid there for not nearly long enough before both Ale’a and the weapons master came by to round everyone up again.

  And then she was off to the archery fields.

  The walk was also a nice break, as her legs and lower back didn’t hurt nearly as much as her upper body. The sun was shining gently and there was a faint fall breeze. Soon it would grow chilly, but nothing like the freezing plains of Baeldred. That was the wonderful thing about Rothaiche M’or: while it had all four seasons, it kept relatively temperate year-round.

  “We’ll start with the short bow, as many of you are still short. Men, I know that this is the part where you like to brag about how tall you are, but trust me, most of you are actually not done growing. I know, your own backs are groaning at the thought right now and your knees are protesting, but fact is fact. I didn’t stop growing until I graduated with my dragon.

  “Alright, line up and I’ll hand them out. I don’t want a single arrow fired until I say so. In fact, I don’t even want you touching the arrows in one of those quivers until I tell you to. Understand?”

  There was a murmur of agreement and they went through the process of everyone taking a bow and standing a distance away from a painted hay bale target a bit away. Ale’a stood in front of them, the only one with an actual arrow, and showed them several important moves. Nocking the arrow was surprisingly difficult, requiring a specific hand hold, arm hold, and way for the fingers to grasp the arrow.

  Once she explained it, she then went to the quiver and grabbed it, handing out arrows one by one. She checked each person’s stance before allowing them to fire for the first time.

  Well, it was Eist’s first time. While her grandfather had taught her hand-to-hand combat and some weaponry, long-range projectiles had been a hard no. According to him, he was never properly trained, so he didn’t see any point in teaching her incorrectly, forcing her to unlearn it later.

  So, for the first time since she had joined the academy, she found herself at the same level of experience as all the other initiates. Maybe even less. It was a foreign experience, and she found herself quite nervous as Ale’a finally reached her and offered her an arrow.

  “Were you able to hear my instructions?” she asked, smiling in a familiar sort of way. Eist didn’t know why the tall, beautiful red-head had decided to be a friend to her, but she certainly wasn’t complaining.

  “Yes, I was.”

  “Alright, then nock your arrow and take aim.”

  Eist did so, and looked to Ale’a, whose expression was quite intense. “No, you’re holding your arm wrong, you’re going to smack your wrist. Only the heel of your palm, by your thumb, should be touching the handle.”

  She adjusted her arm slightly, which was shaking from the weight of the bow, then looked to Ale’a again.

  “Your stance is at the wrong angle. Try this.” She moved her booted feet into a specific position and Eist followed it. Once she was adjusted, she tried to look to Ale’a for approval once more, but her hand cramped and the string slipped through her fingers.

  THWACK!

  Eist yelped and nearly dropped the bow, and for once she was grateful that she couldn’t hear the giggles around her.

  “You moved your hand after you fixed your feet. Keep trying your form without the arrow and I’ll come back.”

  Eist nodded, her cheeks flushing, and Ale’a moved on.

  But not one to be discouraged, she kept on practicing, trying to adjust her feet, back, and wrist how she was supposed to. That seemed to last forever, until Ale’a finally finished with the last student then gave everyone the okay to go get their arrows.

  They all rushed forward and then the whole cycle started again.

  By the time it all ended, Eist’s wrist was swollen and red, with several welts arranged in vibrant lines. If she thought her upper half was in pain before, now it was literally screaming. She was incredibly grateful that
the next two days would be classes only, because she certainly needed a break.

  She limped back to the inside fields with the rest of her group, the muscles in her upper body so tense that they were affecting her gait. She was immensely jealous when she saw Dille and Yacrist already laying on the grass, not too differently from how they had found her.

  “By the Three,” she groaned to them on approach.

  Yacrist clearly tried to sit up but ended up flopping on his side. “Everything hurts,” he replied.

  “Eist, help me up,” Dill implored, “we’ll both go to the heated baths.”

  “I don’t know if I can help you up.” Nevertheless, she did offer her friend her non-injured arm and together they managed to get the slight girl on her feet. It helped that she was back to her thinner frame, but hopefully that would be changing soon as she got more regular meals into her.

  “No fair,” Yacrist groaned. “I wanna come.”

  “You can go to the boys’ baths,” Dille sighed, offering him her hand along with Eist. Together, along with their dragons, the two of them managed to pull up his much larger frame.

  “But that’s not as fun.”

  Eist just rolled her eyes and kept limping onward. Sometimes that was the only way to deal with Yacrist’s flirtatious ways. He did that with everyone, but she and Dille sometimes seemed like the only ones to be immune to it.

  He limped after them, his stride soon overtaking them due to his longer legs. He gave a very weak wave then disappeared down the hall leading to the male baths while Eist and Dille continued onward.

  “Goodness,” Dille breathed, sweat covering her noble features. “I cannot wait until we get to the part where this doesn’t hurt at all.”

  Eist agreed, but deep in her stomach, she had a feeling that point was a very long way off.

  5

  Missing Links

  Somehow, life began to settle into a bit of a rhythm, even if they were training harder than ever before. After their weapons day, they had a full day of rest with only classes, but the very next day, it was the morning spent on their usual physical training, then the afternoon with even more classes.

  They were still learning history, but now other things had been thrown into the mix. Their battle strategy now involved sieges, and properly utilizing dragon abilities. Each of the type of creatures had inherently magical ability—although the teachers never used the word ‘magic.’ No, they used phrases like ‘natural gifts’ and ‘blessings of the Three.’ It made Eist think of that book she had found and the woman who had written it, but she mostly kept those thoughts to herself. The last thing she needed to do was stick out in any other, stranger ways. She wanted to be the best of the best, not that one disabled rider that weird stuff always happened to.

  Unfortunately, her small dragon—who was now constantly chewing on hardtack—didn’t exactly help her blend in. But such was the way. She wouldn’t give up Fior for the world, even if the other students’ dragons seemed to get bigger by the day.

  She was idly staring at Verelda, who really was growing chunkier and more scarlet with every passing meal. Dille had taken her to the healers, worried she was overfeeding her charge, but after a thorough examination, the healers told her that she was just a big red dragon and most likely would end up being one of the largest in their entire class. Eist wondered what that would be like, riding around on a mountain of muscle and scale, but it was probably something she’d never—

  “Lady W’allenhaus, can you tell us where we last left off?”

  Eist’s gaze moved to the teacher, who was staring down her hawkish nose at her pupil. Eist knew what she was doing. The woman was pretending to be gracious and checking if she could hear her, but really the teacher just wanted to single her out for not paying attention. But four years of living with a hearing impairment had the strict teacher beat.

  “We just finished off with the raid of Balvaych M’or, which would become one of the founding points for outer Rothaiche M’or and how we got our name.”

  “Oh…” Eist really loved that part, when the teacher was surprised by her answer but didn’t want to show that she was. “Very good. And now we’ll move right on to the beginning tensions between our fledgling country and two city-states which would later combine to make Margaid.”

  Eist nodded, as if that was perfectly normal, before her brain caught up to the situation. That actually wasn’t right at all. They were missing about two hundred or so years between those events, including the foul dragon uprising and the first sightings of the Blight.

  She thought about raising her hand and asking why, but again, she didn’t need that kind of attention.

  Dille, however, clearly had no qualms, because her hand shot up like a flash of light.

  “Yes, Dille?” the teacher asked, her thin lips tucking downward. Eist didn’t know if it was because of her lack of a family name, her skin color, or her social class, but the teacher was terrible at hiding that she didn’t like the dark-haired girl. Too bad she was never actually outright about it or said anything, because Eist would have reported her to the headmaster so fast that the teacher’s head would spin.

  “Aren’t we leaving out a couple centuries of information?”

  The teacher’s watery eyes narrowed. “I know you like to think yourself clever, but you’re going to have to trust that I, a teacher who has worked here longer than you have been alive, might know what I’m doing.”

  Dille, however, was never one to back down easily. Eist found herself wincing for her friend as she tried to continue. “But—”

  “No buts, Miss Dille. If you feel the need to prove yourself by trying to grandstand, please do it in one of your physical sessions where teachers have time to tolerate those things. I, however, have a class to teach and I would oh so appreciate it if you would let me do so without interruption.”

  Dille quieted, but Eist could feel her seething in the next seat over. She wondered if she should have backed up her friend, but before she could come to a conclusion, Dille was speaking again.

  “Is it because you don’t want to talk about the Blight?”

  Even Eist could have heard a pin drop in that moment. The teacher stalked over to their table, but Dille wasn’t one to back down and stood to face the woman. It was certainly a sight, the elder in her official robes, eyes narrowed into slits and her lips pulled back from her teeth while Dille was as cool and placid as a frozen over lake. They were two opposites, in every meaning of the word.

  “Even speaking of the Blight’s name gives it power, so you would be careful of saying it in my class,” the woman breathed, her voice low and dangerous.

  Now that was a line that Eist wasn’t interested in letting her cross. She stood as well and joined her friend, staring up at the teacher like she dared her to take a step closer.

  But it never came to that because then another student cleared their throat.

  “Why does that matter if the Blight is gone?”

  That seemed to stall the teacher, and all the power in her fury drained from her face. Standing straight, she retreated to the front of the room where she clapped her hands together.

  “Class is dismissed.”

  “But it’s—”

  “What has happened in this academy that makes all of you think that it’s appropriate for you to question your teacher?! Class is dismissed! Do not question me and leave!”

  The class quickly got to their feet and hurried out, scrambling to snatch up their parchment, ink, and quills. Most of them were completely mystified, but Eist had a feeling she knew why the teacher was skipping over such a large part of their world’s history.

  They were being more careful, because they weren’t certain if the Blight was back or not.

  And they weren’t certain because of what her grandfather had said.

  But certainly, the white dragon would know if the Blight was back or if the black dragon had been reborn.

  Once, long ago, the black and white drago
n had been two halves of a whole. They ruled all of dragonkind together, a nearly unstoppable union. When he or the white dragon died of old age, the nations mourned until a new white or black dragon was born. There was only ever one at a time, and the twenty years it took for them to mature were always fraught with danger. Never had either of their kind died of violence, or a lost battle.

  Until the present era. It had been the trigger of the last great war, actually, the one that had taken Eist’s parents from her. Traitors within the ranks, corrupted by the Blight’s influence, brought him down and nearly the white dragon too. The black dragon and his rider sacrificed themselves to give her and Elspeth time to escape.

  Another one hadn’t been born since.

  While no one knew why that was, Eist had a feeling that also was involved with the Blight.

  Or maybe she was just Blight obsessed, seeing it everywhere since her grandfather had spoken of his dreams. Either way, she was glad to be out of class early. It gave the students extra time to do all of their favorite thing together:

  Eat.

  6

  Crash Landing

  THWACK!

  Eist suppressed the long string of curses that she wanted to let out, her wrist stinging like someone had set it on fire. In the two weeks that she had been doing weapons training, she had improved much. However, she still had her occasional mishap, and those mishaps usually resulted in the tender, inner flesh of her wrist being slapped by all the power in her bow.

  “You alright?” Yacrist asked from beside her. Today it had worked out that she and her friends all ended up in the same group, and Eist was comforted by their presence. Especially Dille, who seemed to have a natural talent for the bow and had permission from Ale’a to help Eist from time to time.

  “I’m not used to not getting things,” Eist grumbled, pulling another arrow from her quiver and lining it up.