“What is it, uncle? I think that you are perhaps the only person left I can trust to give me advice!” I implored.
I watched as my uncle glowered at the fire, before my words made up his mind. He nodded to himself with a grunt, cleared his throat, and then said in his loud and clear voice, “I had counselled myself not to say this to you, Neill, for fear of influencing your decision. And your Aunt Maya advised the same. But you are a young man, and you must make your own path in this life. But my heart could not leave you to these dangers that I see mounting around you on all sides, so I will give you the counsel of Family Chief Lett Shaar-Anar,” he flourished his hands formally, indicating himself. “I think that you could leave this place,” he said simply.
What? I almost coughed out loud, but my uncle was being deadly serious.
“They are asking too much of you, too much of any one man perhaps. They want you to be Neill Malos-Torvald, but Malos Torvald spent his life wading knee-deep in blood. The Dark Prince Vincent, and all of his brothers will view you as a threat, and you will have to decide whether to bend your knee to one of them, or to fight all of them – neither are wise choices for either you, for those students up there, or for your dragons,” Lett carried on, despite the way that I could see Aunt Maya looking dismayed from her seat.
“You should leave this place, with your girl, and your dragon if it will come, and you should fly. Ride like we do, the traveling Gypsies of your mother’s people. Become a dragon-rover, traveler of the world over! You know that you will always have a home with us, and we will never insist that you nor your dragon ever fight wars for us or lead us into battle! Just to work hard and to take what joy out of life as we are allowed before the final days. Leave the Dark Prince to squabble with his brothers over the scraps of ancient times! Come live in the now, with us!”
My uncle finished with another flourish, and Daros and Sami cheered, clearly used to listening to my uncle’s dramatic speeches.
But for myself, however, I felt a strange, yawning sensation inside my heart. It trembled with fear, but also with excitement as well. Was it even possible? I started to think. Could I really start afresh, somewhere else? Somewhere new?
Could I just be myself, with my friends Char and Paxala and any of the others who will come with me? It made me feel fluttery and even hopeful, like there was going to be a way through this mess, if we but walked away from it. But what of the academy? I suddenly thought. What of all of those hours of training that we’d put in? Of all that knowledge held up there… Could I really just walk away from all of that?
Yes, I realized with shock. I really could, if it meant helping the dragons at the same time. As long as I stayed here, as the entire academy stayed here then it would always be in danger. Some lord or abbot or sorcerer would fix their greedy sights on it. Why not encourage the dragons to be wild once again? To freely choose their companions however they wished?
Why should I wait here, getting into arguments and plunging the dragon crater into war, anyway? I reasoned with myself. If the dragons really did return to the wild, then maybe everyone could develop their own relationship with the dragons, and not fight over them all the time?
It was a tenuous and fragile hope, but it was one that I threw my heart at.
I didn’t have to be Neill, the Son of Torvald, the Leader of the Dragon Academy, I found myself smiling. I could be Neill Shaar-Torvald, Dragon Rider and dragon-rover, with Char at my side…But as tempting as that dream was, as close at hand that it felt, in some corner of my mind there was still a nagging thought that would not leave me be.
“Enough of this serious talk!” My uncle belched loudly into the night air. “We should tell stories under the night skies, and I want you, Master Neill, to make sure that my beautiful Maya and I don’t get eaten by dragons in the middle of the night! We will all sleep out under the stars with our blankets as we used to do in the old times!” My uncle raised a heavy eyebrow at the two second or third cousins, Daros and Sami. “Apart from those two, however – your wyrms can eat them. They’re only any good at stealing horses, and that is only when the horses are asleep!”
Chapter 13
Char, the Problem of Magic
“Char?” Maxal Ganna said as he peered at me with his wide, perpetually-worried eyes from behind the dark door to the main chamber.
Our first council meeting was over, and it had gone disastrously, all things considered. It was now full-on nighttime and I was exhausted. We had had supper as we argued, and I had missed my usual sunset with Paxala, which was something I looked forward to every night—witnessing the dragons’ particular affinity for both sunrise and sunset, expressed in caws and shrieks of approval. I was annoyed, and surrounded by the disheveled tables littered with scrolls upon which everyone had been taking notes.
“Maxal,” I smiled wanly, despite the fact that all I could think was not something else, please!
The smaller student looked nervously about the room as he entered. He wasn’t one for the press and tear of people. Maxal was one of the few students, like me, who had gone through the Abbot’s magical training – or torture, as I now thought it to be—and I wondered if it had affected him as much or more than it did me. But Maxal relaxed visibly as he saw that only Dorf, me, and half a dozen of the other students remained in the large hall.
“How did it go?” he asked cautiously as he walked in.
“Berlip’s faction is threatening to revolt. Nan’s staff is overworked. Zaxx is out there somewhere. The students are desperate to get more time with the dragons, and Neill is nowhere to be found!” I finished in exasperation. How could Neill do this to me, at this time? I thought. I needed him!
“He went off with his uncle,” Dorf said, mumbling under a mountain of scroll work that he was trying to collate. “I think it’s good, actually. He hasn’t been looking himself recently. Maybe his uncle will help to put him back on track.”
“We can only hope,” I muttered. I knew that Neill admired his strong Uncle Lett, and the way the Gypsy had diffused the tension with Berlip earlier had been excellent. “Anyway, what is it, Maxal?” I looked over at him. Maxal wasn’t one to chat or gossip lightly, and so whatever he must want to talk about had to be important.
“Well, two things,” Maxal said. “I was doing as you asked, looking into the Abbot’s dragon magic, if you wanted us to train people again…” he said.
“Great, thank you,” I congratulated him. In fact, I had been all for stopping the magical training entirely now that I knew that the Abbot’s magic came from the powdered remains of baby dragons, but I still didn’t know if that meant that student magic came from the same source. The Abbot had never offered us students a potion, or any concoction to ‘help’ our magical abilities, so I was still mystified as to what to think about it all. “I guess it’s important that people have the opportunity to find out if they have the skill…” I grumbled.
“Well, I had so many students ask me when the training was going to start after this morning that we would have enough for three or four groups, not that I know if any of them will have any magical ability…” Maxal said thoughtfully.
Three or four more groups of dragon Mages? I had to bite my tongue to stop the dismay from creeping onto my face. From my own experience of the magic, I didn’t know if it could ever be redeemed. But who are you, Char, to make that choice? I told myself.
“Char? There is also another little problem…” Maxal interrupted my quandary.
Oh great. Of course there was. “A problem?” I asked, rubbing my tired eyes.
Maxal nodded and produced from his over-large black robes a small leather book in one hand, and a green-glass vial in the other with a cork stopper.
“What’s that?” I felt a chill go down my spine.
Maxal grimaced as he set the vial onto the table in front of me, and turned to the book instead. “You remember this volume. It’s Versi’s Voyage, the memoirs of the explorer who travelled far to the south?”
I nodded that I did remember it. It was from Explorer Versi that we had first got accounts of natural dragon friends in the southern tribes. Hearing about his exploits in the deserts there had made what I did with Paxala seem a bit more normal, if uncommon.
“Well, later on in this volume he starts talking about dragon magic, the types of strange abilities that some of the older dragons have, as well as the humans that spend time with them.” He said the last part heavily.
“What?” I looked at Maxal, who cleared his throat and prepared for his favorite past time besides reading, reading aloud.
“So then, we can assume that the older dragons develop strange powers over the soul of a man, powers such as telepathy, suggestion, hypnotism, and even the ability to influence dreams, feelings, and thoughts,” Maxal continued reading the explorer’s words.
“There are even tales that the eldest of dragons can ‘smell the future’ although I have never seen it in practice. But even stranger, too, are the mystics and shamans who spend much time in contact with their befriended dragons. It seems that the closer that the human and the dragon become, and the more that they start to share each other’s life, the more that the human and dragon qualities become shared….” Maxal gave me a meaningful look.
“These shamans exhibit the same powers of suggestion and hypnotism as their dragons, and can also summon great and strange elemental powers: sudden fires, violent storms, fearsome winds – and move things with the strength of their prayers and mind alone!”
Maxal closed the book with a ‘what do you think of that!’ look upon his face.
I didn’t know what I thought of it. I couldn’t explain it, but I knew that it was the answer to why I had the magic. “That explains it,” I said. “I befriended Paxala, and raised her from hatchling to newt to dragon. Some of her power must have rubbed off on me…” I said.
“That explains everything,” Maxal corrected. “Why the Abbot started this monastery here, at the natural crater home of the Middle Kingdom dragons. He must have known that this could happen, that humans could start sharing in the dragons’ powers.” Maxal looked around the walls and floors of the monastery. “But he wanted to control that sharing of power. He didn’t want everyone to have it…” Next, Maxal picked up the small green vial and shook it in front of me. It gave off a slight hissing, tinkling noise as it did so.
“I was in the Abbot’s old rooms, and I found this,” Maxal said darkly. “And so I started searching. I found some more near the library, in a crate in one of the old storage rooms.”
My stomach turned over. “Is that… Is that what I think it is?”
I remembered the tiny, crabbed and spider-scrawled handwriting on the Old Queen Delia’s very own journal that I had found at my father’s fort. It had been a record of the strange practices and ceremonies that she had performed, in tandem with Abbot Ansall, in order to prolong both of their lives and gain more and more unnatural power. They had killed baby hatchling dragons, and used their remains to imbibe their power.
And the old queen lived to well past a hundred, I thought in horror. She had not lived until my time, but she had given birth to my father, the Northern Prince Lander, well into what must have been her eighties or nineties, although her portraits still painted her as a fulsome woman in her middling years.
Which meant that the Abbot Ansall could be ancient. Two hundred? Three hundred years? I shivered at the thought of his pale, papery skin and his wiry beard like frozen briars. Just how far back does his evil go?
“I think that it is,” Maxal grimaced. “Powdered remains of dragons. The Abbot…”
“He must have been putting it into the food!” Dorf suddenly gasped, a moment before his careful stack of scrolls that he was holding in his hands slipped from them and fell to the floor in disarray once more. He looked decidedly green, and rushed out of the room to the nearest convenience.
I nodded sourly at Maxal. It was a thought that I had considered before now, but hadn’t wanted to believe was true. The Abbot could have been dosing us with his powdered dragon, at the same time he used his own magic to subdue and twist us to his own ends. I felt sick, but both my and Maxal’s constitution proved stronger than Dorf’s.
“No more training.” I said heavily. “And we’re going to scatter every vial that you found, back to the crater winds where they belong.”
“I agree…. But…” Maxal tapped the table with his delicate, small fingers. “But what if some of the students start developing their powers naturally? Without the powder? Just as Versi talked about?”
“Then…” I started to say, before feeling exasperated. Then what? What do we do then?
“I think we should teach the theory of dragon magic,” Maxal stated. “But the practice...? That will remain a private thing. If someone shows promise, then they’ll have to come to one of us.”
“Or their dragon, of course,” I said. In fact, in a sick way, it was a relief to come to this decision about the teaching of dragon magic. It felt right to leave its mysteries be; to let people and their own dragons find their own rhythm. Yeah, I thought. The Dragon Academy in the future wouldn’t be where you came to study magic; it would be a place where you came to study dragons, and if dragon mages came out of that, then that was just an added bonus.
“We’ll get rid of the vials in the morning, at dawn,” I said to Maxal, yawning. “But for now, we’ll have to hide them. I don’t want anyone else finding that…” The thought of the uproar, greed, and scandal it would cause between the older monks (who might even approve of the powder) and the students (who I knew would hate it) would be enough to destroy the fragile alliance that we had worked out this night.
Maxal nodded, picking up the vial and the book and turned to go, before pausing at the door. “You should get some rest, Char,” he said. “You look terrible.”
“Thanks,” I groaned. Coming from him, a boy who was so pale as to be almost see-through, I knew I must really need some sleep. “I can’t believe how long this day has been. Just a few hours ago, I thought that we were going to have to fight Zaxx the Golden!” I muttered, easing myself to my feet.
“Oh, I almost forgot!” Maxal stopped completely this time, his hands rummaging in the deep pockets of his black cloak.
“If you’re going to produce something else gross Maxal, then really, right now I don’t want to know. Can’t it wait until morning?” I said.
“No, it’s not gross. Well, not really gross, anyway…” Maxal instead brought out a dense handful of something black, blue, and grey, and strangely fibrous.
“What is that?” I asked. It looked organic, like it was a plant or something.
“Feather-Sponge, it’s a type of moss that grows on some of the trees on Mount Hammal. I read about it in Versi’s Voyage, that some of the tribes put it in their ears and used it to block out the sounds of dragon calls. I was thinking that maybe…”
“We could give it to the dragons!” I clapped my hands in delight. “It might help protect them from Zaxx!” Of course, I knew that the dragons would still be alarmed by the scent of Zaxx, but they would be much better protected than they had been.
Maxal nodded, giving me a shy grin. A large part of the problem, it seemed, was that the golden bull dragon had spent decades – centuries even, training his clutches and broods to fear his roar, and so, like the dragon pipes of old, he could use his roar to terrify and subdue them. If we could even make it just a little more difficult for Zaxx to intimidate the crater dragons, then it might mean that we had a chance to fight back against them!
“This is brilliant, Maxal,” I nodded. “We’ll harvest some in the morning, after scattering the powder.”
Chapter 14
Neill, and the Dark Prince
The dragon horn blared its alarm across the mountain, waking me up from quite possibly the soundest sleep I had ever had. Even though I had spent the night wrapped in one of my uncle’s brightly-woven blankets on the stone and shingle beach of the lakeside, and
my body was now cold and a little stiff, I had slept deeply and well, and woke up feeling refreshed.
Neill Shaar-Torvald, I remembered, my heart hammering as Uncle Lett groaned and grumbled awake. That was who I would be.
“What is that heavens’ awful racket?” he said blearily, clearly having imbibed in too much of the berry wine he had produced at some point in the evening. “Does that happen every morning? At this hour? No wonder you’re so stressed, Neill!”
Daros and Sami slept on, blissfully unaware, but Maya was groaning, and already shuffling to the cold embers of the fire, tutting and snapping twigs.
The dragon horn sounded again, and I checked the lightening sky once again. The sunrise was imminent, but the problem was, we didn’t use the dragon horn at sunrise. We had stopped the former practice of the old Draconis order of sounding the old dragon pipes at dawn and sunset immediately. We had no wish, no need, to remind the dragons who was ‘really’ in charge on this mountain, as the Abbot Ansall had, and now only used our modified, gentler dragon horn as an alarm or a celebration of something.
“No, that sound doesn’t happen every morning. Something’s wrong!” I said, picking up my cloak and running to Stamper who was placidly nibbling grass on the edge of the trees. I was about to leap upon him bareback and urge him up the track to the ridge, and the monastery beyond, when Uncle Lett shouted at me.
“Wait, Neill! Can’t it wait until after breakfast?”
It couldn’t, and I knew that my uncle would forgive me for abandoning him there. He was a man of taking quick offense, and offering quicker forgiveness. I had never known Uncle Lett to hold a grudge against anyone or anything, as, in his own words, “life is short and the roads are long.” So I continued to click my tongue at the surprisingly obliging bitless Stamper and soon we were trotting up the trail until we neared the top of the ridge, the warm air billowing like smoke from Stamper’s nose in the cold morning.
Dragon Mage (The First Dragon Rider Book 3) Page 12
