Will nodded. “Yeah, no problem. I remember the way from here.”
While the master bard hurried to join Ilsa, Will went into his room to organize his supplies. His room was simple but elegant, with two beds, a small desk, and a tall stained-glass window letting a rainbow of light in through the stone wall.
He emptied his bag onto a bed and re-packed his supplies to balance the weight evenly.
Then he made his way to the bathhouse to get cleaned up, not sure what to expect from a building set aside just for bathing. Was it one big pool where everyone washed together? He grimaced at the thought. When he made it inside the warm steamy building, he found a series of wooden doors leading to small closed rooms. A sign hanging from a hook outside the first one had his name written on it. Will walked through to find a warm pool, like a hot tub, built into the floor with a jar of soap and a washrag sitting next to it.
Delighted, Will stripped down and immersed himself in the warm water, scrubbing all the dirt from his skin and getting thoroughly clean for the first time since his family came to Avria. While the servants who worked for Elder Madoc were expected to have access to washbasins, a full bath seemed to be a luxury reserved for the rich.
After he had soaped and scrubbed every inch of his body, Will took some time to float on his back in the warm pool, letting every one of his muscles relax and trying to forget all his worries.
He knew he should be thinking about saving his uncle, or at least finding out what happened to him so his family could have closure, but as he floated in the warm bath with his dragon egg nestled in his bag nearby, it felt like he was at the start of a pretty big adventure. He could hardly think about anything else. Even if they found his uncle, going back to his old life didn’t seem so important anymore. The idea of becoming a dragon rider was becoming more and more intriguing. It would be difficult to leave Avria, to go back to a world of high school and social media, where the biggest dream most kids had was to make a viral YouTube video.
When he’d finished with his bath, he found a set of clothes laid out on a bench for him—a sturdy pair of trousers and a comfortable dark green tunic. It felt liberating to put on clothes that didn’t mark him as one of Elder Madoc’s servants. Running his hands over the soft linen undershirt made this new start feel more real than anything else had yet. He was actually doing this. He was taking a dragon egg to the hatching ground.
He hoisted his bag, slid his arms through the straps like a backpack, and headed to the banquet hall. Master Bard Aven had said food would be waiting, and Will’s stomach grumbled, reminding him that he’d skipped breakfast.
The girls he’d met before were already sitting together at a table when he arrived, eating what looked like roast beef and vegetables. The delicious smells coming from the pot over the hearth made his mouth water. He didn’t miss the unfriendly looks two of the girls aimed at him as he strode across the room.
He sighed quietly as he filled a plate with generous portions of meat, gravy, and vegetables. Then he joined them at their long table, determined to make friends if he could.
“The food here is pretty good, don’t you think?” he asked. Then, in his eagerness to make friends, he rambled on. “I really miss pizza, though. I mean, really! I can’t imagine spending the rest of my life here and never eating pizza again.”
The girls were looking at him like he had four eyeballs, so he made himself stop talking.
“Well, we’d better get back to the room,” the blonde girl said, lifting her nose slightly and pointedly not looking at Will. He watched her as she stood and stalked away with her dishes. He knew girls like her from his school back home. They were usually rich, pretty, and thought they were better than everyone else. He didn’t care what she thought of him.
The short-haired girl—Rin, Will remembered—took her last bite of food before mumbling something under her breath and following her friend. Will liked her a little better. At least she didn’t seem to hate him. She just seemed uncomfortable, though he didn’t understand why.
Now he was sitting at the table alone with the pretty dark-eyed girl. The bag with his egg rested on the bench next to him. Her bag sat next to her. They took a few bites of food, mirroring each other in silence.
The little furry creature he’d noticed before, the one that had been riding on her shoulder, poked its head out of her bag and she absently passed a piece of cooked vegetable to it. The critter reached out with squirrel-like hands to grab it before taking adorable little bites that made its huge ears wiggle.
Will struggled to remember the girl’s name. She was the one who seemed determined to fight with him on the way to their rooms earlier. Funny that she was the only one willing to sit at the same table with him while they ate.
He smiled at the irony. “They don’t like me much, do they?” He nodded to the door to indicate the other two girls, but he was pretty sure this girl disliked him as much as they did. Maybe more.
Anri! That was her name. Anri, the girl who found a dragon egg by looking for it.
Anri took a gulp of water before answering. “They don’t even know you. How can they dislike you?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. You don’t like me much either. Why not?”
Anri took a deep breath and stared at the tabletop for a while, as though she was carefully choosing her words or deciding whether she should tell the truth. Finally, she looked him in the face and said, “I don’t think you deserve that egg.”
This was not what he’d been expecting.
Why shouldn’t this egg be his? Just because he wasn’t born in Avria? Just because he’d been a servant? Because he’d found it by accident? “I found it. Doesn’t the law say that—”
“The law!” Anri threw her head back and laughed once. “Yes, the law says you can try to get it up Fire Mountain. And it’s a good law. But do you even know what it is you have there?” She aimed a finger at the egg in his bag. “Have you heard the dragon search song? Or listened to the tales of the swarmers?” She aimed her accusing finger at him now. “Has your town had to pay tribute to the dragonholds? Do you even know how to get to the hatching ground?”
Will fidgeted uncomfortably. She was right about most of those things, of course. He knew how to get to the hatching ground now, or at least he was pretty sure he did. The rest of it . . . “I don’t . . . well . . . um . . . what exactly are swarmers?”
She dropped her hand to the table with a loud smack. “You don’t even know what swarmers are?”
Will rubbed the back of his neck and grimaced under her piercing stare. “I mean, I heard people saying ‘swarms’ all the time, or ‘stinging swarms’ or ‘black swarms on the hills.’ And I thought it was a useful way for me to swear without my parents getting mad at me.” He grinned. “But I never knew what they were actually talking about.”
Anri stared at him, her expression unchanging, blinking slowly. Finally she closed her eyes and sighed, then pushed herself up from the table.
Will sighed, too. It looked like she was going to walk out on him like the others had. He lowered his eyes to his plate and pushed his remaining vegetables around with his fork, waiting for her to leave.
“Follow me,” Anri said.
He lifted his gaze to her. She stood with her bag over her shoulder. The creature inside poked its face out to blink at him, twitching its whiskers. Anri was waiting, like she wanted to explain something, not like she was going to storm away in disgust.
He got up to follow her.
They didn’t go far. Anri led him to the wall of the banquet hall where a tapestry hung between two tall windows. She gestured to it with her hand. “What do you see?”
Will studied the picture. The tapestry was old, so the details were hard to make out, but he thought he got the general idea. He pointed out a few large geometric shapes. “Buildings here and here.” Then he waved his hands over colorful winged shapes with long tails. “Dragons, right? There are red ones here, green ones there, blue, yellow . . .
” He noticed jagged white stitching zig-zagging through the dark blue background. “Is that lightning?”
“Yellow dragons battle with electricity,” Anri said, with a touch of irritation. “What else do you see?”
He noticed a few dark, many-legged things flying around with the dragons in the picture. Some seemed to have tails and pincers. “I don’t understand these black things. Are they scorpions? With wings? Bugs?”
She gave him a meaningful look. “Those are the swarmers.”
He looked closer at the dark bug shapes, trying to understand them. “Okay. So dragons fight off a nasty pest problem? What, these stinging bugs live up in the mountains or something and you have to keep them under control?”
Anri scoffed and shook her head in disbelief. “They’re not just some little bugs! Don’t you understand? Look how big they are. Each one is twice the size of a cormant. And they’re called swarmers because that’s what they do. They swarm! They might even be swarming all over Avria again soon. And if you’re a dragon rider, you’ll have to fight them. Are you prepared to do that? Because I’m not even sure if I am, and I’ve lived here my whole life.”
Will gazed thoughtfully at the tapestry for a while longer, paying closer attention to the dragons and their various methods of fighting. Yellow dragons shot lightning at their enemies. Red ones spouted flaming breath. Green dragons seemed to fight with tooth and claw while their riders wielded long spears. Blue dragons spewed white breath that Will took to be freezing ice.
What would it be like to ride one of those dragons, battling hideous flying scorpions the size of draft horses? Sure, it would be dangerous, but Will felt a thrill run through him at the idea. “You know, that actually sounds pretty exciting,” he said. His mind raced with all the implications of doing battle on dragon back. “Do dragon riders get armor? I assume so. And you have to train to fight these things flying on a dragon? Riding on a fire-breathing dragon and searing swarms of nasty horse-sized flying scorpions sounds totally sick!”
He looked at Anri and noticed that she was staring at him in disgust.
“Are you out of your mind?” she demanded. “How can you possibly imagine that you could handle something like that?”
What was with this girl? She barely knew anything about him but seemed determined to hate him no matter what. Fine, if that was how she was going to be, he didn’t care anymore if he said something that offended her. Just because he found his egg by accident and she had to work for hers didn’t make her better than him. “You know, I’m starting to think you’re jealous,” he said.
Anri took a step back and her mouth dropped open. “J–jealous?” she sputtered. “Me? What do I have to be jealous of?”
She seemed awfully defensive. Maybe he was close to the truth here. “And maybe you’re trying to convince me to give up now so that I’ll give you my egg. Then you’ll have another chance at getting a dragon, wouldn’t you? One less kid to worry about on the hatching ground?”
Her mouth fell open again, and she took in a deep gasp of air. He could practically see her rage building to the exploding point. “You! How dare you accuse me of something like that?”
Oh, so that’s how it was. This girl seemed to think she was above everyone else. That she could do no wrong. She thought he wasn’t worthy of carrying an egg, but nobody could question her worth?
Will folded his arms and looked her over through narrowed eyes, like he was questioning her mettle. “Well, you said yourself that you might not be prepared to fight these swarmer things if they come back. So maybe I’m more ready to be a dragon rider than you are.”
Anri stared at him with trembling fists clenched at her sides and blood rushing to her cheeks for several seconds. Then she stormed past him toward the banquet hall door.
“Have a good night!” he called, just to heckle her some more. “Maybe I’ll see you on the road!”
Anri huffed an angry scoff and stormed around the corner without looking back.
Will shook his head and sighed. Sure, Anri was irritating and arrogant and seemed bent on starting a fight with him, but he’d been hoping to make at least one friend. Oh well.
He sat back down at the table to finish his half-eaten dinner, but the banquet hall felt awfully empty now that he was alone. After a few more bites, he gave up and went back to his room. He wanted to get an early start, after all.
Chapter Thirteen
The darkening sky stretched overhead, murky with a thin layer of mist. A cool night breeze rustled between the sleepy buildings. Here and there orange candlelight flickered from windows.
Will’s feet tapped purposely forward along the cobblestone street as he put the bard hall behind him, along with the comfortable bed and hot food.
He couldn’t sleep anyway, he told himself. But the truth was he’d studied the map that Master Bard Aven had given him, showing him the route to the hatching ground, and the distance was much farther than Will had assumed. The hatching ground was nearly as far away from Aldlake as Aldlake was from the bridge where Elder Madoc had found his family. And it had taken them many days to travel that far.
Will hoisted his bag higher on his back and tried to pick up his pace. The arch of his foot, where his still-healing skin rubbed against his shoe, ached at the strain, but he had a goal to achieve. About a quarter of the way to the hatching ground, a small village was marked on the map. He decided that he would try to get to that village by sunset the following day; that way he would know he could get to his destination in time for Hatching Day.
It took a few hours to get out of the closely packed buildings and nighttime activity of the city. Street cleaners wandered up and down the roads, cleaning up after cormants. Shop owners swept the steps outside their businesses. A few buildings still had lights on, and rowdy music and laughter drifted from a few of them.
As he was leaving Aldlake behind, Will noticed that instead of a wall, tall stone towers bordered the city. They looked like something you might see attached to a medieval castle, tubular with narrow slits for windows between the rough-hewn stone. In fact, they looked similar to the huge gray fortress standing in the middle of Aldlake, like they were all hundreds or maybe thousands of years old. Whoever had built them had done so to defend against a powerful enemy—an enemy that walls wouldn’t stop, no matter how high they were.
Will thought of the pictures of the swarmers he’d seen in the tapestry. It was one thing to see black and brown threads woven together to depict giant flying bugs. It was another to see these towers, huge, ancient, and very real, and realize how terrified people had to be to build these things, to realize that many people had probably died before the towers and fortress were complete. How big would these swarmers actually be? He imagined a flying scorpion the size of a horse and shuddered at the mental image.
Beyond the towers, familiar-looking fields and vineyards met him. Will breathed in the cool, sweet, grassy-scented air and checked his map to make sure he was still going the right way. In Avria, it didn’t look like such things as suburbs existed. People either lived in cities, villages, or the countryside.
He seemed to be on the right road, so Will continued at a quick pace, following the river to the mountains. The sky darkened from dark blue to black, and he soon had a hard time seeing the ground in front of his feet. He had to slow down then, listening to the sound of the water below the bank and feeling the road with his feet when he couldn’t see well enough. Nights were never this dark back in his hometown. There were always street lamps or lights from windows or headlights from cars. Here only the dim glow of the crescent moon, shrouded by thin clouds, gave light to his path.
His feet stumbled, his eyelids drooped, and he yawned and yawned again. Leaving his convenient, warm, and comfortable bed to travel all night looked less and less like a good idea. Several times he nearly gave up and curled in the grass on the roadside to sleep, but he plodded on, promising his tingling muscles and aching eyes he would sleep as soon as he got to the village.
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Then, after hours and hours of walking, the sky became visible in the distance to his right. At first it didn’t look like anything significant, just a lessening of the blackness. Then the color shifted to blue-gray. He could see the road at his feet and the shadows of the surrounding hills. Every moment the world came more clearly into view until a line of bright gold pierced the horizon.
It was like waking up from a vague but troubling dream, only to find himself in a glittering world so wonderful he was sure he must be asleep. Next to him, fields swayed with flax and wheat. Millions of tiny dewdrops glistened from the stalks, making the hills glitter like an ocean of golden diamonds. The river to his left flowed smooth, deep, and green. Now and then, a silver fish jumped from the water, landing with a happy splash.
In the distance ahead, the mountains looked almost purple in the russet glow of the sunrise. The shadows behind the foothills were soft with mist. Lazy puffs of clouds drifted between the peaks.
Without meaning to, Will slowed down to take in the beauty of his surroundings. The scenery was so idyllic it made him want to linger to appreciate it. Now that the sun was up, he didn’t feel so much like sleeping anymore. Still, going without sleep all night made his mind feel fuzzy and relaxed. It was hard to remember how urgent his goal was.
When he came across a herd of shufflos grazing in a green field, he turned his head to watch them as he strolled along the road. There were about twenty shaggy beasts with their heads down, flicking their long tails against their sides and shaking their heads as they ripped up mouthfuls of grass. It looked like a pleasant pasture scene in a painting—the kind of painting his grandmother might have in her dining room.
A shadow flashed in front of the sun.
Will looked to the sky, but the sunlight was too bright for him to see if anything was there.
He kept walking.
Then a massive blue form swooped down over the field. Its wings spread wide as it silently descended on the herd. The shufflos saw it at the last moment and bellowed in terror.
Secret of the Dragon Egg (Dragon Riders of Avria Book 1) Page 12
