Fire: Tales of Elemental Spirits (34 page)

Sippy, who has a limited vocabulary, understood ʺhungry.ʺ The way he tore around he was always hungry, and playing with dragons had evidently worn off lunch. He shot over and pranced around Setyep who had said the magic word. Setyep bent to pat him when he came to a halt for long enough, and ruffled the forelock that fell into his eyes. ʺHe's got the vestigial third eye, doesn't he?ʺ he said. ʺI've always heard that's lucky in a foogit.ʺ

I shrugged. ʺIt's supposed to be rare. People always make rare stuff lucky, don't they?ʺ

ʺGetting killed by a roc is rare,ʺ said Setyep. ʺAnd I've never heard that it's lucky.ʺ

Dag laughed and Setyep looked pleased. ʺCome on then, supper for you too,ʺ he said, and stretched up to put his hand on Arac's nearer ankle spur. Arac turned—obediently, carefully, setting each enormous foot down as gently as a feather, as if testing for the presence of small crunchable creatures before he put his weight on it. Also when you're that big even stepping along really slowly eats up the landscape, and gives the small crunchable creatures you're being careful not to stand on a chance to keep up with you—and started back toward the hill.

ʺThat was interesting,ʺ said Dag as soon as Setyep was out of earshot. ʺSetyep said a long time ago that he thinks jumping lower-class cadets is all wrong and it's no wonder trouble comes of it. At least he admits it. Fistagh doesn't think he has to admit anything. But it's not that much easier to live with your enemy even when you know who he is. Not that he's exactly my enemy.ʺ

I said, ʺHe's nothing like your enemy. He admires you. He wants you to think well of him.ʺ

Dag looked at me like I'd grown a second head. Or a third eye. ʺYou're raving. But he may be making an effort because Arac has a crush on Hereyta.ʺ

ʺPeople change,ʺ I said. ʺThey grow up. They learn things. They change their minds.ʺ

ʺGods, Tinhead, you sound like Dad,ʺ said Dag. ʺOr a wizard.ʺ He looked up and Hereyta, with that weird consciousness good dragons have of their partners, looked down. For some reason the sun was glaring right across her brow crest, and shining into her missing eye. The blind black hollow showed suddenly, shockingly, red, and full of light.

The last few days before First Flight went way too quickly. Some of it was just trying to get along in this very strange new place Sippy and I found ourselves in, but that should have made the time crawl by, wondering every time you put a foot down if it's the wrong foot on the wrong piece of ground. And trying to make yourself invisible is very tiring. (Also impossible, if you have a foogit with you.) But time with Hereyta—and most of our time was with Hereyta—flew by.

It wasn't till dinner the day after we arrived that Eled said to Dag, ʺHaven't you got Ern a visitor's ribbon yet, you chucklehead? What happened, getting yourself back into uniform absorbed your total non-dragon powers of concentration? And there's old
Zek
Darab with his eagle eye at the tutors' table now.ʺ Dag got me the ribbon the next morning. After that I felt a little better, especially after I saw someone else wearing one.

But mostly I was too busy identifying with Dag to think about how I was feeling. Every minute that went by was another minute closer to First Flight. And there weren't enough minutes in all of history to spend with Hereyta, even if First Flight hadn't existed.

At first I helped polish Hereyta's harness, not that it needed it or Dag needed any help; but that meant he could spend a few more hours polishing Hereyta herself, which they both enjoyed. Not that she needed it either. From a little distance she glowed in the dark, like she was all over eyes—those magical, shining dragon eyes—like every single faintly-hollow-curve scale was an eye: thousands and thousands of eyes. It can't all have been Dag; there'd have to be twenty Dags to keep one Hereyta polished, if she really needed polishing.

I admit I found harness boring when there was a whole mountain range of dragon available, and it was almost like Hereyta left bits of herself near me as a lure or an invitation, so I polished the odd toe and fraction of cheek and a few human-hands'-breadth of tail myself which I knew was just a special treat for a new worshipper. Up close you could lose yourself in the reflections, running a soft cloth over her scales. The reflections went on forever, down and down and down, into, who knows, the Grey Place, maybe. Maybe the Grey Place is grey and cold because the dragons stole all the colour and all the fire. If they did, I'm sure they didn't mean to. Or maybe the Grey Place had been the first worshipper, and gave the dragons everything.

I woke up with a crick in my neck the second night at the Academy, which I discovered was the pot of ache ointment that Ralas had given me. None of us had needed it and I'd forgotten about it (although how it got under my pillow I have no idea) and that morning before breakfast while I was waiting for Dag to sew a last-minute escapist button on his jacket (cadets, even or perhaps especially rogue cadets, had better not ever be seen outside their own rooms in a uniform missing a button: Dag was muttering and scowling, but he was also sewing) I sat on my bed tossing the pot from hand to hand. Sippy, having made sure it wasn't edible, let me do this without getting in the way. I could feel my face frowning.

Dag stopped scowling when he bit off his thread and looked up. ʺWhat's wrong? You look kind of like the morning after the night before, except we didn't have one.ʺ

I stopped tossing the pot. ʺThis is the stuff Ralas gave me, in case we got road sore. And then we didn't. I was just thinking . . . about Hereyta's stiff wing . . . I mean, it can't hurt. If she'd let me. If you'd let me. It's only a little pot.ʺ Hereyta had a long scar across her belly from her first crown, which didn't seem to bother her at all, and a stiff wing-joint from her second. And a missing eye from her third.

Dag looked surprised, then thoughtful. ʺWe'll ask Hereyta.ʺ

I was dragon-besotted enough by then that asking her seemed perfectly reasonable, but I had enough brain left over to wonder how we were going to do it. Dag and she had long conversations—even I could see that—but I didn't think they were about anything much, most of the time, or if they were, I couldn't translate. This was going to be one I could actually watch, and maybe I'd learn something.

Except that it wasn't like that. We brought Hereyta outside and found a little space (which is to say a vast space) away from all the other cadets with their dragons, behind a grove of trees that must have been almost as old as the Academy. There weren't many of them but they were big gnarly old things and they weren't totally dwarfed by our dragon. Then Dag told me matter-of-factly to take the lid off my pot and hold it up toward Hereyta.

ʺShe's not going to pay any attention to me,ʺ I muttered.

ʺYes she is,ʺ said Dag. ʺDo try a little less hard to keep yourself crammed into that dim-little-brother mould of yours.ʺ

I looked up at him, startled, and forgot to keep my shoulders hunched up.

ʺBetter,ʺ he said. ʺYou keep coming with me, and she pays attention to me, doesn't she? She's not stupid.ʺ

ʺBut—I—ʺ

ʺYes. Exactly,ʺ said Dag. ʺYou're going to have to choose. You're going to have to give it up that you're a worm, because Hereyta notices you, and Hereyta wouldn't notice a worm, would she? Or you can think she's stupid. Your choice.ʺ

I stared at him with my mouth open.

ʺOpen the pot and hold it up,ʺ Dag said inexorably. ʺYou can leave your mouth open too if you want.ʺ

I took the lid off and held it up. Hereyta's enormous nose descended toward it and then paused, waiting politely.

ʺDab a little on your fingers, and then gesture at her wing, like this,ʺ said Dag, and showed me a kind of sweep-and-point motion, which I half recognised from watching him groom her, and then clumsily followed. Her wing immediately unbent down, toward me, the bottom edge splaying against the ground, and the red lights bucking up out of the creases like live things themselves. Then her head came all the way down till it was resting flat on the ground, the nose pointed straight at me. Her breath poured around me, gentle as a caress, endless as the sea.

Dag nodded. ʺI knew she liked you. Climb up. She'll take you to where you want to go. Pat her with one hand and then point with the other, and she'll take you in that direction.ʺ

ʺOh, but—ʺ

ʺDon't worry. She's taught dozens of terrified and adoring cadets how to talk to a dragon. She'll teach you too.ʺ

ʺOh, but—ʺ

ʺWe only use the tapping sticks on formal occasions or when we're flying,ʺ Dag said nonchalantly as if he thought that would be what I would be asking him about. ʺYour hand'll be fine.ʺ Dag has a lot of force of personality. I can see why dragons liked him, but it's hard on little brothers. I swallowed hard. I don't
like
heights, and Hereyta was big even for a dragon. I looked at her. Even her
nose
was taller than I was. But I spent the rest of the day climbing and patting and pointing . . . and rubbing, since there were several leagues of shoulder once I got there, and even through a dragon's thick skin I could feel some of where the tension and stiffness ran. I almost forgot about how high up I was, at the crest of her spine, where the wing-joints were.

ʺYou could help,ʺ I said, panting, to Dag.

ʺI could,ʺ he agreed, from somewhere out of sight around her rib cage. His voice echoed slightly. ʺBut I'm not going to. This is your show, I think.ʺ The way he said it I didn't even feel like my older brother was telling me he wasn't going to do something I wanted him to do. What I thought of was the way he agreed when Ralas told him to take Sippy and me with him. Just like that. No fuss. Although that was about Ralas, of course. And it was me she gave the ointment to.

Dragon skin isn't, I guess, quite as thick as you think—or anyway as I thought—it's just that they're so big, dragons, everything is all about how big they are. Also the bumps and knobs and ridges are thick and hard, but they're supposed to be protective. The scales in between feel surprisingly like skin—warm and unexpectedly elastic. Although you still have to get down on your hands and knees and lean as hard as you can when you're trying to rub liniment into a dragon. And the occasional scale-edge bites into your palms. But you know you've finally started to get where you want to go when the dragon begins to hum.

By that third day the other cadets were coming back. A few of the fourth-years came around when everyone was eating to gloat at the First Flighters, but it was a nice sort of gloating, a ʺsee you on the other sideʺ kind. Most of the different years did kind of stick together, the first-years together and so on, but you could sure tell that the third-years were a tense bunch. They were huddled together like a regiment in enemy territory. Dag being Dag, he joined the First Flighters but always managed to stay at the edge. I could guess that he'd been like this before the First Flight assignments went up, but it made it easier for the third-years to overlook him now. Except it seemed to me that they didn't. If anything they were trying to welcome him but he wasn't making it easy. Dag is a stubborn old geezer and I guessed that whether it was conscious or not he was damned if he was going to be accepted at last because everyone was (nearly) as upset that Hereyta was on the First Flight list as he was. I swear he got taller every time we approached a third-year group.

But there was more to it than that. I didn't notice, the first two days. One or two people wandered as if idly past where we were sitting and said something to Dag about a dragon, and Dag answered, and they went away again. Then once I did notice that someone seemed to have passed by our table an awful lot for one meal unless he was very hungry or very absent-minded, and finally Eled said to Gham, who were both sitting with us, ʺLet's go pester the cooks for a few minutes and let poor Chort ask Dag whatever he's dying to ask him. Ern, you come with us.ʺ