Fledgling (The Dragonrider Chronicles) (16 page)

           
Mavrik
made a loud screeching noise as he swooped in low and circled around me. Now it
was time for my plan. I got Beckah as close to me as I could to wrap an arm
around her waist.

“You have to hang on to me,” I told
her.

She nodded and wrapped her arms around
my neck. “I’m not afraid. I trust you.”

When Mavrik came swooping low again,
his powerful wings spread out
wide,
I gave him the
hand signal for doing a roll. I wasn’t sure he’d get it, I
mean,
we’d never really perfected his understanding of the hand signals we riders
used in the air. But as he started to get dangerously close, he whipped over
with his back facing down toward us.

I jumped straight up with all my
might, reaching for the saddle handles. Not in a million years did I think I’d
actually grab them. He was moving fast, like a streak of blue lightning. My
timing had to be absolutely perfect.

And it was.

I grabbed the saddle handles, hanging
on for dear life as we were suddenly snatched off the top of the tree. Mavrik
rolled over, and I quickly got myself settled into the saddle with Beckah
sitting right in front of me. We cruised over the tops of the trees, making a
wide turn to go back and make sure Felix and Lyon were able to get on Nova.

I’m pretty sure Lyon was crying when
they were finally sitting on Nova’s back, him hugging Felix as he sat in the
back of the saddle. Felix gave me a thumb’s up, letting me know they were okay.

Take
the lead
, I signed to
him.
We’ve got to get to
Halfax
before they do.

Felix smirked, and I saw him lean down
closer to Nova’s neck. He put on the speed, and Nova shot forward like a brown
and gold bullet. Mavrik roared at her, and I felt his body go tense and solid
beneath the saddle. He beat his wings hard, and we went hurling forward with a
new burst of speed.

Beckah reached to grab my hand,
squeezing it until her knuckles were white.

“It’s okay,” I yelled to her over the
rush of the wind. I thought she was afraid, but when I saw her face . . . I
could see that she was smiling.

Her eyes were wide, and she was
looking out across the trees that blurred past. She looked at me with a huge
grin. “This is amazing!”

I smiled back at her, and brushed some
of her hair away that was blowing into my eyes. I wasn’t sure if I’d ever
noticed before, but Beckah was really pretty—even if she did look a lot
like her father. When she smiled at me like that, it made me blush.

Mavrik snapped his wings in sharp,
quick beats that sent us bolting forward until we caught up to Nova. We kept
our pace fast and our position as low to the ground as we dared. When we
reached the other side of the marsh, I could see the royal city of
Halfax
far in the distance. I knew it right away because of
the tall, swirling spires of the king’s castle set back from the rest of the
city against the side of a huge cliff. You could see the castle from just about
anywhere in the city, even from the gray elf ghetto where I’d lived with my
mother.

Beyond the city’s outskirts and
surrounding farmlands was the prison camp. I’d never actually seen it before,
but I knew what it was right away. From the air, it looked like a dark patch on
the horizon. It was a big complex surrounded by high, black
stone
walls
. The stones for those walls had been mined from the volcanic
cliffs along the coast, so they were rough, uneven, and nearly impossible to
climb without cutting your hands and feet to shreds. On the tops of the walls,
tar mixed with shards of broken glass had been spread over it to keep people
from trying to escape.

The prison camp was built in a big
diamond shape with eight watchtowers looking down at the prisoners inside. From
where we were, it just looked liked a big tangled mess of scrap surrounding one
dark crater in the middle. The crater must have been an abandoned quarry, with
layers of rock carved away to the glaring sunlight.

Seeing it, even from a distance, made
my stomach tangle into painful knots. Ending up in a place like that was my
absolute worst fear. I didn’t want to go anywhere near it. I wanted to turn
Mavrik around and bolt in the opposite direction. But
Sile
might already be there, trapped in that horrible place. We had to save him. I
had given Beckah my word that we would, and I was determined to keep that
promise.

í
í
í

“We’ve got to find a way inside,”
Felix said as soon as he dismounted. “If we try to take them from the air,
chances are, the dragonriders stationed at the castle will come after us, and
we’ll all be arrested before we even get a chance to find
Sile
,
that is if the bowmen in the watchtowers don’t shoot us down first. Being
stealthy will give us our best chance.”

We had landed in a big open wheat
field outside
Halfax
, about three miles from the
prison camp. From where we stood, we had a straight view of it. Smoke rose up
from beyond its tall black gates, and I was beginning to feel sick with dread.

           
“Break
into a prison camp?” Lyon scoffed. He crossed his arms, and sneered at the
idea. “You’re all crazy. I’m not going in there. As if we could even get past
the guards in the first place.”

           
“It’s
your fault
Sile
is in there in the first place,”
Felix reminded him with a threatening growl. “You’re coming with us, one way or
another.”

           
The
two were about to start arguing again, glaring at each other and squaring off.
I could sense the tension rising, but I wasn’t eager to jump in the middle and
break them up. It wouldn’t exactly hurt my feelings if Felix beat Lyon to a bloody
pulp.

           
“Y-you
did this?” Beckah stammered suddenly. “But you’re a dragonrider too, right?”

           
I
flinched. Felix and I exchanged a glance. We hadn’t told her Lyon was the one
responsible for her father’s abduction. I wasn’t sure how she as going to handle
that news.

           
Beckah
was looking up at him with wide eyes. At first, I thought she might start
crying. I could see revelation come over her whole demeanor as she started
piecing it together that there was a traitor in our midst. Lyon had betrayed
her father, and the reasons why didn’t really matter.

           
But
Beckah didn’t cry. Instead, she balled her hands into fists and started for him
with violent intent blazing in her eyes. “You! You did this! You’re a traitor!”
She screamed at him. “What did my daddy ever do to you
?!
You . . . you selfish coward!”

I grabbed her by the shoulder before
she could actually start hitting him, pulling her back and holding her while
she kicked and fought to get away from me. I wasn’t going to take the chance
that Lyon wouldn’t hit her back just because she was a girl.

Lyon was staring back at her, and his
expression was difficult to read. If he could have felt any remorse for what
he’d done, maybe he did in that moment. I didn’t know Lyon well enough to be
sure.

“I hope you die!” Beckah screamed at
him. “You deserve to die!”

I put a hand over her mouth, holding
her tight against my chest as she kept on fighting me. “Hush, Beckah. Don’t say
that.” I told her as calmly as I knew how. I started forcing her to walk a few
yards away with me. She needed to cool off.

“How can you defend him
?!
” She turned on me next, and I saw angry, frustrated tears
starting to brim in her eyes. Her cheeks were dark red, and her whole body was
trembling.

As soon as
we
were far enough away
that Felix
and Lyon wouldn’t be
able to hear us, I grabbed her as tightly as I could. I hugged her. I held her
that way, even though she fought me at first.

“I’m not defending him. He’ll have to
pay for what he did. But right now isn’t the time. Right now, we have to
concentrate on saving your dad. That’s what’s most important.” I tried to talk
gently to her to calm her down. She was just a kid, and even if I wasn’t that
much older than her, I felt like it was my responsibility to help her
understand. “So just take some deep breaths. I know you’re angry. Just calm
down.”

I heard her start to cry, and she quit
fighting me. She put her arms around my waist and hugged me back, hiding her
face against my shoulder.

“I hate him, Jae!” She whimpered.

“I know.” I patted her head awkwardly.
I wasn’t sure what else I was supposed to do. My experience in comforting girls
was pretty limited. “I’m not all that wild about him, either. He’s used my face
as a doormat before, you know.”

“You’ll make sure he doesn’t get away
with this, right?” she asked, looking up at me with her chin trembling.

I had already made some steep promises
to her—promises I wasn’t sure I could keep. But I’d try. After all, she
deserved the very best effort I could give.

I nodded, “I’ll try.”

That seemed to satisfy her, and she
pushed away from me a little. “People like that, who betray their own kind,
they don’t deserve any kind of justice. We should just throw him in the prison
camp and see how he likes it.”

I frowned at her. “You know, that’s
exactly the reason humans and gray elves don’t like me, Beckah. They both think
I’m a traitor to my race.”

I saw her expression fall. Her
shoulders hunched up some like she was embarrassed, and she looked away
uneasily. “That’s not the same thing,” she mumbled stubbornly.

I knew she was still upset, and most
of what she said was just out of anger and frustration. But it still stung.
“You can’t just condemn someone, no matter what they’ve done. Everyone deserves
justice, even traitors.”

nineteen

I
had a feeling Felix was going to get us all killed. We had given our dragons
the signal to lay low and wait for us to come back, but that didn’t make me
feel any better as we snuck into a barn outside one of the little farmhouses
nearby. It was a few hours after dark, and Felix had decided we needed to find
some weaponry before we tried to get into the prison camp.

           
As
Felix pushed the barn door open a crack and we all rushed inside, I started to
get a queasy feeling. The moonlight filtered through the slats in the ceiling,
revealing harvesting scythes, axes, and a whole collection of farm tools
hanging on the walls of the barn. There
were
big clay
jugs crowded against the walls, crates stacked to the rafters, and big sacks of
grain and feed for horses. Felix went straight for a big hunting knife that was
lying on a table that looked like it had been used for butchering and dressing
game.

           
I
picked up a sickle and held it awkwardly, wondering if I could actually hurt
anyone other than myself with it. “Felix, how is this going to work?” I turned
around to face him. “How can we fight the king’s elite guards with farm tools?”

           
He
was shoving an axe in Lyon’s hands. But Lyon dropped it as soon as Felix looked
away. “Better to have something than nothing at all,” he answered. “Look,
hopefully it won’t even come to that. Quick, take off your cloak and shirt.”

           
I
watched him pick up an empty feed sack off the floor and start cutting holes in
it until it looked suspiciously like a tunic. “What for?” I frowned as he
handed it to me, and then started making another one for
himself
.
I did as he told me, stripping away my mud-caked tunic and putting on the
scratchy burlap sack.

           
“We
need to blend in. If they see us in fledgling uniforms, they’ll know right away
who we are. You, Lyon, and I are going to sneak in first. Once we’re inside,
Beckah and the dragons are going to create a diversion for us. We’ll cut
Lieutenant Derrick loose in the chaos while Lyon is getting the main gate open,
and hopefully the guards will be so distracted, they won’t even notice us
escaping.” Felix explained. “Jae, you speak enough
elven
that we should at least be able to talk to the other prisoners and figure out
where they’re holding him.”

It sounded good, but I was still
confused about how we were actually going to get inside in the first place. He
didn’t explain that part, and I was sort of afraid to ask.

“How do we know they’ve even arrived
yet?” Beckah was watching us, and she looked really nervous. Not that I could
blame her. If everything went according to plan, she’d be the one being shot at
by guards and hunted by the dragonriders from the castle. I didn’t like it. I
didn’t want to put her in danger, much less imagine what
Sile
would do to me if she got hurt. But I also trusted Mavrik. I knew he wouldn’t
let anything happen to her.

           
Felix
made himself a crude-looking tunic to match mine out of another empty feed
sack, and put it on. Then he took the sickle I’d picked up, and a long coil of
rope. “We don’t,” he answered sharply. “But we can’t afford to wait. By now,
Commander
Rayken
has realized we’re missing from
Blybrig. They’ll be looking for us. And if we get caught, then there’s no one
left to help your dad. This is our one and only chance.”

           
Beckah
nodded, and I saw her swallow hard. Our eyes met, and I tried to show her a
confident smile. “It’ll be fine.” I told her. “Don’t worry. Mavrik is the
fastest dragon in Blybrig. Nothing will be able to catch up with you.”

           
“
You
quit worrying,” she insisted
stubbornly. “I can do this.”

           
Felix
stooped down to pick up one of the clay jugs on the floor, pulling the cork out
of the top and making a face like it smelled bad. I could smell it too, even
from a few feet away. They were jars full of lamp oil. He handed it to her, and
gave her a serious look.

“You better be able to do it,” he
warned. “Because it’s our lives on the line.”

           
Outfitted
with our makeshift farm tool weapons and empty grain sacks for tunics, Felix,
Lyon, and I hunkered down in the shadows only a few hundred yards away from the
huge black wall of the prison camp. Beckah was already with Nova and Mavrik,
waiting for our signal to start her diversion. I’d given her the best
crash-course in flying I could, showed her how to sit in the saddle, and felt
like a complete jerk for leaving her like that. Felix had tied about a dozen of
those clay jugs full of oil to
Mavrik’s
saddle, going
over the plan with her several times. She kept insisting she wasn’t scared. At
least that made one of us.

After creeping in as close as we
dared, Felix, Lyon and I were laying flat on our stomachs, side by side on the
ground, and watching through the tall grass. There was only one gate, just one
way in and out of the prison camp, and it was heavily guarded. More armed
guards stood at each of the eight watchtowers, looking down over the inside and
outside of the walls. Even more of them marched around the wall to keep watch
for people trying to escape from inside.

           
“It
looks like the perimeter patrols are set about five minutes apart,” Felix
whispered. “That doesn’t give us much time to climb the wall.”

“We’ll have to do it one at a time,
then. That’s going to take too long. They might see us.” I frowned over at him,
hoping he had a better idea.

           
“There’s
no other choice. We’ll just have to go as fast as possible.” Felix reached to
pull the bundle of rope and sickle out from where he’d tucked them in his belt.
He started to tie one end of the rope to the sickle, like a makeshift hook and
line we’d be able to use for climbing up the wall. “I’ll go first, then you,
Jae. After Lyon comes up last, we’ll split up and then give Beckah the signal.”

           
When
the next guard walked past, we waited a few seconds. It was long enough that I
glanced at Felix, wondering if he’d lost his nerve. But suddenly he took off,
sprinting toward the wall and swinging the rope and sickle over his head like a
lasso.

The
wall
was
about two
storeys
tall
. If he
didn’t hook the top on the first try, he might not have enough time to climb up
before the next guard came by. He swung the rope harder and harder, and finally
let it
go
, sending the sickle howling through the air
and clattering against the stone. The sickle cracked against the shards of
glass on top of the wall, scraped, and finally snagged with a loud crunch. It
made me cringe. Someone definitely could have heard that.

We all waited, and I held my breath.
But no one came. The guards hadn’t heard us. Felix started reeling in the rope
as fast as he could, giving it a few hard tugs before finally leaning his
weight into it. When it held fast, he turned around and gave us a quick thumb’s
up.
So far, so good.

He started to climb, using the side of
the wall as leverage while he scaled the rope.
 
Just as the last few inches of his boots disappeared up into
the dark, the next guard came strolling by on patrol. I held my breath again,
waiting to see if the guard would notice anything suspicious.

The guard walked past without even
stopping, and all of a sudden it was my turn to climb. My heart was hammering.
My hands were sweaty. I was petrified. But I set my jaw, balled my fists, and
didn’t give myself a single second to hesitate.

I bolted toward the wall, feeling
around in the darkness for the rope. When I found it, I gave a tug. From
somewhere above me in the dark, I felt Felix tug back. The coast was clear, so
I started to climb.

I didn’t dare look back to see if the
next guard was coming. I just tried not to think about that. The climb was a
lot further up than I’d thought. From the ground, it had looked pretty high,
but by the time I got to the top of the wall, I was sweating and heaving for
breath. Felix grabbed my arms when I got within reach, and hauled me up the
last few feet. The top of the wall was slathered in tar mixed with shards of
glass, but Felix had spread out his cloak to keep us from getting cut up. He
made sure I was steady before he gave me a pat on the back.

Next, it was Lyon’s turn. Felix got
himself braced, holding the end of the rope that was hooked to the top of the
wall, just for good measure. And we waited.

Minutes passed. Two guards walked by
down below, and I held my breath each time, expecting to see Lyon come
sprinting up to the wall to start his own climb. Maybe it was just taking him
longer to work up the nerve. But he didn’t come, and it was too dark to see
where we’d been hiding in the grass before.

A few more minutes passed, then
another guard, and Felix cursed. “That little worm! He ditched us!”

I was stunned. Lyon hadn’t exactly
been a friend of ours—more like an enemy that was stuck with us for
survival purposes—but this? This was twice he’d betrayed the
dragonriders,
twice he’d proven to be nothing but a lying
coward. I cursed, too. Lyon was supposed to be the one who opened the gate to
let us out once Beckah and the dragons stirred things up as a distraction. Now
we were short one set of hands.

“We can’t wait any longer,” Felix
growled under his breath as he reeled the rope in. “We’ll just have to find
some other way to escape. Maybe we can climb back down.”

Felix had dismissed that idea
originally because of the arrows that were sure to be flying in the chaos. One
of us could get shot. I knew if he was considering that as our best option now,
then we were in real trouble.

“You go,” I told him. “Go get ready to
open the gate. I’ll get
Sile
.”

His eyes got wide. “Jae, you can’t go
by yourself. What if something happens? What if you need me?”

“You said yourself that I’ve got the
better shot at finding him. I’m the only one who can speak
elven
and talk to the prisoners.” I held out my hand for him to shake. Something in
my gut told me this might be the last time we ever saw each other. “You know
this is the only way.”

I could barely see Felix under the
starlight as he looked down at my hand, and instead of shaking it, he took the
big hunting knife he’d stolen from the barn and put it in my palm. “Yeah, I
know. Just . . . try not to get killed.” He clapped a hand against my shoulder
roughly. “And remember, once the fire starts we only have a few minutes. Don’t
be late.”

While Felix fixed the rope and
makeshift hook so we could climb down the other side of the wall, I tucked the
knife into my belt, making sure it was hidden under my scratchy burlap tunic.
He let me climb down first. My head was spinning with fear as I repelled over
the steep, jagged black stone. I prayed over and over that the guards wouldn’t
see me. And none of them did.

When my feet hit the ground, I looked
around to get my bearings. It was dark, but the torches burning the watchtowers
gave off just enough light that I could see the faint silhouettes of the buildings
all around. They weren’t really buildings, though. More like shacks made out of
pieces of garbage for prisoners to live in.

Everything was eerily quiet and still,
except for Felix’s boots scraping off the stone from over head. He climbed down
quickly, left the rope where it was, and hurried over to crouch down with me in
the shadow of a nearby shack. My heart was pounding in my ears as I strained to
see through the gloom. As my eyes adjusted, I could make out how all the
garbage-made shacks surrounded the big crater in the middle of the prison camp.
There were carved dirt stairwells leading down into the crater, and huge
wheelbarrows that would take four or five people to move parked along the rim.

The inside of the prison camp smelled
disgusting. It was like a mixture of filth, rotting flesh, and smoke that
reeked like burning hair. There was also something in the air that left a
mineral taste in my mouth. It was bitter, and made me want to spit.

“It’s a salt mine,” Felix whispered.
“Can you taste it?”

“Yeah, but what’s that smell?” I
whispered back.

He just frowned darkly and pointed at
the crater. “I’m not sure, but it’s coming from in there. I don’t like it, Jae.
Something’s not right.”

Suddenly there was a metallic-sounding
boom from the gate, and Felix and I tripped all over each other as we scrambled
to hide. We ducked into a narrow crevice between two shacks, huddling in the
dark and watching as the gate began to open.

The gate really was enormous, it was
as tall as the walls, and made out of wood and iron. The only way to open it
was by operating a crank in the heavily guarded tower. Just looking at it, I
wondered if we really could pull this off. Strong as he was, I wasn’t sure
Felix could even open it by himself.