ʺHey,ʺ said Dag, still bothered, and gave me half of his half sandwich. ʺLook, even Hereyta’s worried about you.ʺ Hereyta was still staring at me.
ʺI’m okay, I’m fine, I’m anything you like, I’m eating my sandwich, ʺ I said, and leaned over to pull my fingers through Sippy’s topknot. It’s one of those comfort things, like rubbing your lucky pebble, but in this case it dragged the hair away from his third eye, which seemed bigger and shinier and more eye-like than usual. I looked up at Hereyta. What is going on? I thought at her. She didn’t answer, but she threw her head back suddenly to look at a dragon flying over us, the tiny bump of its rider just visible only because you knew where to look.
Most of the other First Flighters flew their dragons—real-time flew, I mean, not Flew. Dag didn’t. I didn’t say anything, but he saw me watching the other ones. The world turns the colour of the dragon’s wings when a dragon shadow passes over you. It’s like magic. It is magic, even if it isn’t the kind you have to measure and count. I was sure that if I knew the right incantation I could do anything, standing in the shadow of a dragon’s wing. I believed it so hard that I found myself holding my breath when it happened, as if waiting for the words to come.
ʺFirst Flighters fly our dragons for us, not for the dragons,ʺ Dag said, half dreamily, and I knew he wanted to fly too, and wasn’t going to, for Hereyta’s sake. She’d taught Dag everything he needed to know, and it was up to him to remember it, not to play schoolboy games with her because he could. She’d get him off the ground again on the day, but real-time flying, especially flying toward the Firespace, is gruelling at best, and it might hurt her. Just not as much as what followed would hurt her. ʺIt’s only we still don’t believe we can. That they’ll do what we say, you know?ʺ
I nodded.
ʺThey will, or they wouldn’t be at the Academy being fumbled by cadets in the first place. Young or stroppy dragons don’t get cycled through the academies, not till they get middle aged and cooperative. And flying’s not the thing, not really. Taking your dragon into the Firespace is. Being able to. Anybody with the nerve could get an old mellow dragon off the ground after fifteen minutes’ training. You could fly Hereyta. She’d go sweet as a lark. The Firespace—in there you can only so much as keep breathing because you’re with your dragon. Here’s something they don’t generally talk about—it’s not just the first time into the Firespace tied in behind a tutor or a dragonmaster that most cadets pass out. Or even the second or third. A lot of the three years most of us spend working with dragons before we’re ready for First Flight is just learning to keep your head on straight after you make that transition. And the most important thing about working with dragons is the connection to the dragon. Nobody—no human—is any good in the Firespace, and it’s obvious pretty soon if you’re going to be one of the ones who can cope at all, or not. In there, there’s no place to stand—at least no place any human has ever found—so you have to keep flying—and there’s something funny about up and down too. It’s too hot to breathe and you can’t see anything except cloud. Red cloud. And you still have to be able to remember how to get where you’re going. Out here comparatively speaking we’re almost equal.ʺ He looked up at our scintillating red-gold mountain, and then looked at me and smiled.
Equal. Right. At least I could be glad I wasn’t going into the Firespace. I couldn’t be very glad, though, when Dag and Hereyta weren’t going there either.
I thought Dag deliberately didn’t stop or look up when the other dragons flew over us. For Hereyta’s sake. So I stopped stopping or looking up too. Besides, now I knew what might make her hum, nothing was more absorbing than trying to please her enough that she did it again. When you bring your dragon outdoors, she usually preens. This includes stretching her wings out as far as they’ll go and then vibrating them like plucked strings. The morning after my interesting conversation with the zedak, when we brought Hereyta outdoors, she stretched her stiff right wing out as steadily and straight as her left one, and when she shook them she hummed, and I about thought I’d died and gone to heaven (one of the better heavens, one with dragons).
But that was a very odd day all around, because for the rest of it it was like being back home, except the people who kept sidling up to me and trying to pretend they weren’t were all wearing Academy uniform. And they were mostly First Flighters who certainly weren’t going to go to the Academy healer and admit there might be anything wrong for fear they’d be pulled out of First Flight. After the first few I kind of wanted to sidle myself into the kitchens and drop a lot of quietleaf in the kettles they kept hot over the fire, to lower the general tension level, but I’m way too cowardly. But I had to tell the last two who wanted something to help them sleep to come by our room after dinner because I’d run out of the quietleaf in my little wallet by then. I hoped I still had some in my pack.
The day before First Flight I don’t think Dag said a word to me. It was worse than the last day of the journey to get here had been. His silence the day before First Flight had not only a wall but a moat and a lot of jumpy sentries with bad attitudes around it. But I don’t think any of the other First Flighters said a word to anyone either. It was like you could tell a First Flighter by the fact they weren’t saying anything. I don’t think anybody even said ʺpass the saltʺ at meals. If they wanted salt, they grabbed it. If they couldn’t reach it, they went without. And all their dragons had three eyes.
We went down to the hsa last thing, after dinner, after dark—after curfew, except most if not all the other First Flighters were doing exactly the same thing and there are always tutors and dragonmasters around, and nobody said anything. Sippy had the good sense to be subdued, at least by his standards and almost by mine. I could feel it—don’t ask me how—that Hereyta was waiting for us, that she knew we’d be there, last thing at night, after curfew, after any time a cadet is allowed to be visiting his (or her) dragon, the night before First Flight. Did that mean she knew that she was in it? Did that mean she knew . . .
She didn’t move into the firelight this time, but I was beginning to learn to feel my way around the darkness that is dragon as opposed to the darkness that is just darkness. She was belly-flat to the ground although her head was up, the long neck carrying it some unguessable length above the reach of the firelight. Her eyes were closed when we stepped into the firelit circle, but then she opened them and we had shining dragon eyes beaming down on us like stars. Two stars.
I leaned against the bottom of her shoulder. She’d moved the foreleg out a little from her body on the side with the stiff wing, which I’m sure was about the wing and not about expecting me or knowing where I’d want to lean, but it meant I could get in between it and her body. I never thought about how this might be dangerous, me being bug-sized and all, and maybe her not paying attention. She was paying attention. I don’t know where Dag went. Sippy came and leaned with me. We just stood there and leaned and nobody said anything or hummed anything either. But I felt better after and I was pretty sure Dag did too.
But she still only had two eyes.
I know Dag didn’t get any sleep to speak of that night because I didn’t either. I did offer him some quietleaf—I did have some left in my pack—but he refused so I didn’t have any either in some kind of stupid loyalty. I lay there trying to be quiet while he tossed and turned and muttered to himself and periodically sat up and stared out the window like he was thinking about running away. Maybe he was. But I bet he was thinking about running away with Hereyta. He wouldn’t have left her behind to face the shame of a First Flight without her partner, even if it maybe looked like the way to spare her shame, because if Dag wasn’t there she wouldn’t have to fly. She was only a dragon, what did she know? But why had she been waiting for us that evening? She knew. Whatever was going to happen he wouldn’t do that to her. But smuggling a dragon out of anywhere, even a place already full of dragons and built to have dragons moving through it, would be a little difficult. So that’s probably why he kept lying back down again with a long sigh.