Fire: Tales of Elemental Spirits

FIRST FLIGHT

ROBIN McKINLEY

My parents had it planned that I’d be a wizard. Eldest son dragonrider, second son spiritspeaker, third son wizard, you know? My dad was a carpenter, but he was a fourth son. I think that was part of the problem, he felt he had something to prove, even though his next-older brother wasn’t a wizard but a merchant. A wealthy merchant, so everyone thought, oh, how clever of him, since most wizards are poor. And my mum made candles, but then she was a daughter, and daughters get to choose what they want to do. (There aren’t very many women dragonriders, spiritspeakers, or wizards. There are some, but not many.)

Obviously not every first son is a dragonrider but it’s every family’s dream, and the problem is, my mum’s family had done it right, and now my dad’s local brother’s family had started doing it right (the other two brothers lived on the other side of the country and were easier to ignore). Their eldest had just graduated from the same academy his dad had gone to, and had already been assigned to his first working dragon. Although it was only a little civilian one that ran up and down our coast and his rating was only Fourth Wing, he was still riding his own dragon. And their second son had just been apprenticed to a popular spiritspeaker.

I’d’ve hated being a dragonrider because I don’t like heights, and I would’ve hated being a spiritspeaker because they’re all so stuck on themselves. (Both my mother and my father admit that their spiritspeaker brothers are a trifle self-important.) I think I would have liked being a wizard, but it wasn’t going to happen. I was all thumbs and I couldn’t do the maths. You’re always having to measure stuff when you’re a wizard. If Mum sent me out for a dozen apples I’d come home with eleven, and even I can count to twelve. It’s just something that happens with me.

And then Dag got into the dragon academy, and not just any academy but the Academy, the first, oldest one. When the Academy started we weren’t even a country yet. Fhig, our cousin, had gone to Whimbrel Academy, which is only about three hundred years old, so we were one up there. Dag wouldn’t admit it but he was dead chuffed, and when our parents assumed that he’d go, he let their pride and enthusiasm sweep him along. But he told Kel and me when he was home for his first half-year break that it was nothing but rules and history and getting the form right when you addressed anybody and the air smelled of eight-hundred-year-old dust and he hadn’t even seen a dragon yet.

He’d sat for the entrance exams assuming he wouldn’t get in, but he’s too honest not to have given it his best shot, and he’s the big bold capable type so he passed the physical just by showing up. I’d always privately thought he was a shoo-in but I may be a little prejudiced. He was the big brother who’d saved not only me but the bagful of kittens I was trying to rescue from drowning—I’d just got hold of the bag when the bank gave way, and the river was running hard in the spring rains. Dag dove in after me and we all got swept downstream but it was Dag who kept his head and pulled us out. He didn’t even yell at me afterward. (One of the kittens has been keeping Dad’s workshop a rodent-free zone for the last five years.)

But it was really bothering Dag that he knew Mum and Dad were staying up all night to earn money for the fees and there was still Kel and me to come, and he didn’t even want to be a dragonrider, especially not if it was tangled up in all this pointless rigmarole. ʺAnd of course it would be,ʺ he said gloomily. ʺNobody ever crowns sheep.ʺ In any war pretty much as many dragons as human soldiers are awarded the crown medal for courage, and most of the Academy tutors and dragonmasters were ex-army. Dag had wanted to be a farmer.

Mum and Dad didn’t seem to mind working all night. They were also busy trying to get Kel signed up to apprentice to this speaker named Jwell who was even more stuck on himself than usual and Kel was pretty dismal about it.

It was kind of depressing because of the three of us I’m the only one who wouldn’t have minded the training I was due for. Although it wasn’t exactly a wizard I wanted to be. I had this fat-headed idea that I wanted to be a healer. It takes a lot of work to learn and then nobody wants to know you after they find out what you do for a living. Nobody’s supposed to get sick. And if you do it’s probably your fault. And then it’s a huge loss of face to admit you don’t seem to be getting better on your own and need help. But everybody gets sick, and almost everybody at some point has to go to a wizard who admits doing healing (not all of them will; it’s rough being a social exile), so pretty much nobody will risk saying any more than ʺgood dayʺ to a known healer for fear someone will see and draw the wrong conclusions.

Injuries are even worse than getting sick. Injuries, unless you got them in battle, mean you’re a careless slob. Before the king made duels illegal about a hundred years ago, there were a lot more duels than were fought, if you follow me, so people had an excuse for having hurt themselves (ʺAnd you should see the other guy!ʺ). But real duels also killed a lot of people, so it was a good thing the king forbade them.

The only healers that make any money are the smoothers—the ones that make the evidence go away, the scars and so on. But they’re not respectable. You don’t invite them to dinner or encourage them to marry into the family. Even soldiers don’t go to smoothers, although they wear their medals and duty badges outside their clothes so everyone knows they’re soldiers. My dad is a seriously good carpenter, and a smoother once tried to interest him in making artificial limbs. A really good smoother can give a wooden arm or leg some movement like a real one, but the fake one has to be nearly perfect. Working with a clever smoother would have meant more money, but my dad wasn’t interested. My parents are nothing if not respectable.

Since I was always bumping into things, maybe that’s why I had some sympathy for the careless slobs of the world. Every mother (and most fathers) knows about gimpweed for bruises. Nobody’s going to advertise that they might need it by growing it in their own garden but you can find it near the edges of any deciduous forest. I used to pick it when I saw it as a kind of charm against bruising and I think it must work because I don’t have nearly as many bruises as I should for all the running into things I do. It also means that I can kind of slip a stem or two to anyone I can see needs it and because I’m only a clumsy kid and no threat to their dignity they mostly let me. One or two of the mothers in the village have even told me that it seemed to work better when it came from me but I knew that was just them feeling sorry for me. Or too busy to go find some themselves. I did tell them that they didn’t have to say that, I was happy to let them have some any time.

Our village did have a wizard, an all-sorts wizard, which is to say she did a little bit of everything. Most all-sorts aren’t very good at anything but she was good at almost everything, good enough that if she told you she didn’t feel like doing something you believed that she didn’t feel like it and it wasn’t that she couldn’t. Nobody could understand why she stayed here in Birchhome. She’d come when I was three or four and she was still here. She could get you or your parcel somewhere faster or easier than a horse or a messenger could, if dragons made you nervous. Her love philtres were so good that she had an almost equally good business in antidoting her own philtres, and if you needed a few words to say over your new house or your pregnant wife or sister or your winter solstice party when you really needed a better year next year, she’d give you some weird little verse that didn’t look like much but that you could feel thunk into place when you said it out loud.

She’d made Dad one of her verses the year his workshop burnt down (he and the cat got out but nothing else did). He was standing in the framed-out door for the new shop, which didn’t even have walls yet, and he was afraid we were going to run out of money before the walls got built, and Mum was mad at him for spending money on the verse. So it wasn’t a great atmosphere for any charm with Mum standing there throbbing with annoyance, and Dad was so tired and discouraged he couldn’t even straighten up properly and he read the words in such a low mutter you could barely hear them.

And then there was this really strange pause that didn’t seem to have anything to do with time, and you could feel something like a big wet fog of discouragement roll itself up and go away, and then Dad straightened up and Mum sort of got shorter as the anger drained out of her, and they looked round and smiled at each other, so then Dag and Kel and I did too.

But what I really liked about our wizard is that she also did healing, and she did it like it was no big deal. Wizards, even all-sorts, are really conscious of their dignity, aside from worrying about whether anyone will ever talk to them again if it gets out that they do healing or that they don’t make you beg for it first. Maybe they make a big fuss about dignity because they’re only third on the list after dragonriders and spiritspeakers.

Ralas lived a little outside of the village, which made it easier to sneak off there and ask about your chilblains or your old dad’s cough or whatever. I should know because I did—sneak off to ask her things I mean—some of the mums that asked me for gimpweed asked me about other stuff too, and if I didn’t know, I asked Ralas. She never seemed to mind, and she always told me anything I could use, that I could pass on. She always seemed pleased to do it too. She liked helping people. Wizard training is supposed to make you want to help people if you aren’t that way to begin with but I bet she didn’t have to be taught to want to. And she never made me feel like a dumb clumsy kid when she said she’d have to see someone herself, that what was wrong sounded sort of complicated. And she never said ʺTell the old so-and-so to come here and pay my fee and stop trying to get it for free out of a kid.ʺ

Also although I’m really healthy, I have a sort of negative gift for finding sick hedgehogs and birds with broken wings and stuff, and I always brought them to her. A lot of them stayed on after they got better. So when I say ʺsneak offʺ you can sneak as much as you like but you won’t surprise her, because she’s got all these three-legged or bald or blind or somehow crooked-up creatures going squawk and squeal and chirp and yelp and so on, every time anyone comes near. And a lot of people did come to see her, people that weren’t from our village too, so it was pretty noisy out there a lot of the time.

Mum and Dad and I were at a craft fair once and a foogit pup got trod on by a horse. Nobody knew who the pup belonged to and it was lying there crying with its leg at a funny angle and all sort of mashed looking. Everybody stared the other way. Once the animal was damaged no one was going to claim it, not when everyone else could see, and it was near noon and the craft fair wouldn’t be over till sunset. It was weird somebody had brought it at all—it was way too young to be useful—and while foogits aren’t the brightest lamp at the festival, you don’t get wild foogit pups in the middles of craft fairs, so it must’ve belonged to somebody.

I asked someone where the town wizard lived, and I picked the pup up as carefully as I could—although it was amazingly good about this and sort of relaxed into me as if company was better than nothing—and went there. It was a grand house in the middle of town with stars painted all over it and a long fringe of charms hanging over the front door. It gave me the creeps—Ralas didn’t use any of that show-offy stuff—but it didn’t matter so long as he knew how to set broken bones. But whoever it was who answered the door wouldn’t let me in to trouble ʺthe master.ʺ I’d just managed to say, ʺHe has a broken—ʺ when Stoneface said, ʺThe master doesn’t deal with vermin,ʺ and shut the door. I’m not sure if he meant me or the pup. It’s true I hadn’t thought about how I was going to pay, but I don’t believe the door thug had got that far in his thinking either.

So I went back to our waggon and stole a bit of lath from my dad, because I knew he’d say no if I asked but I also knew he wouldn’t ask any questions if he recognised what I’d stolen, and then I had to use my belt and some of my sleeve because Mum would ask if some of the stuff she wrapped her candles in disappeared, and I splinted the pup’s leg as best I could from having watched Ralas do it a lot better, although it was harder than that because, as I say, it wasn’t just broken, it was kind of crunched up. There were a couple of places where the bone poked through the skin and I didn’t have a clue what to do about that, I just made a big green smelly poultice of pretty much any plant I could find that hadn’t been stomped flat by everybody at the fair and slapped it on. Mum was really annoyed, but mostly about my shirt (she said something about vermin too but I think she meant fleas) but she let me keep him till we got home. Nobody came around asking about him either.

But we didn’t get home till ten days later and the bones had already started to knit (Ralas said) and, as I say, I didn’t know what I was doing so the bones healed a bit funny and Sippy has been lame ever since, which is why he stayed with Ralas, but I don’t think Mum would have let me keep him anyway. Ralas tried to make me feel better and kept saying that I was only eleven and Sippy’s leg would have been tricky even for her, but the point is I’m a screw-up and Sippy is lame for life. Sippy’s always really glad to see me when I go to Ralas’ and that makes me feel both better and worse.

There was a joke in the family that the reason I didn’t grow is because I kept wearing the growth off the bottoms of my feet with all the running I did for Mum. In finding all the best shortcuts through woods and fields, I found the best places for gimpweed, so I started looking for other stuff too, especially the common stuff that Ralas got through pretty fast. Ralas started letting me keep watch on her supplies so I could collect what she needed at the right time of year. That felt really good.

I started looking for new things when people would ask me, after I’d checked with Ralas what it was and where it grew and if it was good for what whoever wanted it for. Since you’re not supposed to be sick in the first place, a lot of people are really dumb about what they think will make them better. Often I got the latest gossip as a kind of payment. It’s less embarrassing than saying thank you. I was the first one to bring it to Birchhome that our councillor’s daughter had run off with a smoother and her parents were going to disown her. I was also the first to hear when Fhig did something clever and got bumped up to Third Wing. Drat him.

But during the second year at a dragonrider academy you finally meet the dragons. And dragons and Dag were . . . wham. Suddenly all the stupid rules and the boring history and the human hierarchy just disappeared, because it was all about dragons.

And then Kel didn’t go to Jwell after all but some young guy named Chooko who’d never had an apprentice before but who told good stories and furthermore amazingly would smile and look at you (even when you’re the youngest and short for your age) when he came to your village and dropped in on the family of the second son who’s going to be his first-ever apprentice in a few months. And he and Kel really hit it off.

So two sons down—and both of them happy—and one to go. Mum being Mum, I’d’ve thought she’d get going on me right away but maybe I was too much even for her tactical skills. Unless I started growing unexpectedly I could go on pretending to be fourteen forever, and never be apprenticed at all. Maybe I’d deliver candles for the rest of my life.

Dag came home on his half-year leave from the Academy right before Kel was going off with Chooko and they were both full of excitement and the future. Their future. Dag’s wham with dragons was so spectacular he’d been jumped a class—Fhig hadn’t done that either—so he was going to be eligible for his First Flight only next year. Which, just by the way, was the year I’d be fifteen and so far as I knew Mum and Dad hadn’t even started looking for some desperate wizard they could bribe heavily (except they couldn’t afford to, although Chooko was a lot cheaper than the Academy) to take me on as apprentice.

Dag and Kel’s way of dealing with this awkwardness was to talk over my head about their own stuff (since they’re so much taller than I am, this was very easy). They didn’t mean to make me feel lower than a foogit pup. But what could they do, anyway?

Maybe my parents thought hanging out with Ralas would make me marginally more desirable as an apprentice. I would have flown like a starling and swum like a fish to be Ralas’ apprentice but I knew that wasn’t going to happen. When I was still only a little kid I’d overheard Mik, who had a third son to find a place for, asking Ralas about apprenticeship. Ralas had been very polite but said that she didn’t take apprentices. I reminded myself of this a lot. At least it meant I didn’t have to go through being turned down by her personally—and I didn’t have to die of jealousy when she took somebody else. Although I’d still have to go away and be apprenticed to someone somewhere about something some day and stop hanging around her. I didn’t really think Mum would keep me delivering candles forever. Maybe I wished she would.

Sippy believing I was wonderful was nice, even if he was only a foogit and it was only because he didn’t realise it was my fault he was lame. He’d grown up a lot handsomer than I was expecting. Bigger too. Foogits are good watchdogs—nobody sleeps through a foogit howling—and tend to be less trouble than real dogs so you see them around pretty often, but only at the backs and edges of things—no one invites a foogit to lie by the hearth during its off-duty hours. Also foogits can move so fast, in that sort of goofy dance they do, they can make you dizzy if you watch them. And if you’re a burglar, you probably will be watching them, because a good guard foogit will bite too, and their teeth sink in a ways. Not that Ralas needed that kind of protection. Some of the strangers who came to visit her were scarier than any burglar but I never saw her worried or bothered.

I’ve often wondered why it’s okay to despise foogits. So that a foogit pup with a broken leg can lie crying in the middle of a hot fairground and no one will even bring it a bowl of water. I suppose it’s because we hero-worship dragons and foogits play the fool in dragon stories. Usually there is no fool in a dragon story, because stories about dragons are always big and grand and solemn and exciting. But if you want something funny or ridiculous to happen somewhere in a dragon story you’ll probably put in a foogit. I don’t know why a foogit. But there’s a connection between them and dragons somehow. Foogits are a bit dragon-shaped, although they’re hairy and a dragon is scaly. And even the biggest foogit would look pretty silly next to the smallest dragon. Also dragons don’t have topknots of hair that look like huka nests. No one can look dignified with a huka nest on their head.

I’ve seen dragons a few times, and around here the only dragons you’re going to see are the smallest and the oldest and the slowest. But even they have that air about them: that they rule the world and they know it. I don’t know why they let us little thin-skinned squeaky wingless humans order them around. I suppose that makes us feel kind of conceited too. Or maybe awed or even just confused. So then you look at a foogit and I guess it’s sort of a joke, but the joke’s in bad taste. Hard on the foogit, who didn’t ask to look like a small hairy dragon with a silly dance. But if Sippy knew he was a buffoon he never let on. Or maybe he liked it. He was always cheerful and he always cheered me up.

You don’t hear from your apprenticed relatives all that often. They’re too busy being apprentices. We got a letter from Dag about twice a year, depending on there being someone to bring it, and because of the unpredictableness of this, it never seemed strange if we didn’t get any letters. And there hadn’t been any gossip, and now that our village had someone at the Academy every tinker passing through had an Academy story for us. There was just Dag, one day, turning up a week before we were expecting him for his half-year break, looking grey and hollow-eyed. We started out being delighted to see him but it was immediately obvious ʺdelightedʺ was the wrong response. It had been raining for weeks and the first thing I thought was that he’d caught a chill, and started patting my pockets for gislarane; I’d been carrying extra in case anyone I was delivering candles to was feeling shivery and sneezy. I gave him the gislarane but it wasn’t a chill.

The story came out in jerks over the rest of the evening. I’m putting it together in more or less the right order now but he didn’t tell it like this.

At first we thought he must be feverish after all because what he said didn’t seem to make a lot of sense. Then for a while we thought it was about having been jumped a year. But bullying or social exile wasn’t the kind of thing that would get Dag down. I even wondered if he might be in love. I had probably a strange view of love from Ralas’ clientele.

That was closer. But it wasn’t a girl. It was a dragon.

ʺI couldn’t believe it, when the First Flight list went up. I don’t know . . . I don’t understand . . . Hereyta, for all the gods’ sake,ʺ Dag said. ʺI know they say it’s all handed down in the signs and so on. But they could just not do it—or they could tell me they’d changed their minds and I’d take my First Flight next year with my old class.ʺ

Typical of Dag that it didn’t occur to him that this might be awkward or embarrassing.

ʺI can’t believe they’d do this to Hereyta. But they’re not going to change it. Some of the other cadets are pretty upset about it too. Fistagh says I should refuse to Fly.ʺ A grimace that had very little relationship to a smile passed briefly over Dag’s face. ʺI’ve thought of that—it’s about the only thing I have thought of—but not for Fistagh’s reasons.ʺ Fistagh was one of the fourth-years who thought a third-year jumper was a bad idea. ʺBut I’ve decided—I think I’ve decided—that refusing to Fly—to try to Fly—would be even worse for Hereyta.ʺ

Some of why I didn’t get it at first is that I’d been around Sippy too much, and I’d unconsciously begun thinking of dragons as being a kind of very large foogit with less sense of humour and better posture. I’d maybe forgotten about the awe part. And the honour part.

Hereyta was pretty old, although not all that old for a dragon, and mostly retired. She’d flown for the king in the last border wars and been pretty special. They used her at the Academy now for the practical stuff, when the cadets get out of the classrooms their second year and start working with the dragons, and she was a big success there. If Hereyta liked you it really meant something. He’d mentioned her before so I kind of half recognised her name. They’d also been breeding her but while she’d been bred this year she hadn’t settled. ʺI knew she was barren this year,ʺ said Dag, ʺand I’ve been worried about her because I’m afraid if she doesn’t settle next year too. . . .ʺ

There are no romantics on a dragonrider academy staff. They can’t afford it. All the dragons used for training in all the academies are rotated back into the income-earning world every few years to make some money, usually including the breeding stock. Nobody could run an academy if they had to feed all their dragons all the time, and nobody but maybe the king could afford to send their kids to an academy if they had to pay total dragon upkeep as part of the tuition. And a young dragon doesn’t start earning its living till it’s twelve or fifteen years old—some of them don’t reach their full strength till they’re twenty. Hereyta was very special indeed to have been granted the luxury of even semi-retirement, although coping with a lot of cadets can’t be too restful.

ʺBut why humiliate one of their best?ʺ Dag was so wrapped up in Hereyta he kept on leaving the crucial bit of the story out.

ʺHumiliate,ʺ said Dad. ʺI don’t understand humiliate. You mean she’s too—too injured or arthritic to fly? That sounds . . . cruel.ʺ

ʺIt is cruel,ʺ said Dag. ʺShe can still get off the ground, yes. She can fly under the blue sky, yes. She’s got one stiff wing—that’s another old war wound—but it still works. But no, she can’t Fly. She only has two eyes.ʺ

Even so it took a moment for this to sink in. Most people don’t get close enough to any dragons to have to think about how they do what they do, and it’s pretty eerie besides. You don’t really want to think about how your expensive parcel or your more expensive visitor got here—what it or they might be trailing in from the journey. Dragons are too big and heavy to fly like birds fly for long; they do it to get going, and they do some pretty fancy blue-sky flying during courtship (and afterward they’ve burnt up so much energy they do nothing but eat and sleep for days) but mostly, as soon as they get a few spans up, poof, they aim their three eyes however it is that they do it and zap, they’re into the Firespace, or the red sky, or the secret way, or the Endless Fire, or the haven, or the centre of the world, or whatever you choose to call it. And anything they’re carrying—back on the ground in its net at the end of its special rope—disappears too. (With a jerk. Careful packing is crucial. Dag says you loop up any parcels while you’re in the Firespace, so they come out with you and the dragon. Otherwise they’d be liable to brain you coming down.)

Most of the academies, and the companies that use dragons, don’t call that other place anything; it’s just how dragons get around—officially they don’t call it anything. But that’s because they don’t want us ordinary people getting too spooked. A lot of your taxes go to the dragon regiments in the army. I’ve wondered sometimes how the tradition got started that you want your first son to go to a dragonrider academy. It seems to me a really convenient counterbalance to the uncanniness of Flying. But some of the old magicians could have cast a spell that huge, so maybe one of them did.

Anyway, when your dragon zaps back out of the Firespace again you’re a lot closer to where you wanted to be than when you went in—or that’s the idea. Depending on how good you are at communicating with your dragon you may be very close to where you want to be or you may not, and if you’re not you may have to go back into the Firespace and try again. Every now and again a dragonrider gets really awful vertigo in the Firespace and has to stop being a dragonrider. (Passengers are securely tied in on the dragon with its rider, and a lot of people only do it once, even the ones who can afford it.) Everybody gets some vertigo so aside from needing to be as fast and efficient as possible because that’s your job—and because dragons are staggeringly expensive to keep—you want to zap in and out of the Firespace as few times and for as short a stretch each as possible. Except for really short hops, when it’s about the same, it’s a lot quicker, going from point A to point B through the Firespace. Which is why it’s worth it, although time as we know it goes a bit funny in there too, which they think is part of the vertigo.

I had been looking forward to Dag telling us what you could see when the dragon does whatever it does. There are stories that you can see three thin shiny lines like threads or ribbons or tiny lightning beaming out of the dragon’s three eyes, and where the lines cross is the way in, somehow—although I wasn’t expecting anything too exact since dragons have been Flying through the Firespace for as long as there have been humans to see them disappear and reappear, and still no one knows anything really about how they do it. Except that they need all three eyes. A two-eyed dragon is grounded under the blue sky.

I’d heard him say his dragon—Hereyta—had only two eyes, but I hadn’t taken it in. I’d maybe half assumed that First Flight was mostly a ceremonial thing or something. Once I understood what he was telling us I was really upset. No wonder Dag looked haunted. And I didn’t even know this (or any) dragon. My mind started flicking through all the stuff Ralas had taught me, because that was what my mind automatically did now whenever there was any hurt or distress around. But nothing I knew could come anywhere near this. I couldn’t help wondering if Ralas could do anything, but she was still only an all-sorts wizard, even if she was a good one, and all-sorts wizards don’t mess with dragons.

Foogits have three eyes too, by the way, or they did, although it’s getting rare. The third one is usually covered up by the topknot, but it’s ornamental or vestigial or whatever, and a foogit can’t see out of it even if it has a haircut. As I sat there thinking miserably about Dag’s dragon it occurred to me to wonder if maybe that’s another part of the reason everybody treats foogits like an ugly whining poor relation, because they have the gall to pretend to have three eyes like dragons, like the only creature there is who can get in and out of the Firespace—but the third eye’s a fake on foogits. Their habit of silly dancing doesn’t do them any favours either. But why do they have something that looks like a third eye? Nothing else does. Maybe they use it really secretly? Maybe the third eye has an extra eyelid that zooms back when nobody else is around and . . . nah. If Sippy was at all typical—and Ralas seemed to think he was—I couldn’t see an entire species of Sippys hiding something like being able to get into the Firespace.

At the same time a third eye on a foogit—even though it’s not a real eye and the foogit can’t see out of it—is considered lucky. Sippy had a third eye.

Mum had been wittering away about how Dag must be mistaken, the Academy staff wouldn’t do what he said they were doing, and Dad was making rumbling support-of-Mum noises, and I wasn’t listening. I started listening when Dag broke in on this well-meaning clatter. ʺHave I told you how she lost the eye? She was in the war with the Srandems fifteen years ago. She took a spear meant for her partner. They were up in the wild lands, up beyond Ogan, and were ambushed. She still got them home, although Carn says he doesn’t know how she did it, since they could only go under the blue sky, and the wound wouldn’t stop bleeding, for weeks, he said, the spear was probably poisoned, so that it kept bleeding is probably what saved her life but even a dragon can only lose so much blood, and he was already pretty out of it himself because the spear-thrower had already had a go at him. . . . Carn’s a tutor at the Academy now. He introduced me to Hereyta himself. Carn’s still pretty lame, and every now and then he turns really grey and has to sit down. You’d think he’d’ve stopped it, assigning her to First Flight. You’d think he wouldn’t care if every Seer ever born stood in a row and told him she had to be assigned to First Flight, after what she did for him, that he’d find a way to stop it.ʺ

I woke up really early the next morning, thinking about Dag’s dragon and how much she was going to mind what happened, just like Dag said, and eventually thinking about it bothered me so much that I went downstairs to boil some water. I’d decide if I wanted blastweed to wake up or snorewort to put me back to sleep after I had the hot water to do it with.

I found Dag still sitting by the fire where he’d been when the rest of us went to bed. He looked even worse than he had when he arrived. Coming home hadn’t helped. Usually when you tell somebody else something that hurts, it hurts less after. ʺWant some blastweed?ʺ I said, making up my mind.

Dag stirred. ʺSure,ʺ he said absently. ʺThanks, Tinhead.ʺ Mum would stop my brothers calling me that if she was around, but since they’d always used it when she wasn’t it came out automatically. I was supposed to call him Geezer back but I didn’t have the heart. I put the mug by his elbow and sat down opposite him with my own.

The blastweed started exploding through my veins and the silence got too loud to bear. ʺWant to come out to Ralas’ with me?ʺ

It took Dag about two minutes to come back from wherever he was and answer me. Was it his life he was looking at being wrecked before it got started—even I knew that if you failed First Flight you were pretty well doomed—or was it the dragon? That took about two seconds to decide. Dag and I don’t have much in common but we’re both nutty about animals.

ʺOkay,ʺ he said. ʺThanks.ʺ

Sippy always knew when I was coming. Don’t ask me how; he usually met me halfway between the village and Ralas’ which means he has to have got started almost as soon as I did. Ralas said she always knew when I was coming because Sippy disappeared. He rushed up to us and cavorted like a puppy the way he always did, except unlike puppies foogits are green(ish) and don’t wag their tails. If you didn’t know about his leg you probably wouldn’t guess; he’d adapted really well, although his run was a little strange. But foogits all run a little strangely. Dag actually smiled.

I knew Ralas would take one look at Dag and know something was badly wrong but being Ralas wouldn’t ask. She just took him on a tour. There was someone coughing in the back of her house but we all ignored it. I knew it was Moga, the cooper’s son, who was allergic to wood dust. Ralas was trying to talk his dad into apprenticing him early to get him away from home, but Gakan was a stubborn old so-and-so, and since Ralas couldn’t actually say what she meant outright—including that she’d be happy to do the tricky negotiating for an underage apprentice that didn’t include any mention of the crime of illness—poor Moga was still coming out to Ralas’ to cough pretty regularly. Ralas would load him up with gil berry tincture and he’d go home and be okay for a few weeks. And then he’d start to wheeze, and then he’d start to cough, and then he’d be back to Ralas’ again.

I let the tour get ahead of me. Sippy wanted to play his charging game, which involved running at me full tilt and at the last minute swerving aside and leaping straight into the air. I guess it was some kind of variation on the foogit dance, maybe because Sippy didn’t have any other foogits to do it with. Fortunately he’d begun teaching me this game when he was still small and unsteady so I was willing to stand still while he charged me because he didn’t go that fast and wasn’t big enough to do either of us much damage if the purpose of the game was to slam into me after all, like maybe when I wasn’t expecting it. Except it wasn’t. So I held my ground as he got older and bigger and cut the last-minute swerve till I almost had to shut my eyes, and the breeze of his turn would hit me instead, and maybe the tickle of the end of a flying ear.

I’d asked Ralas if he ever charged her, or anyone else, or maybe a tree or something, or if he ever just leaped in the air and did his trick out of nowhere, and she said she didn’t think he ever did.

So I stood there so Sippy could play his game, and moved around a little to go on facing him when he charged, which seemed to be what he wanted, and thought some more about Dag and his dragon. When Sippy got tired—which didn’t take long; this was a very high-energy game—we went off to find Ralas and Dag.

I could tell he was telling her about his dragon. People do tell Ralas things. I suppose we were both secretly hoping that she’d say, ʺOh, your dragon is missing an eye? Why, I had a case like that last month. Apply this night and morning for a week.ʺ But she didn’t of course. She just looked really sympathetic. I wondered if maybe she could give a two-eyed dragon a home but she didn’t say anything about that either. And a dragon does take up an awful lot of space (and food) and the woodland where Ralas lived isn’t that big and Birchhome is on one side and Twobridge on the other side.

Dag was just finishing when Sippy and I arrived. We sat around (in Sippy’s case lay around) in silence for a few minutes drinking Ralas’ tisane (Sippy had most of a bowl of water) and then Ralas said to Dag, ʺWhy don’t you take Ern and Sippy with you when you go back to the Academy?ʺ

She said it in this really reasonable voice like you might say, ʺBe sure to pack enough sandwiches, and don’t forget your oilskin because it’s going to rain some more.ʺ Dag opened his mouth and closed it again. He may call me Tinhead but he’s not a bad guy. So since he wouldn’t say it, I did.

ʺWhy?ʺ

Ralas laughed. ʺI don’t know,ʺ she said, in that maddening wiz ardy way of hers. ʺIt feels like a good idea.ʺ

It’s true that when your wizard suggests you do something—especially a local wizard who usually gives pretty good advice and who furthermore has done your family a good turn or two already—you tend to do it. However useless or insane it sounds. Even so, when Dag looked into the bottom of the mug he was holding and sighed and said, ʺAll right,ʺ I wondered what she’d put in his tisane.

I could think of about six buts immediately and, give me a minute, I’d think of six more. But I looked at Dag with his big shoulders all slumped staring into the bottom of his mug with his hands cupped over the brim like the answer was in there and he was trying to prevent it from jumping out and running away, and didn’t say anything after all. No, that’s not true. After a little while I said, ʺWhen do you want to leave?ʺ

ʺTomorrow,ʺ he said.

Mum blinked once or twice when Dag told our parents what Ralas had said, but Dad didn’t even do that much. He was polishing a fancy carved chair leg he’d just mended and neither sons nor wizards were going to interrupt his train of thought. Mum tried to get him to pay attention by repeating the news but all he said was, ʺAh? When’re they leaving then? Maybe you can get Jardy to do some of your deliveries.ʺ But when he came in from his workshop he gave me a very clear, sharp, paying-attention look, and then nodded. I knew that nod. It was the nod he used when he’d been going around a craft fair or something looking at all the other carpenters’ work and found something he really liked. It rattled me, that nod, but it also made me feel good, although I wasn’t going to risk it by saying anything like ʺWhat do you mean?ʺ

But it was even stranger, later on, when I was doing the washing up, and Mum came up behind me and said, ʺErn.ʺ Dag had already gone to bed; he’d had no sleep last night. I braced myself. Mum tended to know everything and to be generous about spreading her superior intelligence around. Or maybe I just wasn’t cleaning the dishes well enough. But she didn’t say anything for so long after she’d said my name eventually I turned around (dripping water and soap-suds) and she was standing there with her face all screwed up with worry.

ʺMum—?ʺ

ʺTake care of him, won’t you?ʺ she said. ʺYou’ll take care of Dag.ʺ

This was more worried than I’d ever seen her. I tried to look taller and older. She didn’t even say anything about the dripping when I put my arms around her. ʺOf course I will.ʺ

In more of her usual manner she said, ʺDon’t patronise me, young man,ʺ although she didn’t shake me off. She added, ʺBut you’ve got a good head on your shoulders, and Dag has . . . temporarily mislaid his. I don’t suppose Ralas can do anything about the dragon?ʺ

I shook my head.

ʺBe careful,ʺ she said. She hesitated and then said, ʺMaybe I should—ʺ and stopped. ʺYou’re dripping on the floor.ʺ

I turned back to the dishes, trying not to let her see me grin. She put her hand on my shoulder. ʺWe’ll talk about your future when you get back.ʺ

And then I bent lower over the dishes so she couldn’t see my face.

ʺYes, I know, we should have done it before.ʺ She added, ʺWe haven’t forgotten you, Ern.ʺ

I didn’t say anything, and she patted my shoulder and left me.

It was sunny and clear when we set off the next morning (but we had our oilskins because it would rain later, and lots and lots of sandwiches because Mum always believed her sons were about to starve to death). If it had just been Dag he could have stayed a week because he’d be able to find a dragon to hitch a ride on; there were always dragons going to Clare, which is a big town in its own right as well as being the Academy town. Even the smallest, slowest dragon doing hop-stops (which is all you find around here) is still days faster than human feet. But cadets aren’t allowed to bring their little brothers let alone their little brothers’ foogits when they hitch. So we were going to walk.

I tried not to sound like I was looking for a way out when I asked Ralas if Sippy could walk that far on his leg. But she said immediately, ʺHe’ll be fine.ʺ And she gave me this enormous pot of liniment in case he seemed stiff. ʺGood for everybody,ʺ she said smiling. I hadn’t thought about that; I spent nearly all day every day walking somewhere. And Dag—Dag was my oldest brother and a dragon academy cadet. They don’t get stiff, do they? It’s probably forbidden in the rulebook. It wasn’t till a lot later that I thought about what she’d meant by ʺeverybody.ʺ

Sippy was obviously a bit puzzled when Ralas made a slightly more than usual fuss over him when she sent him off with me that morning. Since we were going to Twobridge it seemed easier to pick Sippy up on the way than get into a flap with Mum. She preferred to know about Sippy from a distance. (Although occasionally after a long day delivering candles I brought Sippy with me, and smuggled him upstairs to my bed which is conveniently tucked way in under the eaves. But I didn’t do it very often. And as long as I didn’t do it very often Mum gallantly pretended not to notice.)

Sippy was even more puzzled when we got to Twobridge and went over the river to Waysmeet and then kept on going. Waysmeet was my candle-delivery limit. But he followed me like he always did even if his eyes and ears seemed to be whirling in five different directions at once, taking in all the new sights and sounds. Not that the village after Waysmeet looked much different. But the next day, after sleeping not-as-uncomfortably-as-it-sounds under a hedgerow, you could start to see the landscape getting flatter and more open, and for days after the towns were still small and there were plenty of fields and hedgerows and streams. Once we camped by the edge of a little forest and collected enough dead wood to have a (slightly damp and sullen) fire. When it spat and fizzed at us Sippy hid behind me.

When we got to Montuthra we turned right instead of left and then I was on new territory; the big craft fair my parents went to every year was in the other direction. And after Montuthra was West Cross and then East Cross, and after that Leton.

Dag and I didn’t talk much so I stumped along beside or behind him like nothing was a big deal. I don’t know if he knew I’d never been this way before. He was getting more and more shut in on himself as the road disappeared under our feet and out behind us in the wrong direction, and the towns got bigger. As he got closer to the Academy, to Hereyta, and to First Flight. With a runty little brother and a lame foogit at his heels.

It was like he was waking out of a trance the last day at sundown. We were getting to what looked like the end of the town we’d been walking through (Sippy so pressed up against me I kept tripping over him; the only other town this size he’d seen was the one I’d found him in with a smashed leg) and I was wondering if I should say something before we walked past what might be the last inn we’d see before midnight. I didn’t think much of the local hedgerows, and I didn’t feel like walking till midnight, and in spite of picking up some food at markets on the way we’d eaten all of Mum’s sandwiches by then (she didn’t realise, because I’d been careful not to let her realise, how much Sippy eats). And we were short of sleep.

Last night’s hedgerow had been a little too well populated and the family nearest us had a crying baby. Eventually I put on my best harmless-and-reassuring manner, although it works better in daylight, and went over there. I could see the mum in question was trying not to snap at me—if I was going to complain, I was also going to force her to admit that her child wasn’t perfect. She said, ʺI’m sorry, but he’s teething. He can’t help it. I can’t help it.ʺ

ʺI know,ʺ I said. ʺBut this will help. Just rub a little on his gums.ʺ I wasn’t sure she’d try it—I’m good at looking harmless, but not so good at looking like I know what I’m doing—but she was desperate. The baby was asleep before I got back to Dag. He said, ʺYou should have gone over earlier.ʺ

ʺYeah,ʺ I said. But I knew he was saying ʺwell done.ʺ

I prepared to take advantage when he stopped and looked at the inn sign hanging under the lantern—looked at it like he was paying attention to something outside his thoughts for the first time that day. A girl in an apron was coming out of the inn with a long spill to light the lantern.

ʺSippy and I’ll sleep in the stables, if you’ll bring us some supper, ʺ I said quickly. I had my hand in my pocket for the coins Dad had given me; most inns would give a cadet in uniform free room and board, but Dag wasn’t wearing his uniform. And sleeping in the stables was cheaper, but I also knew that no respectable inn would have a foogit indoors, and I didn’t want to imagine what Sippy might do locked up all by himself in a little dark box in a strange town.

Dag wouldn’t take Dad’s coins and when he found us in the stables later on he was carrying a big tray with enough for three, and threw his pack down beside mine. He seemed almost cheerful. I’d already piled up straw so high that it was going to be a much more comfortable bed than we’d had the last several nights, and was feeling relatively cheerful myself. ʺHope you don’t mind if I join you,ʺ Dag said. ʺIf I sleep in one of their rooms I’ll just lie awake and . . . think. I find Sippy’s snoring soothing.ʺ

The tray included a big jug of beer, which Sippy promptly knocked over, or maybe I did. Dag had put the tray on the ground because there wasn’t anywhere else, but Sippy assumed it was for his benefit, and made a lunge for the plate of meat, which was still warm, and even my mere human nose registered that it smelled really good. I lunged for Sippy and the beer went over. Dag looked at the spreading pool for a moment and then laughed. ʺI’ll take that as a sign,ʺ he said, ʺthat I’m to be stone cold sober tomorrow; but it was only small beer.ʺ

We’d get to Clare tomorrow.

Maybe it was the beer he didn’t have but Dag was awake before dawn the next day. Well, so was I. So we got up and left. I hope the horse that had the stall after us didn’t get drunk on the straw. The sleepy kitchen maid—the same one we’d seen lighting the lantern the night before—wearily found us a couple of chunks of last night’s bread, and we trudged off down the road. I loitered momentarily after Dag so I could give the kitchen maid a little coldleaf for the angry new burn on her wrist, which I was pretty sure was why she hadn’t slept very well, and told her how to use it. She looked at me, surprised, but she took the leaves, and I was pretty sure she’d do what I said. Especially when she gave me a handful of apples to go with the bread.

The overnight dew had laid the dust, and the road before us was cool and white in the dawn fog. It looked, I don’t know, magical somehow, like it was going to lead us to some great adventure. Not to a First Flight where one of the dragons would be left behind. The one my brother was with.

I’ve already said that Dag and I didn’t talk much but that last day it was like his silence had a wall around it, that even if I had said anything my words would have bounced off like arrows against a shield. I wouldn’t even have known that we’d get to Clare today except that I’d heard one of the ostlers the night before telling someone’s groom that Clare was less than a league away and they’d get there in a morning even if the roads were crowded. That and Dag’s barricaded silence told me we were close. I wanted to ask him what he wanted Sippy and me to do when we got there. I didn’t think he’d want to bring us into the Academy grounds—his dim little brother and his dim little brother’s defective pet foogit. He had enough to deal with. I started worrying all over again about why we were there at all. It was stupid to think that Sippy and I could do anything but make Dag’s humiliation more complete. But Ralas wasn’t stupid. And even Dad—even Mum—had seemed to think it wasn’t a bad idea. Take care of Dag? How?

But here I was. Why hadn’t Ralas told me what I was supposed to do?

The road was busy, but not so busy it slowed us down. Also I’m sure Dag speeded up. It was like, we’re here, might as well get on with it. I would have preferred a little loitering myself. I don’t know where Clare really began; it all pretty much ran on from the last town. It just got noisier, and there were little roads that branched off from the big road and if you looked down them they were lined with buildings too; and there were a lot of inns, and all their yards were busy. We wouldn’t have been walking till midnight last night after all.

I was getting ready to hang off Dag’s sleeve and bellow in his ear, something about if he’d recommend an inn that wasn’t too expensive but didn’t have too many bedbugs either, Sippy and I would go there and we could meet up later after Dag had checked in or whatever returning cadets did. I’d already put my hand out when I felt Dag stiffen and turned my head to look where he was looking, and saw the big ugly guy in a cadet’s uniform.

But I was too slow, and as I was about to drop back into the crowd so Dag could pretend we had nothing to do with him, Dag grabbed the wrist of the hand I hadn’t pulled away fast enough. The big ugly cadet walked straight up to us and to my surprise his face broke into an enormous smile. This wasn’t necessarily an improvement—too many teeth—but he thumped Dag on both shoulders like they were best friends and I saw Dag was smiling too, if more restrainedly, but that might have just been from being thumped.

Big and Ugly now turned to me and if he was thinking ʺWho is this gnome and what is this vermin with him?ʺ (Sippy was attached to my leg again; this town was even bigger and busier than yesterday’s), it didn’t show. ʺThis is my brother, Ern,ʺ Dag said, and then Big and Ugly thumped my shoulders too and this sure made my smile feel strained. ʺAnd this is Eled,ʺ Dag continued. ʺHe—he’s on for First Flight too.ʺ

ʺThat’s right,ʺ Eled said. ʺYou know your brother showed us all up, don’t you? He’s taking First Flight a year early.ʺ

I glanced at Dag but the smile was still fixed in place.

Sippy from behind me was craning his long neck toward Eled, or anyway Eled’s trousers. Foogits’ nostrils are like gathered or pleated, and foogits make the most revolting noise when they blow out through them to clear the way for new smells, and he was doing it a lot lately, because of the extra town smells, I suppose. But he sounded like he had at least forty nostrils when he did it now. Eled glanced down. It was a long way down for him so maybe he really hadn’t noticed Sippy before. ʺClear skies and great dragons,ʺ he said. ʺIt’s a little dragon. He yours?ʺ

Nobody calls foogits little dragons except in folk tales. Eled had to have been being sarcastic, but I couldn’t hear him doing it, so I muttered, ʺHis name’s Sippy.ʺ

ʺHey, Sippy,ʺ he said, and offered his hand to be snuffled, which was gallant of him. Sippy came out from behind my legs and tried to frolic, which is what he usually does when he’s decided he’s made a new friend, but there wasn’t room, so he banged into all our knees in turn a couple of times and subsided with a wounded look at the hurrying passers-by who were cramping his style. Eled laughed. It was a nice laugh.

ʺI’ve never heard anyone call a foogit a little dragon,ʺ Dag said, who knew the same folk tales that I did.

ʺDidn’t your dad ever—ʺ Eled broke off, looking embarrassed. I’d already noticed that Eled didn’t have the manner of a carpenter’s son.

ʺEled’s dad is a dragonrider,ʺ Dag said calmly to me.

ʺAnd my mum’s oldest brother and four of my cousins,ʺ Eled said, grinning again. ʺAnd both granddads and all four of their granddads. My dad has two brothers and two sisters. And all of their first sons went to the Academy. And three of their daughters. And one second and one third son. I’m the youngest first son in this generation—and I have four older sisters, and one of them is a dragonrider too. I had the worst childhood you can imagine.ʺ

I didn’t mean to laugh, but I did, and for the first time since Dag had come home and told us about Hereyta, some part of me I couldn’t name stopped feeling quite so gloomy.

Eled looked pleased, and even Dag’s smile softened a little.

ʺIs everyone else here?ʺ said Dag.

ʺPretty much,ʺ said Eled. ʺA few of you with a long way to come are still on the road.ʺ

A long way to come trailing extra cargo, I thought. And can’t afford coach fare. Not that any coach would take a foogit.

Dag nodded.

After an uncomfortable little pause Eled said to me, ʺMost of us First Flighters get back early from this break. We can’t stay away. Everybody else turns up at the last minute like normal. First Flight itself happens first day of term. We’re supposed to get back one day before to check our gear over one last time, not like we didn’t leave it in blisteringly perfect order, and to look our dragons over too, but the dragonmasters have been doing that while we’re on leave a lot better than us dumb cadets can. A lot of the dragonmasters say that we shouldn’t be allowed to come back early, because we fret the dragons. Most Academy dragons take First Flight every year.ʺ

Dag’s silence was getting louder and louder.

Abruptly Eled added, ʺI’m hungry. Let’s go back to halls and get something to eat.ʺ

They set off but I just stood there. Sippy started to follow them and then stopped when I didn’t move, looking at me and them and back at me again.

ʺCome on then,ʺ said Eled, ʺno reason to block traffic,ʺ as a great rumbling cart went by and Sippy shied into me so violently he nearly knocked me down.

ʺI—er—Sippy and I will go to an inn if you’ll tell us which one,ʺ I said. ʺI mean, cheap.ʺ

ʺNot necessary,ʺ said Eled. ʺNobody does it much lately but in my dad’s day First Flighters always brought someone from home to see them off. It’s good luck.ʺ

ʺNot foogits,ʺ I said, stubbornly standing where I was. I held on to a handful of Sippy’s ear to make him stand still. This would work for approximately two minutes but was good for emergencies.

ʺNonsense,ʺ Eled replied. ʺExactly what they are is lucky.ʺ

Maybe fool’s luck, I thought. Maybe sometimes that’s good luck.

ʺMy aunt keeps foogits,ʺ said Eled. ʺI’ve always liked ’em. I miss having ’em around at the Academy.ʺ

Dag was smiling again, but he looked genuinely amused. ʺIf Eled says you and Sippy should come, you’d better. It’s easier than arguing with him.ʺ

Eled grinned a slightly different kind of grin and I thought, I just bet people don’t argue with him much, and I wondered when Eled had befriended Dag and what Fistagh thought about it.

ʺAnd besides, Tinhead,ʺ my brother went on graciously, ʺdo you really think I’d drag you all this way and then pitch you in an inn? Ralas would be ashamed of both of us.ʺ

ʺRalas?ʺ said Eled.

ʺOur wizard,ʺ said Dag. ʺAnd she’s a good one. I don’t know how our little boring village keeps her. She told me to bring Ern and Sippy.ʺ

ʺDid she then?ʺ said Eled, looking at me thoughtfully in a way I didn’t like at all. I let go of Sippy’s ear and started off in the direction they’d been walking before Eled said anything else. In a minute I was struggling to keep up—Eled’s legs must have been twice as long as mine. He said casually, ʺMy granddad on my mum’s side, he had a foogit. She flew with him and his dragon. It was rare in his day but he told me that in his granddad’s day all the dragonriders had foogits. They were mascots—they were good luck.ʺ

Dag, equally casual, said from Eled’s other side: ʺI don’t suppose your granddad had any good stories about two-eyed dragons, did he?ʺ

There was a pause full of stall-holders shouting, ʺThree a penny! Your best deal here!ʺ

ʺI don’t get it,ʺ Eled said finally. ʺIt’s making me crazier than a blind cawgilly in spring, trying to find a way to think about it. And okay, the grown-ups have to huff and blow and tell you you’re a bad boy and so on and so on—ʺ

I was startled enough to look up here, but Eled was waiting to catch my eye. ʺNo, he didn’t tell you that part, did he? He’s a bit of a brawler, your brother, when the virtue of one of his dragons is impugned. And they’re all his dragons. But that’s why he got jumped, you know? He has what Dorgin—he’s the chief dragonmaster—calls the grace of dragonriding.ʺ

ʺEled, shut up,ʺ said Dag.

ʺI knew he wasn’t telling you the whole story,ʺ said Eled, imperturbably. ʺIf Hereyta still had three eyes we’d’ve probably all expected her to get him, even if she’s old. She’s that good. She was the best before she lost an eye, and she’s been the best drill dragon the Academy ever had. And she doesn’t lose her edge even though she never gets to cycle out like the rest of ’em. That’s just it. She’s just as proud—and as merciless—as she was when she still Flew. A lot of the drill dragons numb out, they’ve been through too many beginners and all they think about when they’re here is food and sleep and when they cycle out again.

ʺI don’t know if any mere rubbishy little human is up to Hereyta’s standard but your brother is pretty close. I bet she brawled in her youth too—I bet her dragonmaster, when she was a youngling, had nightmares about her, when he wasn’t dreaming of what she’d accomplish when she was grown, if she didn’t kill off too many dragonmasters in the process. Did Dag tell you she has three crowns? She got the third one for the spear she took for Carn—that, and getting him home anyway.ʺ

ʺMaybe,ʺ I said, thinking about Ralas, ʺmaybe their wizard told them to do it.ʺ

They both looked at me. ʺThe Academy doesn’t like wizards much,ʺ Eled said at last. ʺWe’re supposed to do without what wizards do—charms and spells and so on—it’s all about dragons here. We do have a bonesetter and stitcher, but he’s only for the cadets—the dragonmasters do for the dragons—and he’s expected to keep out of sight. I can’t imagine anyone going to him for advice, or listening to him if he was rash enough to give it.ʺ

ʺWe have Seers,ʺ said Dag grimly.

ʺYes, we do,ʺ said Eled, the way you might say ʺwe have rats.ʺ

Ralas had once said of one of her scariest-looking visitors, ʺOh, he’s a Seer. They get like that. He started as a wizard—most of them do—but he didn’t stay there.ʺ She’d made a quick, ironical face, as if perhaps he should have.

Dag glanced at me. ʺThey’re supposed to read the signs and so on. The Academy won’t take you if the Seers find against you. And the Seers read for First Flight.ʺ

ʺMaybe we should try wizards,ʺ said Eled.

We were getting near what even I could guess had to be the Academy gates. We had crossed what must have been the oldest part of the town, where there were lumpy, bulgy, much-mended walls which ran in all directions and sometimes they made sense and sometimes they didn’t. But the way we were going now was getting more open and less crowded. I hadn’t realised I’d been breathing shallowly till I started breathing normally again. All those buildings and people really lean on you. The problem was that as soon as I took a few deep breaths I was zinging all over with a different kind of tension. I didn’t remember when the wall had changed from an ordinary town wall to something else, but as we neared the huge gates—big enough, I guessed, for two dragons to go through together, although it seemed kind of unlikely they’d want to—it was obvious that the wall that led up to it was anything but ordinary. There were pillars built into it at intervals, and the mended places were a lot neater, and it was twice as high, which presumably meant it was twice as thick.

My mind went blank and I started walking jerkily, like my legs were trying to turn me around and run me away, which they probably were, but I was too scared even to think about that. There was a guard at the gate although the gates were open. The wall there was twice as wide as I was tall. ʺClear skies,ʺ Eled said to the guard affably.

ʺAnd to you,ʺ replied the guard. His gaze lingered on me and Sippy, but he didn’t say anything. I was still on the other side of Eled from Dag. Eled put his hand on my shoulder and pointed with the other, saying, ʺThat way.ʺ I’m sure the guard thought my presence was his fault. I didn’t know whether to be flattered or embarrassed.

Sippy and I got some funny looks and both Dag and Eled said ʺclear skiesʺ or ʺheyʺ to what seemed to me to be a lot of people but probably wasn’t. The food halls were nearly big enough for dragons, and nearly empty, or maybe they just seemed that way because of their size. Eled evidently was hungry and Dag and I should have been but weren’t, and Sippy got most of ours. When we left the halls Sippy staggered after us, obviously wishing he could lie down somewhere and sleep it off.

We stopped just outside. ʺYou’re going to go see Ansilika,ʺ said Dag. ʺShe’s always anxious before a First.ʺ

ʺTrust you to know that,ʺ said Eled. ʺYes. I would’ve come back early anyway but maybe I came back a little earlier still because I knew she’d be worrying. Probably about me. ‘Can that great oaf stay in the saddle on the day or will he dishonour his family’s proud name?’ But I’ll see you there later.ʺ

ʺYes,ʺ said Dag. ʺAnd Ansilika won’t let you fall off. You’d have to jump. I’ll see where to stow all of us and then I’ll be along too.ʺ He turned away and I glanced at Eled before I followed. I knew I should say something but ʺmy open-handed thanks, excellent sir,ʺ which would probably have been the correct form, or anything else along those lines, felt like it would sound the opposite.

ʺSee you,ʺ said Eled.

ʺYeah,ʺ I said courteously.

He hesitated. ʺIf you want to know something about anything around here, you can always ask me. Dag’s maybe a little obsessed with dragons.ʺ

I glanced at my brother. Tell me about the brawls, and about grace, I thought, but I didn’t say it. ʺYeah,ʺ I said again. ʺThanks.ʺ

ʺIf your brother calls you Tinhead, what do you call him?ʺ

ʺGeezer,ʺ I said.

Eled laughed.

ʺHis sisters call him Ogre,ʺ said Dag. ʺDyla told me. She’s the one graduated from here.ʺ

ʺAnd I keep forgetting to grind her bones for my bread,ʺ said Eled. ʺFamilies—who needs ’em?ʺ

As I followed Dag it seemed to me his shoulders were squarer than usual. We went into a slightly less huge building and climbed a lot of stairs, all of our feet making funny noises on the tiles. We had wood floors at home, and Dad’s workshop was packed earth. ʺThis is mine,ʺ Dag said on about the ninety-fifth landing, and pushed open a door. I fell in after him, gasping. ʺYou can have the bottom bunk in case Sippy wants to join you.ʺ Dag didn’t even sit down, and he wasn’t breathing hard. He dumped his pack on the upper bunk and looked at me. ʺI’m going to go see Hereyta. D’you want to come?ʺ

I was sure I should let him greet her in private, but I rolled up instantly off the bed where I had flopped and said yes. It wasn’t even anything to do with not wanting to be left behind in a really strange place and wondering what I would say if anyone knocked on the door looking for Dag. I wanted to meet Hereyta.

The dragon hsa were on the far side of the training fields which meant a long hike, although the training fields went on and on and on out to either side of us a lot farther yet than what we were walking across. I wondered if a piece of this ground was used for First Flight or if it happened somewhere else entirely. Dragons have tremendously powerful wings to get themselves off the ground at all, and they really lash ’em. And gods help any mere paltry human caught in the backdraft. So maybe the First Flight field, where there would be a whole lot of dragons stirring up storm winds, was some special separate place. In which case I wouldn’t see it. Whatever it was like in Eled’s granddad’s day.

Nobody knows if dragons really can spout fire any more, or whether that’s all a complete myth (like whether or not foogits ever had a working third eye), or if over several thousand years of selective breeding humans have managed to get rid of the fire-spouting (in which case we’ll be in a lot of trouble if we have a nasty-tempered throwback some day. The myths include whole countries burning if they get a big enough dragon mad at them). Dragons spit a little fire at you no more often than a horse tries to kick you. Which is to say if you treat your dragon nicely you’re fine. Or that’s the standard line. It’s different though because horses are twitchier animals generally; they’re prey. Dragons aren’t. They can afford to have a look and a think before they do anything about it; nobody’s going to bite them on the back of the neck and then tear out their entrails. And domestic dragons have been bred for good temper for a long time. People do get burned, but it’s rare, and when it happens it’s a huge story and it’s told all over the country and everyone’s horrified and there’s always an investigation because the presumption is the human did something wrong.

But dragons still smell of fire. It’s a hot, charred smell, and when you smell it for the first time it’s pretty scary, even if it’s only one of the little ones carrying freight, and even when it’s the other side of the jammed-with-smells fairground from where you are and behind the long series of warehouses there. It’s scarier yet when you’re walking toward a whole hsa full of them. I can’t begin to imagine who the first human was who decided to try and tame one. It’s like who thought of trying to eat a cawgilly for the first time? They sure don’t look like they’d be good to eat and they smell bad too, raw, even after you’ve got rid of the scent glands. But at least a cawgilly isn’t as big as a mountain. Also they run away if they see you coming after them, like a wild horse does. And there’s no fire involved.

I kept reminding myself that not only were these tame dragons I was walking toward but this was the Academy, and furthermore I was with my brother who was a First Flighter at the Academy. What was really interesting though is that Sippy, who’d spent most of the last ten days skulking and cowering, wasn’t. When we first set off he had made an attempt to run a few circles around us, since he had the space to do it in for the first time in several days, but he was still too full of food and had to give it up. He trotted along behind, panting rather, but then he picked up and trotted past us, with his head and ears up and his tail straight out behind with the guard hairs on it raised, which in foogit language means, ʺHmm, what’s this?ʺ If he’d been frightened or worried the guard hairs would run backwards the full length up his spine, eventually up to his topknot, which would have bushed out (or tried to) like a sort of extreme mane. Among other things this exposes the third eye, if there is one, and I’d never seen Sippy in that much of a strop, although I’m told a big male foogit ready for battle isn’t funny any more.

And then I smelled the dragons too, but it made me want to slow down, not speed up.

They’re properly called hsa but they’re often slangily just called barns, Dag told me, and they’re huge enough to look at, but huger still from inside, because they’re dug into the ground and the hillsides as well. The Academy was where it was because there was this huge flat plain with these sudden hills leaping up at its edge, and the hills are mazes of underground caverns. A mountain over your head keeps the temperature down, and a lot of dragons all rubbing up against each other generate a lot of heat. Supposedly wild dragons lived there once, before the beginning of time. It’s been the Academy hsa since there was an Academy, and there are pretty much only folk tales about the time before the Academy existed. But even so people had been riding and breeding dragons for riding a long, long time before anyone thought of establishing an Academy about it.

I’d never been there before of course. None of our family had except Dag. I don’t know if he remembered what it had been like for him the very first time—but it was the dragons themselves that had made him change his mind about staying at the Academy, and maybe the wham had happened while he was walking across this field just like I was. Maybe, if he thought about me at all, and I wouldn’t’ve blamed him if he didn’t, he only thought that I was potty about animals too and that I’d have the same reaction to the dragons that he did so he didn’t have to worry or think about me, except maybe how lucky I was that I was going to meet, really meet, a dragon, which almost nobody outside the academy system ever does. There are handlers at all the regular commercial stations, but they only handle whatever the dragon is carrying. The only person the dragon pays attention to is the rider—the partner. And that’s true several times over in the army.

I felt myself starting to walk stiffly, like I had approaching the Academy gates. But this was worse. I fixed my eyes on Sippy’s happy, interested tail a few paces in front of me, and told myself that if my foogit could do it, so could I.

There was a beyond-enormous door in front of us. The funny thing was it was built like an ordinary double stable door, and the top halves were open. Any of the four quarters was big enough to be the roof of our house with some left over. When you got close enough you saw there was an ordinary human-sized door cut into the right-hand bottom half. I didn’t mean to giggle but I did, although it sounded more like I was being stabbed than laughing. Dag said at once, ʺI know. But dragons don’t like draughts. It makes them restless. So we keep the bottoms closed all year, and the tops closed in the winter.ʺ

Sippy squeezed through the little people door with me and I took hold of his topknot on the far side to keep him near me. Holding an ear isn’t fair for long; it’s just for when you really need him to pay attention. His topknot was nice and long and I could get a good grip and he could still turn his head.

There was the rustle of vastness all around us. It took an effort of will to look up from the top of Sippy’s head. I looked up. There was a sharp slope down from the doors and then a big empty sandy space just beyond that. It was pretty scuffed up but at the same time you knew it got raked all the time, and there were the rakes, leaning on either side of the doors. The piece at the bottom with teeth was about as wide as I am tall, and the length of the handles was twice that. Beyond the sandy space it was too far away and dark to see clearly, but that’s where the rustling came from.

Dag set off at once down a corridor. We were still mostly above ground and there were windows here although they were over our heads, and the corridor slanted downwards. Pretty soon it was more shadows than light, and then the lanterns began, sitting in niches in the walls (the first ones low enough for mere humans to fill and trim and light them; then when the second overhead rank began there also started to be the occasional ladder hung against the wall). Every so often there was a wide gap in the walls—a gigantic doorway—with its own shadows and its own flickering light. And its own hot charred smell.

We met the occasional other human. I recognised the cadet uniform, but there was another uniform too. One of the men in the other uniform stopped as we came toward him. ʺSingla Dag, honoured sir,ʺ he began. ʺYou sand-for-brains chucklehead, Dag, don’t you know enough to climb back into your uniform before you come to the hsa? I won’t report you, but there are plenty who will.ʺ

ʺI forgot,ʺ said Dag, humbly for Dag.

ʺI believe you, or I’d send you back. I still should send you back. If you hear anyone coming, hide behind a dragon, will you?ʺ

ʺYes, Hlorgla Dorgin,ʺ said Dag, still humble.

ʺMmph,ʺ said Dorgin, and looked at me. ʺYou must be one of his brothers,ʺ he said.

ʺI—er—yes, sir,ʺ I said.

ʺYou look like him,ʺ said Dorgin.

ʺNo, sir,ʺ I said.

Dorgin smiled suddenly. ʺYou’ll grow into those feet,ʺ he said. ʺI’ve seen dragons like you. Keep your brother in order, will you? I wonder what else I should be telling you, besides don’t let him go to the hsa out of uniform?ʺ He gave Dag another glare and walked on.

ʺThat was Dorgin,ʺ said Dag unnecessarily.

ʺHave we met anyone who’s going to report you?ʺ I said.

ʺI don’t think so,ʺ said Dag, whose mind was obviously leaving this uninteresting topic.

ʺYou wouldn’t want to tell me what Fistagh looks like?ʺ I said innocently.

Dag gave me a sharp look and then laughed, although the laugh was almost as sharp as the look. ʺI’ll hide behind a dragon like Dorgin said, okay?ʺ

After a lot more corridors and a lot farther going down, we came to another big sandy space. There was a fire burning in a stone-ringed fire pit in the centre of it. The smoke rose cleanly and straight up, and I looked up to see where it was going, but the ceiling, assuming there was a ceiling, was again lost in darkness, along with the chimney-hole. Dag made a curious humming, crooning noise. It wasn’t very loud and I don’t think it was just the creepiness of the surroundings that would have made me take special notice of almost anything, but it was a very attention-catching sound.

And an immense heap of darkness at the edge of the firelight uncurled itself, and made a crooning noise in return. This sound was no louder than Dag’s had been, but it could no more have been made by a human chest than a human could fly. It was like the echo of an earthquake. I was surprised the earth didn’t tremble underfoot. Sippy, however, was trembling like seven earthquakes, and he made no attempt to get away from my now-convulsive grip on his crest, but I thought the trembling was more excitement than fear. I was trembling too, but I wouldn’t want to say it was mostly excitement.

We stood still as Dag went toward the humming blackness. Against the firelight I could see what I guessed was a head and neck untwist itself from the top of the mound, and arch down toward Dag. Dag reached a hand up toward it; it was like a leaf trying to pat a forest.

But the forest liked it. The hum dropped down a few more earth-shaking notes and the gigantic spade-shaped head—which I could now just make out in the twilight—came to a halt within human arm’s length of Dag’s hand. I thought dizzily of the sensation of a gnat landing on your skin; you could just about feel it if you were paying attention. And dragons must have thick skin. Maybe not on their noses. I hoped dragons didn’t blow through their nostrils the way foogits did.

Dag left his hand on the dragon’s nose and turned his head toward me. ʺCome say hello. She knows you’re here and that you came with me. But it’s polite to greet her yourself.ʺ

I walked toward them, feeling as if I was in a dream. The weird light and the weird echoy rustling noises that came from everywhere—and the sense of being so far underground—was part of it but it was mostly the dragon. This dragon. Her humming was almost inaudible now but she didn’t seem to want to dislodge Dag’s tiny hand, so as Sippy and I came closer, rather than turning toward us, there was a sort of half-imaginary tremor through the blackness that was perhaps her acknowledgement or her acceptance of our approach. When I was standing right beside Dag there was a ripple at the top of the head that I thought might be ears.

Dag said sheepishly, ʺI don’t know how to do this. I’ve never introduced anyone to their first dragon. When we do it as cadets, we kneel.ʺ

This seemed perfectly reasonable to me. I knelt. Sippy prostrated himself without any prompting from me. I let go of his topknot and bowed my head so I didn’t see her move her head at last, but I heard it—do I mean heard? Underground in the dark next to a dragon your senses do funny things—and felt the surprisingly gentle whisper of her breath through my hair. I don’t know if she quite touched me or not, but I felt the heat of her on the top of my head.

Everything was fine. Then Sippy leaped up from his imitation of a hearth-rug, and licked her nose.

The head disappeared instantly, whipping back up and away from us into the darkness, and the rest of the darkness blurred at the edges as it shifted backward. ʺOh, Sippy,ʺ I wailed. I didn’t suppose an unwanted lick on the nose would be one of the things that made a dragon spit fire, but I didn’t want her even a little bit mad at Dag five days before First Flight either.

It took me half a minute to realise that the noise I was hearing was Dag laughing—a normal, easy, proper laugh, like it wasn’t costing him anything. And there was another noise too that later on I learnt was the sound of him scratching one of her forelegs. Dragons’ claws are very flat, so you can just about reach their ankles when they’re standing up. ʺI was going to take her outside anyway. Let’s go now before Sippy gangs up on her.ʺ He set off at a brisk trot and I heaved myself along in his wake. I wanted to protest the pace, but when you think about it, you running flat out is still a slow amble to a dragon. And furthermore it was uphill. Sippy dashed ahead of us and then dashed back, but he had to make do with jumping straight up in the air since Hereyta was keeping her head well out of reach. It looked a little like his swerving-and-leaping game.

Outside in daylight . . . dragons are beautiful. Their skin shines rainbow colours, although a green dragon is green under the rainbows, and a red dragon is red, and so on. As I say, I’d seen a few little ones that did hop-stops to the bigger towns near us, and I thought they were beautiful and proud and just a little bit arrogant—which they were. That’s what dragons are like. But Hereyta just about knocked me over, just looking at her. She was a kind of red-gold; when she stretched her wings the iridescence made them look like they were on fire, and when she gave them a flap you would swear you could see the fire running down their edges. I mean, yes, all dragons are beautiful—all the ones I’ve seen, anyway—but Hereyta was special. Hereyta was amazing. I knew this, even if I had never seen a dragon up close before, and even if she was Dag’s dragon so I was going to like her even if she was foogit-sized, dung-coloured, and warty. And even if she had only two eyes.

Dragon eyes vary in colour the way dragon skins do, but all dragon eyes glitter. I know that you talk about eyes glittering—the evil enchanter in a fairy tale always has glittering eyes; so do the things in dark corners when you’re little and trying to go to sleep—but dragon-eye glitter is the real thing. I suppose almost everything about a dragon is scary, because they’re so huge, and also, of course, because they’re the only creature (that we know of) that can fly through the Firespace. But the glitter of their eyes isn’t like anything else.

I think that it’s the glitter of dragon eyes that’s the origin of all those stories about the beds of jewels that wild dragons are supposed to have made for themselves back in the days when dragons were wild, and used to eat children when they couldn’t find any sheep. Where all those jewels are supposed to have come from was always beyond me; even if you put all the kings and emperors and enchanters (good and evil) together and stripped them of everything they had, I still don’t think you’d get more than about one jewel-bed for one medium-large dragon out of it. But you see the glitter of the eyes and you do think of jewels. Nothing else comes close—not fire, not stars, not anything. Of course I, and most of the other listeners to fairy tales, have never seen more than the mayor’s beryl or topaz or whatever the local badge of office is, but we can all dream. When you see a dragon’s eyes up close—if you’re lucky enough to see a dragon’s eyes up close—you don’t have to dream.

It was Hereyta’s left eye that was gone. Dragons have that great knobbly ridge over their eyes, and some of the breeding lines still throw out horns sometimes, but no really top-class dragon has horns any more. Hereyta didn’t. And she had two eyes—which shone so vividly I felt I’d be embarrassed ever staring into a mere bonfire again—and one black crater. It wasn’t ugly, any more than a dark hollow in a mountainside is ugly, but it looked all wrong.

She didn’t seem to favour that side. As soon as we got outdoors—and this was true every time we came outdoors together for the few days left before First Flight—Sippy went into his full rushing-and-leaping-into-the-air routine. Dag just about killed himself laughing, that first time. In other circumstances I’d’ve probably got pretty mad at him laughing at Sippy like that, but it didn’t actually feel like he was laughing at Sippy. It was like Sippy was doing him this enormous favour by letting all the laughter he hadn’t been able to laugh out, where it ought to be, instead of all pent up inside and squashed by worry and misery. Like Sippy licking Hereyta’s nose had knocked the bung out of the barrel, and now the laughter came flooding out. And because I wasn’t getting mad, I noticed what it really was: love. Dag really loved Hereyta. I understood that. It’s so much easier, loving animals. They love you right back, and it doesn’t get complicated. Unless it’s a two-eyed dragon who you’ve been partnered with for First Flight at your dragonrider academy.

I don’t know if Hereyta just had really nice manners (yes) or if she was amused by Sippy too, but rather than ignoring the tiny lunatic doing his nut around her feet, by the end of that first game she’d developed her own side of it. When Sippy did it to me, the only rule I played by was that I had to move between rushes, so he had to keep adjusting and re-aiming. It was like, if you’re going to be this insane, I’m at least not going to make it easy for you. Hereyta used her head. She’d arch her endless neck (I swear the top of the arch had clouds hanging over it) so that her nose was just above ground level—say the top of my head, which is just above ground level to a dragon—and as Sippy rushed at her, she’d twitch it aside. I don’t think he started to develop his mid-air twist till he was playing with Hereyta; I was too easy a target. Then she’d move her head along sideways—keeping it amazingly the same distance above the ground—as if she was daring Sippy to try again, which of course he did.

I wasn’t laughing like Dag, like that giddy relief when the pain-bane finally kicks in, but I’d almost forgotten all our problems, watching Hereyta and Sippy having such a good time. And then Dag suddenly shut off like he was a door that had been closed. There was a little breeze, and between the sound of that, and Sippy’s panting (and thudding back to the ground), and Dag’s laughter, I hadn’t noticed anything else. But there was another dragon in the field with us. Fancy not having noticed a dragon. But I was fully occupied watching our dragon.

This one was a kind of midnight blue, and it was only about two-thirds the size of Hereyta, which was still plenty big enough. There was a tiny person tearing along beside it with his hand on its ankle, the way Dag had had his hand on Hereyta’s. They’d come out of the hsa after us. It was half rousing its wings as I turned my head, although I don’t know if this was a greeting or an ʺI can take you with one wing tied behind my backʺ show for Hereyta’s sake. Hereyta went on playing Sippy’s game as if it was all that mattered. I can’t believe she didn’t know the blue dragon was there, but I still don’t know nearly enough about dragon behaviour and I didn’t know anything then.

So I made do with the fact that Dag wasn’t happy to see whoever it was. He didn’t say anything to Hereyta, but I don’t know if you call off a dragon like you call off a dog (or grab your foogit by the topknot). I know I keep saying how they’ve been bred for thousands of years to be amenable to human commands, but I defy you to get anywhere near a dragon and not utterly and profoundly believe that a dragon obeys any human only because it is a bizarrely good-natured creature. Or maybe because it has a bizarre sense of humour, in which case maybe dragons have something in common with foogits after all. Anyway, Hereyta went on with her game as Dag stiffened himself to greet the other dragonrider.

ʺMay you fly over a clear horizon,ʺ said the other, with that funny lilt that goes with a formal ritual greeting. I thought I saw his eyebrows go up as he registered that Dag was out of uniform but if they did they came right back down again.

Dag without preamble said to me, ʺThis is Setyep.ʺ I was horribly embarrassed. I was sure there was a proper response to the greeting before you even got to the introductions, and then there is no way that a younger brother should have been introduced first to a dragonrider, even a pre-First-Flight cadet dragonrider. But that was Dag. He’d sit the dragonrider exams to please his parents (and maybe a little to show his cousin we weren’t the useless branch of the family) but once he found himself in the Academy, he was going to do it his way. ʺSetyep,ʺ he went on, ʺthis is my brother, Ern.ʺ

If Setyep was offended, he didn’t show it. Maybe he was used to Dag. His eyebrows didn’t even twitch. ʺThat’s a foogit, isn’t it?ʺ he said, sounding interested. ʺHow did you train it to do that? I could use a foogit myself, if I’d known.ʺ

I may have made a gargling noise.

ʺAracʺ—this was presumably the dragon, who was now staring off over the trees as if it hadn’t seen Hereyta either, and hadn’t roused its wings in an attempt that failed to get a response out of her—ʺcan be remarkably lazy about paying attention to which direction I’m trying to send him in, and I live in dread that he’ll go some other way entirely, from not paying attention.ʺ

I felt Dag relax a little. I wondered what Setyep had done to annoy him. He’d stiffened for Eled too when we’d first met him but this was a stiffer stiffening. ʺI’m not sure Ern would call it training, would you, Ern?ʺ

I tried to swallow the large boulder in my throat and with a heroic effort made a semi-intelligible answer. ʺHe’s always done that. When I—er—when I found him he had a broken leg, and at first when he could use it again, this seemed like a good way to exercise it. But it was his idea. I just didn’t, you know, try to stop him.ʺ

Setyep seemed to find this amusing. ʺI’m only a cadet, of course,ʺ he said, ʺbut I guess that’s pretty much how dragons get trained too. We don’t stop them doing things and then pretend it was our idea. The big question has always been why they happen to do things we might want them to do—and why they let us get away with pretending it had anything to do with us.ʺ

This was so much what I had been thinking I was temporarily distracted. I hadn’t seen either dragon move; it wasn’t that they were standing like statues, but I hadn’t seen them move purposefully. But somehow or other they had squared themselves off so that Sippy was suddenly like the third point of the triangle. I don’t know why it looked like that to me. If you have three things plonked down somewhere you can always make a triangle out of them, can’t you? And Sippy—it’s not like he ever stayed plonked.

But as he ran around making hexagons and dodecagons and things—like a street fair juggler moving his hands fast enough to fool you about where he’s hidden the pebble or the ball—it was like when he ran over the correct triangle point something happened. Or something almost happened. I know how dumb this sounds, but for like half a breath where we were was somewhere else. It was hotter there, wherever it was, and the trees had a funny pink halo. If they were trees.

Then Hereyta turned her head, and whatever it was—whatever dragon magic it was—was broken. Arac turned his head too, and looked at Hereyta. Then they both looked at Sippy. Sippy nodded his head and shook himself all over . . . and then flung himself on the ground and rolled around wildly as if it was all too much for him. Whatever it was. Having two dragons to run at, maybe, assuming what I’d just seen was his adaptation of his game, for two dragons. I wondered if either of the other humans present had noticed anything. Anything like hot wind and pink trees.

Dag was in fact looking at the sky. ʺThere aren’t any clouds,ʺ he said. ʺAnd the trees are motionless. Am I losing my mind or is there a weird breath of hot air that keeps gusting over us?ʺ

ʺYou’re probably losing your mind,ʺ said Setyep. ʺIt’s a well-known phenomenon, First Flight nerves. But I’ve got it too, if it’s any comfort—it’s more like opening an oven door, rather than a breeze.ʺ

ʺYes,ʺ said Dag. ʺThat’s what I thought.ʺ

There was a little silence. ʺEven Dorgin says he lives in a state of perpetual surprise, living around dragons,ʺ said Setyep. ʺIt’ll be suppertime by the time we get the dragons back to the hsa. You hungry?ʺ

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

ʺNo, Ern, you stay here,ʺ said Dag. ʺChort has to grow up some day, and Ern’s not even a cadet.ʺ

So Eled and Gham strolled away and Chort, after a moment, sidled up, looking at me in a sidly kind of way, and then asked Dag what seemed to me a completely harmless question about the grooming mixture he used on Hereyta. Dag answered calmly and Chort sidled away again. Eled and Gham came back with a plate of sweet buns the kitchen had given them to make them go away, and we all went on eating. I would have started noticing more after that anyway, but by the next day when the Academy started to fill up again for the next term it got so obvious that a lot of people turned to Dag for answers about dragons that I didn’t have to.

But I was totally not expecting it when one of the tutors came to our table at breakfast on the fourth day. The cadets all shot to their feet so I stood up too. Facing us was a tall, white-haired, straight-backed, commanding old fellow in the red and blue of the seriously senior higher-ups. He let everyone scramble to his or her feet and come to some kind of dazed, early-in-the-morning, not-expecting-any-ordeals order, but he had the sort of presence that makes you feel after the fact that whatever you’ve actually done, it’s the right thing. So the line of half-stupefied third-year cadets was transformed under this man’s eyes into a crack troop, alert and ready for anything. Ralas has a quieter version of it. It makes you like her even more at the same time as it makes her even more intimidating.

Then he said, as politely as if he were the cadet and we were the tutors, ʺSingla Dag, please introduce me to your brother, as I have not yet had that privilege.ʺ

Dag was less flustered than the others, maybe because big impressive in-charge types were all, to him, both inclusively and individually responsible for Hereyta’s presence on the First Flight list. The higher you were in the hierarchy the more responsible, and this guy looked pretty high. He answered promptly enough though, and maybe only I could hear the edge in his voice: ʺZedak Storkhal, this is my brother, Ern. Ern, I wish to present you to Zedak hri do lun Storkhal.ʺ

I made sure I had my visitor’s ribbon on straight, but the zedak didn’t look like someone who’d be ironic before he laid you out. I didn’t know how to address a tutor, let alone a zedak, which were the really important ones, and I had no idea what the hri do lun meant, but the way everyone was behaving, it probably meant ʺgod.ʺ Oh, well, I thought. ʺZedak Storkhal, my honour is already in your hands; anything else I can give you is yours.ʺ

ʺYour honour is gift enough,ʺ this scary old man said, which is the correct response, of course, but he said it as if he meant it. I tried to stand straighter. ʺBut I would ask you for something else. I have heard that you have an ointment that heals old aches, and I, like Hereyta, have a sore shoulder, and I would beg a little of your ointment if I could.ʺ

If he had said ʺthe Academy is being dissolved tomorrow and all the dragons set loose to go feralʺ it couldn’t have been more astonishing. Around me I felt everyone turning to stone, and tables all over the hall were falling silent. The zedak was standing a few feet away from us and he had a carrying voice.

Back home I was used to giving people stuff for things like aching shoulders. But I was used to having them ask me quietly, and offhand, as if they weren’t really asking. I was not used to being addressed like an audience was watching, which there was. And I wasn’t at home either. But Ralas had drummed it into me that you were responsible for the stuff you gave people, and you did not automatically give them what they asked for. You asked questions first. I should have been saying ʺyes, sir, no, sir, how high do I jump, sir?ʺ and I was going to interrogate him instead.

At least I remembered to call him sir. ʺHonoured sir, I must ask you about the pain in your shoulder, because the liniment may not be the best choice. Sir.ʺ

He looked positively amused—and still perfectly at his ease. That made one of him, in the length and breadth of the food halls. ʺAsk away, respected brother of Singla Dag.ʺ

So I did, and at the end I took a deep breath and said, ʺIt’s not the liniment you want, sir, butʺ—here patting my pockets; I’d brought all the stuff I knew how to use with me to the Academy because I couldn’t help it, it would be like leaving your trousers behind, but most of it was upstairs in Dag’s room under the bed—ʺbut delor leaf. Ah.ʺ At the same time, I wouldn’t feel like myself if my pockets weren’t lumpy, and one of the lumps had just proved to be a little cloth wallet I knew contained, among other things, delor leaf. I was fascinated to observe that my hands weren’t shaking as I unfolded it. I don’t suppose the zedak was really ten feet tall but I felt mouse-sized as I went round the table to give him his leaves. ʺSir. That’s, uh, about three days’ worth. Steep it in boiling water. Sir.ʺ

ʺI rejoice in your assistance,ʺ said the zedak gravely, and turned and left the hall. There was a sigh as big and gusty as a dragon’s when everyone started breathing again. I went back to my place and fell into my chair. Dag took one look around and said, ʺErn, we’re late. Come on.ʺ I didn’t say, ʺWhat do you mean, late? Late for what?ʺ I scrambled gratefully to my feet, grabbed what was easily grabbable from my plate for Sippy, who had missed the excitement by scrounging for crumbs under the table, and both of us followed Dag.

We were heading straight for the hsa. After a few minutes I risked glancing at Dag. He was smiling faintly. He noticed me looking and looked back. ʺI don’t know what’s in Firstarrow’s mind, but whatever it was he was pleased with you. I know you’re not a cadet or anything but people gibber and fall over when he appears from nowhere like that, which is what he does. You can see where he got his nickname. Although there’s a story that when he was a zero level soldier waiting in reserve on his first battle he let off an arrow before the command, except that he killed the assassin that was trying to sneak up on their troop’s colonel with it, so he got promoted for disobedience.ʺ

ʺBut he stood there in front of everybody and asked for help. Healer ’s help. From a kid.ʺ

ʺYeah. Interesting, isn’t it? And you’re Hereyta’s First Flight partner’s little brother.ʺ

ʺI can’t heal Hereyta,ʺ I said in alarm.

ʺI know, Tinhead,ʺ said Dag, but he reached out one arm and gave me an absent-minded big-brother hug. ʺIf I knew of a wizard who could, I’d’ve stolen Dad and Mum’s life savings and be gone over the Fabulous Mountains by now.ʺ All the best fairy-tale wizards live on the other side of the Fabulous Mountains from wherever you are.

ʺI wonder if his shoulder really does hurt,ʺ I said.

Dag snorted. ʺHe spent thirty years fighting the Borogon. He’s taken so many spears and arrows and swordstrokes he probably did eenie-meenie-miney-moe about what to use when he decided he wanted to talk to you. And now he has talked to you and . . .ʺ Dag didn’t finish. Two days till First Flight.

We saw Eled with his dragon, Ansilika, every day—Ansilika looked pretty serene to me—and Setyep and Arac too, till Dag stopped stiffening up when he saw them. I had been introduced to pretty much all the third-years, quite a few of the other cadets and a few tutors. And about twenty more dragons—I remembered the dragons best. They were all beautiful. One of the best—after Hereyta of course—was Munyinzia, who was purple and blue, and his partner was one of the few women at the Academy: Doara. ʺShe’ll be a city captain in five years,ʺ said Eled. ʺThe girls are always like that. They’re out there aiming and aspiring while a lot of the boys try to come back to the Academy as soon as they can and teach, so they can have regular meals and their baths indoors in hot water. Unless there’s another big war on, which please the gods there won’t be. My cousin was a city captain in four years and my sister’s already a deputy.ʺ

ʺYou said three daughters in your family went to dragonrider academies.ʺ

ʺYes. The other one was in the last war. She went from city upper guard to colonel in one fell swoop, and lasted fourteen months on the Haksap border before they killed her. It’s nearly a record. Her parents have a crown for it.ʺ

I finally found out who Fistagh was. I hadn’t realised I was expecting him to have horns and fangs till I met him and he was normal. Short, even. Well, not as short as me but shorter than Dag. I found out I was relieved he didn’t have horns and fangs because I’d’ve worried about his dragon.

Sippy went on playing his game. He never tried to play it when Hereyta was doing something for us, or we were doing something on the front bits of her. He didn’t pester like a little kid, he just waited. Hereyta had so much neck she could perfectly well play the game so long as Dag and I were busy doing whatever we were doing somewhere else—the rest of her stayed as steady as a, well, a small mountain. Unless of course you were asking her to flex the top of her wing in and out so you could find the sore places to rub better.

When Arac (with Setyep in tow) came round Sippy played it with the two of them. He never tried it with any other dragon, even Ansilika. I generally watched this show, waiting for that flash of dragon-magic when Sippy hit the right triangle point. I’d begun to recognise the flash—it wasn’t a flash, I just don’t know what else to call it; it was like a crumple or a crack more than a flash, but a crumpled what? Or a crack into what? Let’s call it a flash. Whatever it was, it didn’t bring a hot wind or pink haloes for the trees any more, and Dag and Setyep didn’t mention it again. But in a funny way it seemed to get sharper, somehow, like it was being pulled together from being all spread out.

The weirdest thing of all was once when I was standing thinking about it right after Arac had left. I was almost as if glued in place, or like a little glamour had got itself laid on me from watching the dragon magic. This does happen, by the way, or something like it, it’s one of the reasons you have to train to do magic with someone who knows what they’re doing rather than try and pick it up yourself; you might go off in one of these trances and not be able to get out again. Dragons aren’t supposed to be magical, not like rocs, say, but this felt like magic. So I was standing there, not noticing that I was kind of tranced, and thinking about the crumple-crack-flash. And I sort of noticed that Hereyta had kind of realigned herself since Arac left, but as if the game was still going on with three, as if Arac had merely changed location and become invisible. I had only just figured out that the invisible Arac was standing where I was standing. They were using me as the second point of the triangle. . . .

And Sippy found the third point.

Ever been caught in a crumple-crack-flash? I don’t recommend it. It literally knocked me down. It was a little like what being stepped on by a dragon might be like—knocked over and very slightly stepped on and then the dragon snatches its foot back just in time. It was also hot and . . . I want to say loud, but the loud part was only sort of part of the being-stood-on part, I think. It was just too much in all the ways you have to feel that something is too much. And my ears were ringing although I couldn’t remember hearing anything.

I sat up from where I’d fallen as Dag came trotting over to me. ʺHey, are you all right? What happened? Do you need food? It’s almost lunchtime and I know how tiring working on a dragon is if you’re not used to it.ʺ He was pulling stuff out of his pockets as he spoke. Various bits and pieces of dragon equipment emerged first, and then he produced an only slightly beat-up sandwich. Usually we had a midmorning break and ate something then, but Setyep had interrupted it. ʺYou just stay sitting down. I’ll sit too,ʺ and he did. ʺWhat happened?ʺ

Sippy was standing perfectly still—Sippy never stands perfectly still—looking at me. Hereyta was perfectly still too but she usually is unless she’s deliberately doing something. But her two eyes were clearly focussed on me.

ʺI have no idea,ʺ I said firmly, broke the sandwich in half and gave half to Dag. Sippy drooped, and then came over to me and fell down, only in standard Sippy falling-down style, nothing serious, and laid his head lengthwise along my legs so he could stare into my eyes, and stared. As if he was asking me to forgive him. Or to understand something. I gave him half my remaining half sandwich.

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.

Mum and Dad had told us lots of stories when we were all little, and a lot of those stories had dragons in them. There was always lots of flying and lots of heroics in those stories. Dragons lost eyes in these stories occasionally but you never heard about what happened to them after. You always knew it was tragic though—worse than the old human veteran limping home leaning on his cane.

Except there was one story I’d been half remembering, but more to the point half forgetting, ever since Dag had come home looking like a condemned man, and told us about Hereyta and First Flight. It was a story Ralas had told me, a long time ago, when I’d first brought Sippy home, and it was mostly about a foogit, which was why Ralas thought I’d like it. But I was sure there was a dragon in it. And I could almost remember that this particular dragon had only two eyes. And as I say, dragons don’t stay in stories when they lose an eye. But I couldn’t remember anything else about the story—the two-eyed dragon should have stuck better, but I was foogit-obsessed at that point. I kept trying to remember anybody’s name—the dragon’s, the foogit’s, even the human’s or humans’, since there had to be humans in it too—because if I could remember a name I’d ask Eled, casually, if he knew a story with someone named whatever in it. I just wasn’t going to say to him, hey, you don’t happen to remember some weird old story about a foogit and a two-eyed dragon, do you? With Sippy standing there. And Hereyta.

Sippy was still subdued at breakfast, although being subdued didn’t stop him from eating everything that came his way. I’ve said that years tended to stay together but the third-years on First Flight morning had invisible ʺdon’t come nearʺ signs all around them. I would have hung back myself except Dag broke his twenty-four hours of silence to say, ʺWhat? Come on. Watching Sippy eat may give me some appetite.ʺ It didn’t seem to.

I probably knew all the First Flighters by name but my eye lingered on the ones I’d had conversations with or slipped some quietleaf or gimpweed or something to. Setyep was looking as green around the edges as Dag was. Doara actually smiled at me, but it was a smile that said ʺYes, I know how bad I look, don’t even try and guess how I feel.ʺ I smiled back. Maybe it was the colour of the cadets’ formal uniforms, yellow and red, that makes fair people look grey and dark people look purple and anybody in between green. And the third-years seemed to walk ever so slightly funny because they had their tapping sticks in their boots. The sticks are really slender and your formal boots have a loop for one anyway, so it wasn’t that a tapping stick in your boot was crippling you. It’s just you knew what having it there meant.

Eled still just looked like Eled, but I thought it was costing him. And Fistagh was looking rather too well, as if he was under a small glamour, which I think he was. He had a funny half smell about him that I recognised from Ralas. I did wonder if it was legal, which I doubted, but even if I’d ratted him out it wouldn’t have given Hereyta a third eye.

Fistagh had a girl with him. She was extremely pretty, and they both knew it. One other First Flighter, Vorl, had someone who had to be his brother with him, they looked so much alike, but Vorl’s brother wasn’t small and scrawny except for his ears and feet, nor was he accompanied by a demented foogit.

When Dag stood up with the others I grabbed Sippy’s topknot and looked uncertainly at Dag.

ʺYou don’t have to come if you don’t want to,ʺ Dag said in this awful flat voice that didn’t sound anything like him. ʺIt’s okay.ʺ

I shook my head violently. ʺIt’s not that—you must know it’s not that. It’s okay with me if you want Sippy and me to stay out of the way and not, you know, not embarrass you. I can go back up to the room and sit—sit on Sippy—till—till—ʺ

ʺTill it’s all over?ʺ said Dag. ʺYes. Well, if it’s really all the same to you, I’d actually rather you came.ʺ He turned away, not checking to see if we were following. Of course we were. I let go of Sippy’s topknot but he stayed right beside me, nearly as glued to my leg as Fistagh’s girl was to his side.

The First Flighters drew lots for the order they filed out of the hsa. We were near the last. It gave us plenty of extra time to adjust, readjust, de-adjust, and super-adjust every scrap of Hereyta’s harness six times. Maybe sixteen. I say ʺusʺ but it was mostly Dag. He knew where the bits went and I still only sort of knew. The tip of Hereyta’s nose followed Dag’s every tiny motion, back and forth, up and down, round and round. She did this a lot anyway but this morning the nose-tip was about a hand’s-breadth away from the back of his neck.

I was watching Dag and didn’t really think about what I was doing so I started petting one of Hereyta’s ankles. I was reassuring me, not her, but when I stopped Hereyta’s nose left the nape of Dag’s neck just long enough to point at me. I started petting again. The nose went back to Dag. Sippy, like we were a pair of bad comedians, was licking the side of her other foot. He couldn’t reach her ankle.

It was our turn—Hereyta and Dag’s turn—finally. I wondered how many times Hereyta had made a First Flight. Maybe never, because I think she hadn’t been an Academy training dragon till after she lost her eye. Why had she been waiting for us last night after curfew? I trotted behind Dag and Sippy trotted behind me.

I’d never counted the First Flighters. There were probably about twenty; Academy classes are small. But twenty dragons look like they go on forever. I couldn’t even recognise the dragons at the far end of the queue. Unfortunately Fistagh was about halfway along and I could recognise him and his yellow-gold dragon. She was beautiful too; I might as well get used to it that all dragons are beautiful. I couldn’t see Eled or Doara. Setyep and Arac were two behind Fistagh, so like only the distance between one end of my village and the other from us. There were only three more dragons and riders after us.

I was just noticing that Fistagh’s girl was in the saddle with him when Dag said, ʺUp you go.ʺ He’d unrolled the double belt that the dragonrider uses to tie himself in place in case of unexpected acrobatics or vertigo (also the Firespace is just so strange, Eled had told me, that you can get numb or breathless as well as dizzy: lots of ways to lose it and fall off), which doubles as a mounting ladder, since it has rungs between the two long bands. It’s an awkward climb because the rungs are made of the same soft tough cloth that the belts are and you worry about grinding your toes into your dragon’s side, but on formal occasions you use the ladder.

I gaped at Dag.

ʺTuck Sippy under your arm; I’ll be right behind you and I’ll give him or you a shove if he looks like he’s slipping.ʺ I’d only been up and down the mounting ladder once—and unhindered by a foogit passenger—most of the time you either climb the dragon as you can, or ask for the head to come down and lift you up somewhere. Dimly I was thinking, Dag let me climb the ladder that once just because he knew I was interested in anything to do with dragons.

ʺCome on,ʺ Dag said impatiently. ʺStad is halfway up already.ʺ Stad was next behind us in the queue. I climbed.

Sippy, who was really not himself this morning, hung like a package over my arm, and while my shoulder was coming out of its socket—and my other arm and side were fiery from strain—by the time I got to Hereyta’s saddle, we did both get there. ʺPush up forward,ʺ Dag said, ʺI’m coming in behind you.ʺ Hereyta’s saddle was bigger than usual because she was bigger than usual, so there was plenty of space, and I now noticed that Dag must have been doing some secret alterations because the bumps and bulges for both padding and helping keep the rider in place had been rearranged for two. Or three. I had thought Dag had been spending a lot of time ripping out bits of the saddle and sewing them back together, but I’d thought it was general reflex obsessiveness. But Dag had been planning for us to come with him. Why? When had he decided? Why? Ralas had only said take us back to the Academy with him.

I settled Sippy in front of me so he could look out over the pommel. Dag dropped a loop of the ladder-belt over me. I stuck my arms through a couple of the rungs and snugged Sippy down with another.

ʺComfy?ʺ said Dag.

I would have liked to say no but I wasn’t sure if truth disguised as humour was a good idea right now so I said thanks instead. I was feeling so stunned and flabbergasted and appalled I wasn’t feeling anything really. Dag grunted. Maybe he thought that truth disguised as humour wouldn’t be a good idea either.

The three dragons after us were all mounted and their riders tied in too. I couldn’t see Vorl so I couldn’t see if his brother was riding with him. Fistagh’s girl was behind him.

My heart was beating so hard I thought I was going to throw up. The Academy officers were making a long queue in front of the dragon queue. Dag had told me they read out a lot of historical stuff that probably nobody ever heard except maybe some of the onlookers. Onlookers. I’d forgotten. Some First Flighters’ families, the ones who either lived nearby or were wealthy enough to make journeys that weren’t about buying or selling anything, came to watch. I looked around. There was a rope fence that wasn’t usually there at the edge of the field. There were probably a hundred people behind it, but they were scattered in little clumps behind the dragon they were interested in. The officers were now bellowing something at us. There was one almost right in front of us and one more near the end of the queue and then five or six stretched out along in the other direction, and they were reading just not in unison enough that it made it impossible to hear what they were saying. I could hear words like honour and heroic and stalwart flying over my head.

I couldn’t think of anywhere I belonged less. Sippy was actually shivering. I put my arms around him. We’d heat up in the Firespace, I thought.

Except we weren’t going to the Firespace. How could I have forgotten? Hereyta had only two eyes. I still didn’t know why Dag wanted us to come with him, but he must have thought it would make it easier somehow, in spite of our extra weight for Hereyta’s weak wing. I had a really ignoble moment when I thought that Dag might have brought us because we were foolish and ridiculous and maybe that would make it our fault somehow when Hereyta couldn’t Fly with the other dragons. But I realised immediately what a really rotten thing that was to think, and I knew it wasn’t true. Maybe it was because Hereyta liked us. She played with Sippy and when I’d stopped petting her ankle she’d noticed. Maybe Dag thought it would be better for her to have three friends with her rather than only one. I wasn’t sure he was right. Dragons are very proud.

The officer-heralds had stopped shouting and were leaving the field. It was a blue clear day, cold for the time of year; Sippy’s and my excuse for shivering. We seemed to be in the sky already, sitting so high up, in the saddle at the base of Hereyta’s neck, with her standing at full attention. And I don’t like heights. The heat of her beat through the heavy leather of the saddle and flowed off her neck in front of us like a mane, but it barely touched me; it was like it broke and swept past, like water around a rock. I wished I felt more rocklike, steady and solid and untroubled. I wished I’d never come. I wished Ralas hadn’t sent us.

Poor Hereyta.

The neck in front of us quivered. I don’t know how I knew that. It wasn’t anything I saw. But Hereyta knew what was coming. I leant forward, squashing Sippy into the pommel, but after years of illicit lying between my feet and the wooden foot of my bed he knew how to squash. I let go of him and put both hands on Hereyta’s neck.

I was so busy feeling Hereyta through the palms in my hands I didn’t notice when the first dragon launched itself into the air.

The backdraft, even from the far front of the queue, was amazing. Not that it disturbed the other dragons one whisker, except that the tension level arced up like a firework on a solstice, but it nearly pulled all my hair out. Sippy rearranged his squashedness a little but he stopped shivering. I was feeling something else, not just heat, beaming up from Hereyta, through my hands, into the rest of me, into Sippy.

Another dragon hurled itself into the air. The ground shook and the trees bent back, their leaves streaming in the wind like a girl’s long hair. And another. And another. It was like being in a series of small, violent, curiously self-contained storms, each one closer than the last. . . .

I wasn’t anything like ready, and I can’t begin to describe it. I wished that it wasn’t just my body tied to the saddle but that I had a neck brace as well. I thought my head might just about part from my shoulders. I couldn’t breathe. My stomach seemed to have been left behind, which was just as well, because if it had come too I might have been sick. My arms felt like they were being dragged out of my shoulders, my legs from my pelvis, my eyebrows and nose just shoved off my face from the pressure, my eyelids peeled down with them. My eyes were trying to weep from the blast, but the wind snatched the tears away and my eyes felt dry and sore. I couldn’t see anything. And it seemed to go on and on and on.

Hereyta went on spiralling up and up and up with great thunderous heaves of her wings. I finally managed to drag my head from crushed backward against my spine to crushed forward against my chest. This way I could kind of see some of what was going on around me, when the vast, country-wide wings on either side of me allowed it. The other dragons were disappearing, and I realised that some of the noise that I thought was Hereyta’s wings was actually the rumbly, echoey, huge whomping noises the disappearing dragons created as they slid into the Firespace.

Whomp and whomp again. There weren’t many dragons left. And Hereyta carried on, climbing and climbing and climbing. The last dragon I saw was Arac, Setyep an unrecognisable speck. And then they disappeared too.

There was only us left.

And then the worst thing happened. The thing that was even worse than Hereyta not being able to make the jump. And I don’t know how it happened. I’d tied him in myself, and I knew how to tie him, because I knew what a wriggler he was.

Sippy snaked out from between me and the pommel. Out of the harness that kept him safe.

And jumped off Hereyta’s back. Into the air. Into nothing.

He might have landed on a wing—he should have landed on a wing; Hereyta’s wings are big enough to hug the world—but he didn’t. I swear he aimed. He aimed for the little triangular gap where the wing met the shoulder. And fell through it. I could see him, a little hairy lump—the wind fanned his hair out till he looked like a greeny-brown dandelion clock—getting smaller and smaller and smaller and farther and farther and farther away. . . .

I heard Dag cry out behind me. I only know because of how sore my throat was later that I must have been screaming. I was busy trying to get out of my own harness—like that was going to do any good—and Dag was busy trying to stop me.

And Hereyta turned in the air like a swallow, neatly, gracefully, impossibly, and plunged after Sippy.

My memory gets pretty confused after that. We’d climbed much higher than where a dragon usually finds its navigation points and goes into the Firespace, I think, so I guess we had some room to manoeuvre. Maybe it makes some kind of sense that Sippy, Hereyta and I—because despite Dag’s efforts I had got out of my harness—arrived at the same little piece of air at the same time. I don’t actually remember falling. I remember seeing Sippy rolling in the air as if he was perfectly at ease, like he rolled on the ground sometimes when he was so excited he couldn’t think what to do with himself.

And I seem to remember Hereyta turning her head toward us, keeping her deadly wings at almost the full distance of her long neck—although even so, with every stroke, Sippy and I bobbed up and down on the air-waves like little boats pitch in the wake of a ship—but we were falling, falling, falling. . . .

And then I do remember the roaring and the squashing, which could just be the air, but then the heat, and the sharpness of it, almost like being cut with a hot knife. And I have a vague, crazy flash of memory of being still in the middle of the roaring and the squashing but having got my arms around Sippy somehow; and then an even crazier flash of glancing off the rough tip of Hereyta’s outthrust nose which was suddenly right there under us to be fallen on, and into the concavity farther back, behind the nostrils, just in front of the steep higher-than-a-man-is-tall crag where the dragon’s array of eyes is. We hit and rolled and juddered . . . and thumped against the bottom of the empty left eye socket.

Hereta threw her head up and I managed to think, ʺOh, no, we’re just going to fall off again,ʺ when . . .

. . . the heat really hit me. It wasn’t like a knife any more. More like being rolled up too tightly in a blanket that had been lying by the fire too long, and it’s high summer. And the redness. It was like looking at the sun through your eyelids, except your eyes were open, and there was nothing to see except the redness. And the weightlessness. Or almost weightlessness. That was what made me think we were falling off again, I think, when we weren’t. But you didn’t feel what you were on properly. Sippy and I weren’t quite floating off Hereyta’s face but even if we did we wouldn’t fall very fast. Not here.

It’s pretty weird to think of a dragon floating like a feather in a breeze, but it was pretty much like that, except there was no breeze. Hereyta’s wings still went on and on and on and on, stretching away on both sides of us, but they lay almost still now, like landscape. With an occasional un-landscape-like tremor, like a hawk on an updraft.

The Firespace. We’d done it. Somehow. Thanks to Sippy. Thanks to Sippy being totally deranged and stupid and a troublemaker and thinking he could play his game in mid-air and if we got out of this alive I’d tie him up for the rest of his life.

Noise seemed muffled. Or maybe it was just shock. But there was a funny dull quality to what my ears were trying to tell me. I could hear something going on—I thought—pretty close but at the same time I couldn’t hear it. And then Arac’s head rose over the leading edge of Hereyta’s left wing and several leagues of neck passed Sippy and me still lying on Hereyta’s nose and then Setyep was hovering right in front of us. You can get quite close to another dragon in the Firespace. Everything moved so slowly, and if two of the floating mountains actually collided, it would happen gently, and they’d just drift away from each other again. But Arac didn’t touch us, and there was no backdraft from the soft riffle of his wings.

ʺI think your brother wants to kill you,ʺ Setyep said in close to his usual laconic manner, although he was having trouble with it. He looked alarmed, amazed, delighted and completely bewildered all together, which made laconic hard to hang on to. It was probably the effect of the Firespace again but even his words seemed rubbed and soft somehow. ʺBut you’re probably safe enough for now.ʺ He shook his head—slowly; it’s hard to do anything quickly when you don’t weigh anything, it seems to turn your muscles to jelly, that and the heat, which makes you not want to try to move anyway. Arac managed to give me quite a sharp look, however, full of all the questions Setyep wasn’t asking, including ʺwhat are you doing on Hereyta’s nose anyway?ʺ

But I thought about his ʺfor now.ʺ We’ve got here. Hurrah and all that.

But how do we get out again? Presumably a dragon needs three eyes to get out too. And I wasn’t looking forward to trying to duplicate what we’d just done. Especially the coming out into the ordinary world again and falling off Hereyta’s face. And falling and falling. Although I supposed staying where we were and frying or starving to death wasn’t a great choice either.

Sippy was puffing away like a bellows; I was panting too, my mouth open, gasping. The hot air tasted funny and felt funny in your throat and lungs; it didn’t feel like air, and you weren’t sure you could breathe it, whatever it was. You felt it pressing against your eyes too. In the murky reddish light Sippy looked sort of maroon, and the usual bright glint of his eyes was dull. When I turned my head I could see that Hereyta had her third eyelids closed; Dag had told me the third eyelids seemed to be some kind of Firespace protection or focus since they were never closed in our world and always closed in the Firespace. Hereyta’s eyes were also half closed. I couldn’t see Arac’s so I don’t know if she was squinting because of the Firespace—how well could she see in the Firespace with only two eyes?—or because of the little things on her nose. She was obviously aware of us though; I could tell by how carefully she was moving her head, keeping it perfectly level as she twisted it around and down, and then down some more. Dragons can scratch the napes of their own necks with their teeth. Or, in this case, they can lower their heads to within reach of someone sitting in a saddle there.

I saw Dag looking grimly determined, standing on the saddle. He still had his harness on, but he’d untied it from the saddle and it hung in loops around his shoulders; his tapping stick was still in his boot. He made one of his peculiar chirruping dragon-calls and Hereyta stopped her nose where it was and angled it very slightly downwards, not enough to tip Sippy and me out of our convenient hollow, and Dag pulled himself gingerly up over her chin and lips, walked gently up the length of her nose and sat down beside us with a heavy sigh.

I waited for the lecture. For the shouting and raving.

It didn’t come.

For something to do while I waited I looked around. Arac had taken a long slow circle off to one side and now, wings slightly tilted, came sweeping back. His upper wing sailed over me and then some-impossible-how he and Hereyta were floating right next to each other again with their enormous wings as if in layers, and I don’t know, pleated. So Setyep was actually comparatively near us. Hereyta had her neck sort of folded up too, like a scarf, so Arac was only a little bit (in dragon terms) below us. I could see Setyep’s face—a congested-looking bricky red, like Dag’s and I’m sure like mine—and see the expression on it although I wouldn’t have wanted to say what that expression was. The alarm and amazement and so on had kind of all blurred together and become something else.

I looked at Sippy then. There weren’t even any dark green glints in the maroon; it was like green just didn’t exist here. He was flat out on his side—or as flat as you can get on the wavy scales of dragon skin—and in spite of how hard he was panting the fine fur on his belly was matted with sweat (foogits only sweat on their underparts). He looked exhausted, but maybe it was just the heat. I’d never seen him exhausted before, even in the heat of high summer when everyone else is.

But maybe he was exhausted from getting us here. And we still had to get out.

Then I stared at Arac, wondering what the Firespace was doing to my sight aside from eliminating green. Arac looked like a god in the Firespace: noble, incredible, glorious. It was probably just as well I couldn’t see Hereyta properly; it would probably kill me, like it killed the king who actually made it to the Mountains of the Sun and looked into the pool at the top of the tallest one and saw into the heart of the world. There are some things you’re better off not knowing. Although the story says that king died happy.

Why wasn’t Dag yelling at me for being a dangerous, suicidal, brainless fool?

ʺThat was interesting,ʺ Setyep offered after a few silent minutes of drifting.

Dag made a short muffled barking noise like a foogit having a bad dream. It wasn’t a laugh.

Sippy, as if answering, yipped.

ʺI suppose,ʺ said Dag, after another reflective spell of drifting, ʺwe could at least go where we’re supposed to.ʺ

Setyep’s silence this time had a different quality to it. I looked over at him and he was frowning. ʺYou . . . er . . .ʺ

Dag made the barking noise again. ʺYes. I did learn my route. It seemed only, you know, polite. Since they’d given us one and everything. ʺ Both Setyep and I knew it wasn’t the Academy he cared about being polite to.

ʺWe won’t be going the same way,ʺ said Setyep.

ʺI know,ʺ said Dag. He pulled his tapping stick out of his boot and looked at it.

More worried silence. Nobody knew if a two-eyed dragon could navigate in the Firespace either, but since two-eyed dragons couldn’t get into the Firespace in the first place, there hadn’t been anything to find out. Like a question that begins ʺif humans could fly, then what if. . . .ʺ

ʺIf I don’t see you, I’ll come back,ʺ said Setyep. ʺI can get the coordinates out of Thispec. And Arac is happy to find Hereyta.ʺ

ʺThanks,ʺ said Dag. And again, ʺThanks.ʺ

ʺUm,ʺ said Setyep, and then he tapped Arac on the shoulder and made a talking-to-dragons noise, and Arac slid away from beside us, unpleating his wing from Hereyta’s; and then he banked and did one of those impossible bird-like turns and was gone away from us. I turned my head to watch them, but they disappeared into the murk almost at once.

Dag looked at his tapping stick. ʺWe’re trained to use these on their shoulders. They’re trained for us to use them on their shoulders. The idea is supposed to be that our arms aren’t long enough and when you’re flying you want your directions to be as easy and clear as possible. But speaking of easy and clear, nothing ever is here, and the view feels like it’s better from up here, or would be if there were a view. There’s no way to tie yourself in up here for the transitions of course but that didn’t work so well last time, did it?ʺ

I braced myself again. Now Dag was finally going to yell at me.

But all he said was, ʺI think all rules are suspended.ʺ He reached over and tapped the tip of his stick as far as he could toward the right-hand edge of Hereyta’s face. ʺHrroar,ʺ he said, or something like that. And Hereyta, still keeping her face perfectly level, did a swing right and set off . . . somewhere or other.

ʺCoordinates?ʺ I said. ʺIt’s like flying in soup.ʺ

ʺYes, it is, isn’t it?ʺ Dag said calmly. ʺMost of your second year at the Academy is about learning to work with dragons. Then your third year is about getting around in the Firespace. Ever noticed the little tattoos on the palms of our hands? You get those at the end of your first year, with your first cadet star for your uniform. That’s to give the magic somewhere to stick, and you have to use a little magic. Sometimes they sizzle faintly so you know they’re working—although they don’t make you go in the right direction, they just let you go somewhere rather than around in circles. If Hereyta has trouble . . . Hekhuk,ʺ he added to Hereyta, and she sank a little, through the soup. I was half expecting a squishing noise as she beat her wings, but they were more silent here than in the ordinary world. In our world. After a moment he added, ʺIt’s not like there’s another special mark for if your dragon has only two eyes.ʺ

Great puffs of redness gusted out under Hereyta’s wings, like clouds, only with iridescent threads through them. Not like soup. I was still glad the navigating wasn’t up to me. I felt faintly sickish, and trying to look around made me dizzy.

I’m not sure how long we flew through the gloom. Dag murmured and tapped a few times. Once I saw him scratching the palm of his left hand with his fingers—the hand that didn’t have the stick in it. But he and Hereyta seemed so calm. Well, I’d never seen Hereyta anything but calm, and maybe Dag was just in shock. Like me. Sippy’s breathing had slowed down but he was still collapsed. If I hadn’t had a lot of other things to worry about—and having him collapsed was extremely convenient at the moment—I’d’ve been worrying about him too.

After a while, a short or maybe a long while, I have no idea why, but I started to feel that we were getting near . . . something. Whatever. Wherever. And I guess I was right, because Hereyta . . . stopped. Mid-air and all. Mid-murk. I hadn’t thought about it before, but when we first came through, we’d still been gliding. Slowly, but moving. If there were an up or a down here you might almost say soaring. And it was as if her wings unfolded a whole extra length that they never had in our world, or maybe they’d picked up some of the murk, maybe the murk weaves itself onto the edges of dragon wings . . . maybe my eyes had gone funny. But when she stopped, it was like her wings shuddered out another span, like shaking out a wadded-up bedspread, except Hereyta’s wings already went on forever.

Dag leaned forward and patted her, her nose, I guess, the part of her nose right in front of where he was sitting. And then he stayed that way, leaning forward. He put his tapping stick down, and pressed both palms against her. Kind of like I had, just before she jumped into the air and started flying. And he bowed his head. I don’t know if he was thinking or . . .

I didn’t think he saw me. I stood up. Carefully. Even with leagues of wing stretching out on both sides standing on a dragon feels pretty insecure. (How did she manage to stay so still?) When I stood up, I was right in front of the great black hollow that was her missing eye.

Sippy stood up with me, pressing himself against me. I gently dug his face out of my thigh and turned him to look the direction I was looking—the direction Hereyta was looking, with her other two eyes. I rubbed the place between Sippy’s two ordinary eyes, where the little ridge and hollow in the skull had produced the myth that foogits had once had a third eye. The place that’s supposed to make a foogit lucky.

And I thought about something Ralas had told me about healing. ʺA lot of the time you haven’t got a clue. It’s not made any easier by the fact that no one will tell you even as much as they know themselves what’s wrong because they’re ashamed that it is wrong. So you just wade in and do it. It’s all you can do.ʺ

This had been about a year ago. She often told me things like I was another grown-up, or like I was her apprentice, and I never knew whether to shut up and be grateful, like she’d forgotten who she was talking to and if I said anything she’d remember and not say any more, or whether to risk asking her a question—letting her see that it was me paying attention. This time I couldn’t help myself. ʺDo what?ʺ I said.

She laughed. ʺIt. It.ʺ

I looked into the murk. I rubbed Sippy’s head. I leaned back against the spiked rampart that was the bottom front edge of Hereyta’s empty eye socket. I chose a direction. I braced myself. I tried to remember Arac and Hereyta and Sippy in the field behind the hsa. I looked at Sippy. He was already looking up at me. And there was a waitingness under my feet too. Hereyta was waiting.

I chose a direction, and shifted slightly to face it. Sippy shifted slightly too, to face me. Hereyta’s face slowly, slowly turned, and Sippy and I shifted slightly in response. Sippy was watching me intently. I could almost believe he was watching me with three eyes. I stared out over the end of Hereyta’s nose. You know how when you stare at something, anything, too long, it starts to sort of break up and turn into something else? It doesn’t have to be anything specific, like a foogit or a candle flame or the back of your brother’s head. It can be darkness or redness or a pool of water. The nothingness I was staring at was breaking up and turning into something else. I raised my hand and pointed—not so much to point, I think, but to give us, me anyway, something stable to stare at in all the disintegrating nothing. I think all three of us, even Hereyta, although for her it must have been like trying to focus on a gnat standing on her eyelashes, looked at the end of my finger.

And the heat had got even hotter. We would definitely fry before we starved.

I nearly fell off when Hereyta dived. Not quite. I grabbed a lesser spike and held on. I lunged at Sippy and got him round the neck. He scrabbled a little, but he didn’t slip either. The redness whipped and churned around us—it was probably just dizziness, but I almost felt it streaming by, like very fine fabric, like the stuff my mum’s best shawl is made of. It wasn’t a steep dive—and it didn’t last very long—although there was a very nasty upside-down-inside-out moment of what I suppose is the crossover and briefly the redness felt like cables, trying to hold us there—

—and the moment we were back out into the ordinary world, our human world, Hereyta levelled off again, long enough for Sippy and me to sit back down, and Dag threw a couple of loops around us, reflexively I think, but if we fell off we’d all fall off together. And then we swirled and whirled and circled down and down and down—

And landed in a field almost as enormous as the one we’d set off from, except that it looked like a field of trolls when the sun has just come up. There were a couple dozen dragons and at least a hundred people, but they were all frozen, like trolls in sunlight, staring up—

At us, twirling down.

Hereyta landed as gently as a butterfly.

And Arac roiled forward—trained working dragons mostly move slowly on land, careful of all the little squishy humans that are likely to be nearby—and thudded against Hereyta’s side in what I think was a friendly tap, like you might thump someone on the back and say, ʺWell done!ʺ—but it just about shattered our bones, I think, Dag’s and mine and Sippy’s, or at least it made me feel even more fragile and crumbly than I’d already been feeling, since the fragile crumbly feeling had started when I’d seen the nothingness breaking up, back in the hot red murk. I felt like a piece of overdone toast. The thump also knocked us an alarming several arms’-length to one side, but Hereyta just twitched her head like keeping people on her nose was something she’d been doing forever, and we jolted back again.

Hereyta made a kind of low purring grunt, which was either ʺit was nothingʺ or possibly ʺI have no idea,ʺ which would have made at least two of us, or maybe it was something else entirely, like, ʺbe careful, you clumsy oaf.ʺ Setyep, still gallantly hanging on to Arac’s saddle, suddenly shouted something I didn’t catch—it sounded like one of those old ritual phrases Academy cadets have to learn—but it must have meant something like ʺcheer nowʺ because everybody, and I mean everybody, started cheering like they’d gone mad. Even Fistagh and his girl. I saw them. And maybe they had all gone mad. After all, everyone knows a dragon needs all three eyes to get in and out of the Firespace, and it probably needs them to navigate around inside it too.

I think they put me to bed right after that. It was kind of embarrassing. I’m more or less used to being small, ugly and stupid, but I’ve kind of imagined I’m fairly tough. But I slept all the way through the rest of that day and halfway into the next.

I didn’t know where I was when I woke up. I’d never seen it before. But there was a familiar weight on my feet which, when I looked at it, was indeed Sippy and not an impostor, and then I looked a little farther and discovered Setyep sitting tipped back in a chair, reading something. He looked up when I moved and put the book down. He didn’t waste words. ʺHungry?ʺ he said.

The water rushed into my mouth so fast I could barely say yes. He had a basket of rolls and a ewer of water next to him, which he shifted to the table at the head of my bed, and then he stuck his head out the door of the strange room I was in and shouted, ʺHe’s awake! Bring supplies!ʺ

I don’t remember much of the next hour or so either. I was too busy eating. (Then someone had to tell me where the loo was, and then I came back and ate some more.) When I could finally think of something besides food again there were only a few people left in the room, although I had some memory of a lot more people coming in and being forced back out again, protesting, and the door being not only closed but bolted behind them.

By that time I’d noticed that the room was a kind of small dormitory although mine was the only occupied bed, so there was room for everyone who was still there, plus Sippy weaving through the chairs scrounging for crumbs and attention (in that order). Dag was there (who’d been the first through the door when Setyep shouted and almost broke some already-sore-from-bouncing-around-on-a-dragon bones when he hugged me) and Setyep and Eled. The one I didn’t know was the old guy from breakfast in the food halls two (three?) days ago—the one who’d wanted something for his aching shoulder. Zedak-something Something. I couldn’t remember his name either. Lormon? Ormlo? I hadn’t noticed him coming in or sitting down. (I was really hungry.)

I was seeing him up close for the first time—or anyway I was looking for the first time. I’d been kind of preoccupied with other things that time in the food halls. His white hair had the occasional black thread running through it, and the wrinkles on his face were so deep, some of them, you could’ve planted corn in them. The person-in-authority aura was worse close up, like sitting too close to the fire, and having him staring at you from only a few handspans away was a little like being pricked with the end of a very sharp dagger. I had to restrain myself from jumping to attention. Or running away. But I wasn’t going to do either one. All I could think of, now, after what had just happened, and still feeling as wobbly as a convalescent, was, he was one of the people responsible for letting Hereyta’s name go on the First Flight list. I was just as bad as Dag. Once I’d met Hereyta I’d probably always been as bad as Dag but it had solidified after what we’d been through. I knew I didn’t have the courage to tell him what I thought about him for that, but I could at least try, I don’t know, to stare back.

He was sitting down but he sat just as straight as he stood, as if he had a broomstick up the back of his coat; and those big square shoulders hadn’t sagged at all over the years he’d been carrying the world on them. Or maybe that was just the most comfortable position for him. I wondered if the delor leaf had helped.

In almost any other situation he’d have scared me witless before he said anything but . . . we’d done something, you know? Dag and me and Sippy and Hereyta. The Academy—who at the moment was this guy—had tried to do something horrible to Hereyta, and we hadn’t let them. Rot them. Rot them all. See if I cared. I even had the cheek to ignore him long enough to ask Dag, ʺHow’s Hereyta?ʺ

ʺShe’s great,ʺ he said, and I thought I saw something of my feelings in his face too. ʺShe’s not even stiff.ʺ I risked a quick look at the old guy, and he was looking just a little amused. A little ironic maybe. Even a little guilty? No, I was imagining that. Authority stays in charge by never feeling guilty. Although when I say things like that at home my dad says wait till I have kids of my own.

There was a general air of barely suppressed frenzied impatience which began to make itself felt even in my still-half-zonked state. I was still in my clothes from First Flight—yuck—I had Sippy drool down my front and dragon dust and oil over most of the rest of me—next thing was a bath—but at least it meant I could sit in a chair too and pretend I was a part of the group. As long as no one asked me anything and I had to try to answer sanely. Like, ʺWhat the hells did you think you were doing???ʺ The kind of authority that had kept Dag in a classroom for a year and made him think about six hundred forms of correct address doesn’t like you doing stuff you shouldn’t, even when it works. Maybe particularly when it works.

Although I didn’t like this old guy looking amused.

ʺThere will be a council meeting about First Flight later,ʺ he said. ʺBut I thought a few of you—especially Dag and Ern as the most closely involved—might like the, er, simple version first. There will probably be a bit of an uproar at the meeting.ʺ He paused and looked thoughtful. And not at all amused.

ʺThe story goes back a long way. Most of it will be familiar to you from your studies—Ern, you can get Dag to tell you anything you want to know, or Eled, who knows more of the history of this place than I do.ʺ He flicked a glance over Dag and Eled and I was startled—no, shaken—by the affectionate look on his face. He almost looked like my dad, trying to explain about authority and guilt. But he was talking again: ʺThe Academy was founded on certain principles; the invisible structure of our Academy is based on these principles and they may not be broken.ʺ

He paused. Into the silence Eled said, ʺIntinuyun.ʺ Dag shifted in his chair and Setyep sighed.

The old guy nodded and waited, looking at Eled expectantly. You could imagine this guy standing in classrooms in front of generations of cadets, squeezing stuff they didn’t think they knew out of them. Ralas did the same thing to me. Some days I felt like an old dishrag.

Eled said reluctantly, ʺIntinuyun broke one of its founding principles. Their Commander wanted his own choice to succeed him as Commander, not the Seers’ choice. The Commander won out. But his successor died in a freak accident less than two years after he took over, and when the Seers tried to read for the next Commander, the signs only gave them nonsense. Intinuyun was disbanded about a year after that.ʺ

The old guy nodded. ʺOne of every academy’s principles is that dragons and cadets are matched for First Flight by augury and token, although exactly how this is done varies a little from academy to academy. Ours are called up and laid out very carefully, exactly and secretly every year by our Seers. Although most of our dragonmasters are almost half Seer themselves; those in charge of training cadets have to have a gift for deciding which cadets will learn most from which dragons, before we even begin trying to teach the cadets how to watch and listen and respond to their dragons.

ʺEven those of us not directly involved in the practical lessons follow this progress very closely, and when the First Flight lots are drawn and our Seers read the signs, we usually know what they will tell us. Sometimes there are surprises. But in the history of the Academy—possibly in the history of all the academies—so far as we know, no one has ever had quite such a surprise as this year when we were told—nay, ordered—that Hereyta was to Fly, and that Dag was to partner her.

ʺI know you, Dag, have held me personally responsible.ʺ

Dag scowled but didn’t deny it. Dag held him personally responsible? Then who was he?

ʺAnd if it’s any comfort to you—which it probably isn’t—I haven’t had a good night’s sleep since the drawing. I’ve looked for ways out—gods know I’ve looked for any possible way out—and there was none. I know Carn, who flew with Hereyta on the journey when she lost her eye; I had partnered her a few times myself, and thought she was the best dragon I ever worked with. I wished I was as lucky as Carn, who Flew with her so much oftener.ʺ

He sounded almost human when he said ʺI wished I was as lucky as Carn.ʺ That’s the sort of thing an ordinary person might say.

ʺCarn stopped Flying when Hereyta did; the official reason was the severity of his wounds, but as I say, I know Carn. That wouldn’t have stopped him. They might have invalided him out, but he wouldn’t have quit. But he told me he didn’t have the heart for it any more: not when the best dragon he’d ever known had crippled herself saving his life.

ʺShe’s produced some brilliant babies in the years since she stopped Flying and I swear that the cadets who’ve worked with her leave here with a better understanding of dragon-nature than any of the others. I’ve wanted to feel that this was a good use of her talents—but dragons were made to Fly. Other than Hereyta, all the other Academy dragons alternate a few years here and a few years outside, Flying with experienced riders, doing what they do. Hereyta’s been here almost twenty years, either raising babies—or raising cadets. And she’s not so old that if she had three eyes she couldn’t still Fly—there’s no strain on her wing in the Firespace.

ʺI admit that for all those sleepless nights since the First Flight auguries were read out I’ve been harbouring a small terrible absurd hope that maybe there was an answer in—in what you’ve called cruelty, haven’t you, Dag. In the apparent cruelty of sending Hereyta on a Flight she cannot make. That maybe a two-eyed dragon can find the way into the Firespace. I got a lot of reading done all those nights I didn’t sleep, and in one—just one—old tale there was a reference to a dragon who’d lost an eye, who still Flew. But it was only one, and it wasn’t even a history, but a ballad. Poets will say anything if it makes a good story.ʺ

ʺWhich one?ʺ said Dag, as if the words were torn out of him. I was sure he should have said ʺsir.ʺ The old guy was definitely a ʺsirʺ kind of guy. What was the title he’d used in the food hall?

ʺErzaglia and Sorabulyar,ʺ the old guy said. ʺIt’s in the Old Library; I’ll give you a pass if you want to read it.ʺ

I didn’t mean to move, I was just so startled. Then I was even more startled when everyone turned and looked at me. And I’d been relieved when the old guy had stopped staring at me.

ʺErn?ʺ said the old guy. I didn’t like the way he said it. It wasn’t unfriendly, but it had that interested, open-ended sound, like Ern? was only the beginning.

ʺIt’s just I know that story. A little,ʺ I said. ʺIf it’s the same one.ʺ The one I’d been trying to remember enough of to ask Eled about. I was thinking: Erzaglia and Sorabulyar, gods have mercy. No wonder I couldn’t remember the title.

ʺIndeed,ʺ said the old guy, sounding even more interested. ʺAnd how do you happen to know it?ʺ

ʺR-r-ralas tells it,ʺ I said, wondering if I was betraying her somehow. ʺIt’s got a foogit in it, you know. After I’d—uh—found Sippy, she used to tell me all the foogit stories she knew.ʺ I went on, knowing I was blithering, but the old guy’s interest was unnerving, ʺF-f-foogits aren’t very popular, at least not where I—Dag and I—are from. S-she was trying to make me feel it wasn’t s-s-silly or dumb to have—uh—adopted one, sort of. I mean, he stayed with Ralas most of the time.ʺ

ʺNot silly at all,ʺ said the old guy. ʺFoogits have a long and honourable history.ʺ

ʺRescued,ʺ said Dag. ʺHe rescued Sippy. Sippy’d’ve died.ʺ

I could feel the blood beating against my skin as if the Firespace had got inside me. I knew Dag was trying to say that I’d done a good thing, but it was way too near my secret, that I wanted to be a healer. Besides, I hadn’t done such a great job healing Sippy.

ʺAnd who is Ralas?ʺ the old guy went on smoothly.

I didn’t say anything. I could feel the stutter waiting to happen some more. I stared at the floor. Then Sippy inserted himself between my knees and I had to look at him instead. He put his head on my leg and stared up at me with his two big fringy eyes—foogits have amazing eyelashes: they’re good at everything to do with hair—as if he was trying to tell me something. He needed a good brushing. He was covered in dust and dragon oil too. The third eye was hidden again, under his topknot.

After the pause got long enough to be uncomfortable, Dag said, ʺRalas is our village all-sorts wizard. But she’s a good one. She can do all kinds of stuff and never makes a fuss about it. None of us knows why she stays in our little nowhere village.ʺ

ʺAnd how did you come to adopt—rescue—your foogit?ʺ the old guy went on implacably.

This time when I still didn’t answer Dag leaned over and banged my foogit-free leg with his hand. ʺHey. Wake up. This is your story.ʺ

I raised my eyes to the old guy’s face and sighed. ʺWe—my parents and I—were at a craft fair a few towns away from home. Sippy was just a pup, and he was lost, and he had a broken leg. He was crying, and everyone was ignoring him because he was a foogit and he had a broken leg. So I picked him up. The town wizard’s door-keeper wouldn’t even let me in, so there was only me, and I made a mess of setting his leg and by the time we got back to Ralas, who will help anyone, it was too late and he’ll always be lame, but at least he’s alive. And he doesn’t seem to mind. And he eats pretty well. Sir,ʺ I finally remembered to add.

The old guy took his way-too-penetrating eyes off me for a minute and looked at Sippy. As if Sippy could feel that gaze burning into his butt he lifted his head off my leg and pranced around the room a time or two.

ʺI don’t see any lameness,ʺ said the old guy.

Dag made a little grunt I knew well. It was a big-brother-about-little-brother grunt. ʺSippy hasn’t been lame in years. Ern seems to need to go on believing he did it wrong.ʺ

Stop, I thought at my brother. Just stop.

ʺAre you Ralas’ apprentice then?ʺ said the old guy.

ʺNo, sir,ʺ I said, trying not to look miserable, which is how I felt every time I thought about not being Ralas’ apprentice. And before he asked me the next obvious question, I said, ʺI’m not anybody’s apprentice.ʺ I could feel the old guy’s eyes boring into the top of my head again but I refused to look up.

ʺHmm,ʺ said the old guy. ʺWell. I had better warn you you’ll be expected to come to the council meeting.ʺ

I jerked my eyes up then, really fast, to see if he was talking to me, and he was.

ʺYou and Sippy are rather the heroes of the hour, you know,ʺ the old guy went on, ʺand the fact is that most of the Academy is very eager to know more about how you did it.ʺ

ʺDid what?ʺ I said. I was too terrified to stammer, but my voice went up about three octaves.

ʺBrought Hereyta into the Firespace, and brought her back out again, of course, you idiot,ʺ said Dag, before the old guy could say anything. ʺIt wasn’t me!ʺ

ʺI didn’t do anything!ʺ I squeaked.

ʺYou jumped off Hereyta’s back when she was about a league up in the sky!ʺ said Dag.

ʺThat was just stupid!ʺ I said.

The old guy laughed. ʺIt worked,ʺ he said.

ʺIt was still stupid,ʺ I said, truthfully. ʺAnd I didn’t jump. I went after Sippy. Which is even stupider.ʺ

The old guy looked at me thoughtfully for a minute or two. I glanced at him sideways. I was longing to know about the delor leaf. I couldn’t see any self-protective rigidity when he moved but he’d be the kind of guy who wouldn’t let pain show until it killed him. ʺYou said your Ralas told you a lot of stories about foogits. What sort of stories were they?ʺ

I stopped looking at him sideways and stared. What sort of stories?

As if I’d said it aloud, he said, ʺWhen there’s a foogit in a story, what usually happens?ʺ

ʺOh,ʺ I said slowly. ʺThe foogit usually does something really stupid.ʺ I added reluctantly, ʺAnd then something good happens that wouldn’t’ve if it hadn’t’ve.ʺ

ʺYes,ʺ said the old guy. ʺAnd since I think getting the rest of what I want out of you would be rather harder than wringing blood from a stone, I’ll say it myself: and usually the person who then makes the something good happen after the foogit does something ridiculous—I’m not going to call it stupid—is a rather special person, and often the hero of the story.ʺ

ʺOr if he isn’t the hero he steals the story away from the hero,ʺ said Dag dreamily. I hadn’t realised he’d ever listened to any of Ralas’ foogit stories. But Dag likes all animals, like me.

The old guy laughed again. He had a rather nice laugh. If only he’d slouch a little. ʺWe all saw what happened when you disappeared—I don’t think anyone on the field was looking at any dragon but Hereyta from the moment the first one lifted off the ground—did you dive after Sippy to get back out again as well?ʺ

ʺNo,ʺ said Dag. ʺErn just stood up and looked around a minute and then pointed.ʺ

I hadn’t known Dag had seen any of it. Last thing I knew he was leaning on his hands with his eyes shut. ʺNo,ʺ I said in my turn. ʺIt’s something about making a triangle with three of us looking in the same direction, Hereyta, Sippy and—someone. I think the two of them and Arac had been doing something like it as part of Sippy’s running-around game, on the ground. I don’t know why it seems to take three of us when Hereyta’s only missing one eye. I don’t know anything. I don’t know why it worked and I don’t know how to do it again. Maybe you can train Arac to do—whatever.ʺ

ʺMaybe we can. And if important discoveries were easy more people would make them,ʺ said the old guy.

ʺMaybe it’s not an important discovery!ʺ I said. I wanted to lie down again and put the pillow over my head.

ʺOh, I think it is,ʺ said the old guy. ʺIf this were a battlefield situation you might be right—at the end of everything anything is possible, and the gods sometimes send a miracle that will not be repeated. But this—pardon me, Dag, Eled and Setyep—this was only one year’s First Flight at this Academy. What you did, Ern, is something that can be done. We need only learn the mechanism for it.ʺ

Only. I wanted worse to lie down and put the pillow over my head. And for everyone to go away.

ʺYou’re tired,ʺ said the old guy. ʺAnd not surprising. What you did . . . well. You’ve proved it was possible but it was not easy. The council meeting is tomorrow. You and Dag will be called for midmorning. You can rest till then.ʺ

ʺHe doesn’t need any more sleep,ʺ said Dag in the brutal way of brothers. ʺHe’s had plenty of sleep. He gets tired as a way of making himself invisible. It doesn’t work as well as it used to, before Sippy. And before he was always looking around for people who looked hurt or worried and then groping in his pocket for some stinky leaf or dirty root that was going to make them feel better. I know,ʺ he said to me, ʺthat sidling around and looking tired and harmless is the reason why so many people let you give them your stinky leaves and dirty roots, but it’s not going to work here, okay?ʺ

ʺYes, I’d noticed the sidling and harmless,ʺ said Eled.

ʺIt’s the little ones you have to watch out for,ʺ said Setyep. ʺYou don’t want to underestimate a little one.ʺ

ʺWith those feet you’ll always hear him coming,ʺ said my brother blandly.

The old guy actually reached out and put his hand on my arm. ʺTake it easy, you lot,ʺ he said. ʺHe’s four or five years younger than you and has important work to grow into.ʺ He stood up. I stumbled to my feet—maybe not only because he still had his hand around my wrist—while the three First Flighters shot up like arrows released from bowstrings. They were all in fresh uniforms and—I only now noticed—all had a shiny new bit of purple ribbon over their cadet badges. ʺDon’t let them bully you,ʺ he said to me. ʺMaybe you have a—er—stinky leaf for that too.ʺ

ʺSir,ʺ I said, and stopped.

ʺAsk,ʺ said the old guy. ʺI haven’t eaten you yet, although I’m aware you’re waiting for me to try.ʺ

ʺWhy did you,ʺ I said confusedly, ʺin the food hall that morning—ask me. Ask me at all. But in front of everyone.ʺ

Some of his wrinkles seemed to smooth out when he smiled. ʺI told you I’ve been cherishing a small terrible hope that there might be a good reason why the signs demanded Hereyta Fly for First Flight this year. When Hereyta’s First Flight partner came back to school a fortnight ago with a brother and a foogit—a foogit with a lucky third eye and a brother who had a secret calling as a healer—ʺ

When he said ʺhealerʺ the Firespace started beating against the inside of my skin again.

ʺ—I wanted anything you could do for us, for Hereyta,ʺ he said, and for a moment he looked a lot like Dag, that fierce, intent, passionate look Dag had when he talked about his dragons. ʺSo I wanted to flush you into the open. I wanted you to feel your healing gift was welcome here.ʺ

Welcome, I thought. Healing welcome. ʺDid you use it, sir? The delor leaf. Did you use it? Did it work?ʺ

For the first time his authority wavered, and he looked almost embarrassed. ʺYes. I used it, and it worked. And when the council meeting is over, I would like more delor leaf, if you would be so kind. I haven’t decided if I’m going to make the half-dozen other of us old smashed-up veterans who’d like to try it too ask you themselves or not. I probably will. You’ll tell me you need to speak to them individually anyway, won’t you?ʺ

I stood up straight. Straighter, anyway. ʺYes, sir. I will.ʺ

ʺGood.ʺ

There was a brief, strained silence after Eled, who had jumped first as the old guy turned toward the door, closed it gently behind him. Then Dag said, ʺI’m going to make Ern have a bath now—ʺ

ʺYou don’t have to make me,ʺ I said with the dignity of the truly filthy. ʺI want a bath.ʺ

ʺAnd then we’ll come to supper. In the hall,ʺ he added, just in case I wasn’t listening.

ʺBut—ʺ I said feebly. I was trying to think but what. Dag had already said that saying I was tired wasn’t going to work.

ʺAnd you,ʺ Dag said over me, ʺyou two can come sit with us and keep off his admirers.ʺ

Midmorning the next day came way too soon. I’d still been pretty much starving at supper, so it wasn’t too bad. The only people who gave me a hard time were the three I was sitting with. Doara and Chort came round to say ʺwell doneʺ and I got a few ʺheyʺs and ʺblue skies and clear horizonsʺ of my own and I tried not to show how much this pleased me. And a lot of people wanted to push Sippy’s topknot back and check out the third eye. Which was fine with him. All attention is good attention. Even Fistagh nodded to both Dag and me: two nods, one each—and his girl actually smiled.

We spent the night back in Dag’s old room. Dag slept. I didn’t. By breakfast I was too scared—and tired: no joke—to be hungry. Dag made me drink some blastweed, saying it would make me alert, but I didn’t drink very much, because I was sure being this scared was going to make me need to pee all the time.

We went back upstairs for Dag to climb warily into a spotless new cadet uniform like it was a booby trap. It had been waiting on a peg outside the door when we got back to Dag’s room after supper the night before, and he’d wordlessly pointed to the new stripe on the shoulder and chest. I’d seen it on the fourth-years’ uniforms, so I said, ʺFirst Flight?ʺ and he nodded. This morning it seemed to glitter in the light but that was probably my eyes. I thought Dag’s hands shook a little when he pinned his old badge and new bit of ribbon to it.

They’d found some clothes for me too. They were too large but they were a little more dignified than anything I’d brought with me. I didn’t have dignified clothes. What would I ever need them for? At least they were dull, invisible-making colours. It didn’t occur to me when I put them on that this would have the opposite effect, making me stand out among all the Academy uniforms.

The meeting was held in the big hall at the back of the main building—the building that had been the whole human end of the Academy when it first opened eight hundred years ago. The hall was still big enough to hold everybody who went there—but I swear everyone who had anything at all to do with the Academy was there, not just the students and the tutors and the dragonmasters. There were people standing at the back and sitting in the aisles. Fire hazard, I thought. But no one made them leave.

You know how on winter solstice nights after it gets dark and you’ve done all the rites—or maybe it’s the night after the solstice, depending on, you know, how well the rites get done, especially the ones with lots of libations—and you sit around the fire with your friends and tell stories about the really scary things that happened to your ancestors? Because telling those stories around the solstice is supposed to stop them from happening again, like to us. Our ancestors had a really rough time is all I can say. So maybe it works.

Sooner or later someone asks what everybody’s worst nightmare is. Telling it out loud at the solstice is supposed to stop it from happening too.

I’m here to tell you that this doesn’t work. Because my worst nightmare is being in front of a lot of other people who are staring at me. And here I was. And they really were staring at me. Nobody else. Me. It was much worse than the food halls. The halls are open all the time, and people sort of stream through, and there’s never that many of them at the same time, and the tutors and dragonmasters mostly eat somewhere else, and it’s all groups around tables, not rows and rows of chairs all pointed in the same direction with a stage at the front, organised for staring. Everyone would’ve known that Hereyta was in First Flight this year with Dag, and word would have got round that they’d actually made Flight. And I knew from yesterday that they’d decided to pin that on me. So everybody was staring at the one person up on that horrible great stage that wasn’t wearing an Academy uniform. Who also, just in case they missed that bit, had a foogit with him. Maybe telling your worst nightmare hadn’t worked for me because I could only bring myself to tell it out loud if it was only my own family listening.

So I took one look at that sea of faces and closed down and went off in my head somewhere. Well, not quite. Sippy wanted me there so I had to leave a little of me behind in the hall to keep him company—and get ready to grab if he got reassured enough to want to go cruising for new friends. I don’t know what his worst nightmare was. Maybe taking a dive off a flying dragon, and he’d lived through that.

But I was enough not-there that it took me a minute to recognise the person coming down the centre aisle toward the stage platform where Dag and I and Sippy and half a dozen more blue and red and yellow coats from the Academy were sitting. Setyep was the only other red and yellow cadet besides Dag; the rest were all the blue and red higher-ups. The old guy from yesterday was the only other person I recognised, although how much you can say you recognise someone when you don’t know his name I don’t know, but what he’d said yesterday was kind of etched into me. (Even if I’d forgotten to ask Dag later what his name was and who he was. I was kind of concentrating on what he’d said.) I was actually staring at him (which meant I was facing away from the audience, which was the crucial part) and vaguely thinking about it that all the other blue and red coats seemed to be deferring to him, like he wasn’t just another blue and red coat, he was the blue and red coat.

So I didn’t notice her till she was walking up the steps to the platform. I’d seen her out of the corner of my eye but, so? There were a million people out there, what was one more? Even if she was walking down the aisle and coming up on the stage. But the walk was familiar. I wasn’t looking at the person but the way she moved was familiar.

It was familiar. She was. It was Ralas.

She seemed perfectly calm. Well, she was always perfectly calm. It occurred to me she was like a dragon that way, or anyway like Hereyta. Someone falls at Ralas’ feet with bright red blood coming wham wham wham out of somewhere so you know they’re not going to last long, she’s still calm. I saw this once. I’m the one stood on the wound—because I was too small and feeble just to press on it—to stop the rest of the blood coming out while she dribbled a little green herbal goo under his tongue and stuck a xan leaf on his forehead with a little dir paste and then got out her needle and thread and went to work. He lived too.

What was she doing here? She looked up as if she felt my eyes on her—she looked up so quickly it was like she’d been waiting to feel my eyes on her—and gave me a friendly, level look back like she was going to be interested in what I had to say for myself and she was keeping an open mind. She’d given me that look when I’d brought Sippy to her the first time, after I’d bungled setting his leg. I don’t know why I always expected her to yell at me. She never did. She was always kind and she always had an open mind.

What was she doing here? I couldn’t think of any way it was going to be good news. Maybe she was going to tell them how I always meant well even if I usually messed it up. But that was hardly worth dragging her all this way for. They must have sent for her—they must have sent a dragon for her—before I woke up and told them I didn’t have a clue how Hereyta got in and out of the Firespace and I couldn’t tell them how to do it and no, I wasn’t going to make a habit of waiting till she was a league in the air and then dropping Sippy over the edge and jumping after him. Not even for Hereyta. If I’d’ve done it for anyone, I’d’ve done it for Hereyta, but . . . no.

There was an empty chair on the other side of Dag and she sat down in it. She smiled at me. It was a ʺthere are more people out there staring at us than there are in the world and this bothers you why?ʺ sort of smile. I came a little more out of my daze for that smile. But I still kept my eyes away from the audience. Sippy had to say hello to Ralas of course but she even makes crazy foogits calmer so he said hello and then he came back to me and lay down, sort of wrapping himself around my ankles like he was making sure I didn’t try to run away.

The old guy stood up and everybody fell silent like they’d all turned to stone. I would ask Dag again after this was over (if I lived that long) who he was. The problem was that both times I’d seen him before the experience was so extreme I forgot. And this time was going to be even more extreme so I’d probably forget again, and harder, if you can forget harder.

ʺWe’ve called this general session to tell everyone what happened three days ago during First Flight and so, we hope, put an end to the rumours. What did happen is quite remarkable enough and the absurd stories that are already being told and listened to and passed on are doing no one any favours, least of all the Academy.ʺ He said this in such a way that anyone who’d let one of those rumours go through them would now be feeling about ant-sized.

No one moved. Maybe the rumour-tellers really had turned to stone, and when everybody else got up to walk out, they’d just stay there forever.

Then he started explaining what had happened, starting with what he’d told us yesterday about choosing the First Flight list, but the moment I heard my name—ʺCadet Dag also took his younger brother Ern with him on Hereyta, and Ern’s foogit, Sippyʺ—I went back into my daze again and stopped listening. So I don’t know how long that part of the story lasted or how he told it, but I don’t think it was very long and I don’t think he’d have made it any more gruesome than he had to.

Then there was a staccato bit when different voices spoke, and I think that was people from the audience asking questions and the old guy answering them. After a few minutes it started getting sort of uproary like the old guy had said it would. I kept hearing my name. Early on the old guy turned and looked at me, and I probably had ʺno one homeʺ on my face, even though I was staring at him again. I was staring at him because staring at Ralas would only make it harder to stay in my daze because I kept wondering what she was doing here, and I still didn’t want to look at the audience. He got that amused look again, and then turned away and answered the question. I think he had been thinking about asking me to answer the question. It’s a good thing he changed his mind.