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.