“I thought as much.” It surprised me, as my father claimed to have no ear for music. He was not angry at the sideways reference to Aidan. Telling my friend to continue playing, he sat down on my cot and handed me the paper that would send me to our most dangerous frontier. Though he hated for me to venture into such a risky theater, it was time. I was eighteen, and he could afford to show no lack of faith in me. I had no doubts of his confidence, so I didn’t make him search for words that were so hard for him to say. Instead, I knelt and kissed his ring, sat back on the cot, and decided that if we were to talk of something difficult on this night, it might as well be something more intriguing than war.
“I’ve heard that Aidan MacAllister could make people see visions with his music,” I said. “Was he as good as that?”
“Better. He could make you live his visions ... and be changed by them.” He paused and smiled a little. “But he couldn’t look at a boat without heaving up his dinner, and he couldn’t shoot a bow worth dirt. Quit hunting altogether when he was ten. Said his fingers were made for harp strings, not bowstrings. I called him a sodding Florin plant-eater who couldn’t stand the stink of blood. He laughed and raced me back to the stables. He could run like a fox and ride like a horse thrall. I could never beat him in a footrace or a horse race either one.”
Aidan had told me the very same story in his tenth letter.
“What happened to him, Father? Why did he stop singing?”
My father did not look at me, but only shook his head. “Some things are not meant to be. There is an order to the world, not always pleasant, not always just, not always explainable. It is why you will be a king, and Vart, who sleeps across the doorway of your tent, will never be other than a slave. Aidan and his visions did not fit within that order. I don’t know what happened to him. I don’t know. ...”
I believed him and promised myself that when I returned from Gondar, I would find out the truth. But three weeks from that night my horse was shot out from under me by a Gondari bowman in a surprise attack. The horse—a very large horse—fell on my leg, which snapped in protest. At least eighteen soldiers died bravely trying to rescue me, but I woke up a hostage in Gondar Lair, facing the rest of my life in a filthy, squalid hut surrounded by dragons.
After three months of captivity, I could walk properly again. At six months, my left arm was burned off by a dragon, teaching me the absolute impossibility of escape. At a year I had lost hope that my father could find any honorable way to set me free. By the eighteenth month of my captivity, I had determined that the dismal chill and unending rain of Gondari winter were preferable to the mind-destroying stink of summer in the lair. But I had not yet learned to stay asleep when a dragon screamed. My days and nights ran together in fits of waking misery and too-shallow sleep.
Twenty-three dragons lived in Gondar Lair. I could recognize their different bellows, and I gave them names: Squealer, Volcano, Grinder, Devil ... Devil was the one who had taken my arm, and his throaty, malevolent screech would inevitably leave me shaking and sick. I laid wagers with myself as to which beast would roast me when I went mad and ran again. When that day came I would not fall back at the touch of flames as I had on the day I lost my arm. I would embrace the fire and free my father from the terrible position I’d put him in.
I thought a great deal about Aidan MacAllister in those dreary months. I recited his letters from memory, trying to imagine myself in the places where he’d been, instead of the place I was. He had written a great deal about dragons, how he was always trying to figure out their role in the world. They had fascinated him. It was perhaps the only place where our interests diverged. Mostly I wished my cousin would come sing to me, to make a holy vision to replace the muddy desolation that was everything I would ever see. I would have traded a month’s rations for him to ease my wretchedness for even one short hour.
In some nameless hour of a nameless day in a sultry, stifling month of my second spring—I had lost track of the exact days in the hazy horror of the time after losing my arm—I was awakened by the bellow of an unfamiliar dragon. I did not seek shelter in the more protected corner of my hut, but lay where I was and prayed that my father had at last decided to sacrifice me and destroy the cursed Gondari. But it didn’t sound like an attack. It would take a legion of at least fifty dragons to attempt Gondar Lair itself. The noise would be unimaginable: the murderous thunder of so many wings, the continual bellowing and roar of flames. I would have heard the Gondari legion take flight, leaving only three Riders to protect me from the two monsters left behind to hold me captive. And the Riders would have come to chain me up in case they would be given the order to execute me. But as I lay on the filthy straw and listened, I heard only the single, strange bellow and the torrent of fire that accompanied it. Then the Gondari dragons answered with a monumental trumpeting unlike any I’d ever heard. Screamer first. Then Volcano.
I crept across the dirt floor and peered out the door. The afternoon was hot and oppressive, thick, gray clouds hanging low over the lair. Nothing appeared out of the ordinary until I looked to the south and saw a sheet of flame so white it hurt my eyes. Again came the fierce cry that raised the hair on my neck. Two dragons flew out of the fire, circled the lair, and vanished into the clouds. The Riders atop the nearest guard tower gestured frantically toward the eastern quarter of the valley. Another white firestorm, another eerie, trumpeting bellow, and again two dragons flew. Three Riders appeared from the south, running madly toward the two on the guard tower. From the west burst white flame and booming thunder and the screaming triumph of a dragon.
Something extraordinary was happening. Anything that left the Dragon Riders in such frenzy was worth knowing more of. I climbed up on the sod roof of my hovel so as to see better, but that looked to be the worst mistake I had ever made. From the east swooped one of the largest dragons I’d ever seen, wings full spread, flames pouring from its snout ... and it was going to pass right over me. I flattened myself to the weedy roof, trying not to get blown off by the hurricane of its passing. It wouldn’t kill me. Its Rider would never allow it to kill a hostage so easily. I’d scarcely sat up again, wondering why a Rider would deliberately make his mount harder to control by riding it through the ring of bloodstones set up to keep me captive, when I heard thunder from behind me. I turned and saw the same beast coming back again. I would have sworn its red eyes looked right into my own.
I had thought myself become dead to fear. For almost two years, fear had been my whole existence, and Devil’s hate-filled eyes blazed red in every moment of my sleep. But when the dragon made a tighter circle and started its third pass, talons the size of small trees fully extended, I begged Jodar to give me strength not to bring shame upon my father and my people. I had once seen a dragon allowed to rend a traitor with its claws. It had taken two days for the wretch to die. Burning was a desirable ending in comparison.
I did not hide—no use in that—but knelt upon the earthen roof watching him come, my horror mounting to a fever as the five claws on one foot opened wider, then snapped around me, dragging me into the gray morning, enclosed in a cage of tissue and bone. I did not scream. I would give no watcher the satisfaction of it. In truth I don’t know that I could have forced any sound from my throat. My knees plugged the gap where the tips of the claws came together imperfectly, and my left side was braced against one of the massive talons. Dragon claws were like razors, and with every jolt I expected to feel them slice through my flesh, but strangely enough I remained undamaged. I tucked my remaining arm tightly to my chest. The consideration that I might lose it and survive long enough to know of the loss was almost beyond bearing.