Chapter 60: Wings of War - Part 1
ULF
Two weeks of training. Two weeks of learning what should have taken years.
The saddle came up the hill road on the fourth day under a tarp. High cantle, deep seat, thigh rolls packed hard as a fist, stirrup leathers doubled and the buckles set inboard. The riding leathers lay folded on top of it, cut close at thigh and chest.
The saddle helped. The leathers helped more.
But mostly it was Silverwing.
For three days after the whip she wouldn't drop her wing for me. I came out at first light with my palm up and she lifted her head clear above my reach until I stopped asking. I hauled her water instead, both troughs, four trips a day, while the keepers found harness to oil that had been oiled that morning. On the third evening she put the wing down without being asked, and neither of us made anything of it.
After that she adapted to me as I adapted to her. My balance points, my reflexes, my limits. When I leaned too far left she came round under me. When I kicked for a turn she had already begun it.
Partnership. That was the word for it, and it had cost three days of being refused in front of two hundred men.
"Naejot," I called. Forward.
She accelerated. Wind screaming past.
"Kelītīs!" Halt.
Her wings flared. We stopped in the air, hanging there over the yard on nothing.
"Jikagon." Descend.
A controlled drop. Fifty feet. A hundred.
"Sōvēs!" Fly.
She caught the air again and levelled out ten feet above the sand.
The dragonkeepers had stopped pretending not to stare. I had overheard two of them at the water butt. *The bastard rides like he was born to it. Two weeks and he's better than lords who trained for years.*
Not better. Just different. I cheat in ways they can't understand.
A shadow came over the yard. Massive. Bronze.
Vermithor landed hard enough to skate grit across the flagstones. Hugh Hammer sat high on his back with the whip already in his fist.
HUGH
The beast was learning.
Hugh Hammer took him through one more set before bringing him down. Tight turns, low over the roofs. Under the third, a fish market emptied itself into the doorways. None of it was for practice.
The Bronze Fury snarled and dragged wide of the line.
The lash came down across the neck.
"Turn, you stubborn bastard!"
Vermithor turned. Grudging. Furious.
That's right. I'm the master here.
Movement at the edge of his eye. The White, coming in on his silver bitch, on a saddle that had cost more than a smith earned in a year.
Hugh brought the bronze down and came off the foreleg in two moves without once looking for the ground.
"Ulf." He nodded. "Getting better."
"So are you."
"I'm already better. Just refining." He rolled the shoulder that had taken his weight coming down. "Vermithor's learning his place."
"Dragons aren't horses. They don't respond to force."
"Everything responds to force. Some things just need more of it."
"And when the force breaks them?"
"Then I find another dragon." Hugh grinned. "Plenty of them around." He tipped his chin at the new leather. "What's a thing like that cost, anyway?"
The White didn't answer him, which was answer enough.
"Thought so," Hugh said, and went to find his wine.
ULF
I watched him go, whip coiled at his belt, that hand still opening and closing.
Vermithor stayed where he was, sides working like a bellows. The welt behind his jaw had crusted and split again in the air. His eye tracked Hugh the whole length of the yard and didn't leave him at the arch.
Hatred. Pure, patient hatred.
"You'll make him hate you," I'd told Hugh a week ago. He'd laughed and said it was better so. *A beast that loves you throws you anyway. A beast that's afraid of you gets you home.*
He believed it. Nine days on he believed it still, and there was a second welt under the other side of that jaw now.
He'll lose eventually. Everyone does. And when he falls—
Helaena's words came back, spoken to a window with her hands full of thread. *I've dreamed of a bronze fury turning on its own.*
I went along the wall toward him, slow, hands where he could see them, and stopped short of the reach of that neck.
His attention came round to me. Wary. Not hostile, but not welcoming.
"Lykiri," I said. Calm. "Nyke daor aōha dārilaros." I am not your enemy.
A rumble came out of the ground more than out of him. Neither agreement nor refusal.
"Patience," I said, quiet enough that the wall behind me took it. "He'll fall. They always do. And when he does, you'll be free."
His eye held mine long enough that I heard water dripping off the trough behind me.
Then he turned his head away. Dismissed.
Marston came up on my left and stood a step further back than I did.
"Two of my keepers asked to be put on the Dragonstone rolls this morning," he said. "Dragonstone. Where the enemy keeps his dragons."
"Did you sign them?"
"I signed both. I'd have signed four." He watched the bronze fold that wing by degrees, open it, fold it again. "He's stopped screaming when the lash comes. You know what it means when they stop."
"It means he's decided something."
"It means he's counting." Marston finally looked at me. "Do you talk to all of them, or only the ones that aren't yours?"
I let that stand and went back to Silverwing, and we drilled until the light went orange.
THAT EVENING
Mock combat.
The keepers had set targets in the fields beyond the walls, past the sheepfolds: straw men in ranks, three wooden towers, painted circles on the turf for enemy positions. Marston kept the count on a board so there'd be no arguing after.
Hugh went first.
Vermithor came down out of the dusk and the fire went out ahead of him in a sheet. The towers went. The straw men went. The grass went, and a hedge, and an alder that had never stood in for anything.
"Clean sweep!" Hugh roared, hauling round for another pass. "Nothing left!"
Nothing targeted, either. Just burning.
My turn.
We came in from the west with the last of the light behind us. Angles chosen. Targets picked before we started.
"Dracarys," I said as we crossed the first tower.
A narrow stream of it, held four heartbeats and stopped. The tower took. The grass beside it did not.
"Jikagon."
We dropped toward the straw men. I set my boot, leaned out against the thigh roll, and kicked.
Rankyaku.
The blade of air cut three of them off at the chest before it came apart in the dark.
"Sōvēs!"
We climbed, circled, came down over the painted circles with her belly nearly brushing them, and she laid fire on each in turn and lifted off it before the grass beyond could catch.
When we landed, nobody was writing anything on the board.
"Did you just—" one of them began.
"Attack from the saddle? Yes."
"Without fire?"
"Different technique."
"That's no technique I've watched a man do." He glanced at the others and got nothing from them. "Ser, the straw's cut. Cut clean, at the chest. What cut it?"
"My leg."
They looked at each other. Three or four more questions in it, and nobody wanting to be the one who asked.
Hugh set down beside us, boots in the ash. Whatever he'd come to say had soured on the way over.
"Fancy tricks. Won't matter when we're fighting real dragons."
"Maybe not. But they won't hurt either."
He spat and walked away.
Out in the black field the lash cracked once, and Vermithor came up off the grass with his wing shivering, and the keepers counting the burned ground stopped where they stood and let him pass over their heads.
I watched all of it. Where he put his weight. Which shoulder he favoured swinging up. How long that leg needed before it took him.
When he finally breaks, I need to be ready.
Silverwing's head came round for me before I asked, and we went back to the pit with the fields still burning behind us.