Chapter 31
Professor Enplencourt stood at the classroom door to welcome us back after the break.
Scarlett and Mabel had bobbed their hair over the break, and I caught Enplencourt emitting a small gasp when the girls appeared in the hall.
Subconsciously, the older woman touched her hair, which was tied up in an elegant knot on her head, as the two girls strolled into the classroom.
An hour into the lecture, Enplencourt drifted down the aisle between desks, her arms crossed, her robe smeared with chalk. “So, you are saying the war was a necessary step in our success as a society?” She paused, her long fingers resting on the edge of Prescott’s desk.
“Yes, ma’am. The war showed everyone what dragons without flame can do.”
A subtle chuckle sounded from the front row, where the top student in the class, Walt, a boy from Sapphire, sat. “Everyone knew what flameless dragons could do; it was the bonds we learned about through the war. That’s the reason our society succeeded.”
As Enplencourt turned her attention to Walt, Prescott flashed him a threatening glare.
“The historians all agree that dragon bonds were not fully understood until this war, yes, Mr. Holmstadt.”
The boy smiled, clearly not hearing the faint note of boredom in Enplencourt’s voice.
“But do you think the cost was worth it?” Vanya asked, sensing Enplencourt’s desire for pushback. She winked at me when Enplencourt lifted her hands outward toward Walt and Prescott, awaiting an answer.
Prescott jumped in first. “Sure it was. Progress never comes without some pain.” He ignored Vanya’s disappointed head shake and pressed on.
“We knew dragons could be destructive, sure, and that’s why the skeptics hated them.
It’s the same way we feel about wild dragons now.
” I flinched, but the only person who seemed to have noticed was Rush, whose attention floated quickly back to Prescott, who was still talking.
“But we learned that dragons—bonded dragons—could be so much more effective in battle than a dragon with flame who just torches everything.”
“Like a gun that aims rather than fires in all directions at once,” Rush concluded, elbowing Prescott beside him.
Enplencourt slowly closed her eyes—her equivalent to an eye roll—and waited for someone else to take up the discussion.
“That’s true, but I think we’re missing something vital about this war when we only study what came from it,” I said, heat flaring up my neck as all eyes turned to me.
In the front row, Walt snorted. “What could we possibly be missing? This war happened over four hundred years ago. Historians have studied it dry by now, don’t you think?”
Nodding politely at Walt, I looked at Prescott as I answered, trying to keep my attention off of Rush. “The skeptics hated dragons—that’s what the history books all say. It wasn’t just the dragons themselves the skeptics were against.”
That drew a slight frown from Prescott and the telltale eyebrow-lift of approval from Enplencourt.
“Explain,” Enplencourt said, nodding at me.
“Like the text said, the people who thought we shouldn’t have anything to do with dragons are the real reason the war started, despite their claims that dragon riders had grown violent and domineering.
But if you look at the burning of the library, the ransacking of the dragon lairs, the pattern of violence started with the skeptics. ”
“People often fear what they don’t understand,” Vanya supplied.
Prescott dropped his fist on his desk. “Exactly. Without the war, the general public wouldn’t have come to see dragons as good.”
Enplencourt lifted her hand toward Vanya and me, waiting for a reply.
“I disagree. The earliest dragons on the continent had burned farms and killed people. They disrupted life as we knew it. The general public knew to fear dragons. The first riders were what told people we no longer had to fear dragons.” I glanced at Vanya.
“Even before the war, there was a growing admiration for dragons, at least those with riders. I don’t think it was that the skeptics hated dragons—it was that they hated the idea of a society where dragons were good, but only for the chosen, the privileged few.
They wanted things to return to the way they were—with dragons on one side and humanity on the other, unified against a common enemy. ”
Prescott sniffed indignantly and looked out the window, where cold rain tapped the glass. Enplencourt’s mouth turned up faintly at the sides.
Vanya scooted forward in her seat. “Okay, I can see that. The fear wasn’t toward the dragons, but toward the disparity forming between social classes.” She nodded, glancing up at our professor, who watched us with intensity.
“Some have posited the same thing,” she said, moving back to the front of the room. “Can anyone think of a reason why burning a library would be a smart move on the part of the skeptics if it was indeed their goal to trigger a war?”
When no one answered, Rush finally said, “Because people deprived of knowledge are always easier to control.”
“And more fearful?” Vanya concluded with a shrug, missing the way I’d stiffened at Rush’s words.
I gave Vanya a curt nod, trying to shake off the feeling of Rush’s stare pressing into me.
“And fear causes people to focus on the here and now, the day-to-day struggle. Make a people afraid for tomorrow, and they stop asking questions about what will better society. They worry about how to feed their families.”
“Bottomsider,” Scarlett coughed from the back of the room. A few people chuckled.
Enplencourt pretended not to have heard Scarlett.
“Very good. So, the skeptics, desirous of a world where dragon riders couldn’t rise above the rest of the population, sowed discord in the city long before the first battles broke out.
” She rubbed her hands together. “Certainly an opinion held by some historians. Mr. Holmstadt, what do you think?”
From the back of the room, Scarlett grumbled, “Sounds like she wants to bring down the godborn to her level…”
The class discussion continued, but Rush’s words nagged at my mind.
I wasn’t in favor of what the skeptics had done, but I at least understood their reason for doing it—if, in fact, the theory was right.
The majority of historians disagreed, saying the war was indeed started by the riders, hoping to prove, once and for all, that the dragons were staying.
But Rush was right: people without knowledge were far easier to control.
And the existence of magic had been erased from common knowledge by an organization growing rich through their means of controlling races.
Though I doubted dragon races were the only things affected by magic.
With the start of second semester and the arrival of the duke’s extra security, Rush’s and my investigation of magic was relegated to the books he’d pilfered from his own house.
At first, he would leave them, deprived of their covers, stashed in various places—crammed behind my saddle in the lair, under my sheets, or, one time, in my trunk, atop my drawers.
I had no idea where he was keeping them, but he assured me no one searching his room would find them.
I slogged through one that was nothing more than a genealogy of dragons from three hundred years ago.
Someone with more knowledge of dragon bloodlines might find something earth-shattering in it, but not me.
Then we shifted to keeping the simple, coverless books tucked discreetly within covers he’d ripped off old copies of our textbooks, which he’d found in the school’s basement.
That way, we could carry them around, read them in the library, set them on each other’s desks, without drawing attention.
The weeks dragged on, and even though flying lessons were increasing in pace and difficulty, despite the frequent snows and the icy temperatures, the books became the thing I looked forward to the most—or more specifically, the notes Rush would leave tucked in the pages.
Notes on what he’d discovered or things I should pay particular attention to.
He never said anything in them that wasn’t strictly related to our clandestine study of magic, and he never outright used the word magic, just in case our notes were misplaced, but I could tell by his penmanship how excited he was about what he’d found, and that alone felt like we were talking.
Because outside of the few times we passed each other in a deserted hall, we hadn’t spoken at all.
At school, we were still no more than classmates who had nothing to do with each other.
The snow finally melted in early spring, the first patches of grass visible in weeks.
I’d skipped the most recent night race to read another book from Rush.
He’d gotten a half dozen more, though he hadn’t said where they were from.
One was a biography I devoured about a mortal who’d lived through the War of the Ancients, and who’d witnessed the first generation of the godborn settling in our lands.
It read more like fiction than history, and I entirely forgot to take notes on magic through the chapters that discussed the woman’s romance with one of the Ancients.
But in the biography, dragonfire was used to heal a grave wound.
I smiled as I scratched out a note that said, “Chapter 23 might explain the bottle you used after the pipe incident.”
At least we were getting closer, finding out a few ways dragonfire magic could be used. I still didn’t know how I was going to beat Rush in a race, but that part felt far away, a distant worry.