7. Aurora
AURORA
The Head Master was a handsome man—tall and straight with dark hair going elegantly silver at the temples. He wore the Academy uniform—though his was black instead of the dark blue all the cadets wore—with a black cape draped over his shoulders.
He spoke at length about duty, honor, and responsibility to both the Academy and the kingdom and how he expected us to be the best First-year class in decades.
“I know many of your fathers,” he said, nodding at the gathered crowd.
“Those of you who come from Great Houses and have a lot of Noble blood in your veins may expect to Impress a Bronze or a Silver-wing—maybe even a rare Gold-wing. But that doesn’t mean those of you from lesser houses are any less welcome,” he continued.
“Everyone is needed here. The Academy attendance is far below what it used to be. Some of the ancient ledgers we keep in the Library have records of ten times your number of new recruits. But of course, we don’t know if that’s accurate, since some of them also speak of admitting women as riders,” he added, which drew a laugh from everyone except me.
Looking around, I could see what he was saying. The vast stone auditorium wasn’t even a fourth full. All of us were sitting together near the front of the room but there would have been plenty of room even if there had been twice as many of us.
The Academy clearly needed recruits—or maybe they didn’t, since the Madlings had been eliminated.
Still, it was sad to think how many people used to live and work and learn here compared with the handful of us there were now.
There were probably only a hundred of us here, I estimated idly as the Head Master droned on.
Why had the numbers dwindled so drastically?
If there was an answer to my question—other than the fact, which my father had told me, that there were fewer female dragons laying fewer eggs—I didn’t hear it in the Head Master’s speech.
He was clearly a man who was in love with his own voice and my bony behind was aching fiercely from the hard wooden chair by the time he finally released us to go take our entrance exams.
I was halfway worried that Chud Larson would come after me but—to my relief—he didn’t even seem to notice me as we all got up and filed out of the auditorium.
Jorn-o was watching him too and he breathed an audible sigh of relief as the giant upperclassmen shouldered his way through the crowd without a backwards glance.
“Whew—I should have warned you,” he muttered to me. “Chud Larson’s always angry and it’s worse today because he failed his exams. His dragon, F’lerna, has been screaming and flaming the Burn Pits since dawn.”
I thought of how my father’s dragon, F’lorn, had amplified his anger and how the two of them seemed to feed off each other emotionally and shuddered. It was a bad situation when rider and dragon got into an emotional loop and kept pushing each other to extremes.
“I just hope he doesn’t mess with you again,” Jorn-o said, breaking into my train of thought. “He’s got a terrible temper.”
“I made a formal apology, didn’t I?” I said defensively. “That ought to be enough.”
“Yes, it ought to be.” Jorn-o still looked troubled. “Come on—classrooms are this way.”
He led the way to a broad stone staircase worn smooth by years and years of booted cadets’ feet and we began to climb. We passed by Level Two, where he’d told me the quarters and dormitories were, and kept climbing.
The stairs seemed endless and by the time we reached Level Three, I was feeling weak, and my thighs were burning. The two slices of toasted bread I’d had for breakfast had long since worn off. I hoped they would feed us something after the test—I was terribly hungry.
“Well, here we are,” Jorn-o said, when we came to Level Three together. The broad stairway went on up but there was an equally broad passage leading away from it, to a long corridor filled with classrooms.
“Yes, but where do we go now?” I asked, frowning.
“Well, the test is by alphabetical order and since your last name starts with an “L” and mine with a “T”, we probably won’t be in the same testing room.
I’ll meet you afterwards and show you where the Mess Hall is, though,” he added.
“I think we get Dinner before they hand out the uniforms and assign us to our dorms.”
“All right—that sounds good,” I said, brightening up considerably. The thought of having something solid to eat—not just weak broth and thrice-boiled tea—was heartening.
“Good luck on the test,” Jorn-o said to me. “Remember, if you make a high enough grade, you can land yourself in the Second-year classes.”
He said it like he was joking, but I was dead serious about the idea.
As I moved down the long corridor, looking for the right testing room, I had already determined that I was going to test out of the First-year classes at the Academy.
I was certain I could handle the lack of privacy much more easily with a single roommate than I could living with twenty boys.
I wandered down the broad stone corridor until I found a door with a parchment that said “L-N” hanging outside it. Deducing that this was my room, I stepped inside and saw several long rows of wooden desks.
The other new recruits were still filing in, so I went up to the head of the classroom where a thin, stern-looking professor with iron-gray hair was sitting.
“Name?” he rapped out, as soon as I approached his desk.
“Er, Lysandra. Auren Lysandra,” I said. I was proud of myself for giving my brother’s name on the first try without a slip-up.
The professor’s head jerked up and he looked me up and down.
“Arden’s boy, are you?” he asked, eyeing me sharply.
“Yes, Sir.” I nodded. “Did you know my father?” I added, hoping I wasn’t overstepping.
“He was my finest pupil,” the professor said, but he didn’t smile as he said it. “Always sharp as a dragon’s fang. Let’s hope you’ve inherited his brains, since you certainly didn’t inherit his size,” he added, frowning. “Go find your seat, we’ll be starting momentarily.”
Feeling hurt, though I didn’t quite know why, I went and found a seat near the far-right side of the room.
We were inside the mountain, of course, so there was no window to look out of, but I sat nearest to the vents that circulated the air.
A warm breeze blew my hair around but I didn’t care—I just wanted to be a little way away from the other students.
The professor rose and clapped his hands for the attention of the boys—there were about fifteen—getting settled.
“Very well—it appears that you’re all here so let us begin. I am Professor Griven. I teach Aeronautical Mathematics here at the Academy, but today I will be proctoring your entrance exams which will give us an idea of your academic aptitude. Now pay attention because this is important…”
He leaned forward, pointing a long, bony finger at us.
“This is the one and only time you can be dismissed from the Academy on academic grounds. If you completely fail this test, we reserve the right to release you and send you home. You have not yet Impressed a dragon, which means you are expendable. Also, the Hatching Master tells me that the present clutch of eggs hardening in the Hatching Sands is too small for this First-year group. So we will be looking to send at least some of you home today.”
Well, that was extremely unwelcome news. I swallowed hard and touched the Dragon Glass pendant at my throat. I hoped that the tutor my father had hired was as good as I thought he was and prayed I was prepared for this test. If I went home now, I would probably starve to death.
“I’m smart,” I told the pendant mentally. “Brilliant, actually.”
But I didn’t know if it would work under these circumstances. From what my father had said, the magic of our family pendant seemed to have more to do with outward appearances than with any intellectual talent or capacity. I strongly suspected the pendant couldn’t help me here.
“I also want to stress that I had better not catch any of you cheating,” Professor Griven went on, breaking into my desperate train of thought.
“Honesty, Integrity, and Courage—that is the motto we are all bound by here at the Academy and I will tolerate nothing less from all of you. Any signs of cheating will get you sent home immediately.”
There were murmurs of respectful agreement and I saw heads nodding all around me.
“Now,” the professor continued but just then there was a loud bang as the wooden door of the classroom hit the stone wall.
All our heads jerked around, and I saw—to my dismay—Chud Larson standing in the doorway.
Professor Griven’s thin lips got noticeably thinner.
“Larson,” he said curtly. “You’re late. Take your seat.”
“Sorry,” Larson muttered sarcastically. He slid into the desk in the row beside mine, a dark scowl on his pimply face. He caught me looking at him and snarled, “What are you looking at, runt?”
I turned quickly away, not saying anything and after a moment, Professor Griven continued.
“Now then, before we were so rudely interrupted, I was just about to begin the test. Please do not use your own writing instruments—I will hand out ink pencils along with your parchment,” he said.
He picked up a thick stack of parchment paper and a small wooden box and began walking down the rows of desks, handing them out.
“You must show all your work,” he said, as he passed out the tests.
“Simple answers on the mathematics portion of the test will not be accepted. If you need extra scratch paper, simply raise your hand and I’ll bring you some.
This test is not timed—you can take as long as you need to with it.
Do not begin the test until I tell you to. ”
I was one of the last to get my test. I waited with the thick sheaf of parchment face down on my wooden desk, my stomach a knot of snakes as Professor Griven deliberately made his way to the front of the room. There he crossed his arms over his lean chest, fixed us all with a warning look and said,
“Begin.”