19. Aurora
AURORA
After that incident at the Cook-pot, my days started to fall into a kind of routine. First Bell came early but I was up before it every morning to hurry into a stall so I could pee before the other cadets woke up.
I didn’t dress in the stall, however—I was afraid it would draw the wrong kind of attention. Instead, I kept my face to the wall and my back to the rest of the dorm and pulled on my uniform as fast as I could. I was always the first one dressed.
After the first few days of classes, I no longer bothered with the bandages to bind my breasts, either.
The Dragon Glass pendant, which I never took off, had everyone fooled.
Well, everyone with the possible exception of Ryse Skoren, but as he hadn’t come after me or said anything, I was able to tell myself that I’d imagined the way he was looking at me at the Cook-pot.
After a delicious breakfast in the Mess Hall—I felt I would never get used to how abundant the food was at the Academy—I went to my first class which was Advanced Aeronautical Mathematics.
There Professor Griven taught us all about Dive calculations.
We had to factor in thermal lift, wind shear, and a dragon’s carrying capacity to get the calculations just right.
We also learned about attack trajectories and formation spacing as well as flaming angles which could be deadly if a formation wasn’t spaced just right.
Receiving “friendly fire” from another dragon in your wing could cost your life, your dragon’s life, or both, as Professor Griven hammered into us day after day.
After AAM, I had History of the Madling wars, taught by the Academy’s Head Librarian and Archivist, Professor Teren Valis.
He was tall and thin with a dreamy look on his face, except when he described the desperate battles to flame the Madlings from the sky before they could infect the whole kingdom with their deadly bites that could turn whole villages into hordes of raving lunatics.
After History, I went to Flight Theory and then I had Battle Signaling taught by a grizzled old combat veteran, Professor Humbolt. He and his Wing had cleaned out the very last caverns where the Madlings were known to nest and multiply like a plague and he had a lot of war stories to tell us.
Battle Signaling worried me. It was the only class I shared with Ryse Skoren and though I tried to keep out of the Wing Leader’s way, I kept looking up and catching him staring at me with a confused frown on his face.
I didn’t like that he kept looking at me that way. Did he know my secret? Was he going to expose me? So far he hadn’t but his interest in me didn’t seem to waver. I made sure I was always across the room from him so he couldn’t get a good look at me.
The other thing that worried me about Battle Signaling was that I didn’t have a dragon yet.
The first part of the semester, we were learning all the signals and flags we had to use to communicate with other Wings in mid-air.
But the second part of the semester, we would be practicing what we had learned on dragonback.
But since I didn’t have a dragon, how would I manage?
I asked Professor Humbolt, but he only waved me off saying,
“Eh, don’t worry about that lad. We’ll get you sorted when the time comes.”
Which wasn’t a satisfactory answer, as far as I was concerned. But I had to be content with it.
After Battle Signaling, the Great Bell tolled for lunch, and everyone scrambled down to the Mess Hall.
I continued to sit with Jorn-o and my other First-year friends. They told me all about their classes and asked about mine. I let them know what they could expect for the Second-year curriculum, which often caused groans and cries of, “What? How do they expect us to learn all that?”
I might have asked the same thing if the tutor my father had hired for Auren hadn’t been so strict and thorough.
I was grateful daily for his rigorous teaching methods.
They allowed me to compete with and even succeed against the older and bigger Second-year students—though I was careful never to broadcast my success.
Still, some of my professors would say things like,
“I can’t believe the highest grade on this test was from a First-year student! You boys need to do better!”
As anyone might imagine, this kind of talk caused resentment.
I tried to keep my head down, but I could feel the eyes of my classmates on me whenever it occurred.
It made me angry—couldn’t the professors who talked like that see they were making me a target?
Professor Griven, who had called me a coward, was especially bad about it.
I wondered if he was trying to cure me of my “cowardice” by putting me in harm’s way and provoking the older boys to hurt me.
Whatever the case, I was glad of the two First-year classes I had after lunch that had only my own age group in them.
The first of them was Botanical Healing for Dragons and Riders, taught by our Head Healer, who—surprisingly—was a woman.
Professor Emmeline Zephyr had a quiet, controlled way about her that earned her students’ respect.
She never raised her voice—she didn’t have to.
Even the rowdiest cadets settled down when she turned her calm stare on them.
I was in her First-year class instead of the advanced Second-year course because she insisted that no one skip the basic foundations of her art.
I loved learning about all the different healing draughts, salves, unguents, and ointments that could be made and prescribed for dragons and their riders.
They ranged from the simplest lotion to prevent windburn on the faces and hands of riders that rode long distances to pain draughts and healing salves for those who had been burned by dragon fire.
I even wondered, wistfully, if I might have become a Healer like Professor Zephyr if only my father had put me forward to the Academy while he was still alive instead of planning to marry me off.
I didn’t really need to fly a dragon to be happy, I told myself.
I would be content if I could just stay at the Academy and study and learn new things all my life.
Or teach, like the Head Healer. I promised myself if I failed to Impress an egg, I would go to Professor Zephyr and ask her to take me on as an apprentice.
But since we were still weeks away from Impression, I didn’t have to worry about it yet.
After the calm and soothing Botanical Healing class came the hair-raising Flight Simulator training.
This class I also had with my First-year classmates, though I was far behind my friends.
Jorn-o, Leaper, Toady, and Bugs had been playing on the simulator since they were little boys and they barely needed any coaching from Professor Leesbruck, who was Leaper’s father.
The Flight Simulator—or “Woody” as the cadets had nicknamed it—was a wooden dragon mounted on a huge gimble and hung from the ceiling on multiple ropes.
Thanks to its many cleverly carved joints, it could dive and spin and flap its “wings” just like a real dragon, mimicking any maneuver a rider might experience in battle.
Woody was mounted in a huge cavern on the fourth level of the Academy, across from the Flight Terraces where dragons and riders took off when they went flying.
The controls were located on the observation balcony, twenty feet above.
That was where Professor Leesbruck watched our performances and caused Woody to bob and weave while we did our best to hang on.
If we couldn’t, though, there was always the net. It was strung ten feet below the massive wooden dragon and would catch anyone who fell off Woody during a difficult ride.
I quickly learned to run lightly across the narrow wooden balance beam between the wooden deck and Woody’s saddle, rather than edging my way across, while staring nervously down at the net swaying below.
“You have to go quick,” Leaper advised me. “If you go too slow, you could lose your nerve or your balance or both!”
My main problem when riding Woody was that I wasn’t strong enough to hold on as tightly as I wanted to. Worse, if I fell off into the net, I had a terrible time climbing back to the wooden platform above. There was no ladder—only a rope with knots at intervals which had to be climbed.
The first time I tried to climb it I realized a terrible truth—I had almost no upper body strength. At least, not compared with the other cadets. Even the plump and awkward Toady could make his way back up faster than I could and my arms ached for hours afterwards.
I knew I needed to get better at riding Woody if I was ever going to manage riding a real dragon—assuming that one would have me—but I fell off over and over.
Much to my chagrin, Professor Leesbruck began using me as an example of what not to do.
It seemed that though I was doing very well academically, physically the other cadets were leaving me in the dust. I had to get better—stronger… but how?
It was a problem I didn’t have an answer to and it worried me a lot.
After an hour on the Flight Simulator, I returned to my Second-year classes and had Dragon Husbandry and then The Ethics of Command—a class I seriously doubted I would ever use.
Who would want to follow a scrawny runt who was smaller than any other cadet into battle?
Still, I did my best, throwing myself into the Academy curriculum and learning how to manage a Wing, as well as advanced command decisions, which I was certain I would never have to make.
After my last class, the Great Bell rang for dinner—my favorite meal of the day because I could be sure of getting a bowl of Dragon Custard for dessert. I still shared it with my friends, but I savored that single spoonful of the silky-sweet custard and looked forward to it every day.
Following dinner, the First-years went back to their dorms, while the upperclassmen had time to go flying and bonding with their dragons.
Once bonded to a human, a dragon will suffer if it doesn’t get to see its rider every day—so I learned in Dragon Husbandry.
This bonding time was extremely important, and nothing was allowed to infringe on it.
I wondered if I would have a dragon to spend time with in the future…
or if all the eggs would refuse me because the drakelings inside could smell that I was female instead of male.
I wouldn’t know until the eggs that had been laid by the Head Master’s turquoise Gold-wing dragon hardened enough to be approached, which was still some time away.
After the First-years went back to our dorms, we all had to go for our daily bathing time in the Cook-pot.
I still felt shy and vulnerable, but I no longer worried so much about being naked around the other cadets.
I did keep my towels on right until I slipped into the steaming water and I made sure to get out before the Second-year cadets arrived, though—there was no point in pressing my luck.
Several times, I saw Ryse Skoren looking at me again, but I was always already wrapped up and heading back to the dorm by the time he came to the Cook-pot. So there was nothing for him to see but a scrawny First-year cadet swathed in towels.
I liked my routine. Though my daily fights with Woody, the Flight Simulator, were humiliating, I had the sense that I was slowly getting better. I excelled in everything else, and I was making straight A’s, even in my most difficult subjects.
My life settled in other ways as well.
At first, I was worried all the time that Chud Larson would come after me.
I caught him looking at me sometimes with such hatred in his small, no-color eyes that it froze my blood.
But he avoided me and didn’t try anything at all and after the first few days I began, slowly, to relax.
After all, the only class I still had with him was the Flight Simulator—which, I told myself, was a good thing.
The fact that I was embarrassed there on a daily basis by constantly being bucked off Woody’s broad, wooden back probably made Larson feel like he was already getting revenge.
He was always the one who pointed first and laughed the loudest when I fell and he often called attention to how slow I was climbing back up the rope too.
“Look at that little shit!” he’d laugh, staring down at me while I struggled to climb up to the platform. “He’s got arms like two limp noodles! Fucking weak!”
His insults and taunts made my blood boil and my cheeks burn, but if it got the hatred he felt for me out of his system, it was worth it—or so I told myself.
Of course, Larson didn’t need the Flight Simulator practice—he had his own dragon to fly.
I had no idea why he hadn’t been excused from the class or given at least one Second-year class to take its place.
Maybe it was part of his punishment for cheating.
Whatever the cause, I was glad it was the only class I had with him.
In the dorm, I avoided him carefully but since he mainly ignored me, except for Flight Simulator class, I gradually let down my guard and stopped scanning the room for him every time I walked into the dorm.
I started to believe that what Professor Griven had said was true—that cadets didn’t fight because it was against the Academy rules.
I was wrong…but I didn’t find out until it was too late.