26. Aurora
AURORA
I almost didn’t go.
What was the point of showing up to the place where I was, likely as not, going to be humiliated by being the odd man out? The only one without an egg that held a dragon who wanted me?
It happened occasionally, even when there were enough eggs, that one of the candidates simply didn’t get picked.
If that happened, there was no recourse—every cadet got only one shot to Impress.
If he didn’t get a dragon when his time came, then he was either dismissed from the Academy or sent to study under one of the professors if he showed promise academically.
If he didn’t show any promise and didn’t want to leave, he would be put in the kitchens or become a herdsman for the many sheep and goats that were kept for the dragons to feed on.
As for the egg which hadn’t chosen anyone, it would be rolled to the back of the Hatching Sands and the drakeling inside would go into a state of hibernation until the right cadet showed up. The scent of the right candidate would wake a sleeping drakeling and he or she would begin calling mentally.
I knew all that from tales my father had told.
“But it hardly ever happens that way,” he told me and Auren. “Mostly, the eggs just sleep away forever. Drakelings can live on, drowsing in their eggs for hundreds of years, you know. Some of them just don’t want to hatch.”
I wondered how many eggs were “sleeping” in the back of the Hatching Ground and then I wondered why I should care. After all, none of them were ever going to pick me.
In the end, I went to the Hatching Ground only because I knew my friends would ask questions if I didn’t.
They would already want to know why I had hung back in the first place, and I wasn’t about to tell them it was because Professor Leesbruck thought I was never going to get a dragon and wanted to tell me to “manage my expectations.”
So I trudged up the many, many, many stairs to the very summit of the Old Drake, until I came to the golden door that guarded the entrance to the most sacred and solemn place in the entire Academy.
This was the foundation of the whole place—without their dragons, the riders were nothing.
Being here was like stepping on holy ground.
When I pushed the door open, I saw that my class was already gathered at the edge of the sands, which were heated from beneath by the volcanic activity of the mountain.
The sands were a shiny, obsidian black and they covered the floor over most of the huge, cavernous space. There was room for several female queens to lay eggs at once, but that hardly ever happened anymore, at least according to my father.
“Dragons know how many of them are needed,” he told Auren and me once. “With the Madlings gone, we needed fewer dragons and so the females stopped laying as much.”
This clutch of eggs was less than a hundred—the lowest number ever laid.
There weren’t even enough for all the cadets who had passed their entrance exam, though three of our original number were gone now.
(Two had failed and one had been put on academic probation and had flunked out shortly after, if the Academy’s rumor mill was to be believed.)
“At least one of you will not get a dragon,” we’d been told by several professors. “Be thinking about your future and where you might go if you happen to be that one.”
I was probably going to be that one, I thought as I stared at the clutch of eggs.
Each of them was roughly oval in shape and all of them were the size of my torso or bigger.
They were many colors—white, pale pink, deep blue, emerald green.
There were even some eggs near the back of the cavern that were pure, shimmering gold, but they didn’t seem to be included in this clutch.
Lying to one side was a magnificent turquoise Gold-wing—the Head Master’s dragon who had laid the eggs. She was the most enormous dragon I had ever seen—even bigger than my father’s dragon, F’lorn—and her blue-green scales shimmered with a golden light when she flexed her enormous wings.
Her eyes, golden and half-lidded, were fixed on the group of boys standing on the edge of the black sand as she surveyed them with lazy watchfulness.
I felt deep pride mixed with protectiveness coming from her in waves. Maternal instinct is strong in dragons—they will refuse to leave a clutch of eggs until every last one is either hatched or has refused to choose a rider and is rolled to the back of the Hatching Grounds.
Master Yarsmouth, who took care of the Hatching Grounds, was standing at the front of the group of cadets, lecturing in his dry, quiet voice which I had to strain to hear.
He was wearing thick leather boots to keep from burning his feet on the sands and there was a fringe of curls around his shiny, mostly bald pate.
I felt someone tug my elbow and Jorn-o whispered near my ear,
“There you are. What took you so long to get here?”
“Had to use the necessary,” I muttered back, because I certainly wasn’t going to tell him the truth. “What did I miss?”
“Mostly a lot about how the egg chooses the rider, not the other way around,” Jorn-o said. “So don’t go trying to choose an egg, because if it doesn’t choose you back, you’ll know it.”
“What happens if a rider chooses an egg that doesn’t want him?” I asked curiously—this was a topic my father had never covered.
“That’s an excellent question, Cadet.” Master Yarsmouth abruptly raised his voice, and I saw he was staring right at me with sharp brown eyes.
“Er, thank you, Master,” I said quickly, hoping he wasn’t offended.
“Why don’t you repeat your question for the entire class—I’m not sure everyone heard you,” he said dryly.
Feeling my cheeks get hot for probably the fourth or fifth time that day—I wished my skin wasn’t so fair and didn’t show a blush so easily—I repeated my question in a louder tone.
“What happens if a cadet tries to claim an egg that doesn’t want him?” I asked.
“Well, first of all, it never goes well,” Master Yarsmouth said.
“Either the egg won’t hatch or, in the worst-case scenario, it will hatch but it will refuse to bond with the candidate who claimed it.
In that case, we have a wild, unbonded dragon on our hands, which can cause a lot of damage as it grows.
Without a rider to bond with it, a dragon’s strong emotions will rule it and cause it to become dangerous. ”
“What happens to the candidate who chose the egg in that case? I mean, if the drakeling won’t bond with him when it hatches?” one of my classmates asked.
“He’s shunned from the Academy, and he will be responsible for paying for the meat that dragon eats every day for the rest of his life.
Do you know how much it costs to feed a growing dragon?
” Master Yarsmouth pinned us all with a foreboding stare.
“Let me tell you, Cadets—it is not cheap. You could bankrupt a Great House trying to feed a Gold or Silver-wing without the Academy’s help. ”
There were some low whistles and murmurs from the boys around me.
“So don’t try to pretend an egg is choosing you if it isn’t.” Master Yarsmouth shook one bony finger at us. “A drakeling that doesn’t want you is impossible to bond with and you’ll just end up paying to feed it the rest of your life. It’s not worth it.”
I wondered how often it happened that a cadet tried to claim an egg that didn’t want him. I supposed it was probably a temptation—it must be hard to be the only one without an egg on Impression Day.
“What about the egg colors—do they tell what kind of dragon is in the egg?” another cadet wanted to know.
Master Yarsmouth frowned and shook his head.
“That’s the most common question we get, and the answer is not at all. The color of the egg does not tell what kind of dragon will hatch from it. Take this one…”
He strode over to a deep purple egg that had a golden sheen to it. He pointed at it, but I noticed that he didn’t touch it.
“You’d think because of the coloring this egg must surely hold a Midnight Gold-wing, wouldn’t you?”
There were some nods and murmurs of agreement.
“Well, it might,” Master Yarsmouth agreed, nodding.
“But then again, it might just hold a common Brown. Remember the old saying—‘you can’t tell by the shell.’ Also, a Gold or Silver or Bronze-wing might come from a smaller egg and common Blue or Green might come from a larger one.
You simply won’t know what kind of dragon you’re getting until it hatches. ”
“So there’s no way at all to predict what you’re going to get?” Bugs asked, frowning.
“I’ll tell you what you’re going to get, boy, if you’re lucky enough to be chosen.
” Master Yarsmouth frowned at him. “You’ll get the best friend of your life—a being who loves you more than anything or anyone else in this whole benighted world.
Take it from a man who lost his dragon—it’s a love like no other, so you’d better not take it for granted. ”
His brown eyes shimmered for a moment, and I realized he was on the verge of tears.
My heart clenched in my chest for him. I didn’t really understand the bond between a dragon and its rider, but I’d seen the passionate intensity of emotion my father shared with F’lorn.
When both of them chose to die together, I’d understood that they couldn’t bear to be separated, even in death.
How difficult must it be for Master Yarsmouth to be here watching as new riders found their dragons on every Hatching Day, knowing that his own dragon was gone and could never be replaced?
Because once bonded to one dragon, a rider could never bond to another.
If he lost his dragon that part of him—the part that was able to form a mental and emotional connection with a dragon—was an open wound that could never be healed.
I felt for him deeply as he turned for a moment and sniffed loudly.
When he turned back to us, his eyes were dry, but I could see the pain etched on his face.
I wished I could do something to distract him from the obviously sad memories he was probably having of his lost dragon, so I raised my hand again.
“Sir,” I said. “What about the golden eggs—back there?”
I pointed to the back of the Hatching Grounds where the pure golden eggs lay glimmering in the black sands.
“Ah—those are duds.” Master Yarsmouth shook his head sadly.
“You’d think they’d hatch the most magnificent dragons of all, but the gold eggs never hatch.
No matter how hard the candidates try to make contact with them, they’re always silent.
” He gestured at the eggs. “Of course, we never get rid of any eggs because you never can tell if a drakeling might change its mind when it smells the right rider but none of those eggs is under a century old and none has hatched in my lifetime or in the lifetime of the Master who tended the Hatching Grounds before me either.”
“I see. Thank you.” I nodded politely, but I couldn’t stop staring at the golden eggs, shoved into the back corner of the grounds like forgotten treasure. Why didn’t they hatch? Why didn’t they find any of the cadets that came to see them on Impression Day worthy of bonding?
“How do you know those eggs aren’t dead?” Toady asked, nodding at the golden ones.
“Why because, boy—a dead egg will rot. And there’s nothing so bad as the smell of a rotten dragon’s egg!
” Master Yarsmouth gave a hearty laugh and held his nose.
“We had one a few years ago that stunk up all of the Old Drake. Why, you could smell the stench all the way down to the Mess Hall! Not many people had an appetite that day, I can tell you!”
Some of the cadets laughed at his exaggerated gestures, but I thought I could still see the pain behind his eyes. The life of every dragon was precious to him, I thought. A dead egg was sad because of the lost potential.
“Luckily, that doesn’t happen very often,” Master Yarsmouth went on. “Our female dragons lay healthy, sound eggs and almost all of them hatch. Only a few don’t.”
He nodded to the back of the grounds again and I saw there were some other colored eggs not far from the golden ones.
Drakelings who had decided to stay in the shell because the right rider hadn’t come for them.
They could dream away their days forever unless just the right scent woke them from their slumber.
That made me think of the golden eggs again.
I wished I could see them up close. I couldn’t say why, but they seemed to draw me—especially the one near the end of the pile.
It was smaller than all the others—barely half the size of my torso, I estimated.
But though I knew it wouldn’t wake for me or anyone else, my palms itched to slide across its smooth, golden surface and see if I could sense the life of the sleeping drakeling within.
“Well, that’s enough for now,” Master Yarsmouth remarked, clapping his hands with finality. “It’s almost time for your next class. But I’ll be seeing the lot of you back here again soon,” he added. “These eggs are almost hardened—Impression Day isn’t far off!”
This announcement was greeted with a muted cheer—no one seemed to want to be too loud, probably because the Hatching Grounds felt like a nursery and we didn’t want to wake the infants sleeping in their shells.
But someday very soon, those shells would harden and then I would find out if any of the dragons inside would have me…or if, as Professor Leesbruck thought, I would never be able to bond with a dragon of my own.