Chapter 21 The Wrong Line
SOUNDTRACK: Freefall by Nothing More (feat. Chris Daughtry)
~ brEN ~
I’d thought I’d be relieved when I woke up because there were no patrols today. But we had squad training—my usual squad of Furyknights, not Shadowfang—and it appeared that Ronen was punishing us for something, because he’d had us flying formations for hours without a break.
As usual, Akhane took it all in stride. She pushed harder to keep up with the bigger males, but her energy seemed nearly boundless. If anything, her recent agitation had made her even more energetic. Even when she panted, her eyes were bright, and she kept up.
The problem was me.
I’d done fine at the beginning, and even appreciated the reminders of formations I hadn’t flown often. But three hours in, on a surprisingly warm afternoon for the late season, my already aching body grew heavy with weariness.
I did my best to stay focused.
“Wheel near, on Wingtip!” Ronen bellowed.
I immediately leaned left—Akhane’s near side, and the direction I thought we were supposed to fly.
But I’d forgotten that the order applied to the pivot dragon.
In this case, Ronen’s. We were all supposed to line up, wing-tip to wing-tip on the nearside of Ronen’s dragon—who was to my right.
Akhane caught a gust to level us out and move us in the right direction. We weren’t the furthest dragon, so we made it to position in time, but it was close.
‘Sorry, Akhane,’ I sent, wiping the sweat out of my eyes.
‘Don’t worry, Bren. It will be over soon.’
I grimaced and took a tighter grip on the strap. I was a fully-fledged Furyknight. I’d been inducted into the Shadowfang. I was about to leave on my first mission. My dragon shouldn’t have to reassure me about flight formation.
Lifting my chin, I pushed away thoughts of my aching body and tried to keep my focus on the commands, and take a breath to make certain I’d understood correctly before I gave Akhane commands. During training, the dragons weren’t supposed to guide us, but let our Wing Leaders assess our performance.
Ronen had us break from the wingtip form to spire, looping upwards as a squad, following each other as we ascended quickly.
Then we scattered and regrouped, and wheeled again—and I positioned correctly. For another half hour, I was close to flawless, and I knew the dinner hour was approaching, which had to mean we’d be finished soon.
But then Ronen bellowed the command, “Talon,” and my body tensed. I was thrown back to an entirely different kind of problem, and I faltered.
Talon was Ruin’s dragon name. It was also a flying command to create a spearhead formation—with one of the reds at the front. But those seconds when I froze, we flew a little too far forward when we should have been wheeling around to take our place near the back of the V.
‘Little Flame, we must—’
Attempting to cover for me, Akhane swept left towards the position we’d taken in the last command. But she didn’t know that I was supposed to take the offside position. Ronen always required us to receive our positions without our dragons, so they couldn’t make us look good.
I should have been flying right—the slightly closer side of this formation. It shouldn’t have been a problem. When I instinctively gasped and Akhane felt my weight shift, she corrected quickly. But we’d forgotten the dragons behind us, who were larger, and flew faster.
Akhane screamed and jerked to redirect our line as quickly as she could, but we'd already slipped into the path of Einar’s dragon, Sona.
There was a piercing scream so loud it rattled my eyes, and a masculine shout as a huge, burnished-gold club of a dragon's tail swept just inches from my shoulder and Akhane’s neck, the gleaming blades that protruded from it flashing in the dying sunlight as the massive dragon twisted like a cat to avoid us.
I felt the air from its passing brush my cheek and flutter my hair.
But before I could sigh in relief, inexplicably, I was jerked to the side as if something tried to yank me off Akhane's back.
I yelped, grabbing the neck-strap so tightly, feeling left my hands.
I instinctively gripped her body with my knees to keep myself upright.
But the sudden yank put all the pressure on my knee that was still sore from the day before, and I was pulled half-out of my seat before the pressure released as quickly as it had appeared.
'Bren!'
I was too busy pulling myself back into my seat to reply properly, but I shoveled reassurance through the bond and urged Akhane to keep her line in slight descent to make it easier for me to clamber back into place.
By the time I'd found my seat and I could direct her to join the formation, the rest of the squad were in position and waiting for us. My hands were shaking.
'I'm so sorry, Akhane,' I sent miserably as we eased into our place.
I felt all their eyes on me—some concerned, some with irritation. I ducked my head and kept flying.
It wasn’t until three maneuvers later, when we banked right again and a strap lifted and fluttered to Akhane’s other side, I realized my safety strap had been sliced clean through.
I gasped, then gulped it back.
‘What is it, Little Flame?’ Akhane asked worriedly.
I opened my mouth, but I was embarrassed. So, I sent her the image of the thick safety strap, sheared off and flapping in my lap.
Akhane lifted her head and gave a high, piercing call that rode right over Ronen’s next instruction—and to my horror, all the dragons responded, and began to wheel slowly, descending.
“What are you doing?!” I hissed.
‘Our instructions are always to land the moment we’re aware of an equipment failure. It’s for your safety, Bren. The others will land also. It’s the rules.’
I was mortified and wanted to argue with her, but it was too late now. My entire squad was coming in to land, and now I needed to focus on riding out her landing without the benefit of a safety strap.
I hadn’t fallen on landing in weeks. Hadn’t needed that safety strap, except in the cast-off exercises we ran in training to practice keeping ourselves untangled from the dragon’s wings if we fell.
But as Akhane hit the ground in the training meadow, without the benefit of a sloping launch hollow, my exhausted body gave up.
The knee I’d injured the night before and that had taken all the pressure of my near-fall just minutes ago, screamed with pain when the jolt of Akhane’s weight hitting the ground slammed my tailbone onto her spine.
And when I tried to catch myself on the fluttering straps falling from her neck, the injury to my ribs caught and loosened my grip on that side.
I managed to hold on long enough that Akhane had almost slowed to a walk before I tumbled to the thick grasses below—grateful that the training meadow remained lush at this time of year.
But even when I managed to tuck and roll, only taking a glancing blow on my shoulder, when I stopped, I found myself on the ground, staring at the sky.
I didn’t move.
It was what we were taught to do after a fall: Assess the body. Search for pain. Move each limb independently. Ask yourself if you can see clearly, hear clearly…
I was still in the grass on my back, trying to get my lungs to inflate properly, when Terra’s concerned face popped into my line of sight and her hand cupped over my forehead. She pressed down, instructing me not to move or sit up.
“Let me check for you: What hurts the most?” she asked me quickly.
Oh God, I’d forgotten the medics were here today.
“I’m fine. Just winded,” I croaked.
“Bullshit,” she cursed, as she pressed on my injured ribs and I flinched. “You’ve re-injured this, and you haven’t strapped that knee like I told you to,” she chastised me. “I bet that’s hurting more now as well, am I right?”
“It was feeling better this morning,” I said weakly. But even though I was humiliated by the entire session, I was secretly grateful to lay there for a moment while she checked me.
Of course, it wasn’t until she’d unbuttoned my jacket and shirt to examine my rib again, hissing when she saw it, that Ronen trotted over from where he’d landed Ekko.
“Are you hurt, Bren?” he asked worriedly.
I shook my head—which made Terra curse—and blinked back tears of embarrassment. “No, I’m just embarrassed. I got muddled in my head for one second. It’s my fault, not Akhane’s. She was trying to correct for me. I think we hooked Sona’s tail and it cut through my strap and—”
“This needs to stop!” Terra barked, clasping my hand and cupping the back of my neck as she helped me sit up so she could check my spine. I clasped my open jacket over my chest and kept my eyes down, cheeks burning. “She’s not a man, and she cannot be expected to do everything you do!”
“We’re teaching her skills to keep her alive,” Voski snapped, appearing near my feet, his hands on his hips.
But Terra didn’t even flinch. “It won’t save her life if the endless training kills her first.”
“Thank you, Terra, but please, let me handle it,” I said on a sigh. “And my back is fine. I rolled. I was just winded.”
I made myself sit up straighter, and kept my eyes down as I rebuttoned my jacket, praying Voski didn’t get an eyeful from that angle.
Terra bristled, but shut her mouth, glaring between me and the men as I reassured them that the injuries weren’t from this fall. It was just poor luck that they’d been knocked again.
“…I’ll be fine in a couple days. I was feeling a lot better this morning. Akhane helps me heal, and—”
“And if she keeps going like this, you’ll destroy her before she can be of use to anyone!
” Terra insisted, pushing to her feet and planting her fists on her hips as she turned on Ronen.
“She isn’t the same as you—and she shouldn’t try to be—that’s the point!
You have different strengths and different skills.
She shouldn’t be trained relentlessly, not if you want her at peak performance.
She should be trained for what she can do that you can’t! ”