4. Kailin
KAILIN
"Bonded, dragon and rider are more than the sum of their parts. Ferocity finds purpose. Fire finds intention. Together, they bend destiny to their will."
—Shaman Saphir Fatewever
Ihad never understood freedom until this moment.
It wasn't the abstract concept we'd studied in political philosophy at the academy.
It also wasn't the personal freedom to choose my own path that I'd wrestled with since the day my brother had been found gifted and I'd realized I might be gifted as well.
This was primal and vast and so overwhelmingly right that I wanted to laugh and cry and scream all at once.
I threw my head back and laughed.
The wind stole the sound from my lips, but Morgateth heard it through the bond and responded with a rumble that vibrated through my body. Satisfaction. Pleasure. A fierce, possessive joy that mirrored my own.
"Again," he said.
"Again what?"
"Laugh. It's been a long time since I've heard that. Dragons don't laugh, and humans are terrified of me."
The words carried an undercurrent of grief that I felt viscerally, as if those three riders he'd lost had been my own family and I mourned their loss. I hadn't known them, but I felt as if I did through Morgateth's memories of them.
Not exactly memories, though. He didn't project events involving them into my mind, or even images of what they had looked like. It was more how he had felt losing them while still bonded and what it had done to him.
His pain was so staggering that I wanted to ask him to throttle it down.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I didn't intend to kill your mood. Let's try this again." He banked left and then shot toward the sky, flooding me with exhilaration.
I should have been terrified, but the joy of flight, of freedom, and Morgateth's sheer mastery of the sky was so overwhelming that I couldn't summon fear even if I tried.
I laughed again, and he kept climbing, above the peaks, above the auroras, into air so thin and cold that my lungs burned.
But the burn felt good. Everything felt good.
Morgateth's strength poured through the bond like a river of light, filling the hollow places the prophetic dreams had carved out of me, and shoring up walls that had been barely holding up for weeks.
I hadn't realized how depleted I'd been until my reservoir was refilled.
"You were running on empty," Morgateth said. "How long has it been like this?"
"Weeks. The dream about Podana hollowed me out. I was trying to rest and replenish my reserves, but it helped only a little."
"You should have bonded with me right after that dream. Saphir should have arranged for a private bonding ceremony for you."
"I wasn't ready. Besides, I didn't know it was even possible to have a private ceremony."
"Why weren't you ready?"
That was a good question. I had needed more flight instruction, but since I'd bonded with an old and experienced dragon, I could have gotten away with much less preparation.
"I'm not old." Morgateth sounded offended. "I'm considered young in dragon years. In fact, even Nyxath and her siblings are not old. A millennium is nothing for a dragon."
I realized that I hadn't been shielding my thoughts and he could read them freely. We were bonded, but that didn't mean that we had to share everything.
I raised my shields. "You shouldn't read my thoughts."
"Why not? What secrets are you hiding that you cannot share with me?"
I laughed. "I'm so full of secrets that I should weigh much more than I do."
"Why? What could you possibly have to hide from me?"
What indeed.
"Secrets that are not mine to share."
Morgateth didn't answer with words. Instead, he banked hard to the right and dove. Was he trying to punish me by having me throw up on his back?
"Are you mad at me?"
"No." He leveled out, easing into a glide. "I have a temper, which makes me dangerous. I shouldn't have bonded with you. I shouldn't have come to the bonding ceremony at all."
I didn't appreciate him saying that he regretted bonding with me. "So why did you?"
"Onyx. He wouldn't shut up about you. He kept saying that you need a powerful dragon, and that bonding with the Hero of Elucia would bring a dragon a lot of prestige."
I was feeling less and less thrilled about having bonded with him. "So that's the only reason you chose me? The prestige?"
"I never wanted to bond again." He banked into a thermal, navigating the current with ease as effortlessly as breathing.
"Onyx said that your life is in constant danger.
That assassins are constantly trying to eliminate you.
That you need the protection of someone powerful and terrifying.
I figured that we could be good for each other.
I figured that if you survived all those assassination attempts, you were strong enough to survive me.
And I also figured that you might be my ticket to redemption.
After Nyxath, I'm the most powerful dragon there is. No other can do for you what I can."
He was blunt and unapologetic, which I appreciated, but I had romanticized the bond for so long that hearing him break it down to practical considerations ruined the magic of the bonding for me.
I gripped the riding straps tighter. "Thanks for being honest with me.
I will be honest with you as well. Those riders didn't die because of you, Morgateth, so stop beating yourself up because of their deaths.
I'm not telling you not to mourn them because that's impossible, but you need to let go of the guilt. "
He chuffed. "Easier said than done, as you humans like to say."
"I know, but you don't have to do it alone. I'm here for you."
He was quiet for a long moment, as though he needed time to consider my words. Testing for sincerity, perhaps. I hoped he felt it.
"You're very young," he said finally.
"All cadets are young. I'm actually among the older ones."
"I didn't mean it as an insult. Your youth means you haven't yet learned the meaning of limitations. You believe that you are invincible."
"I wish that were true." I leaned forward to rest my palm against his scales.
The bond hummed between us, warm and steady, and I suddenly noticed that for the first time in weeks, my head wasn't aching, my vision was clear, and my mind felt sharper than usual.
Morgateth's vast reservoir of energy was mine to draw and replenish from, and I hoped that my empathy and the so-called prestige he'd gained from bonding with me were a worthy exchange.
"Let's just fly, Little Warrior." He used Onyx's nickname for me.
I chuckled. "Shouldn't you come up with something more original?"
"Little Shaman?" he asked. "Or Little Dreamer? We can also go with Hero of Elucia."
"No, not that!" I cried with mock horror. "And why does everyone keep calling me little? How about Big Dreamer?"
"Doesn't sound right. I'll think of something."
We dove through a gap between two peaks that was so narrow that his wingtips nearly brushed the rock on either side. We skimmed the surface of a mountain lake so still it was like a mirror, and our passage left a wake that shattered the image into a thousand rippling fragments.
"Can you see the shimmering ribbons of the magnetic currents?" he asked.
"No. Can you?"
"Of course. Dragons see them like a vast web. This is how we navigate. They shift constantly, but the patterns repeat. Learn the patterns, and you can fly anywhere on Aurorys."
"What happens during storms? Can you see them then?"
"Naturally. The currents are strongest then. What do you think causes the storms?"
"Changes in atmospheric pressures."
"That too. The best thing riders can do during a storm is to let their dragon guide them through the weave."
The currents Morgateth had described sounded remarkably similar to the energy pathways that the healers had diagnosed as wide open and bleeding in me.
Perhaps those pathways were somehow connected to the magnetic currents, channels that the shamanic gift opened but that the body wasn't designed to sustain without a dragon's strength to anchor them.
I was about to share my musings with Morgateth when I saw a streak of crimson shoot through the sky.
It started far to the west, rising from the mountains that marked the border between Elucia and the Elurian Federation.
The smoke climbed in a thick column, vivid as blood against the auroral shimmer.
"Do you see that?" I asked.
"The red smoke. Yes."
I knew what it meant. Commander Langston had covered the joint rescue protocols in one of our early lectures.
A crimson flare meant a life-threatening emergency requiring dragon-assisted evacuation.
The protocol had existed for generations, one of the many ways Elucia and the Elurian Federation cooperated.
Someone was in serious trouble over there.
"That's a rescue flare," I said. "Should we notify someone?"
"The border outpost will have seen it too. They'll relay the request through the standard channels."
"It might take too long," I said. "Between the time it takes for the message to travel to the right department, and Storm Wing scrambles a rescue squadron, at least an hour will pass. We can do that instantaneously."
I could contact Nyxath as I had done before, but so could Morgateth. "If you contact her now, she can dispatch a squadron right away, which will cut the response time by more than half."
Morgateth was quiet for a beat, and I felt his surprise ripple through the bond. Not at the suggestion itself, but at my decision to act rather than let the system handle it.
"Shall I?"
"Please."
I couldn't hear the exchange, which meant that Morgateth was shielding the communication from me.
I wondered why he was doing that.
"Done," Morgateth said. "Nyxath is handling it. The Storm Wing squadron should be airborne within minutes."
"Thank you."
"No need to thank me. You were right to act quickly. An hour can mean the difference between life and death on those mountains." He adjusted his flight path, angling slightly west so we could watch the squadron deploy. "You have good instincts, little shaman."
"Please, can you not call me little?"
"Would you prefer small? Compact? Vertically modest?"
I bit back a laugh.
I had no idea that Morgateth had a sense of humor buried beneath all the fury and grief.
"How about just Kailin?"
"How about just shaman? It's what you are."
"I'm not a shaman yet. I'm still just a cadet."
"We both know that's not true. You can communicate with every dragon in range, your prophetic dream saved Podana, and you are being personally trained by Saphir. You are as much a cadet as I am a hatchling."
It was funny to think of Morgateth as a baby dragon. Was it just as funny for him to think of me as a cadet?
From afar, I saw five little dots heading our way.
"That was fast," I said.
"Storm Wing are trained for rapid response, exactly this kind of mission. The hikers on that mountain are fortunate that we were in this area today."
"Perhaps it was fated. Did you plan to take me all the way to the border with Tarina?"
He chuffed. "I didn't, but since I don't have one prophetic scale on my body, it was probably your influence.
Whoever got hurt over there might owe their lives to you.
If they had to wait for the alert to go through the official channels, someone might have bled to death.
You shaved an hour off the response time. "
I watched the squadron grow larger as they drew near us, then smaller again as they flew over the western peaks, and I was glad that I was in the right place at the right time.
"We should head back," I said reluctantly. The flight had been extraordinary, the best hour of my life, but the Day of Volition was still underway, and I wanted to know if my friends had bonded and who they had bonded with.
I was particularly worried about Alar and the kind of dragon who would choose to bond with him. I had no doubt that rumors regarding the letter he'd gotten from home had spread through the Dragon Force, reaching the dragons as well.
"One more pass through the high currents," Morgateth said. "I want to show you something."
He climbed again, higher than before, until the air was more memory than substance and the auroras danced around us rather than above. At this altitude, the magnetic currents were visible even to my human eyes, faint shimmers that wove through the thin air like threads of liquid light.
"Watch," Morgateth said.
He folded his wings and dropped.
My stomach lurched into my throat, and for one terrible instant, I was falling, wind screaming, the mountains rushing up to meet me. Every instinct I had urged me to squeeze my eyes shut, but I didn't. Instead, I leaned forward, pressing my body against his neck, and trusted Morgateth.
The bond flared between us, bright and fierce, and in that moment, I understood something fundamental about what it meant to be bonded. It wasn't just sharing thoughts or emotions or strength. It was the absolute trust that they would catch you when you fell.
Except that trust had been broken through no fault of Morgateth's. Three riders had entrusted their lives to him and were dead now.
No wonder he was devastated.
In his mind, he'd broken that sacred trust. He'd let them down.
He unfurled his wings at the last possible moment, converting our plunge into a sweeping arc that carried us along the mountainside so close that I could have reached out and touched the rock. The g-force pressed me into the saddle, and my vision narrowed to a tunnel of light and rushing stone.
Then we were climbing again, and I laughed.
"That," he said, "is what trust feels like."
I knew what he meant, but I teased him anyway. "That's what terror feels like."
He chuffed. "Without terror there is no need for trust."