He held my gaze for several agonizing seconds. Then he turned on his heel and marched away.
I waited until his footsteps diminished, and then I slumped forward, hands on my knees.
My time at Cardan Lott was tied inexorably to that boy and how long he believed my lie.
I madeit to the next morning, and the next. But each time a professor walked toward me in the halls or looked at me too long in the Great Hall, I feared the news about Myth had been discovered.
“You’re a bit jumpy,” Vanya concluded as we marched to the lair for our first official day of training with our dragons.
“Just nervous,” I said with a shrug. It was true enough.
“Don’t worry about what people say. You’ll catch up. No one here has as much training as they let on. Even if they’ve ridden, they haven’t riddentheirdragons for long. Big difference.”
She thought I was nervous about my poor performance at the ceremony. That would be the case if I weren’t so worried about Myth. But she was right, at least, that even the most experienced riders here had only had at most a few months of riding their own dragon. Bonding only happened when a person stopped growing, which for most of us was at eighteen or nineteen, and the first years here had all bonded within the past school year. I’d only barely made the cutoff.
Day one of training turned out to involve nothing more than Bryce telling us the proper way to sit in the saddle—contrary to what he assured us were bad habits we’d formed before coming here. I, however, had no habits when it came to sitting on a dragon, a fact that no one let me forget.
Snickers and half-covered coughs followed me everywhere. As I mounted Myth for training, wobbly but not as disastrous as the first time, my entire class spewed barely contained laughter.
“See here,” Bryce said, stomping over to me with his heavy gait. “She will be the perfect student here because, unlike you all, she doesn’t have to unlearn anything. See her ankles? They’re exactly where I told her to hold them. Unlike you lot, with your legs dangling like limp noodles.”
It was meant as a compliment, I think, but it had the opposite effect. My classmates leered at me, their pinched brows and tight lips enough to make me sweat. Myth danced around in agitated little circles, which made listening harder. He was feeding off my energy, and I hated how obvious it was that the other students were getting to me. Even if I could hide it on my face, Myth’s behavior was playing my emotions for them like an orchestra.
“Tense, Miro?” asked Covington as he paraded by on Azeron at the end of the lesson.
Ignoring him, I loosened Myth’s saddle and carefully pried it off his spikes. Beside me, Clarence was grunting under the weight of his saddle as he hauled it down from his dragon’s back. Bryce had instructed us to unsaddle our dragons in the rotunda today, so he could correct any errors we made—did we unstrap the girth after the neck straps, did we loosen the saddle before pulling it off, did we properly check our dragon’s scales for any signs of the saddle impinging movement? He and Indigo weaved among us, observing.
“Vaughan, if you rip off the saddle like that, you could hurt him or damage your saddle,” Indigo said, patting Theo’s dark green side.
Clarence nodded vigorously, then adjusted his glasses. “Sorry.”
“No need to apologize,” Professor Indigo said, moving on to watch Vanya.
Clarence shot me an embarrassed grimace. “Father insisted that I have no advantages here.” His eyes were on Indigo as she complimented Vanya. “Being the headmaster's son,” he saidin imitation of his father’s deep voice, “will come with enough trouble. I will not have you looking like I’ve given you unfair treatment.”
I let out a small laugh. “Well, at least you know all the answers in chemistry.”
His cheeks flushed. “He couldn’t keep me from reading.”
At that, I smiled, but it faded quickly. I’d read what I could get my hands on growing up, but I was woefully behind the others, whose erudite answers this week had shown me just how far I needed to climb to be anyone’s competition this year. “Why aren’t you in Sapphire, Clarence?” He was easier to call by his first name than Covington—everyone was easier to call by their first name, for that matter.
He busied himself with his saddle, folding the straps in and prying it off the ground the way I’d shown him. When it was balanced on his shoulder, he turned to me. “My father wanted it, but the dragons had other ideas.”
My brows rose. Headmaster Vaughan was largely a figurehead in my mind, a crisp suit with a powerful voice and commanding presence. Inspiring every time he spoke to the student body and affable when addressing individual students in the hall, but he was a father, and he clearly had plans for his son to earn his place here.
“Didyouwant Ruby?” I asked. People could choose, but the dragons, who could apparently read us better than we could read ourselves, made the ultimate choice for us.
He flashed a grin that was both sheepish and proud. “I did. I didn’t think the dragons would let me in, to be honest. But I know it surprised my father. He thought I’d end up in Sapphire or Emerald.”
I lugged my saddle and walked beside him. “Emerald? No way. Diamond, maybe.”
He laughed. “Why do you say that?”
“Because you’re nice.”
His smile shrank but was touched with genuine delight. “Thanks, Miro.”
“Ari,” I said.
