“Tell her I’ve already left.”
The landlord hesitated. “But, she’s downstairs and I …”
Valenna was already dragging her bag off the bed and staggering across the room.“You’re not lying,” she said, opening the window and throwing her bag out. “By the time you get downstairs, I’ll be on my way.”
The landlord watched in bewilderment as Valenna hopped nimbly to the tree outside the window and climbed to the ground. Her tidy traveling suit was rumpled, but this was no time to worry about her appearance. She did, of course, worry about it anyway.
She skirted the building, slipped through the dracorium, and ran to the town center, where the mail coach was already beginning to clatter over the cobbles, four dragons straining against their harnesses, their wings beating street debris into the gutters.
Valenna tried to run faster, but her bag weighed her down.
A sacrifice had to be made for freedom. Either she could go to Silvanlight drably dressed, or return to Sennalaith smartly dressed.
With physical pain, she dropped her carpet bag and sprinted. The coach’s rear wheels were lifting off the street when she lunged forward, catching the door. Her sudden weight pulled the coach down enough for her to scramble onto the side, and two helpful passengers reached out and hauled her gracelessly through the window. A moment later, she was sitting on a leather seat, crushed between two smelly travelers.
Her trousers were torn at the knee.
Chapter five
Valenna
Renowned throughout the three kingdoms for training the best battle dragons, Silvanlight Dracorium collected the highest income in Allegesh from the dragons and dragon-sourced products it sold. Dragon bones made excellent shotfire barrels, dragon scales could be fashioned into reliable armor, medicines derived from wings, hearts, teeth, and blood were worth a king’s ransom.
Queen Regent Madelaine did not quibble about allies; she traded with both Sennalaith and Ashkendor, feeding their expensive war machines while remaining pleasantly neutral and bolstering her thriving economy.
Since the Scathmore Barrens (once a verdant seaside kingdom and the home of the dragons) faded into a battlefield waste, the stubborn creatures would only breed and roost in the mountains, so Allagesh purchased yearlings from a sanctuary known as Cobblepine. No one knew where Cobblepine was located. Cadmus had long searched for it, but the sanctuary’s secret remained untouched.
As the coach settled onto a dirt path, Valenna leaned out the window and took in her first glimpse of Silvanlight. It was a quaint hamlet that sprouted between two sloping hills and a sunny woodland. The woodland appeared innocent enough until, a league or two in, it changed abruptly from elms, maples, andflowering cherries to the ancient gnarled oaks and cedars of the infamous Whyspenware forest.
The Whyspenware was said to be haunted by a vengeful spirit who devoured men and left their bones on the forest floor. A ten-foot stone wall separated Silvanlight from Whyspenware and kept curious village children (and men drunk on bravado) from wandering into the shadows and being consumed by the spirit or the venomous creatures that prowled beneath the trees.
The coach followed a stone road through the village, curved between the hill’s shoulders, and stopped in the woods.
“Silvanlight Dracorium!” the coachman shouted.
Feeling oddly naked without her carpet bag, Valenna stepped out of the coach with her chin held high, painfully aware of the disheveled state of her traveling suit. She was greeted by a pair of wrought iron gates, fashioned to look like dreadnought wings. No gatekeeper met her, no dracorium manager asked her what her business was. The entrance stood open and empty, and so, with a bewildered shrug, Valenna strolled inside.
Lavender, foxgloves, and daffodils edged the path as it wound through a haphazard array of stone buildings, paddocks, and barns. Underkeepers kicked up dust as they scurried along the path, some with their arms full of hay, some pushing wheelbarrows of dung. One young woman was holding a broken carrot out to a stubborn baby club-tailed dragon, trying to coax it into a wooden cage. Tears of frustration streamed down her cheeks as the creature curled into a ball, its blue armored plates fitting together like puzzle pieces, and rolled away. Beside the path, a young man was screaming for help as a giant carnivorous drowserjaw plant slowly sucked him into its gaping mouth. A second underkeeper grabbed his arms, and the young man had to choose between becoming lunch or losing his dignity. He chose the latter, shrugging off his suspenders and slidingout of his trousers and free of the plant. The drowserjaw then began to choke on the trousers, and the second keeper took the pantless young man by the ankles and lowered him into the plant’s gullet so he could pull the obstruction from its throat before it suffocated.
Valenna moved on, her lips pursed. Impossible to imagine Evander Trevelyan in a chaotic place like this, with his soft voice, iron calm, and aversion to noisy crowds. How did he stand it?
Dragons bellowed like distant cannon fire. Valenna flinched, and the old familiar burning hissed behind her ribs. She shoved it down like a keeper shoving a vicious baby hydra into a crate as she passed through the dracorium and along a pathway that led between two lush gardens to a large glass greenhouse. The door was open, so she walked inside, hoping someone could help her find the dracorium manager.
The greenhouse was warm and humid, a jungle of potted trees and flowers stacked on shelves and tables. Valenna pushed aside the graceful boughs of a weeping cherry and found a lovely, plump, middle-aged woman clutching a pair of curved shears in her gloved hand while she wrestled with an angry blundertuber. The plant was as tall as a man, its purple, plate-sized blossom lined with sharp teeth.
Valenna cleared her throat.
“Can’t talk now, dear!” the woman cried, swinging dangerously from her perch on the edge of the pot. “Someone is coming from the master dracologist tomorrow. This place will be shut down in an instant if he sees it like this!”
“Ma’am …” Valenna said, circling the pot in an attempt to keep up with the woman’s wild swinging. “I would like to speak to the dracorium manager …”
“Whoop!” The woman slipped but grasped the tuber’s leaves and managed to keep her balance. “An order came in yesterday, and now we’ve no dragon master! Agh!”
The plant swatted her, and she swung out of sight.
Stifling a smile, Valenna gave up on the woman and left the greenhouse to find the barn. It was deserted, save for a few distracted underkeepers, so she passed through it, down a narrow path to the aviary, and then stepped out of the trees and made her way toward a grassy slope between the woods and the village, where she found the large paddocks.
They weren’t the iron cages you’d expect for a dragon paddock. That was part of the wonder of the Silvanlight training program. The flightless land dragons were trained so precisely that they wouldn’t break or trample the simple wooden fences.
