19
AURORA
After that incident at the Cook-pot, my days started to fall into a kind of routine. First Bell came early but I was up before it every morning to hurry into a stall so I could pee before the other cadets woke up.
I didn’t dress in the stall, however—I was afraid it would draw the wrong kind of attention. Instead, I kept my face to the wall and my back to the rest of the dorm and pulled on my uniform as fast as I could. I was always the first one dressed.
After the first few days of classes, I no longer bothered with the bandages to bind my breasts, either. The Dragon Glass pendant, which I never took off, had everyone fooled. Well, everyone with the possible exception of Ryse Skoren, but as he hadn’t come after me or said anything, I was able to tell myself that I’d imagined the way he was looking at me at the Cook-pot.
After a delicious breakfast in the Mess Hall—I felt I would never get used to how abundant the food was at the Academy—I went to my first class which was Advanced Aeronautical Mathematics. There Professor Griven taught us all about Dive calculations. We had to factor in thermal lift, wind shear, and a dragon’s carrying capacity to get the calculations just right.
We also learned about attack trajectories and formation spacing as well as flaming angles which could be deadly if a formation wasn’t spaced just right. Receiving “friendly fire” from another dragon in your wing could cost your life, your dragon’s life, or both, as Professor Griven hammered into us day after day.
After AAM, I had History of the Madling wars, taught by the Academy’s Head Librarian and Archivist, Professor Teren Valis. He was tall and thin with a dreamy look on his face, except when he described the desperate battles to flame the Madlings from the sky before they could infect the whole kingdom with their deadly bites that could turn whole villages into hordes of raving lunatics.
After History, I went to Flight Theory and then I had Battle Signaling taught by a grizzled old combat veteran, Professor Humbolt. He and his Wing had cleaned out the very last caverns where the Madlings were known to nest and multiply like a plague and he had a lot of war stories to tell us.
Battle Signaling worried me. It was the only class I shared with Ryse Skoren and though I tried to keep out of the Wing Leader’s way, I kept looking up and catching him staring at me with a confused frown on his face.
I didn’t like that he kept looking at me that way. Did he know my secret? Was he going to expose me? So far he hadn’t but his interest in me didn’t seem to waver. I made sure I was always across the room from him so he couldn’t get a good look at me.
The other thing that worried me about Battle Signaling was that I didn’t have a dragon yet. The first part of the semester, we were learning all the signals and flags we had to use to communicate with other Wings in mid-air. But the second part of the semester, we would be practicing what we had learned on dragonback. But since I didn’t have a dragon, how would I manage?
I asked Professor Humbolt, but he only waved me off saying,
“Eh, don’t worry about that lad. We’ll get you sorted when the time comes.”
Which wasn’t a satisfactory answer, as far as I was concerned. But I had to be content with it.
After Battle Signaling, the Great Bell tolled for lunch, and everyone scrambled down to the Mess Hall.
I continued to sit with Jorn-o and my other First-year friends. They told me all about their classes and asked about mine. I let them know what they could expect for the Second-year curriculum, which often caused groans and cries of, “What? How do they expect us to learn all that?”
I might have asked the same thing if the tutor my father had hired for Auren hadn’t been so strict and thorough. I was grateful daily for his rigorous teaching methods. They allowed me to compete with and even succeed against the older and bigger Second-year students—though I was careful never to broadcast my success. Still, some of my professors would say things like,
“I can’t believe the highest grade on this test was from a First-year student! You boys need to do better!”
As anyone might imagine, this kind of talk caused resentment. I tried to keep my head down, but I could feel the eyes of my classmates on me whenever it occurred. It made me angry—couldn’t the professors who talked like that see they were making me a target? Professor Griven, who had called me a coward, was especially bad about it. I wondered if he was trying to cure me of my “cowardice” by putting me in harm’s way and provoking the older boys to hurt me.
Whatever the case, I was glad of the two First-year classes I had after lunch that had only my own age group in them.
The first of them was Botanical Healing for Dragons and Riders, taught by our Head Healer, who—surprisingly—was a woman. Professor Emmeline Zephyr had a quiet, controlled way about her that earned her students’ respect. She never raised her voice—she didn’t have to. Even the rowdiest cadets settled down when she turned her calm stare on them. I was in her First-year class instead of the advanced Second-year course because she insisted that no one skip the basic foundations of her art.
I loved learning about all the different healing draughts, salves, unguents, and ointments that could be made and prescribed for dragons and their riders. They ranged from the simplest lotion to prevent windburn on the faces and hands of riders that rode long distances to pain draughts and healing salves for those who had been burned by dragon fire.
I even wondered, wistfully, if I might have become a Healer like Professor Zephyr if only my father had put me forward to the Academy while he was still alive instead of planning to marry me off.
I didn’t really need to fly a dragon to be happy, I told myself. I would be content if I could just stay at the Academy and study and learn new things all my life. Or teach, like the Head Healer. I promised myself if I failed to Impress an egg, I would go to Professor Zephyr and ask her to take me on as an apprentice. But since we were still weeks away from Impression, I didn’t have to worry about it yet.
After the calm and soothing Botanical Healing class came the hair-raising Flight Simulator training. This class I also had with my First-year classmates, though I was far behind my friends. Jorn-o, Leaper, Toady, and Bugs had been playing on the simulator since they were little boys and they barely needed any coaching from Professor Leesbruck, who was Leaper’s father.
The Flight Simulator—or “Woody” as the cadets had nicknamed it—was a wooden dragon mounted on a huge gimble and hung from the ceiling on multiple ropes. Thanks to its many cleverly carved joints, it could dive and spin and flap its “wings” just like a real dragon, mimicking any maneuver a rider might experience in battle.
Woody was mounted in a huge cavern on the fourth level of the Academy, across from the Flight Terraces where dragons and riders took off when they went flying. The controls were located on the observation balcony, twenty feet above. That was where Professor Leesbruck watched our performances and caused Woody to bob and weave while we did our best to hang on.
If we couldn’t, though, there was always the net. It was strung ten feet below the massive wooden dragon and would catch anyone who fell off Woody during a difficult ride.
I quickly learned to run lightly across the narrow wooden balance beam between the wooden deck and Woody’s saddle, rather than edging my way across, while staring nervously down at the net swaying below.
