So I trudged up the many, many, many stairs to the very summit of the Old Drake, until I came to the golden door that guarded the entrance to the most sacred and solemn place in the entire Academy. This was the foundation of the whole place—without their dragons, the riders were nothing. Being here was like stepping on holy ground.
When I pushed the door open, I saw that my class was already gathered at the edge of the sands, which were heated from beneath by the volcanic activity of the mountain.
The sands were a shiny, obsidian black and they covered the floor over most of the huge, cavernous space. There was room for several female queens to lay eggs at once, but that hardly ever happened anymore, at least according to my father.
“Dragons know how many of them are needed,” he told Auren and me once. “With the Madlings gone, we needed fewer dragons and so the females stopped laying as much.”
This clutch of eggs was less than a hundred—the lowest number ever laid. There weren’t even enough for all the cadets who had passed their entrance exam, though three of our original number were gone now. (Two had failed and one had been put on academic probation and had flunked out shortly after, if the Academy’s rumor mill was to be believed.)
“At least one of you will not get a dragon,” we’d been told by several professors. “Be thinking about your future and where you might go if you happen to be that one.”
I was probably going to be that one, I thought as I stared at the clutch of eggs. Each of them was roughly oval in shape and all of them were the size of my torso or bigger. They were many colors—white, pale pink, deep blue, emerald green. There were even some eggs near the back of the cavern that were pure, shimmering gold, but they didn’t seem to be included in this clutch.
Lying to one side was a magnificent turquoise Gold-wing—the Head Master’s dragon who had laid the eggs. She was the most enormous dragon I had ever seen—even bigger than my father’s dragon, F’lorn—and her blue-green scales shimmered with a golden light when she flexed her enormous wings.
Her eyes, golden and half-lidded, were fixed on the group of boys standing on the edge of the black sand as she surveyed them with lazy watchfulness.
I felt deep pride mixed with protectiveness coming from her in waves. Maternal instinct is strong in dragons—they will refuse to leave a clutch of eggs until every last one is either hatched or has refused to choose a rider and is rolled to the back of the Hatching Grounds.
Master Yarsmouth, who took care of the Hatching Grounds, was standing at the front of the group of cadets, lecturing in his dry, quiet voice which I had to strain to hear. He was wearing thick leather boots to keep from burning his feet on the sands and there was a fringe of curls around his shiny, mostly bald pate.
I felt someone tug my elbow and Jorn-o whispered near my ear,
“There you are. What took you so long to get here?”
“Had to use the necessary,” I muttered back, because I certainly wasn’t going to tell him the truth. “What did I miss?”
“Mostly a lot about how the egg chooses the rider, not the other way around,” Jorn-o said. “So don’t go trying to choose an egg, because if it doesn’t choose you back, you’ll know it.”
“What happens if a rider chooses an egg that doesn’t want him?” I asked curiously—this was a topic my father had never covered.
“That’s an excellent question, Cadet.” Master Yarsmouth abruptly raised his voice, and I saw he was staring right at me with sharp brown eyes.
“Er, thank you, Master,” I said quickly, hoping he wasn’t offended.
“Why don’t you repeat your question for the entire class—I’m not sure everyone heard you,” he said dryly.
Feeling my cheeks get hot for probably the fourth or fifth time that day—I wished my skin wasn’t so fair and didn’t show a blush so easily—I repeated my question in a louder tone.
“What happens if a cadet tries to claim an egg that doesn’t want him?” I asked.
“Well, first of all, it never goes well,” Master Yarsmouth said. “Either the egg won’t hatch or, in the worst-case scenario, it will hatch but it will refuse to bond with the candidate who claimed it. In that case, we have a wild, unbonded dragon on our hands, which can cause a lot of damage as it grows. Without a rider to bond with it, a dragon’s strong emotions will rule it and cause it to become dangerous.”
“What happens to the candidate who chose the egg in that case? I mean, if the drakeling won’t bond with him when it hatches?” one of my classmates asked.
“He’s shunned from the Academy, and he will be responsible for paying for the meat that dragon eats every day for the rest of his life. Do you know how much it costs to feed a growing dragon?” Master Yarsmouth pinned us all with a foreboding stare. “Let me tell you, Cadets—it is not cheap. You could bankrupt a Great House trying to feed a Gold or Silver-wing without the Academy’s help.”
There were some low whistles and murmurs from the boys around me.
“So don’t try to pretend an egg is choosing you if it isn’t.” Master Yarsmouth shook one bony finger at us. “A drakeling that doesn’t want you is impossible to bond with and you’ll just end up paying to feed it the rest of your life. It’s not worth it.”
I wondered how often it happened that a cadet tried to claim an egg that didn’t want him. I supposed it was probably a temptation—it must be hard to be the only one without an egg on Impression Day.
“What about the egg colors—do they tell what kind of dragon is in the egg?” another cadet wanted to know.
Master Yarsmouth frowned and shook his head.
“That’s the most common question we get, and the answer is not at all. The color of the egg does not tell what kind of dragon will hatch from it. Take this one…”
