His words reminded me of what his father had said, and I was about to question him further when a loud baritone voice rang out.
“New recruits! Listen up and pay attention!”
Everyone stopped what they were doing and conversations died away as all eyes turned towards the voice.
I didn’t know it then, but my fate was sealed the moment I saw the cadet who was speaking.
6
AURORA
The deep baritone voice belonged to a tall, well-built cadet with broad shoulders and thick, black hair pulled back to the nape of his neck. There was something strange about his eyes, but I couldn’t tell what it was from this distance. The sunlight danced across his temples and high cheekbones in a way that made me think he was wearing some kind of jewelry, which was odd since any kind of facial jewelry was strictly forbidden at the Academy. A cadet couldn’t even have his ear pierced—let alone anything more exotic.
“Oh—that’s Ryse Skoren now,” Jorn-o muttered to me. “Better listen up and do as he says—he’s the North Wing’s Wing Leader. He flies a Midnight Gold-wing, you know,” he added, with a touch of awe in his voice.
I did remember my father talking about the four different formations of dragons, each named for a different point of the compass. He’d said that once the Academy had housed forty full formations of dragons, but as fewer female dragons were born and fewer eggs were laid, fewer riders were needed. Now there were only four formations or “Wings” left. It was a good thing all the Madlings had been killed years ago—the Old Drake didn’t house enough riders to take care of them now.
“The Academy is mostly living on past glory,” my father used to say. “But someday the Madlings will come back, and we’ll rise again—then they’ll need every last rider and drake we have to burn them from the sky and the rest of the kingdom will sit up and take notice!”
“New recruits follow me,” Ryse Skoren called in his deep voice. “You’ll be attending an opening lecture by our Head Master and then you’ll be heading to Level Three for your academic aptitude testing.”
“Aptitude testing?” I muttered to Jorn-o as we all surged forward.
“Oh yeah, the entrance exam.” He nodded. “The professors need to know where you are in your studies so they can know what classes to place you in.” He brightened. “You know, if you score really well, you can get placed in the Second-year classes which means you can also stay in the Second-year rooms.”
“Does that mean I could skip the dorm?” I asked anxiously, thinking that it would be much easier to live with only a single roommate rather than twenty boys.
Jorn-o nodded.
“It’s rare, but it does happen. Once they had a boy who skipped all the way up to Third-year, but that’s rare. Apparently his parents had been paying for a private tutor, and he was some kind of genius.”
Well, I didn’t know about being a genius but the tutor my father had hired for Auren had been extremely strict and thorough. Could I possibly make a high enough score to keep myself out of the First-year dorms? I didn’t know, but I was determined to try.
“Of course, we won’t be the only ones taking the tests,” Jorn-o remarked. We were climbing the polished stone steps by this time, about to enter the vast, cavernous entrance of the Academy which was carved into the side of the mountain. A blast of warm air hit me, blowing out of the dormant volcano and ruffling my newly shorn hair.
“Who else would be taking them?” I asked curiously. I was glad that Jorn-o had found me. It was useful to know someone who’d lived here for years.
“Oh, mostly Second-years that flunked their finals,” he said. “They have to sit for the entrance exams all over again and if they don’t score high enough, they get booted down to the First-year dorms and they have to take the First-year classes all over again.”
“They don’t get kicked out?” I asked, frowning.
“Oh, no—you can’t kick them out.” Jorn-o looked shocked. “By the time they’re Second-years, they already have a dragon. Where’s the dragon going to go if you get rid of his rider? And how can a rider on his own feed his dragon? That’s why the meadow lands around the Old Drake are filled with flocks—you can’t have a twelve-ton beast roaming around the countryside hungry. That’s a recipe for disaster.”
“Oh…I hadn’t thought about that,” I confessed.
“Once they bond, the rider and his dragon are one,” Jorn-o lectured. “You can’t have one without the other. Trying to separate them would drive both of them mad with grief. Oh, sorry—I don’t mean they would actually go mad,” he added, casting a quick sidelong look at me. “I just meant, you know, it wouldn’t be good for them.”
Clearly, he thought he had offended me. I remembered how his father, Jorn, had told me that everyone at the Academy knew what had happened to my father and his dragon—did they all believe the pair of them had gone mad?
I really didn’t know what had happened myself. My father’s claim that he had been bitten by a Madling could certainly be a sign of madness, I supposed. But I hoped not everyone knew about his shameful fate.
“It’s not—” I began but by then we were entering the Academy with a crush of boys around us. I didn’t want to speak about my father and his death in such crowded conditions, so I just shook my head and looked around.
The high, arching entryway was big enough for a full-grown Gold-wing dragon to walk through—if one had wanted to. The stone walls and the vast, arching ceiling were a warm, reddish brown swirled with burnt umber and black. They were smooth and shiny—polished by dragon fire, so my father had said. The many babbling voices of my new roommates filled the space with chatter that sounded twice as loud as it had outside in the Receiving Bowl.
We followed the broad back of the cadet Jorn-o had told me was Ryse Skoren through the entrance of the Academy and into a vast, echoing chamber with a kind of stage or dais at the far end. There were wooden seats lined up in rows and we all sat down facing it.
Unfortunately, the boy in front of me was extremely tall and broad in the shoulders. His hair was cut short and flat against his rather lumpy skull and his ears stuck out on either side in a way that would have been comical if it wasn’t so hard to see around him.
