“You have to mind the nice ladies,” I told my naughty golden dragon, who had been following the whole conversation with a rebellious look in her rainbow eyes. She was still the smallest dragon in the Academy, but she didn’t let that stop her or even slow her down.
“they wanted us to eat before we drilled,” was her reply. “but that is not right—eating too much before you fly makes you too heavy. i am training the others so that when we fly together, we know what to do.”
I didn’t ask why she was so certain of herself, I just told her to stop bossing around the other drakelings. But the next week, when they started to fly and do practice jumps from the tops of the Dragon Caverns on Level Five to the Flight Terraces on Level Four below, she was at it again.
“She was ordering the other drakelings to jump off the ledge before I judged they were ready!” the Flight Instructor, Professor Torrance told me. He and his grizzled Bronze-wing, Fl’erdale, were in charge of teaching each new crop of dragon hatchlings to fly.
“L’eesha, no!” I exclaimed, genuinely horrified.
“i wasn’t hurting them—they needed courage!” She protested. “so I gave them some—all of them know how to fly now, don’t they?
There was no denying that they did—and Professor Torrance did admit that he’d never seen a bunch of drakelings learn so fast. None of them seemed angry at L’eesha. In fact, all of them were crowding around her, nosing her respectfully.
“She just seems to be a natural born leader,” I said to Ryse later, when we were in his room together—though now it was technically our room.
“Mm-hmm,” was his maddening reply as he barely looked up from the latest dusty tome he was studying. He’d had his head in old books from the library for days now and had even dug up a dictionary to help him translate the book that was written in the Root Tongue.
I sighed and gave up trying to talk to him—aside from our swimming lessons, which happened daily—he had grown distant and quiet for much of our time together. We slept in the same bed together, but he kept his back to me and never offered any more “lessons” for which I was half grateful and half regretful.
But though most of the time it seemed that he had forgotten about me entirely, I would often look up and see him studying me, his golden dragon eyes narrowed as though he was trying to unlock some secret.
The staring made me nervous, and I wondered what he was thinking, but when I tried to ask—in an off-hand way—he just shrugged and shook his head, or said, “Nothing.” Which was worse than no answer at all.
I told myself he was just busy and that I shouldn’t care that it seemed he had lost interest in me. I had L’eesha to keep track of and she was always into some kind of trouble that kept me on my toes.
For instance, the Dragon Nursery kept a huge pile of shiny stones—mostly things like Quartz and Bakelite—which had been polished to a high shine for the drakelings to play with. Naturally, being dragons, they loved to pretend to hoard things. At the beginning of the day, each drakeling would be given a pile and they were allowed to sort them and trade them and build different kinds of collections with them.
But only that day, the nursery workers had informed me that all of the drakelings had each given their five best stones to L’eesha, who was apparently building her own collection of tribute stones, given to her by her admirers—which was every single one of the other drakelings.
In the end, she had everyone’s prettiest stones and was extremely pleased with herself.
“But why did they all give you their stones?” I asked, exasperated when the nursery workers complained yet again.
“because they love me because I am the Queen,” she answered. “can we get something to eat? I’m sooooo hungry!”
That was another problem—because she was growing so rapidly, L’eesha had a huge appetite. And because I felt what she felt, I was ravenous much of the time, too.
This meant that I was now eating more than I ever had in my life. And for the first time, my body started really filling out. I’d had to get a bigger uniform size twice since the Hatching and my breasts were getting so big it was difficult to find a uniform shirt that buttoned without being much too long in the arms.
Luckily, my Dragon Glass pendant kept anyone around me from noticing what was happening. But when I dared to take off my clothes and look in the mirror, I saw the truth—I was getting actual curves.
My chest was no longer flat, and my hips were no longer boyishly straight. Instead, I had full breasts tipped with ripe pink nipples and wide hips as well as a full behind that jiggled when I walked.
“I have to stop eating so much!” I told myself sternly. But then L’eesha would get hungry again and project her hunger onto me and I would find myself heading to the Mess Hall or the Commissary to get something to eat.
I suppose my body filling out probably had something to do with what happened next, though I couldn’t be sure. But surely it must have played a part.
Before coming to the Academy, I had been on the brink of starvation. My body had stopped growing and maturing—even my monthly cycles had stopped. But one morning when Ryse woke me up for our usual morning work-out, I didn’t feel so good.
“You go without me,” I told him, putting a hand to my abdomen. “I must have eaten something that disagreed with me last night.”
He leaned over me, looking worried.
“Are you all right, little one?” he murmured, putting a hand to my forehead, as if to feel for fever.
“Fine.” I tried to smile at him. “Just…not feeling good enough to do pull-ups today.”
“All right—I’ll excuse you…this time. But tomorrow we’re back at it,” he said sternly.
