Chương 247: 45. Undeclared War 3

It took me the whole of the next day to truly understand something. Whatever "basic training for a Rider" was, it bore absolutely no resemblance to the "learn how to mount first" I'd had in mind. Or rather — the word "mount" had no business appearing anywhere near it.

Because anything capable of flipping you into the air with a single flick of its tail, using wind pressure at altitude strong enough to rupture your lungs to reeducate you on the concept of your own mortality, and finishing by breathing a lungful of scorching heat past your ear as a reminder not to fidget — that thing did not belong under the heading of ordinary transportation, no matter how you looked at it.

And I was now standing on the high-altitude Riding Field on the outer edge of Latpan's royal city, discovering this cruel truth firsthand. The morning wind sliced down off the sea of clouds, strong enough that keeping both eyes open took real effort. The whole training ground had been carved directly out of a black rock spine — no outer wall at all, only platforms jutting straight out into open air and vast, curved stone aprons built for dragons to land and launch.

Farther off, Latpan's towers and sky-bridges hung nailed into the high air like some unreasonable miracle. Below all of it: cloud. Cloud so absolute it hardly seemed worth wondering what happened if you fell. Because the answer was unlikely to be pleasant. I looked at the enormous red dragon in front of me and, for the umpteenth time, silently reconfirmed— Yes.

This creature, which looked entirely capable of flattening a column of heavy cavalry underfoot and taking my worldview down with it for dessert, was Ignicia. She'd kept her dragon form. Her dark, red-tinted scales caught the morning light like layers of metal pressed down over banked fire. The line from her neck to her spine was fluid to the point of feeling feral. With her wings folded, simply standing there made the entire platform feel too small.

She lowered her head slightly, those molten-gold slit pupils fixed on me. Then she spoke. Her voice in dragon form wasn't as clear as it was in human shape — lower, heavier, as if fire were resonating up from somewhere deep in her chest.

"How long do you plan to stand there staring?" I snapped back.

"I'm considering a very important question."

"Say it."

"In the history of the Dragon Kingdom's Riders, how many died from falling on their very first day of training?" She was quiet for a second. Then a thin jet of white-hot steam puffed from her nostrils.

"None."

"Truly?"

"Because anyone who couldn't survive the first day doesn't qualify to be recorded as a Rider."

"..." Wonderful. Very Dragon Kingdom. In other words, the system didn't guarantee you wouldn't die. It simply refused to count you if you did. I was still marveling internally at logic this ruthlessly energy-efficient when Ignicia turned to the side, giving me a clearer look at the rig secured along her back. Not a traditional human saddle by any stretch.

A set of black-gold fittings custom-shaped to a dragon's spine and shoulders, with grip points and footholds front and back, the surface etched with faint dragon motifs. It looked sturdy enough. The only problem was that "sturdy" was being applied to something strapped onto a dragon — which made the word sound like a very elaborate form of sarcasm.

"Get on," she said. I eyed the height and paused.

"Can you answer one question first?"

"You have a lot of questions today."

"Because I'd rather not become a commemorative splatter on the capital's outer wall on my very first lesson," I said, with complete sincerity.

"Is the standard procedure to climb up myself, or do you carry me up in your teeth?" Something remarkably close to disdain flickered through those dragon eyes.

"If you genuinely want to be carried in my teeth, I'm not entirely opposed to considering it."

"... No. Thank you." I still wanted to preserve some shred of human dignity. So, at her signal, I began climbing the footholds along her side. Honestly, it was steadier than I'd expected. Dragon scales weren't cold like metal — they carried a faintly warm, solid texture, like pressing a palm against living armor. That sense of "steady," however, became highly questionable the instant she shifted her shoulders even slightly.

The moment my foot landed on the anchor point, my balance slipped and I very nearly went straight over the edge.

"—shit—" I grabbed the forward fixture on pure reflex, my other hand slamming flat against the scales at the back of her neck, barely managing to leave myself hanging on. A low vibration rolled up through the dragon's back. I suspected she was laughing.

"Did you just laugh?" I asked through gritted teeth.

"No," she answered far too quickly.

"I was simply thinking that handing you the first wave of reinforcements back to Eckhaus means my father is sometimes remarkably willing to gamble."

"Ignicia."

"Mm?"

"If I actually fall in a minute, at least half the blame belongs to you."

"And the other half?"

"Belongs to the fact that I didn't flatly deny the Dragon Kingdom's throne-candidate rumor yesterday while I still had the chance." This time she genuinely laughed. A dragon's laughter isn't obvious, but I felt it clearly — her shoulders and chest shook together, and the whole world wobbled with them.

"Sit properly," she said.

"Don't grip with brute force. You're a Rider, not luggage hanging off my side."

"Could you save that line for after I'm safely seated?"

"Isn't that exactly what you're currently learning?"... Unanswerable. I took a deep breath, forced down the absurdity of perching on the back of an active volcano, and adjusted my posture according to her instructions. Legs close to the grips, center of gravity low, body not locked rigid but aligned along the line of her spine. The hands were the real trouble — too tight and I'd wrench at her scales and muscle, too loose and the first turn would send me off to make acquaintance with a cloud.

"Left hand," she said suddenly. I looked down. The scale on the back of my left hand caught the daylight, its faint red-gold edge just visible.

"Press it here," she said.

"Where's here?"

"The third row of primary scales at the back of my neck."

"... Do dragons actually number these things?"

"We don't. You're just slow, and I couldn't be bothered to explain it in more detail." Very her. I did as told, slowly pressing my left hand against the large scale high on the back of her neck. The instant my palm made contact, that familiar-yet-alien heat surged up through the scale on my hand — like a fine wire of fire suddenly connecting, snapping the previously vague bond between us into sharp, sudden clarity. I drew a breath on reflex. Not pain. More like — I'd suddenly started hearing something. Not a sound.

A rhythm. Her breathing. The pattern of her shoulder muscles tensing and releasing. The power already gathering through her frame before her wings had so much as opened. Even which way her weight would shift next — all of it seemed to arrive through that heat a fraction of a second before it happened. I froze.

"You feel it?" she asked.

"... Yes."

"Remember it," she said.

"What you're learning from here isn't to guess my movements with your eyes. It's to take my rhythm directly." My throat worked.

"This is Riding?"

"This is only the beginning," she said flatly.

"In real combat, by the time you've sluggishly seen what I'm doing, you'll already be dead on the ground." She gave me no time to sit with that. The great wings snapped open. The next instant, the entire world felt like it had been yanked backward by something completely unreasonable. Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences. Wind. I had never understood, before this, that wind could hit a person like that. Not blow. Slam.

She lunged, drove off the platform, beat her wings — the whole takeoff as clean as a blade of red light hurled straight into the sky. The pressure nearly stopped my heart on the spot; my ears filled entirely with wind, wingbeats, and my own thoroughly undignified instinctive cursing.

"Ignicia—!"

"Shut up. Get down!" I obeyed instantly. Not out of deep trust in the instruction, but because at this altitude and speed, anyone who didn't comply generally only got one chance to regret it. She carried us out past the training field's outer ring and cut the first long arc through the high air outside Latpan.

I tried, at first, to cling to reason and remember all that nonsense about "follow the center of gravity" and "don't fight the dragon's back" — right up until she tucked one wing and rolled, and very nearly flung my soul clean out of my body. For the first time in my life, I learned that a human stomach really will attempt to evacuate the body by some deeply tragic method of its own devising.

"You call this basic training?!" I was practically shouting. Her voice came back scattered by the wind, but still perfectly clear.

"This is already the slowest I go."

"You'd better be—!" She pulled the wings up into another climb before I could finish. I swallowed the rest and focused entirely on staying alive.

After roughly three moments where I was certain I was about to be thrown, five where I seriously doubted the Dragon Kingdom classified humans as a fragile species worth protecting, and more times than I could count being forced, through that scale, to "listen" to her rhythm — I finally graduated from clinging on pure instinct to barely managing to lean my weight the right way a half-beat before she turned. Barely. But still alive. Ignicia was clearly not satisfied with "still alive" as an outcome.

"You're too stiff," she said, on the third loop around the field.

"That's because I'm currently dedicating all my energy to playing the role of a man who doesn't fall to his death off a dragon."

"Then you're not playing it convincingly enough."

"..." If murder at altitude weren't a crime, I might genuinely have considered taking her down with me. She took me around once more, this time without the deliberately sharp maneuvers, holding a pace that was relatively steady, though still nowhere close to "comfortable." Once the wind pressure eased slightly, I finally had enough spare attention to divert some of it away from how not to die. Such as: Latpan, seen from up here, was almost too beautiful for a capital heading into war.

Black-and-gold towers and long bridges pierced the sea of clouds. Dragon towers stood in the distance like nails driven into the sky, several dragons of different colors threading along encrypted wartime routes. Farther out, supply convoys split off toward the northern secondary city, and the white canopies of the refugee camps bloomed below like a thin sheet spread across the ground. The city was still functioning.

Even with the fires of war genuinely at its door, it held onto its own order with something bordering on arrogance. And right now, I was sitting on the back of the fire dragon at its very center. That thought struck something in my chest. It was in that exact instant that Ignicia asked, low:"Do you feel it?"

"What?"

"Not the wind. Not the height." She didn't look back, but her voice came through the bond with perfect clarity.

"The feeling of knowing where I'm about to go, a beat before I move." I was quiet for a moment. The scale on my left hand pulsed faintly. Then I nodded, slowly.

"Yes." She said nothing more. But on the next turn — the instant before she tucked her wings and dropped into a dive — I genuinely felt it beforehand. Not saw it. Felt it. So this time, before she'd even dropped her shoulder line, I pressed my body down along her rhythm ahead of her. Her movement met almost no resistance. The whole dive ran clean, like a line of fire skimming diagonally across Latpan's edge from high above. For that one instant, I didn't even have room to be afraid.

Only something striking hard in my chest, blood briefly running hot with the speed and the synchronization. When she leveled out, her voice finally carried the faintest trace of satisfaction.

"That was far more presentable." I nearly laughed out loud.

"Do you have any idea that hearing 'presentable' out of your mouth is practically a medal, as far as I'm concerned?"

"Then work harder, and you might earn a 'not bad.'""... That's the bar?"

"Because you're going to war with me." She said it so naturally that, for a moment, I had nothing ready to say. The wind was still filling my ears. The clouds were still streaming below. Her back was still hot like banked fire. But the instant she said that, I understood with total clarity — this wasn't a joke, and it wasn't some title-game confined to the capital's high walls. She really was taking me out there. Back to Eckhaus. Onto a battlefield. I said nothing more.

I only pressed my hand a little more steadily into place. She seemed to know I understood, and added nothing further. The rest of that morning's training passed in exactly this state — me repeatedly questioning my life choices, dragged back into rhythm again and again. Level flight, basic turns, weight-shifting through ascents and descents, and finally the worst of it, the buffer before landing. She skipped none of it.

By the time the sunset had dyed the clouds around Latpan's outer edge a deep, bruised gold-red, I finally set my feet back on solid ground. Then my legs gave out. I very nearly offered the soil of the Dragon Kingdom a full prostration on the spot. Fortunately, Ignicia had already shifted back to human form and caught the back of my collar.

"Stand up." She said it lightly, as if my current state — something recently fished out of the sea, soul still somewhere behind me being sick — was a personal embarrassment to her. I grabbed the nearby stone rail and spent several seconds finding my balance.

"I'm starting to think," I said, catching my breath, "that the reason the Dragon Kingdom has so few Riders in its history isn't that they're hard to find. It's that half of them die on the first day of training."

"You didn't die today."

"I'm only temporarily still upright." She glanced at me, then reached out and took my left hand. The scale on the back of it was more visible in the evening light than it had been that morning, the red-gold lines along its edge glowing as if something inside were burning low. Her fingertip brushed it, and heat surged up at once.

"Not bad," she said quietly.

"In what way?"

"The bond is steadier than this morning." She let go, her tone light, stripped of the edge she'd used purely for training.

"At least you didn't pass out entirely on the third dive."

"... So that already counts as high praise."

"For you, yes." I couldn't help laughing. She said nothing further, only turned and started back. A few steps out, as if suddenly remembering something, she glanced back and tossed off one flat line:"Wash up later." I didn't catch it right away.

"... What?"

"I'll come find you tonight." She walked on without looking back, her red hair catching a thin streak of fire in the dusk — clean and deliberate, as if she'd thrown the rest of the sentence at my feet for me to figure out on my own. I stood there and counted three full seconds. Then, in a manner I'm not particularly proud of, began to wonder.

Could it be that Her Highness, the Princess of the Dragon Kingdom, was — just slightly, just the smallest fraction — using "training" as cover for something that would be very difficult to face with a straight face?... No. That line of thinking was dangerous. Extremely dangerous. The trouble was that the subject in question was Ignicia.

And just the night before, she'd used the impeccably professional-sounding excuse of "stabilizing the bond" to leave an entire body of precedent in my head that was thoroughly unhelpful to calm judgment. I cursed myself silently, and then, with complete honesty, noticed I was already, unmistakably, looking forward to the night. This was bad. But probably not the worst thing happening in my life right now.

That night, after washing up, sitting in my room waiting for her, I realized that waiting was its own particular form of torment. Latpan outside my window had gone quiet. In the distance, the patrol lights of the high dragon towers still blinked in and out through the clouds. The capital hadn't lost its nighttime silhouette just because it had entered a state of war — the extravagant lights of the upper city had simply been dimmed, replaced by something more restrained and watchful.

I sat on the edge of the bed, and the longer I sat, the less dignified I felt. Because I knew perfectly well that she was coming, most likely, genuinely to stabilize the bond. And yet my mind kept circling back to that line she'd tossed over her shoulder at dusk — wash up later.... Could I really be blamed for that? Surely not entirely.

I was just starting to consider whether to lie down and feign sleep — anything to avoid looking like a man loitering suspiciously, waiting to be summoned — when two soft knocks came at the door. Knock. Knock. My throat moved.

"Come in." The door opened. Ignicia walked in. She wasn't wearing the day's training gear, nor the formal attire that could press the entire capital flat. Just a lighter, dark-colored robe, the fabric falling clean from her shoulders and arms — none of the daytime sharpness, which only made her already striking red hair look deeper. She looked at me once after closing the door. The look was perfectly level. Level enough that I nearly wondered if I'd imagined that line at dusk.

"Looks like you're still standing," she said.

"Barely."

"Then today wasn't wasted." She crossed to stand in front of me, at a distance neither close nor far — exactly close enough to make you acutely aware you were breathing the same air, without giving you any excuse to simply step back.

"Left hand." I gave it to her. Her movements were slower than during the day's training. The scale on the back of my hand glowed faintly under the lamp, and the instant her fingertip pressed against it, that familiar heat rose again from beneath.

"Your breath is still unsettled," she said quietly.

"You make it sound less like I have a scale on my hand and more like a nest of unruly creatures moved in."

"Close enough." She looked up at me.

"This was your first proper Ride. It's normal for the bond to fluctuate."... Sure. There was probably nothing wrong with the sentence itself. I still wanted to point out that certain phrasing, at night, in a room, at this distance, made it extremely difficult for a man to maintain a strictly proper train of thought. She must have caught the unnatural stiffness in my expression, because her eyes narrowed slightly.

"What strange thing are you thinking about now?"

"I'm not."

"You are."

"..." This dragon's perceptiveness could be genuinely obnoxious. I was about to deploy some half-baked deflection when she'd already pulled my hand and drawn me down to sit on the edge of the bed. Not the ambiguous kind of sitting. More like she had a plan clear enough that she had no intention of leaving me room to spiral. She settled me first, then sat closer than she had during the day, placed my left hand in her palm, and pressed her other hand over the scale on the back of it.

"Close your eyes," she said. I did. Her hands were hot. Not just the surface warmth of someone who ran a little high — deeper, quieter, like fire actually moving beneath the skin. As that heat slowly spread through her palm, I felt the bond — which had grown somewhat turbulent from the day's intense synchronization — being pressed, bit by bit, back into something steady. Our breathing began to align. My heartbeat slowly followed. I'd assumed "stabilizing the bond" would be something purely technical.

Lying here with her this close, her hand pressed to the scale, I realized this could never have been purely technical. Too close. Close enough to catch that faint, clean warmth she carried, like heat left behind after fire; close enough that when she spoke, her voice seemed to fall directly against the side of my ear.

"After the third dive today, you lost the rhythm for a moment." She said it quietly.

"Because I thought I was about to die."

"You weren't," she said, perfectly calm.

"I was there." That was absolutely unfair. Especially with my eyes closed and her hand still on mine. I worked hard not to let my breathing scatter again because of it. Then, the next instant, her other hand settled at the back of my neck. Every muscle in my body locked.

"Ignicia."

"Don't move," she said.

"The moment you tense up, the bond starts to scatter again."

"I don't think I'm the only one contributing to that."

"Oh?" I finally opened my eyes, looked at her this close, tried to hold it back, and failed.

"I'm simply starting to suspect," I said, low, "that Her Highness might be using training as cover for certain other activities." She went still for a moment. Then those gold eyes narrowed, just slightly. I'd expected a cold laugh, a cutting retort, or an outright demand to know what garbage was in my head. She did none of that. She just looked at me. For two seconds. Then she laughed, very softly.

"And what do you think?" Something lurched in my chest.... That question was far too dangerous. Yes or no, I had a strong feeling the loser was going to be me either way. Before I could work out an answer that might preserve both my life and my dignity, she'd already closed the last sliver of distance and touched her forehead lightly to mine. Not a kiss. Somehow harder to defend against than one.

"That's enough for tonight," she said softly. I blinked.

"Just like that?" She looked up at me, expression calm to the point of being infuriating.

"What else?"

"..." This dragon was absolutely doing this on purpose. Absolutely. She knew exactly what I'd been thinking. She knew exactly how unreasonable her leaning in, her tone, her almost-guaranteed-to-be-misread proximity had been — and then closed it all off with a single "what else," leaving me nowhere to go. I looked at her and, for a moment, had nothing.

She seemed thoroughly satisfied with my expression — left dangling halfway between the ceiling and the floor with no landing in sight — and slowly let go of my hand and stood.

"Let it settle tonight," she said.

"We continue tomorrow."

"Continue training?" Standing at the bedside, she glanced back. Her red hair fell over one shoulder, that familiar fire still in her eyes, still somehow catching me off guard every single time.

"Which kind were you hoping for?" I shut my mouth on the spot. She let out a soft, satisfied laugh, as if she'd finally tied a neat bow on her own bad behavior for the night. Then she walked to the door. Just before stepping out, she paused, didn't turn around, and dropped one last line.

"Cedric."

"Mm?"

"If I really did plan to use training as an excuse for something—" Her voice was as light as a single spark in the dark.

"Do you think you'd be able to get away?" The door closed. The room went quiet again. I sat on the edge of the bed, staring at that closed door, and stayed completely still for several seconds. Finally, I lifted a hand to my temple and let out one long, low breath.... Wonderful. I hadn't just learned my first lesson in Riding today. I'd also learned, firsthand, what it means to know exactly that you're being played by a particular fire dragon — and to have absolutely no way of doing a single thing about it.