Robin McKinley - Fire - Tales of Elemental Spirits

Dag and Kel’s way of dealing with this awkwardness was to talk over my head about their own stuff (since they’re so much taller than I am, this was very easy). They didn’t mean to make me feel lower than a foogit pup. But what could they do, anyway?

Maybe my parents thought hanging out with Ralas would make me marginally more desirable as an apprentice. I would have flown like a starling and swum like a fish to be Ralas’ apprentice but I knew that wasn’t going to happen. When I was still only a little kid I’d overheard Mik, who had a third son to find a place for, asking Ralas about apprenticeship. Ralas had been very polite but said that she didn’t take apprentices. I reminded myself of this a lot. At least it meant I didn’t have to go through being turned down by her personally—and I didn’t have to die of jealousy when she took somebody else. Although I’d still have to go away and be apprenticed to someone somewhere about something some day and stop hanging around her. I didn’t really think Mum would keep me delivering candles forever. Maybe I wished she would.

Sippy believing I was wonderful was nice, even if he was only a foogit and it was only because he didn’t realise it was my fault he was lame. He’d grown up a lot handsomer than I was expecting. Bigger too. Foogits are good watchdogs—nobody sleeps through a foogit howling—and tend to be less trouble than real dogs so you see them around pretty often, but only at the backs and edges of things—no one invites a foogit to lie by the hearth during its off-duty hours. Also foogits can move so fast, in that sort of goofy dance they do, they can make you dizzy if you watch them. And if you’re a burglar, you probably will be watching them, because a good guard foogit will bite too, and their teeth sink in a ways. Not that Ralas needed that kind of protection. Some of the strangers who came to visit her were scarier than any burglar but I never saw her worried or bothered.

I’ve often wondered why it’s okay to despise foogits. So that a foogit pup with a broken leg can lie crying in the middle of a hot fairground and no one will even bring it a bowl of water. I suppose it’s because we hero-worship dragons and foogits play the fool in dragon stories. Usually there is no fool in a dragon story, because stories about dragons are always big and grand and solemn and exciting. But if you want something funny or ridiculous to happen somewhere in a dragon story you’ll probably put in a foogit. I don’t know why a foogit. But there’s a connection between them and dragons somehow. Foogits are a bit dragon-shaped, although they’re hairy and a dragon is scaly. And even the biggest foogit would look pretty silly next to the smallest dragon. Also dragons don’t have topknots of hair that look like huka nests. No one can look dignified with a huka nest on their head.

I’ve seen dragons a few times, and around here the only dragons you’re going to see are the smallest and the oldest and the slowest. But even they have that air about them: that they rule the world and they know it. I don’t know why they let us little thin-skinned squeaky wingless humans order them around. I suppose that makes us feel kind of conceited too. Or maybe awed or even just confused. So then you look at a foogit and I guess it’s sort of a joke, but the joke’s in bad taste. Hard on the foogit, who didn’t ask to look like a small hairy dragon with a silly dance. But if Sippy knew he was a buffoon he never let on. Or maybe he liked it. He was always cheerful and he always cheered me up.

You don’t hear from your apprenticed relatives all that often. They’re too busy being apprentices. We got a letter from Dag about twice a year, depending on there being someone to bring it, and because of the unpredictableness of this, it never seemed strange if we didn’t get any letters. And there hadn’t been any gossip, and now that our village had someone at the Academy every tinker passing through had an Academy story for us. There was just Dag, one day, turning up a week before we were expecting him for his half-year break, looking grey and hollow-eyed. We started out being delighted to see him but it was immediately obvious ʺdelightedʺ was the wrong response. It had been raining for weeks and the first thing I thought was that he’d caught a chill, and started patting my pockets for gislarane; I’d been carrying extra in case anyone I was delivering candles to was feeling shivery and sneezy. I gave him the gislarane but it wasn’t a chill.

The story came out in jerks over the rest of the evening. I’m putting it together in more or less the right order now but he didn’t tell it like this.

At first we thought he must be feverish after all because what he said didn’t seem to make a lot of sense. Then for a while we thought it was about having been jumped a year. But bullying or social exile wasn’t the kind of thing that would get Dag down. I even wondered if he might be in love. I had probably a strange view of love from Ralas’ clientele.

That was closer. But it wasn’t a girl. It was a dragon.

ʺI couldn’t believe it, when the First Flight list went up. I don’t know . . . I don’t understand . . . Hereyta, for all the gods’ sake,ʺ Dag said. ʺI know they say it’s all handed down in the signs and so on. But they could just not do it—or they could tell me they’d changed their minds and I’d take my First Flight next year with my old class.ʺ

Typical of Dag that it didn’t occur to him that this might be awkward or embarrassing.

ʺI can’t believe they’d do this to Hereyta. But they’re not going to change it. Some of the other cadets are pretty upset about it too. Fistagh says I should refuse to Fly.ʺ A grimace that had very little relationship to a smile passed briefly over Dag’s face. ʺI’ve thought of that—it’s about the only thing I have thought of—but not for Fistagh’s reasons.ʺ Fistagh was one of the fourth-years who thought a third-year jumper was a bad idea. ʺBut I’ve decided—I think I’ve decided—that refusing to Fly—to try to Fly—would be even worse for Hereyta.ʺ

Some of why I didn’t get it at first is that I’d been around Sippy too much, and I’d unconsciously begun thinking of dragons as being a kind of very large foogit with less sense of humour and better posture. I’d maybe forgotten about the awe part. And the honour part.

Hereyta was pretty old, although not all that old for a dragon, and mostly retired. She’d flown for the king in the last border wars and been pretty special. They used her at the Academy now for the practical stuff, when the cadets get out of the classrooms their second year and start working with the dragons, and she was a big success there. If Hereyta liked you it really meant something. He’d mentioned her before so I kind of half recognised her name. They’d also been breeding her but while she’d been bred this year she hadn’t settled. ʺI knew she was barren this year,ʺ said Dag, ʺand I’ve been worried about her because I’m afraid if she doesn’t settle next year too. . . .ʺ

There are no romantics on a dragonrider academy staff. They can’t afford it. All the dragons used for training in all the academies are rotated back into the income-earning world every few years to make some money, usually including the breeding stock. Nobody could run an academy if they had to feed all their dragons all the time, and nobody but maybe the king could afford to send their kids to an academy if they had to pay total dragon upkeep as part of the tuition. And a young dragon doesn’t start earning its living till it’s twelve or fifteen years old—some of them don’t reach their full strength till they’re twenty. Hereyta was very special indeed to have been granted the luxury of even semi-retirement, although coping with a lot of cadets can’t be too restful.