Robin McKinley - Fire - Tales of Elemental Spirits

I woke up with a crick in my neck the second night at the Academy, which I discovered was the pot of ache ointment that Ralas had given me. None of us had needed it and I’d forgotten about it (although how it got under my pillow I have no idea) and that morning before breakfast while I was waiting for Dag to sew a last-minute escapist button on his jacket (cadets, even or perhaps especially rogue cadets, had better not ever be seen outside their own rooms in a uniform missing a button: Dag was muttering and scowling, but he was also sewing) I sat on my bed tossing the pot from hand to hand. Sippy, having made sure it wasn’t edible, let me do this without getting in the way. I could feel my face frowning.

Dag stopped scowling when he bit off his thread and looked up. ʺWhat’s wrong? You look kind of like the morning after the night before, except we didn’t have one.ʺ

I stopped tossing the pot. ʺThis is the stuff Ralas gave me, in case we got road sore. And then we didn’t. I was just thinking . . . about Hereyta’s stiff wing . . . I mean, it can’t hurt. If she’d let me. If you’d let me. It’s only a little pot.ʺ Hereyta had a long scar across her belly from her first crown, which didn’t seem to bother her at all, and a stiff wing-joint from her second. And a missing eye from her third.

Dag looked surprised, then thoughtful. ʺWe’ll ask Hereyta.ʺ

I was dragon-besotted enough by then that asking her seemed perfectly reasonable, but I had enough brain left over to wonder how we were going to do it. Dag and she had long conversations—even I could see that—but I didn’t think they were about anything much, most of the time, or if they were, I couldn’t translate. This was going to be one I could actually watch, and maybe I’d learn something.

Except that it wasn’t like that. We brought Hereyta outside and found a little space (which is to say a vast space) away from all the other cadets with their dragons, behind a grove of trees that must have been almost as old as the Academy. There weren’t many of them but they were big gnarly old things and they weren’t totally dwarfed by our dragon. Then Dag told me matter-of-factly to take the lid off my pot and hold it up toward Hereyta.

ʺShe’s not going to pay any attention to me,ʺ I muttered.

ʺYes she is,ʺ said Dag. ʺDo try a little less hard to keep yourself crammed into that dim-little-brother mould of yours.ʺ

I looked up at him, startled, and forgot to keep my shoulders hunched up.

ʺBetter,ʺ he said. ʺYou keep coming with me, and she pays attention to me, doesn’t she? She’s not stupid.ʺ

ʺBut—I—ʺ

ʺYes. Exactly,ʺ said Dag. ʺYou’re going to have to choose. You’re going to have to give it up that you’re a worm, because Hereyta notices you, and Hereyta wouldn’t notice a worm, would she? Or you can think she’s stupid. Your choice.ʺ

I stared at him with my mouth open.

ʺOpen the pot and hold it up,ʺ Dag said inexorably. ʺYou can leave your mouth open too if you want.ʺ

I took the lid off and held it up. Hereyta’s enormous nose descended toward it and then paused, waiting politely.

ʺDab a little on your fingers, and then gesture at her wing, like this,ʺ said Dag, and showed me a kind of sweep-and-point motion, which I half recognised from watching him groom her, and then clumsily followed. Her wing immediately unbent down, toward me, the bottom edge splaying against the ground, and the red lights bucking up out of the creases like live things themselves. Then her head came all the way down till it was resting flat on the ground, the nose pointed straight at me. Her breath poured around me, gentle as a caress, endless as the sea.

Dag nodded. ʺI knew she liked you. Climb up. She’ll take you to where you want to go. Pat her with one hand and then point with the other, and she’ll take you in that direction.ʺ

ʺOh, but—ʺ

ʺDon’t worry. She’s taught dozens of terrified and adoring cadets how to talk to a dragon. She’ll teach you too.ʺ

ʺOh, but—ʺ

ʺWe only use the tapping sticks on formal occasions or when we’re flying,ʺ Dag said nonchalantly as if he thought that would be what I would be asking him about. ʺYour hand’ll be fine.ʺ Dag has a lot of force of personality. I can see why dragons liked him, but it’s hard on little brothers. I swallowed hard. I don’t like heights, and Hereyta was big even for a dragon. I looked at her. Even her nose was taller than I was. But I spent the rest of the day climbing and patting and pointing . . . and rubbing, since there were several leagues of shoulder once I got there, and even through a dragon’s thick skin I could feel some of where the tension and stiffness ran. I almost forgot about how high up I was, at the crest of her spine, where the wing-joints were.

ʺYou could help,ʺ I said, panting, to Dag.

ʺI could,ʺ he agreed, from somewhere out of sight around her rib cage. His voice echoed slightly. ʺBut I’m not going to. This is your show, I think.ʺ The way he said it I didn’t even feel like my older brother was telling me he wasn’t going to do something I wanted him to do. What I thought of was the way he agreed when Ralas told him to take Sippy and me with him. Just like that. No fuss. Although that was about Ralas, of course. And it was me she gave the ointment to.

Dragon skin isn’t, I guess, quite as thick as you think—or anyway as I thought—it’s just that they’re so big, dragons, everything is all about how big they are. Also the bumps and knobs and ridges are thick and hard, but they’re supposed to be protective. The scales in between feel surprisingly like skin—warm and unexpectedly elastic. Although you still have to get down on your hands and knees and lean as hard as you can when you’re trying to rub liniment into a dragon. And the occasional scale-edge bites into your palms. But you know you’ve finally started to get where you want to go when the dragon begins to hum.

By that third day the other cadets were coming back. A few of the fourth-years came around when everyone was eating to gloat at the First Flighters, but it was a nice sort of gloating, a ʺsee you on the other sideʺ kind. Most of the different years did kind of stick together, the first-years together and so on, but you could sure tell that the third-years were a tense bunch. They were huddled together like a regiment in enemy territory. Dag being Dag, he joined the First Flighters but always managed to stay at the edge. I could guess that he’d been like this before the First Flight assignments went up, but it made it easier for the third-years to overlook him now. Except it seemed to me that they didn’t. If anything they were trying to welcome him but he wasn’t making it easy. Dag is a stubborn old geezer and I guessed that whether it was conscious or not he was damned if he was going to be accepted at last because everyone was (nearly) as upset that Hereyta was on the First Flight list as he was. I swear he got taller every time we approached a third-year group.

But there was more to it than that. I didn’t notice, the first two days. One or two people wandered as if idly past where we were sitting and said something to Dag about a dragon, and Dag answered, and they went away again. Then once I did notice that someone seemed to have passed by our table an awful lot for one meal unless he was very hungry or very absent-minded, and finally Eled said to Gham, who were both sitting with us, ʺLet’s go pester the cooks for a few minutes and let poor Chort ask Dag whatever he’s dying to ask him. Ern, you come with us.ʺ

ʺNo, Ern, you stay here,ʺ said Dag. ʺChort has to grow up some day, and Ern’s not even a cadet.ʺ