Robin McKinley - Fire - Tales of Elemental Spirits

We spent the night back in Dag’s old room. Dag slept. I didn’t. By breakfast I was too scared—and tired: no joke—to be hungry. Dag made me drink some blastweed, saying it would make me alert, but I didn’t drink very much, because I was sure being this scared was going to make me need to pee all the time.

We went back upstairs for Dag to climb warily into a spotless new cadet uniform like it was a booby trap. It had been waiting on a peg outside the door when we got back to Dag’s room after supper the night before, and he’d wordlessly pointed to the new stripe on the shoulder and chest. I’d seen it on the fourth-years’ uniforms, so I said, ʺFirst Flight?ʺ and he nodded. This morning it seemed to glitter in the light but that was probably my eyes. I thought Dag’s hands shook a little when he pinned his old badge and new bit of ribbon to it.

They’d found some clothes for me too. They were too large but they were a little more dignified than anything I’d brought with me. I didn’t have dignified clothes. What would I ever need them for? At least they were dull, invisible-making colours. It didn’t occur to me when I put them on that this would have the opposite effect, making me stand out among all the Academy uniforms.

The meeting was held in the big hall at the back of the main building—the building that had been the whole human end of the Academy when it first opened eight hundred years ago. The hall was still big enough to hold everybody who went there—but I swear everyone who had anything at all to do with the Academy was there, not just the students and the tutors and the dragonmasters. There were people standing at the back and sitting in the aisles. Fire hazard, I thought. But no one made them leave.

You know how on winter solstice nights after it gets dark and you’ve done all the rites—or maybe it’s the night after the solstice, depending on, you know, how well the rites get done, especially the ones with lots of libations—and you sit around the fire with your friends and tell stories about the really scary things that happened to your ancestors? Because telling those stories around the solstice is supposed to stop them from happening again, like to us. Our ancestors had a really rough time is all I can say. So maybe it works.

Sooner or later someone asks what everybody’s worst nightmare is. Telling it out loud at the solstice is supposed to stop it from happening too.

I’m here to tell you that this doesn’t work. Because my worst nightmare is being in front of a lot of other people who are staring at me. And here I was. And they really were staring at me. Nobody else. Me. It was much worse than the food halls. The halls are open all the time, and people sort of stream through, and there’s never that many of them at the same time, and the tutors and dragonmasters mostly eat somewhere else, and it’s all groups around tables, not rows and rows of chairs all pointed in the same direction with a stage at the front, organised for staring. Everyone would’ve known that Hereyta was in First Flight this year with Dag, and word would have got round that they’d actually made Flight. And I knew from yesterday that they’d decided to pin that on me. So everybody was staring at the one person up on that horrible great stage that wasn’t wearing an Academy uniform. Who also, just in case they missed that bit, had a foogit with him. Maybe telling your worst nightmare hadn’t worked for me because I could only bring myself to tell it out loud if it was only my own family listening.

So I took one look at that sea of faces and closed down and went off in my head somewhere. Well, not quite. Sippy wanted me there so I had to leave a little of me behind in the hall to keep him company—and get ready to grab if he got reassured enough to want to go cruising for new friends. I don’t know what his worst nightmare was. Maybe taking a dive off a flying dragon, and he’d lived through that.

But I was enough not-there that it took me a minute to recognise the person coming down the centre aisle toward the stage platform where Dag and I and Sippy and half a dozen more blue and red and yellow coats from the Academy were sitting. Setyep was the only other red and yellow cadet besides Dag; the rest were all the blue and red higher-ups. The old guy from yesterday was the only other person I recognised, although how much you can say you recognise someone when you don’t know his name I don’t know, but what he’d said yesterday was kind of etched into me. (Even if I’d forgotten to ask Dag later what his name was and who he was. I was kind of concentrating on what he’d said.) I was actually staring at him (which meant I was facing away from the audience, which was the crucial part) and vaguely thinking about it that all the other blue and red coats seemed to be deferring to him, like he wasn’t just another blue and red coat, he was the blue and red coat.

So I didn’t notice her till she was walking up the steps to the platform. I’d seen her out of the corner of my eye but, so? There were a million people out there, what was one more? Even if she was walking down the aisle and coming up on the stage. But the walk was familiar. I wasn’t looking at the person but the way she moved was familiar.

It was familiar. She was. It was Ralas.

She seemed perfectly calm. Well, she was always perfectly calm. It occurred to me she was like a dragon that way, or anyway like Hereyta. Someone falls at Ralas’ feet with bright red blood coming wham wham wham out of somewhere so you know they’re not going to last long, she’s still calm. I saw this once. I’m the one stood on the wound—because I was too small and feeble just to press on it—to stop the rest of the blood coming out while she dribbled a little green herbal goo under his tongue and stuck a xan leaf on his forehead with a little dir paste and then got out her needle and thread and went to work. He lived too.

What was she doing here? She looked up as if she felt my eyes on her—she looked up so quickly it was like she’d been waiting to feel my eyes on her—and gave me a friendly, level look back like she was going to be interested in what I had to say for myself and she was keeping an open mind. She’d given me that look when I’d brought Sippy to her the first time, after I’d bungled setting his leg. I don’t know why I always expected her to yell at me. She never did. She was always kind and she always had an open mind.

What was she doing here? I couldn’t think of any way it was going to be good news. Maybe she was going to tell them how I always meant well even if I usually messed it up. But that was hardly worth dragging her all this way for. They must have sent for her—they must have sent a dragon for her—before I woke up and told them I didn’t have a clue how Hereyta got in and out of the Firespace and I couldn’t tell them how to do it and no, I wasn’t going to make a habit of waiting till she was a league in the air and then dropping Sippy over the edge and jumping after him. Not even for Hereyta. If I’d’ve done it for anyone, I’d’ve done it for Hereyta, but . . . no.

There was an empty chair on the other side of Dag and she sat down in it. She smiled at me. It was a ʺthere are more people out there staring at us than there are in the world and this bothers you why?ʺ sort of smile. I came a little more out of my daze for that smile. But I still kept my eyes away from the audience. Sippy had to say hello to Ralas of course but she even makes crazy foogits calmer so he said hello and then he came back to me and lay down, sort of wrapping himself around my ankles like he was making sure I didn’t try to run away.

The old guy stood up and everybody fell silent like they’d all turned to stone. I would ask Dag again after this was over (if I lived that long) who he was. The problem was that both times I’d seen him before the experience was so extreme I forgot. And this time was going to be even more extreme so I’d probably forget again, and harder, if you can forget harder.