Traitor (5 page)

He pressed his lips together uncomfortably, glancing down to my belt where I had the scimitar clipped against my hip. “I know. I gave it to your brother for safekeeping. I’m glad to see he kept his word.”

Closing my hand around the newly refurbished hilt, I drew the blade from its sheath so he could see how it had been restored. “I saw it in a dream, too. I’ve seen a lot in my dreams. Horrible things; things everyone else says can’t possibly be true.”

Sile took the scimitar from my hands and held it up to the light. The expression on his face was distant, maybe even a little sad. It was as though he was remembering something—something that had happened a long time ago. “The first time I saw this blade, the person who gave it to me asked me to destroy it,” he said in a quiet, somber voice. “I couldn’t do it. Even then, it just felt wrong.”

“Was it my father?” I guessed.

He didn’t answer right away. He just ran his thumb over the stag head engraved upon the pommel. “Until that moment, I wouldn’t have refused him any favor he asked of me. Your father and I were like brothers. We both served in the infantry as common foot soldiers. We went through training together. We were both newly married with young wives waiting for us at home, and neither of us had an extra dime to spare. We weren’t fighting for glory or because we even believed in the king’s campaigns. We fought to put food on the table. It was our struggles that brought us together.”

I watched Sile carefully as he turned the blade over, inspecting the runic marks engraved down the length. When our eyes met at last, he handed the scimitar back to me. “Your father was a different man back then. Much different than the one you know now. He was a lot like you, actually. I always admired his bravery—brave to the point of stupidity. Surrender just wasn’t in his vocabulary.”

I remembered Sile saying something to me like that before. Still, it was hard to imagine that he and my father had been close friends. It was even harder to imagine my father being brave or even friendly. I’d never seen that side of him. The Ulric I had known growing up was cruel, intolerant, and harsh. He hated me. He’d beaten me more times than I dared to count, and had basically abandoned me once I started my training to become a dragonrider.

Needless to say, I wasn’t in a hurry to start feeling sorry for him.

“Then it is true,” I replied, “what I’m seeing in my dreams; the gray elf warrior and the death of the king. It all happened, didn’t it?”

Sile wouldn’t meet my gaze again. “It’s not time to talk about that yet.”

I started to get frustrated. He was clamming up, right when I was about to get some good answers. “What about my father, then? He stole the god stone from Luntharda, didn’t he?”

That one answer would have been enough to satisfy me. But Sile wouldn’t give me anything. He just put his hand on my shoulder, like he was trying to reassure me. “Have some patience, Jaevid. I know it doesn’t seem fair. But you, of all people, should understand that there is no fairness in this world anymore.”

What more could I say? None of my questions were going to be answered—that much was clear to me now. Standing there arguing with him was pointless.

I turned my back to Sile long enough to pick up all my gear again, grumbling angry words under my breath the whole time. By the time I turned back around … he was gone. Sile had vanished like a ghost without a trace, and I was left standing there gaping at the patch of empty floor where he’d been only a few seconds ago.

My mind felt like someone had taken a jar full of moths and shaken it just to watch them panic. Thoughts and worries fluttered through my brain, frantic and directionless with no hope in sight. I was so confused about what he had asked me to do. It sounded impossible, not to mention suicidal. I was angry with him for even suggesting it, especially when he still wouldn’t tell me what was going on in the first place. I couldn’t see how going into Luntharda and getting disemboweled by gray elves or eaten by some monster would make things better for anyone, least of all me. Besides, it had taken me years to win the trust of my dragonrider brothers. Marching into Luntharda out of the blue would completely destroy that.

I wasn’t going to do it. My mind was made up even before I finished putting on all my layers of weatherproofed padding and battle armor. The work was a welcomed distraction, and I took my time fixing Mavrik’s saddle snuggly against his scaly hide. I buckled down my bag of possessions, checked every belt and buckle over again, and then took one last look at the view of the academy from inside Mavrik’s stall.

Sitting in the saddle with my legs fitted down into the sheaths on either side of his body, I was looking down Mavrik’s neck and snout at the steep drop to the ground below. The morning sun made the sky burn brilliant red and it cast a pink glow over the snow-crested mountains. My heart was beating with wild, anxious energy.

This was it—the turning point. The minute we left this place behind, my days as a student were over forever. There was no going back.

I gave Mavrik’s neck a pat. He chirped in response, and I felt the muscles in his shoulders grow tense under his hard, plated scales. He flexed, letting out a thunderous roar as we leapt into the air. He spread his wings wide, catching the wind and immediately surging upward toward the breaking dawn.

Northwatch was so close to the border of Luntharda it made me restless just to look at it. Less than ten miles away, the ominous wild jungle of Luntharda loomed with nothing to separate it from Maldobar except a big, man-made wall of stacked stone. I could imagine the soldiers inside the citadel always kept one eye trained on that wall, dreading the day they saw something nightmarish coming over it.

Over the top of the wall, I could see the dark, massive trunks of trees that stood like giant columns. They grew so close together, they seemed to make a wall of their own, and the interwoven canopy of their branches squeezed every drop of light from the air.

The tower of Northwatch itself was much more impressive, though. It was an enormous structure with many skinny slot-shaped windows and different tiered levels going up at least fifty stories into the air. It stuck out of the center of a city like a great black spike, visible from miles and miles away. In fact, it was the first thing I had spotted on the horizon that let me know I was getting close. The king’s gold and blue banners hung like frayed old rags, fluttering tiredly against a dull gray sky.

A snowbound city lay just outside the tower’s main gate. Three circular walls surrounded the base of the tower, each one with tall ramparts lined with what looked like giant crossbows made of wood and steel. I’d read about those kinds of weapons during my training. They were used to launch javelins at enemies on the ground or in the air, but it took at least two men to fire them. From the air, I could see infantry soldiers dressed in armor walking the ramparts, manning their posts, and operating the heavy gates leading in and out of the tower.

The lower levels looked plain enough from the outside, but the upper levels all had broad, open platforms where dragons could land. Huge arched doorways led from the platforms into the tower, and iron gates closed off all the entryways to keep enemy forces from slipping inside. It truly was a fortress—a structure made of dark stone and iron—and nothing about it was beautiful at all. Jace had jokingly called it the “spearhead of the war” once, and now I understood why.

It was growing dark when Mavrik and I made our final descent and circled the tower, looking for a good place to land. Fortunately, the platforms were lit with braziers, and I quickly spotted a few soldiers gathering on the end of one. They were waving green flags and giving me hand signals to land. After spending all day in the saddle, crossing most of the kingdom without stopping, I was happy to oblige. My rear end was sore and my back was aching from straddling Mavrik for so long. I was ready to pry all the heavy armor off my body as soon as possible.

As we prepared to land, Mavrik flared his powerful wings and stretched out his hind legs like an eagle. The floor of the platforms had been coated with something like tar mixed with gravel. It gave the dragons something to grip onto with their claws when they touched down. As soon as we landed, the iron gate at the end of the platform was cranked open, and a few more soldiers came out to greet us.

I let out a sigh of relief. When I pulled my helmet off, I got a deep breath of the bitterly cold air. We were farther north than I’d ever been before, and the air was so cold it almost hurt to breathe it in. It made my long, sweaty hair feel cold against my neck and back.

After unbuckling myself from the saddle, I climbed down and started to unfasten my bag. Being so far up in the air, near the top of the tower, meant the wind was howling. It made it difficult to hear anything.

But I did hear a voice shout at me, “Toss it here!”

I glanced back to see who it was.

Jace was standing right behind me, his steely eyes as piercing as ever. It was like staring a wolf in the eye, and when I was his student, it had been terrifying to try to meet his gaze. But I was used to it now.

I wasn’t surprised he had come out to meet me. He’d been expecting me to arrive all day, after all. I was a little shocked he was offering to help with my gear, though. He wasn’t usually so … friendly.

Until recently, he’d been my instructor at the academy; one of the men responsible for making sure I was ready for battle. Now he was my partner, so I started wondering if that meant things would be different between us.

“Hurry it up; we can’t have the gate open for more than a few minutes. Safety procedures.” Jace held out a hand expectantly, so I tossed my go-bag with all my equipment and possessions to him.

I carried my helmet under my arm as I followed Jace into the tower. Mavrik crawled along behind us, chirping curiously at the unfamiliar surroundings. As soon as we had all passed into the entryway tunnel, a pair of infantrymen turned a huge crank that dropped the heavy iron gate back into place. I have to admit, having that metal partition made me feel a little safer—but only a little.

Jace gave me a quick tour of the upper levels of the tower. All the dragonriders posted here were housed in the top ten floors. Even our dragons had their own floor that had been designed like a large stable. It could accommodate several hundred of our scaly companions but there wasn’t much room to spare. They each had a stall that felt cramped. It was just big enough for a dragon to squeeze in, curl up, and sleep. The floors were covered with old hay and there were water troughs that Jace said were refilled daily.

Everything in the tower seemed dark because of how few windows there were. It was like we were all living on top of one another, with barely enough room to breathe. Because of that, the air had a twinge of salty sweatiness to it that reminded me of the gymnasium at the academy where we had combat training. Man-smell.

I got Mavrik settled into his stall, which wasn’t easy. He didn’t like the close quarters. Lucky for me, he was too exhausted to give me much trouble about it. After I fed him, filled his water trough, and rubbed down his back where my saddle had probably made him sore, his big yellow eyes started to get droopy. He yawned widely, showing me all his jagged fangs and the back of his throat, before he flopped down and put his snout on his tail. As I left his stall, he sent cozy, satisfied colors swirling through my brain.

I didn’t dare have any expectations about what my room was going to look like. Turns out that was a good thing. I probably would have been disappointed otherwise.

It wasn’t much better than Mavrik’s stall, to be honest. Granted, we were on the most dangerous and active battlefront in the kingdom. Things were bound to be rugged. When Jace let me in and tossed my bag onto the floor, he gestured to the cramped little space that we would be sharing. There wasn’t much to it: one small, skinny window, two rickety single beds on opposite sides of the room, and one washstand with a cracked mirror.

“Just be glad you aren’t on the infantry floors,” Jace said with a smirk. “There are four of them in a room this size.”

“Oh.” Frankly, I was just relieved to see a bed with my name on it. I went over to sit on it. The mattress sank horribly, and it smelled like it had been used—a lot. But I was too tired to care. “So do we get to go out into the city at all?”

Jace shrugged. “Occasionally, when we aren’t on waiting shift. There are about two hundred riders here. We all answer to Colonel Bragg. He runs this tower and every rider in it. He’s your new boss. Chances are, you won’t meet him—and that’s a good thing. You don’t want to meet him. Meeting him means you did something stupid and he’s about to hang you by your toenails for it.”

I made a mental note of that as I started unbuckling my cloak and taking off all the layers of my riding armor and weatherproofed padding beneath. I dressed down to my plain uniform, kidney belt, vambraces, and boots. Since that’s all Jace was wearing, I reasoned it was probably okay for me, too.

“Like I said,” Jace continued, “we’re all in one of two shifts. We call them squadrons. There’s Blue Squadron and Gold Squadron. We rotate duties to keep everything running as smoothly as possible. Waiting shift means you are on standby, ready to deploy immediately when the battle horn sounds. You can’t leave the tower during that time, and you’re expected to devote your spare time to resting and keeping up with your training. Then there’s working shift, which means you’ve recently come back from battle. You’ll be responsible for helping maintain your area of the tower, mucking dragon stalls, repairing gear, that kind of thing. When one squadron does deploy, we do what we can to make sure all the work gets done. We all do our part to keep this place livable. When you’re on working shift, you can leave the tower for short periods of time, but never without your wing end. Just because you’re on working shift doesn’t mean you can’t be called up for duty if there’s a dire need.”