The Boon of Alon

CHAPTER FIVE

In the morning, Erno comes and finds me in the dining room. It's a little cold for the thin tunic and leggings I had on under my tourney outfit yesterday, but it's not like I had a chance to pack; I'm going to need to track down some new clothes. And apparently some leather, because that's half of what the riders here seem to wear. They come and go as I eat and I get a few welcomes but no confusion—I guess word has spread already.

"There aren't a lot of us," Erno explains. "So I'll give you the rest of the tour today, too. All the recruits have training and the riders who aren't out traveling have chores... I've already bonded with a dragon, but I can't take the oath yet, so I don't have as much to do." He shrugs—I guess he's not too upset about the lack of responsibility, even if it means he isn't a rider yet. "My dragon is Merald. You'll see him eventually, but for now you can't actually meet the dragons, because someone has to agree to mentor you first. And obviously I can't do it."

He might not be a full rider, but he seems to know his way around this place pretty well, so it's not that obvious. But I think my pride would take a hit being mentored by a teenager, anyway. He leads me outside to get a better look at the garden we passed last night, and the training grounds out back—in the permanent shadow of the mountain behind and the monastery in front, there's a running track, a few training dummies, and a shed with "equipment" he doesn't bother to define—but there's not much more to see. Particularly because he won't take me down to the silty mountain lake where the trainees meet the dragons. He just points it out from atop a winding stone staircase cut into the mountainside, leading to a dirt path that meanders down to where a few dozen dragons—colorful like wildflowers in a field, and they look so small from this distance—lounge at the water's edge.

"Soon!" he tells me, holding me by the elbow like I'm gonna bolt down the stairs anyway. It's tempting, despite the residual ache from yesterday. "It's just that someone has to teach you everything, and we don't have, you know, a dedicated person for that. I bet Chama will mentor you, but she's gonna want a couple days to settle back in and decide. Look—you can see Arnet from here."

He points; the dragon in question is a red splotch well down alongside the lake, further than most from the bottom of the trail. I can see Chama, too, when she pauses hauling a full bucket towards him to pick up a rock and skip it across the lake. I can just barely make out the ripples as they spread across the lake's glassy surface.

With grounds covered, Erno leads me back to the archive and tells me I can read whatever I want until the other trainees come back up from the lake. I've never been much of a reader—not much time on the circuit for that—but after signing Boss's contract I made sure I learned how to read it. So, rather than pick anything in particular, I wander through the shelves, trying to get a sense of what kind of archive it is. There's some kind of register near the door, where Chama has scrawled my name, but most of the books are tucked neatly onto their shelves. I tilt my head and squint at the titles as I pass. Mostly history, it looks like. Makes sense.

More interesting is the size of the archive—it must take up almost half the monastery. Which makes sense, too. The riders are devoted to Hrat, and though I would think the more relevant of her domains is justice, she is also the god of knowledge. And there is a lot of knowledge here. There was a notable lack of worship space on my tour, considering this place is called a monastery, but then, maybe this archive counts.

It's impossible to know which stories about the gods are true and which are just stories, but the ones I can remember offhand about Alon and Hrat always seem to have them in conflict. Their domains are adjacent, communication to knowledge, lawyers to justice—usually, Alon wins the argument initially, but Hrat gets her way in the end, and there's no hard feelings on either side...supposedly. I just hope that someone booned by one god but devoting herself to another isn't the kind of thing that'll set off a conflict, amicable or not. Gods—I hope they aren't watching me.