The Boon of Alon

CHAPTER NINE

Now that I can go get greasy with the other recruits in the mornings, I'm going to have to wait for the next rest day for any serious hunting in the archive. I might not be able to talk to Iamon, but other people have, and with any luck, someone has written about him. Maybe there's a journal from one of his past riders—there's a whole section of the archive for riders' journals. Then I can figure out how to approach him.

In the meantime, I meet Arnelia, another red dragon, and Zuri, who's blue. Our conversations are much like the one I had with Asper; I don't know what I want to do with my life, so the dragons tell me about their past riders. It's nice to know I'm not the only one who just sort of ended up here—a couple of Arnelia's riders were more interested in getting away from something, like me, but chose to stay. One of Zuri's, too. I'm a little boggled at how easily these people made a lifetime commitment without the driving desire for justice that other riders had—but then, it's not like the dragons can tell me nearly as much about the recruits who gave up and left.

"I have a question for you to consider," Zuri tells me when I'm nearly done oiling her, as she lifts her wing enough that I can get under it. Chama is nearby, ostensibly supervising, but actually chatting loudly with another rider now that I've got the hang of this. Under the wing of a dragon, though, her voice is muffled, and the world feels comfortably small.

"I'll hear it," I say. I have a lot of questions to consider already, so what's one more?

"Do you have plans that would take you away from this place?" she asks me.

"Well... no. I don't have any plans. That's kind of the problem." And that's why I have all these riders to compare myself to now.

"Then, if you have no desire for anything in particular, why does it matter what path you take?"

Dragons, I'm finding, are very good at probing. They always seem to find your softest parts to stick their claws in, no matter how you try to hide them.

"It's not like I don't want stuff," I say defensively.

She waits for me to elaborate, and I fight the urge to fill the silence. That's another thing dragons are good at—getting you to spill your guts. I haven't said anything about the prophecies or my boon to any dragon yet, but I don't think I'm going to last much longer. Assuming they don't already know—Arnet could have told them.

"I think I'm worried that if I stay here, I could someday find something I do really want to do and I won't be able to," I say finally, wiping my sponge across the sky-blue underside of her wing. "But that's normal, right?"

"For your age, yes."

"So, what, I'm gonna grow out of it?"

Zuri chuffs, which in my experience so far has been the dragon equivalent of a chuckle. "You will learn to find satisfaction within, instead of without."

I can't help but groan. Zuri chuffs again and peers under her wing at me.

"You said you 'want stuff'," she says. "Like what?"

I want to earn my boon and get out from under the yoke of the two prophecies I've been caught in. Both of those are things I've been trying not to talk about.

But I figure word about at least one prophecy is going to get out, sooner or later. "I... accidentally kind of triggered a prophecy, and I want to get out of it?"

"This prophecy being...?"

I sigh and move on to another part of her wing. "The tourney champion could only be defeated by her true love. And I defeated her."

"That doesn't sound that bad," Zuri says wryly. "Are you in love with someone else?"

"No." I barely had time for the occasional fling, let alone a real relationship.