Dragons Rising ✔️

Ch 4: Hopes and Threats

I was up to my elbows in dirty straw when someone knocked on the door to Leera's empty stall. "Give me a second." Cursing quietly, I felt through the wheelbarrow full of straw in search of my necklace. The stupid clasp had broken, and now it was going to be covered in literal prip. If it was just a cheap nickel piece, I might've left it, but in addition to holding my alabri, the chain also held the red amillian crystal that was with me when my parents found me on their front porch. Covered in prip or not, I couldn't lose it.

"Ugh, that is not horse prip. Unless horses've started eating bones?" Ashyr's annoying voice made me spin around.

"What're you doing here?" I moved to shove her toward the front doors, but I didn't need to; my gloves were plenty nasty to drive her back from a distance. The dragons were all out in the exercise enclosure, so she couldn't have seen them yet. Maybe I could sell this as an experimental horse stable with very large stalls and meat-based diets.

Before I could even try, Ashyr pulled her wand out from behind her ear and drew a green rune in the air. Two particularly pungent red flowers grew from my gloves. They did little to conceal the smell.

"Cut that out." I plucked the flowers off and tossed them at her. They'd left two uneven holes in the middle of my gloves. "Come on, these are the only ones I have." Fraitan would take them out of my salary, too. "If the smell bothers you this much, just go home. Whatever you want can wait. Oh, and it is horse prip. It's an experimental diet to improve-"

She scoffed. "I'm sixteen, not three." Putting her hands on her hips, she cocked her head to the side. Her dirty blond ringlets dangled like they were just asking to get a handful of prip rubbed in them. "You're lucky I'm in a good mood. And I've got a history assignment due tomorrow."

"What does your history assignment have to do with- Ah. You want me to buy your silence." With school and work, I didn't have time to do her homework too. At least, I couldn't do it long-term.

But I didn't have to do it long-term. I only needed to keep my job at the stables a secret until the Choosing Ceremony in five days. Then I could sneak out to the ceremony, convince a dragon to choose me as a rider, and go to the Dragon Rider Academy where I could finally do something exciting and worthwhile with my life. Somehow. I hadn't exactly figured out how I was going to get a dragon to choose me, but one of them had to do it, right? I'd worked with a different dragon each week for more than a year, and Leera and Firehorn were the only ones that hadn't gotten along great with me.

I could do whatever Ashyr wanted me to for the next five days, as long as it kept me from getting locked in my room and missing the ceremony.

"Fine, okay? I'll do your stupid history assignment."

"And clean the chimney."

I gritted my teeth. She could clean the chimney in like ten minutes using magic. It would take me an hour without it. "And I'll clean the chimney."

She flashed me a fake smile. "That's it for today. I'm sure I'll have more for you tomorrow."

"Great." I waved her off, and she finally left.

I dug my necklace out of the wheelbarrow, wheeled the load of dirty straw out to the compost pile, and re-covered the floor of Leera's stall with clean straw. Then came the hard part—cleaning Leera. Fraitan liked the dragons to be practically shining, which was difficult when they spent most of the day rolling around in the dirt outside.

I tossed a leg of smelly barrelback meat into Leera's trough so she would be distracted when I brought her in. One hand on my shockstick and one on my chain, I reluctantly went out to the exercise yard. Leera was muzzled and taking it very badly, if the gouges in the muzzle were anything to go by. She was chained to one of the fence's support pillars, and Firehorn was chained to another across the enclosure. At least I wouldn't have to worry about him today.

"Come on," I murmured, reaching for Leera's metal collar. She looked down at me but didn't move, so I had to jump up and down until I managed to get the chain through the hook on her collar. Once I unchained her from the fence, she walked back to her stall with little resistance. I felt almost like a rider, with a majestic beast following my every whim. It would be incredible to ride a class 7 like her, but unfortunately, only chosen riders were allowed to do that.

As soon as I had Leera in her stall, I chained her to a support post and retrieved an armful of cleaning supplies from the tack shed. She was growling at her trough and clawing her muzzle again.

Sighing, I reluctantly took her muzzle off. She could be pushy, but she never bit or clawed the stable hands. As she ate, I grabbed a rag in one hand, a brush in the other, and a bucket of soapy water with my tail. The one good thing about scales was that they wouldn't get wet and grimy when I used my tail as a third hand.

"Need some assistance?"

I turned to see Tawny at the door. "You can't possibly be done with your dragon already."

"BlueIsle is class 5. She and her stall have significantly less surface area." She took the brush.

"Well, I'd love the help. I have to clean the chimney after I get home, and I'd like to have a few free minutes before I crash tonight." I made a face.

She mimicked my grimace. "Sounds... unpleasant."

"You can say that again." I dipped my rag into the water and started scrubbing the soft scales under Leera's wings. Tawny used the wire brush on Leera's armored chest plates.

"What class do you prefer?" she asked after a minute.

I smiled at the common conversation starter. It was something I'd heard other kids at school talking about, but they'd never really invited me to join in.

"The larger classes, like 7 or 8, they're the coolest, but they're so high maintenance. And I'm always worried they're going to forget I'm there and claw my feet off by accident. What about you?"

"I prefer class fives. They have sufficient bulk to be a decent threat to larger dragons, but I would hardly call them vicious. Also, they are much more common, which means we actually have a chance of being chosen by one." She stood on her tiptoes to reach the plates on Leera's neck, while I worked my way along Leera's wing.

The last time I told someone I honestly thought I'd become a dragon rider, they laughed in my face. "You really think we have a chance?"

"A chance, certainly. A large chance..." She leaned her head from one side to the other. "Unbiased research concerning the Choosing Ceremony is hard to find, but what little I did find said that few talmes are chosen purely because we form the end of the line. Dragons act only on instinct, and their instincts tell them to choose a rider as quickly as possible once they turn ten—at the ceremony—so they go for the people at the beginning of the line first, making it seem like they prefer cinems and elents. However, slightly younger dragons could theoretically wander along the line for a few minutes or even a few hours more before their instincts become active, increasing their chances of choosing a talme."

"Ah. I see." So basically, it didn't matter how much the dragons liked me, only how old they were. All this time I'd spent working at the stables wouldn't change a thing. It was entirely likely I'd be stuck as a nobody and a freak under my parents' strict care for the rest of my life.