“Gee, Dad,” Garth said, “why not rub it in a little more?”
As Noctis had done a moment before, Garth spoke to me using the unique telepathy that existed between dragonmancers and their dragons. It was a gift, a link, opened between rider and dragon during the Transfusion Ceremony. It resulted in an intimacy and fluidity of battle awareness that was said to be unparalleled.
That might have been so, but when three minds shared a single space, I couldn’t help but be reminded of sitting at a table with three people all trying to talk over one another.
With an abruptness that tore an involuntary gasp from my throat, Garth and I speared out from the underbelly of the cloud layer. Suddenly, the world below us transformed from a blank, misty gray into a patchwork of rolling, living topography.
Garth turned his head sideways, peering at me through one of his all-black, silver-pupiled eyes. Fronds surrounded his head in a captivating crest, pulsating red in time with his heartbeat. They were pressed to his neck by the wind of his speed.
He opened his mouth and gave me a dragon’s approximation of an excited grin.
I snorted and grinned back.
“All right, slow down and let’s get our game faces on, eh?” I thought.
“You’re the boss,” Garth replied, his head facing forward again, though the toothy grin remained.
“And don’t you forget it, kiddo,” I said.
Garth’s wings opened, and the rate of our descent slowed.
Simultaneously, on either side of me and from behind, there came the snapping and popping sounds. The dragons of my three companions—Penelope, Saya, and Tamsin—had also all opened up their wings.
A smile lit my face at the sound of my fellow dragonmancers following my lead. This smile dimmed a little as I realized that the only person missing, really, from our formation was Elenari.
The red-headed elf was currently caring for my other son, Wayne. He was a dragonling in need of a special crystal before he could mature into a fully-fledged dragon, like his half-brother, Garth.
The worry that accompanied the thought of Wayne gnawed at my insides, but with some difficulty, I pushed it to the back of my mind.
Dragons did not feel empathy, not as humans did. That was what made them such ruthlessly efficient hunters and killers. It was what made them so feared in battle. It was why they could live for hundreds and hundreds of years and survive where most other things perished. Even though Garth was Wayne’s half-brother, the Pearl Dragon showed little concern for the danger posed to his dragonling brother.
“He will either survive or he won’t,” he told me, tapping into my thoughts as I ran my eyes over the countryside spread out far below us. “It’s not like we can do anything from here, so why waste time thinking about it?”
Before I could think of a fatherly way to tell Garth to shut up and be less of an asshole, Noctis said, “The young one is right, Mike. Face one battle at a time. Focus on the one in front of you now and prepare to fall upon your foes like a thunderbolt. Decimate them and then waste your energy worrying about that which you cannot yet change.”
I gave my head a little shake. Tried to instill myself with some of that coldblooded dragon mentality.
“Good team talk, boys,” I thought drily. “You’d make a hell of a pair of shrinks. Remind me never to call you in to help me talk someone off a ledge.”
“There!” Tamsin the red-skinned hobgoblin yelled from my right. She leaned forward across the neck of her Force Dragon, Fyzos, so that her long black hair streamed behind her like a pennant. “I can see our coteries just to the south of us, about fifteen hundred feet below.”
I followed where her yellow eyes were gazing and saw that she was right.
Our coteries—the trio of specially selected soldiers that acted as each dragonmancer’s personal squad of bodyguards—were, indeed, a head of us. They had set out that morning, well before us, in the magical floating skiffs that reminded me so much of Viking longboats. With the aid of my dragon-boosted vision, I could just make out the gleaming white skin of Bjorn in the lead longboat. Although from this distance, I couldn’t see the details, I did not doubt that the half-Jotunn warrior would be clinging to the mainmast like a princess to her virginity.
“How do you want to go about this, Mike?” Penelope called over the rush of the wind and the thrum of the taut membrane of our dragons’ wings. The all-blue Knowledge Sprite was hunkered down over the neck of Glizbe, her Rooster Dragon. Penelope’s navy Librarian robes whipping about her.
I considered her question. War and battle, or so our preceptors at Drako Academy tried to tell us, was often one big game of deception. It was the ultimate life and death competition. Oftentimes, it was the smarter, subtler, and more patient warrior that walked off the battlefield victorious.
Except, other times, you had to make an example. Sometimes, there was more to be gained by charging into the fray like a bull elephant on bad acid running through a glassware shop. It was important to remind the bastards of the Mystocean Empire what would happen to them if they stepped out of line.
It was like medieval public relations—rain down hell upon your foes today, and maybe the next bunch of professional dickwads will think twice before they do something naughty.
I remembered something one of my favorite authors
