That was it.
I had a sneaking suspicion as to who got the letter here. It was the kind of thing that Manuel would have done, though why wouldn't he have given it to me when I had seen him before?
Still, my heart hammered, and excitement filled me.
Joran was coming to the city.
I smiled to myself, and was left with other emotions I had not anticipated—excitement, yes, but maybe a little embarrassment that I hadn’t reached for the magic yet.
How would Joran react?
My oldest friend would probably tease me about failing to become a dragon mage, but then he would be jealous when he learned that I could be a dragon rider.
I smiled again. Now I only had to figure out how to find him when he came to the city. I wanted to figure out why he was coming, as well.
It didn't matter though.
And when Joran arrived, my months of feeling isolated here would no longer matter either.
And maybe, I had to hope, he could stay for a while.
5
Heat radiated from the dragons, and I stood outside of their pens, watching them. The dragon pens were made out of metal worked with a hint of dragon magic, the metal itself unlike anything that I had ever experienced before, and perpetually warm. Patterns were worked into the metal, so finely wrought that they blurred into the metal itself—you could only determine what they were by tracing your fingers along it. Perhaps by using power as well, though I didn't have that experience.
The bars of the pens stretched high above. The only way in was through a gate in the center of the pen. It was not enclosed at the top. There was no purpose in doing so. It was not designed to keep the dragons in, but to keep others out.
The small greenish dragon that had come back to the city with me was curled up in the corner of the yard, watching. This dragon was small, larger than a horse, but not nearly as massive as so many of the other dragons within the pens. He had grown in the time that we had returned to the capital and now his scaled sides glittered in the sunlight. A heat washed over him, giving him an energy that caught my awareness.
I focused, thinking about the power that radiated between myself and the dragon, using the techniques that I had learned within the Academy. I needed to breathe, to focus, and to find some way to recognize how to channel that power.
Those were the steps.
I moved on from my breathing, trying to feel for the heat within me, though it came suddenly and faint. I steadied my breathing, focusing on each breath within my lungs, thinking about just how much I needed to find some energy buried deep within me.
Finally, I attempted to relax. It hadn’t worked all that well for me out in the forest, but while standing this close to the dragon, especially one that I knew that I could connect to, I had to hope that I would be able to feel that connection.
I readied for the possibility that it would strike me in the chest when I did, throwing me back. It had happened when I’d been in the forest.
“Do you always stand there and stare at the dragons? I don’t think they will do anything more than what they have.”
I turned to see a dark-haired woman watching me. She had on a plain brown cloak, and she watched me with dark oval eyes. There was something almost impossibly alluring about her. I smiled. “You might be surprised.”
The woman approached slowly, and she leaned up against the bars of the dragon pen, squeezing them. When I had been here before, I had never seen anyone other than the students at the Academy who had been willing to approach the dragons so closely.
“I think they are impressive, but I feel bad for them.”
I tipped my head to the side, frowning at her. “You feel bad?”
The woman nodded and took a deep breath. “They’re captives here.”
“This is only where they sleep,” I said. “Most of the time, the dragons are free to travel wherever they would like.” I thought of the black dragon that had flown away from me, the one that Jerith had used to test me. Those dragons were not in captivity. “You aren’t with the Academy.”
She shook her head as she glanced over to me, holding my gaze with her dark eyes. They practically swallowed me. “Are you?”
I nodded, staring through the bars of the cage at the dragon. “I’ve been here for a few months.”
“A few months?” She arched a brow. “Most students at the Academy are younger, are they not?”
I shrugged. “I came here following a testing out beyond the borders of the forest.”
Her eyes widened slightly. “The Wilds?”
Why did everybody keep assuming that I came from the Wilds? Did so few people within the kingdom know that there was anything beyond the forest? Did everybody really believe that the Wilds were all that was there?
“Not the Wilds. I came from the city of Berestal. Well, not quite from the city, but outside of it.”
“I don’t have much experience with those who trained at the Academy,” she said, “but I would not have expected someone like yourself.”
I shrugged. “I suppose I wouldn’t have expected someone like myself either.”
She turned her attention to the bars of the cage, staring through. “Why this dragon?”
“No reason,” I said. She didn’t need to know the dragon seemed to call to me. I couldn’t really explain it, anyway. There was a sense of power that came from the dragon. While it was similar to what I detected from the other dragons, it wasn’t
