Page 55 of Court of Rivals
There’s a knock at my bedroom door.
I call out, “Who is it?” from the bed.
“Roland,” comes a voice from the other side.
“Come in!”
A second later, he enters. His cheeks heat when he finds me on the bed. “Uh, it’s practice time with the dragons.”
I sit up, still frustrated by a schedule I can’t quite understand. “How should I know where to go and what to do?”
He looks sheepish. “It just takes time to figure out what we do.”
“Fair enough,” I say, sitting up and climbing off the bed. “So any advice for today? The princes seem to want me to follow their lead, but the dragons seem to be only willing to follow Ebron.”
Roland takes a minute to think, while I put my dagger into the belt at my hip.
“I guess if you’re going to lead, lead well. Stop doing crazy stuff, like flying into the water. Direct Ebron how to lead. Follow the formations.”
“Formations?”
Roland goes to the stack of books I have on my nightstand about dragons. He flips open one that’s titled War Dragons, and stops at a specific page, pointing to what’s on it. “This is the Arrowhead Formation.”
I stare down at it in surprise. It shows one dragon at the head of the pack of dragons and two behind the head dragon, two behind that, more spread out than the first two, two behind them, more spread out than the last, all the way back until the twelve dragons are in a perfect arrowhead formation. I’ve seen a pattern like this before in migrating geese, which is pretty fascinating.
Roland turns to the next page. “The Encircling Spiral Formation.”
This one the dragons almost look random, but they’re all spaced out in a really tight-nit image.
He turns more pages. “Here are the combat maneuvers and the coordinated attacks.”
There are drive-and-strikes, where it seems you swoop down to attack enemies on the ground. Rolling evasions, where you roll to avoid an attack from a Hollowborn in the air. Wing-over-turns, reverse directions midflight. The coordinated attacks are even neater. There are Fire Runs, which require the dragons to all use their fire at the same time, Staggering Fire Burst, which allows the dragons to attack opponents constantly, between all the dragons, but help reserve their energy, and even something called a Pinch and Burn that involves two dragons blasting one opponent from two different directions at the same time.
“This is awesome! Why didn’t anyone tell me about this?” I ask.
He looks embarrassed. “I actually didn’t think about it, and they probably didn’t have any desire for you to actually learn anything.” He turns more pages in the book. “But check it out, because there’s a lot more. Endurance and speed drills, all the signals we use in the air, even psychological warfare.”
I grin at Roland and kiss his cheek. “You’re sent by the gods themselves.”
A smile flashes across his face. “Thanks,” but then a bell tolls. “But, we’re, uh, going to be late.”
The last thing I want to do is give the princes a legitimate reason to complain about me, so I head for the door, with Roland trailing behind me. The halls are busy with dragon riders hurrying for the training area, laughing and joking, but their smiles stop reaching their eyes when they see me. There’s a strange energy like I’m a hot piece of metal, and they’re afraid to touch me and get burnt.
“You’ll see a change in some of the dragon riders over the next few days,” Roland says.
“Why?”
“They’ll be changing out the dragon riders that guard Gore Rock with some of our guys. Those men are going to be exhausted after battling with the Hollowborn for the last three months. The guards are switched out every three months, because that seems to be about the limit we can handle before we need downtime. Or, of course, when someone dies.”
Gore Rock is well-known by all Dravari people. No matter where you are on our continent, you hear the stories of the many battles that have taken place there. It’s the one island with resources between Narthyx, our lush continent, and Volcaris, their content full of volcanoes and ash. The Hollowborn have to stop at this island to rest before coming to Narthyx, so ninety percent of our battles occur there. It’s few and far between when their people make it past the island and onto our lands, but it does happen.
He glances at me. “You should know. Those men will likely be tired, recently injured, and still in battle mode, so they may not be as… friendly as the dragon riders here.”
“You’re kidding me, right?”
Roland shakes his head and gives me a sympathetic look. “Your best bet might be to just completely steer away from them.”
“Noted,” I say, not wanting to even imagine a pissed off dragon rider, if the dragon riders here are all peaches and cream.
