face barely an inch from hers. His weight crushed her neck against the arena floor.
“Submit?” called Ga’ando, the Master of Weapons.
Lia felt her face turn purple as the shaft cut off her air supply. On an impulse, she kissed the handsomely cleft point of Hal’s chin. He gasped in surprise; she swung her legs up, wrapped them around his neck, and tried to apply a stranglehold she had learned that week. Hal toppled to the sand, losing his grip on the staff.
Two seconds later, the monk kicked her off as though he intended to launch her back over to Ha’athior Island. Lia somersaulted in the air, fluffed her landing, and landed with a jolt on her tailbone instead. Pain shot up her spine. Almost elegant. The story of her life. Master Jo’el could have his joyous indignity–Islands full of indignity–because all of it belonged to hopeless Hualiama.
“Enough,” said Master Jo’el. “Lia, how are you?”
“Fine!”
Lia limped over to her staff, and bent with clenched teeth to pick it up. There was no part of her body which did not ache. She was more bruise than clear skin. Only a complete null-brain would to try to keep up with warrior monks who had trained like this, sixteen hours a day, since their boyhood. The difference between their skills and those of the Palace guard was the difference between a dragonet and a fully-grown Dragon. Lia was efficient and creative in combat, but that simply did not shave the proverbial Dragon’s beard when it came to fighting warriors of this calibre.
A hundred pairs of eyes watched her hobble back across the arena. Two, in particular, disturbed her. One set belonged to an apprentice called Ja’al, whose dark blue eyes followed her every move with unnerving intensity. Handsome but aloof, she thought, wishing he might unbend just once to offer her a welcoming smile, rather than that constant, withering appraisal. Next to Ja’al, his older brother Hua’gon watched with brooding mien. Hua’gon was the one who had broken two fingers on her right hand the previous week.
A polite clearing of a throat drew her attention.
Forming his long fingers into a cone reminiscent of the volcano he lived on top of, Master Jo’el said, “Hualiama of Fra’anior, you’ve completed three weeks’ probation. Masters, your assessments. Weapons?”
Lia gazed up at the ranks of Masters gathered on the stone steps above the circular training arena, trying not to disclose how her heart lurched toward her ankles, and from there leached away into the sand.
“She fights with great heart,” said Master Ga’ando, in his characteristic ruined whisper. A windroc had once tried to rip out his throat. Ga’ando, famously, had won that encounter by shoving his fist down the bird’s throat to strangle it. “Lia has tried as hard as any prospective apprentice I have ever trained. But I regret to conclude that, despite demonstrating basic capability, she seems to lack a natural aptitude for weapons–any weapons at all.”
Lia winced. Mercy. Don’t hold back, Master Ga’ando!
“Your tutors, Master Ha’aggara?”
The bookish young monk, whom the apprentices called ‘Aggers’, said, “Lia is a fine and dedicated student of literature, and the sciences, histories and Humanities, Master Jo’el. But she is deplorably fond of joking about serious matters. That aside, she corrected Tutor Ga’al’s knowledge of Dragonship aerodynamics. She’s a fine engineer.”
“I see,” said Jo’el, in a tone that made Lia shuffle her feet. If only she had not cracked a joke about Ga’al’s gaffe afterward. That had earned her a stern reprimand and a night spent cleaning the practice arena until not a grain of sand was out of place.
“Master Ra’oon?”
The elderly Master managed a surprisingly nimble and florid bow. “As you know, Master Jo’el, the prospective apprentice sings like a purple-crested warbler, and plays a decent hand on the great-harp and the Jeradian pan-flute. Lia is a fine musician.”
“Master To’ibbik?”
The harsh Master of Arcane Arts sniffed loudly, as he was wont to do, in Lia’s general direction. “It is too early to tell if the girl has any ability in the mystical arts. But I doubt it.”
“Master Ja’alkon, your behavioural assessment?”
“Disruptive, Master Jo’el, as we expected.” Hualiama hung her head. Trust Ja’alkon to put it that way! “She behaves with the propriety one would expect of a member of the royal household, but the regrettable fact that she is a girl has the boys in uproar–we could cover her in a sack and they’d still swoon left and right to be the one to fall into her shadow. However,