she is more motivated than any apprentice I have ever worked with. If she could master armed combat, the traitor Ra’aba would find he had a truly formidable enemy.”
Lia’s jaw sagged. She had concluded Ja’alkon hated her. Had his hatred mellowed into violent dislike?
“The Master of Secrets?”
Master Yiiba, the only non-Fra’aniorian among the Masters, inclined his dark, habitually searing gaze toward Hualiama. “The student displays a notable aptitude for code-breaking, lock-picking, and subterfuge,” he said, so mournfully that Lia wondered once again if teaching her caused him unspecified but excruciating pain. “She excels at espionage, is cunning and resourceful, adequate at disguise, and would make an excellent sneak-thief.”
Master Ja’alkon’s rubicund face broke into a smirk.
“After all,” said Yiiba, “who else has ever broken into our monastery, let alone the Chamber of Dragons?”
Ouch, double-wince as the Master of Secrets did what he did best, slipping in the unseen, unanticipated dagger. Maybe living in a cave was not so bad after all. Maybe she could beg Amaryllion to pop over the gap and swallow this ridiculous house of macho egotism and … she’d say, ‘Well, who’s laughing now? I’ve been hiding an Ancient Dragon in my pocket.’
Hualiama smiled involuntarily.
Gritting his teeth, Master Jo’el hissed, “Hualiama, what exactly do you find so funny? Do you think we’ve taken you in for any reason save duty to our King?”
She, and many others in the arena, gasped, Ja’al loudest of all.
No place in the Island-World had ever felt lonelier than the centre of that training arena. Lia knew it as a roaring in her ears, a melting of self into the storm. The Master’s words speared her soul. She had believed in this man; entrusted her life into his hands. Now the truth emerged. Hualiama was a burden. A duty. Master Jo’el had never wanted a royal ward in his monastery, nor had he viewed her bid to learn weapons-craft as more than a frivolous waste of time. Lia burned. A shaking began in her toes and worked up her body, wracking her with pain as violent and consuming as the fire the Orange Dragon had breathed into her cave.
What she had fought for was as the dust beneath her feet. She knew that his eyes measured Hualiama, and found her wanting.
In flat, definitive tones Master Jo’el said, “While you’re stood on that sand giggling like a parakeet, Princess, Ra’aba is out there, abusing and maltreating your people–”
The tearing of cloth arrested his speech.
Lia ripped the buttons off her shirt, sobbing as she fought her way free of the material. She whirled abruptly, facing away from the Masters, screaming into the mortified silence, “Look! See the gift Ra’aba left me!”
The use of two mirrors in her small chamber in the apprentice halls, had allowed Hualiama to examine her back. The scar ran jagged, angrily red, from behind her right shoulder blade to her left hip-bone. Despite Flicker’s best work, it was unsightly–only marginally more hideous than the wound the Master had just dealt her.
She turned, pointing just above her belt. “And before he threw me off the Dragonship, he stabbed me, here.” The dagger’s entry-points were puckered, two-inch scars in the indentation between her abdominals. The blades had exited right next to her spine, practically shaving the nerves which would have left her paralysed.
Unseeing, swaying as the memory cast a soul-shadow within her, she cried, “I tried to kill him. At the last, as he pushed me against the railing, I pierced him in the throat … but Ra’aba was too strong. He’s still alive and I failed. I failed all of Fra’anior.”
Clarity pierced her awareness. Despair coiled python-like about her throat, choking the living pith out of her. Ra’aba’s life had been hers to claim, if only for the briefest moment. Had her hand only been surer in the strike, had she flung the sword but an inch higher … her eyes blurred. Pain burned her scarred back as though the wound were bathed in Dragon fire.
Silence smothered the arena.
Only the abrasion of breath against her raw throat told Lia she was alive.
She rasped, “I need you to teach me, Master Jo’el. But, more than that, I need you to believe in me. I don’t have the strength. I can’t do this alone.”
Lia sank to her knees. An uncontrollable juddering shook her body as Master Joel’s words hammered her once more. Brutalising. Ruling with a Dragon’s iron paw. She had seen it in Ra’aba’s eyes. Not just casual contempt for another life. No, he