was sadness in her voice. “We lost so many good teams, Emilian and Kalesta included. Falka has been pushing us hard to get these new teams ready for the air, with everything brewing on the horizon.” She turned away from Tauran to get the attention of the recruits. “All right, listen up. You have twenty minutes to get your gear on. There’ll be quality checks.”
Catria waved for Tauran to follow.
Tauran took the reins of his horse and led it into Valeron’s shadow. “Falka mentioned a war. What’s the deal with that?”
It was Roric who answered, sitting on the grass with his legs outstretched. “It’s Irades to the southeast,” he said. “Falka hasn’t told us everything, yet, but I heard they’re threatening to withhold resources if we don’t start handing over dragons.”
“Handing over dragons?” Tauran sat on the grass beside him.
“After the battle, we could no longer station teams in other nations, for obvious reasons,” Roric said. “They claim they feel less safe without them. And they’re apparently convinced we are hiding dozens of dragons. Apparently, some of them even accuse us of staging the Battle of the Broken Wings so we could withdraw our teams and keep the dragons to ourselves.”
Tauran bristled. “That’s fucking ridiculous.”
Roric nodded. “They’re no longer satisfied with gold in exchange for metals and medicine. They want dragons.”
Tauran huffed. “Then why don’t they ask the Sharoani? They’re the ones with the wild dragon population.”
Roric shrugged one shoulder. “A few of the members are protesting preparations for war, but the people elects the council, and the people agree with the guard. We’ll fight if we have to.”
Tauran turned Roric’s words over in his head. The council consisted of twelve members, three from Valreus, the rest from the larger towns of Kykaros. The council and the guard each held half the nation’s power. In the event of disagreements, they would turn to a public vote, but if the public largely agreed with the guard… “We’ve got, what, two-thousand ground soldiers and three-hundred recruits? As well as three war-ready dragons and more on the way,” Tauran said. “Irades’ armies are only half the size of ours.” He watched a fledgling take off with a leather strap between its teeth, a recruit hot on its tail. It’d be a long time before they would be battle-ready sky teams, but still.
Roric leaned forward. “Only, Irades is significantly better friends with Cadell and Donathal than we are. If the leaders of Irades convince the other nations to band together against us, we’ll be in deep shit. Fuck, Andreus really screwed us over. I swear, Tau. You did us all a fucking favor by putting him in the ground.”
Tauran wiped a hand over his mouth. There it was again, that creeping sadness always lingering under the surface. Roric made it sound so heroic, like he had somehow saved the Sky Guard from the evil traitor twisting the minds of their fellow riders. But in reality, it had been a terrifying, desperate struggle for survival. A struggle he had lost. Andreus’ death had only been the lucky result of Tauran’s failure. Tauran shook his head slowly. “I never saw it coming.”
He spoke quietly, but Catria must have heard him, because she gave Tauran’s shoulder a comforting squeeze. “I don’t think anyone did,” she said. “Falka and Andreus were always fighting, no one could have predicted it would explode the way it did. You did the best you could.”
“Sure.” Tauran looked away. He cleared his throat, trying to dislodge the lump growing in it.
For an agonizing moment, they were all quiet.
Catria broke the silence with a clap and turned back to the recruits with a sigh. “All right, time’s up.”
The tension lifted. Tauran took a breath and looked to Roric. “And the wild dragons? What’s going on with them?”
Roric watched Catria approach the recruits with a distant frown. He took a moment to answer. “We don’t know yet. They’ve been volatile. Attacking towns, stealing livestock. We flew out with Falka to one of their nesting sites to see if we could find the root of the problem. We found all these eggs pushed out of their nests, cold and abandoned. So we took them with us.” He angled his chin at the fledglings.
“And the titan egg?”
“That was one of them. You heard about that?”
“Mhmm.” Titan births were so rare. Tauran had never heard of a mother abandoning