Chosen at First Light

The last name I entered on the Muster roll was his, and the one under it was mine, and tonight the dragons get to decide what either of us is worth.

The sun goes down behind the fortress, and the cold comes up out of the sea to take its place.

I count my kit by feel, because there is nothing left to see it by. Scarf, wound twice and tucked into the collar. Gloves, the left one with the seam I mended last week. Wool shirt under the jacket. Wool drawers under the breeches. Two pairs of socks, which the quartermaster said would make my boots pinch, and which do. Everything is where it was the last time I counted. The last time I counted was a minute ago.

The Ledge is a shelf of granite two-thirds of the way down the cliff, wide enough to land a dragon on and open on the seaward side to nothing at all. Behind us the rock goes straight up to the walls of the Wingwatch. In front of us it goes straight down to the water.

No fire tonight. No lamps, no blankets, no roof. That is the whole trial. We sit along the lip in a line, and we stay alive until first light, and the dragons are allowed to come down and look at us while we do it. Some years the cold takes somebody before morning. The rolls hall writes that down. I know, because for three years I was the one who wrote it.

"You're in my wind," says the man on my left.

I'm not. The wind comes off the water and up the face of the cliff, and it hits all of us the same. I don't say so. I know who he is. Everybody in Ash wing knows who he is, and I know a little more than everybody, because I wrote his entry.

Cassel, Daven. Twenty-six. River cities. Father's trade: boat-builder.

"Move along, then," I tell him. "There's a whole cliff."

He doesn't move. He sits the way he stands in the yard, straight-backed, forearms on his knees, as if the cold were a drill and he means to score well on it. The last of the light is behind the fortress now, and what is left comes off the sea, gray and flat, and it is enough to see him by. He is Black, deep brown skin gone dull with cold across the cheekbones, his black hair cropped close to the scalp for flight, a short beard trimmed hard along the line of his jaw. Broad through the shoulders and long in the leg, so that even sitting he takes up more of the rock than the rest of us. His family came north from the sea-islands, boat-builders for as far back as anyone bothered to write. His leathers are brown like mine, a candidate's brown, and he has oiled every strap until it shines like an officer's black.

"You're the clerk," he says.

"I was."

"How old?"

"Twenty-four." I let that sit, then give it back to him. "You're twenty-six. Born in the river cities. Your mother signed your Muster paper in green ink."

He turns his head and looks at me properly for the first time. Very dark eyes. A mouth held hard, the way you hold a rope you don't trust.

"You read my entry."

"I wrote it."

That should be the end of it. It isn't. He looks down at me, at the scarf I have wound up to my nose, at my braid pinned at the nape and the dark red of it gone almost black in this light, at my face, which I know is doing what it always does in wind. I am white, fair-skinned and freckled across the nose, the kind of fair that turns red in a breath of cold, from a fjord-hold family that came south to Iselde three generations back to work the ground services. Every Brierly in the harbor has cracked knuckles and red cheeks by midwinter. I have both.

"The rolls hall has a stove," he says.

"It does."

"Then why are you on this rock?"

"Same reason as you."

"I doubt that."

He says it without heat, which is worse. It's a statement of fact, the way an instructor reads out a score. A clerk on the Ledge is a clerk who got lost on the stairs.

I put my gloved hands in my armpits and say nothing, because the true answer is too long and he hasn't earned it.

On my right, Orla Ketter has been talking since we came down the stair, and she is still talking. She is small and quick, light-brown-skinned, with short black curls she cuts herself with a knife and a round face that is never still. She told the whole line at the top of the stair that she turned twenty-one just before Muster, which makes her the youngest candidate in Ash wing, and that she intends to be the youngest one chosen too.

"I can't feel my nose," she says now. "Linnet. Can you see my nose? Is it still on?"

"It's on."

"What color is it?"

"Purple."

"Good. Purple's a living color. You worry when it goes white." She leans past me. "Cassel. What color's your nose?"

"Brown," he says.

Orla laughs so hard she has to put a hand on the rock. The man on my left does not laugh. But something at the corner of his mouth shifts and then goes still again, and I think that might be as far as he goes.

The light goes out of the sea. The stars come up hard and many, and the wind goes on.

Ledgemaster Vennick walks the line with a lantern. He is the only one on the Ledge allowed a flame, and he holds it low so it lights our boots and not our faces. He is big and slow and weathered as a cliff post, and he has never been bonded, and he talks to the dragons anyway. I have read his reports. They are short and spelled badly and they are always right.

He stops in front of each of us. He takes each candidate's hand and pulls off the glove and looks at the fingers in the lantern light and puts the glove back on. When he gets to me he does the same, and his own hand is as warm and rough as a forge-glove.

"Brierly," he says. "From the hall."

"Yes, Ledgemaster."

"Hands in the armpits. Feet off the stone if you can. Sit close if you need to." He looks along the line, at the gaps we have all left between us out of pride. "The rule is no fire. The rule isn't no sense."

He goes on. The lantern goes with him.

Nobody closes the gaps.

My feet go first. I stamp them on the rock, quietly, then less quietly. Then my fingers, in the gloves, in my armpits. I count my kit again because it is something to do. Scarf. Gloves. Wool shirt. Wool drawers. Socks. The leathers themselves, cut close at Muster and holding me at the waist and across the hips like a good saddle holds a rider, warm as long as I don't move and cold everywhere the moment I do. My thighs ache from sitting folded on stone. My ears are gone.

"Why are you here?" I ask him, because talking is warmer than not. "Since you asked me."

I don't expect him to answer. He takes long enough that I think he won't.

"Corva," he says.

The name goes through me like wind through a seam. I know it better than my own. I have copied it into the rolls every midwinter for three years, in the same line, under the same heading. Corva, bronze. Came down. Chose none. And before me, in other hands, all the way back to the year her rider died.

"She hasn't taken a rider in forty years," I say.

"I know."

"She doesn't fly to the passes. She sleeps out on the point."

"I know that too." He is looking at the sea, not at me. "My father brought me north the year I turned ten. To see the Wingwatch. We stood on the harbor wall in Iselde all one afternoon, and she came in off the point and hunted seals in the shallows under the wall. She took one so close I got wet." He stops. His jaw moves. "I've wanted her since then."

It is the plainest thing anyone has said to me since Muster. It is also the most ridiculous.

"Sixteen years," I say.

"You keep count of everything."

"It's my job."

"It was your job." He looks at me then. "Mine's to be on this rock when she comes down. And she will come down. She comes down every year."

"And looks at no one."

"Then she'll look at no one." He turns back to the water. "And I'll be here next year."

I want to tell him that next year he will be bonded to some other dragon or he will be in the ground services carrying ledgers, because that is how the rules work, and I have read them. I don't. My teeth are chattering too hard to get it out clean, and he would only say he knows.

Orla goes quiet around midnight. That frightens me more than the cold. I lean into her shoulder, and she leans back, and she mumbles something about seals, and I tell her she is not to fall asleep, and she says she isn't, and her eyes are shut.

"Ketter," says Daven, across me. "Name the signals for riders home."

Orla's eyes open. "Two short and one long."

"Riders lost."

"Three long. Ash and salt, Cassel, I'm not dead, I'm resting my face."

"Rest it with your eyes open."

She does, glaring at him. It works. I look at him with something I don't want to call gratitude, and he doesn't look back.

By the time the stars have swung halfway over, my hands have stopped working.

Not hurting. Stopped. I take them out of my armpits to stamp some feeling into them, and they won't make fists. I tell my fingers to close and they think about it and decline. I hold them up in front of my face in the starlight and they look like a pair of old tack-room gloves left out in the frost. I try to undo the scarf to wrap them and I can't find the end of it.

I don't make a sound. I'm sure I don't make a sound.

"Brierly." His voice is low, just for me under the wind. "Will you sit back to back with me?"

I look at him. He is still facing the sea, still straight-backed, but his shoulders are drawn up hard and there is frost in his beard.

"Is that an offer or a judgment?"

"It's a question." He says it carefully, the way you say a signal so there is no mistaking it. "Yes or no."

Pride says no. My hands say yes, louder.

"Yes," I say. "My hands have gone."

He shifts round on the rock without another word. I turn too, clumsy, using my elbows, and then his back is against mine, and it is like leaning on the forge wall in the yard. Broad and solid through two layers of leather and whatever he has on under it, and warmer than anything has been since the sun went down. I feel his breathing. I feel the cold go out of the place between my shoulder blades and the heat come in, slow, like a forge coming up in the morning.

"Hands inside your jacket," he says over his shoulder. "Against your skin. Under your arms. Not your belly, it's too cold."

"I know."

"Then do it."

I fumble the jacket buttons with fingers that don't work. It takes three tries. I get them inside, against the wool, and the shock of my own cold hands on my own warm ribs makes me hiss through my teeth.

"That'll hurt worse before it's better," he says.

"I know that too."

"You know a great deal for someone who's never been on this rock."

"I've read every report anyone has ever written about this rock."

"Reading isn't sitting on it."

"I'm sitting on it."

He is quiet for a while. Then, "This isn't a kindness. If you freeze next to me they'll mark me down for it."

"Copy," I say, and feel him breathe out once, hard, against my back, which might be a laugh or might be the wind.

My hands come back. It is like having them held over a brazier and then hammered. I clench my teeth and breathe through it, and behind me he doesn't say anything, and he doesn't move away.

They come in the hour before dawn, when the sky over the sea has just begun to gray.

I hear them before I see them, a sound like a sail filling, and then another, and then the whole air over the Ledge is full of wings, and the wind that comes off them is warm, warm, and smells of salt and hot stone and something older, and they come down onto the far end of the shelf one after another in a run of thuds I feel through the granite and up through the backs of my legs, copper and slate and sea-green, the scales on them catching the gray light like oiled harness, and the whole line of us stops breathing at once, and Orla grabs my arm with both hands, and against my back Daven goes still as a drawn line.

Above us, on her high shelf, Grauvel lies with her iron-black head on her forelegs and watches. She doesn't come down. She never comes down.

The others walk the line. They don't choose. Not tonight. Tonight they look. A copper the length of the yard puts her head down to Orla and breathes on her, and Orla makes a noise I have never heard a person make. A slate, young and lean and restless, walks past us twice and snorts at Daven's boots. A sea-green looks at me with one great yellow eye, and then at my hands, still pushed up under my jacket, and moves on with what I swear is contempt.

Ledgemaster Vennick stands at the foot of the stair with his lantern and talks to them, low and steady. They don't answer him. They never answer him. He talks anyway.

Then the last one comes.

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

Get the e-book