Page 71 of Flameborne: Chosen

Alsoexasperatingin the extreme.

My squad, full of grown men who were fully-fledged Furyknights, bonded to their dragons for years, and taking near-daily patrols, had been forced to spend hours every day teaching me how to strap my dragon, climb to her back, clip in as if for flight, then release the straps high on her withers before climbing back down and unstrapping her from the harness.

Three days.

Three days.

I had been harnessing horses since I was five years old. I understood the process and mechanisms the first time it was shown to me. But we were three days in, and the only thing I had managed to do completely alone was clean her harness when it had already been hung in the tack room for me by my brothers—and even then, the stablehand, Benji, had appeared to help me, though I hadn’t asked him to.

Three days, and I still hadn’t managed to throw her harness over her back, or climb up to my seat unaided, which meant I hadn’t managed tounharnessher alone either.

Literally the simplest function and skill of a Furyknight and I was already failing.

That first morning after my acknowledgement, when the dragons lined up in the field, I’d been thrilled. They looked magnificent in the morningsun, and my squad brothers were in high spirits, teasing each other and speaking to their dragons like old friends.

They’d carried Akhane’s hurriedly constructed harness for me. Ronen had explained how the straps worked, the unique and specific function of each one, how they worked together and then my entire squad had demonstrated how a dragon could be harnessed and mounted in seconds.

Hold the harness properly.

Toss it up and over the dragon’s withers that were the same height as the thatched roof of a cottage.

Catch the straps dangling around the legs and pull them into a balanced position.

Walk under your dragon’s belly to buckle the straps around the girth and legs, then the connecting straps that ran between the front legs to connect the chest plate and girth.

In less than a minute, each dragon stood proudly, strapped safely with one, long, loose leather strap dangling from the base of their neck to just a few feet off the ground.

When Ronan gave the order to mount, every one of my brothers grasped that strap and raced up their dragon’s side, hand over hand on the thick leather strap, their feet running up their dragon’s scaled leg, then shoulder until they reached high enough to pull themselves up to straddle the base of the neck and slide back to sit with their knees hooked over the wing ridges.

A few seconds later, each had located the safety strap that connected them to their dragon’s harness and would stop them plunging to their death if they fell.

They looked amazing, so high, their dragons huffing and puffing, fluttering wings, all of them impatient for flight.

Then they’d demonstrated releasing the key strap at the top of the neck so that the entire harness could drop off the dragon’s back when it was unbuckled beneath.

Each of them shimmied back down the dragons—Ronen cautioning me that a jump to the ground wasnotproper dismount because it came with too much risk of injury.

Then they unstrapped the dragons so that the harness dropped to the ground.

“…Always re-buckle that top strap before you do anything else with the harness. It’s the first thing you should do, and the last thing you should check every time you remove the harness, take it apart for cleaning, or before you mount,” Ronen told me firmly. “If that strap isn’t correctly buckled the entire harness can give while you’re mounting—or worse, while you’re on board. The last thing we need is your harness dragging you off your dragon and throwing you back to earth.”

The men chuckled, but my arms prickled with goosebumps as I was suddenly gripped in the memory of falling from the cliffs before I landed on Akhane’s back.

I shook my head, pushing away the thought and turning my focus back to my first attempt at harnessing Akhane…

What a mortifying disasterthathad been.

By the end of the first day, they’d all accepted that I simply wasn’t strong enough yet to throw the harness high enough to get it over Akhane’s back.

By the end of the second day, my hands were blistered and cracked, even though I hadn’t managed to climb halfway up her side without falling.

And now, at the end of the third, even my very patient, very positive squad brothers were growing short and frustrated.

I couldn’t blame them. But I felt sosmall.

‘Sometimes a trial cannot be easily overcome,’Akhane sent me sweetly as I walked back to the dining hall with my brothers. I dragged behind them, and they either hadn’t noticed, or preferred not to have me in their midst. Ronen had told us to go ahead. He had a task to complete before he could go to the meal. So having left the dragons in the hands of grooms to return them back to their stables, we were walking the cobbled path to the Academy buildings.

But I wasn’t hungry. At all.