Read Chapter 6: The Sickness Lie

The dragon care class met in the eastern mews, where the oldest and gentlest of the Academy’s dragons were quartered. Elara stood at the back of the group, a worn leather bucket in her hands, watching the beasts with a careful eye. The morning light filtered through the high arches, catching dust motes that drifted lazily over the straw-strewn floor.

Something was wrong.

The dragons before them should have been stirring, craning their necks toward the handlers with the familiar eagerness she’d seen a hundred times in the stables at home. Instead, they lay in their stalls, heads low, wings folded tight against their bodies. Even the great bronze male at the far end—the one Fiora had called Old Meridian, a veteran of three wars—barely lifted his head when the instructor approached.

“A quarantine,” Instructor Hale announced, his voice clipped and bored. “The mountain air has turned foul with the spring thaw. The dragons will be kept in their mews until the sickness passes. You will learn your care routines by observation only.”

Elara frowned. The mountain air smelled perfectly clean to her—crisp, pine-tinged, sweet with melting snow. She looked at the dragons again. Their eyes were open, not glazed. Their flanks rose and fell in steady rhythm. No foam at the mouths, no discolored mucus, no visible wounds.

They looked tired, not sick.

Behind her, Fiora whispered, “They’ve been like this for three days now. The kitchens are sending up extra meat, but the grooms say half of it comes back untouched.”

“That doesn’t sound like the spring thaw,” Elara murmured back.

“Careful,” Fiora warned. “Don’t ask too many questions. The instructors get twitchy when the beasts are off.”

Elara fell silent, but her eyes kept tracking. Across the large mews, she counted the dragons. Twelve stalls along the western wall, eight along the eastern. But the ceiling beams told a different story—heavy iron rings set at intervals for the larger mounts, and at least four of them hung empty. The hooks for their tack were bare, the nameplates above their stalls polished and blank.

The biggest dragons were missing.

She knew the riders who belonged to those stalls. She’d seen them during her first week, tall figures in dark leather, the dragons overhead blotting out the sun. They’d looked strong then, the beasts bright-eyed and restless, straining against their reins like eager hounds.

Now they were gone.

Instructor Hale droned on about poultices and proper hoof care. Elara pretended to listen, but her mind was racing. She’d been raised in the stables—not dragon stables, but horses, which were close enough in temperament and habit. Animals didn’t just go slack without cause. Something had to trigger it. A change in feed. A change in water. A change in the riders themselves.

She slipped away when Hale turned to demonstrate a leg wrap on Old Meridian. The old dragon let out a low, weary rumble as the instructor lifted his foreleg, but didn’t resist. Elara moved down the row of stalls, past the bronze and the copper and the dappled grey, her hand brushing the wooden slats as she went.

At the fifth stall, she stopped.

The dragon inside was a young female, a pale green with silver-veined wings. She lay curled in the straw, her head resting on her foreclaws. When Elara approached, her eyes opened—and Elara felt something pass between them, a flicker of recognition, of warmth. The dragon’s name was Vanna. Fiora had pointed her out as one of the most skittish, a beast who had rejected three riders before finally accepting a quiet noble girl named Seraphine.

Vanna’s rider was not in the stall.

“Where is she, girl?” Elara whispered, crouching low. “Where’s Seraphine?”

Vanna’s tail twitched, once. She let out a sound that was almost a whimper, and her gaze drifted toward the far wall—toward the iron gate that led out to the training yard, and beyond that, the long road down the mountain.

Elara’s stomach tightened.

She heard footsteps and straightened quickly, turning to see—not an instructor, but Lady Voss herself. The headmistress moved through the mews like a blade through silk, her grey-streaked hair pulled back tight, her dark robes rustling against the straw. She was speaking to Instructor Hale in low, urgent tones, their heads bent together.

Elara ducked behind a stack of feed sacks and held her breath.

“—the reports are clear,” Voss was saying. “The pattern is established. If we wait until the full quarantine, it will be too late.”

Hale’s voice was strained. “But Lady Voss, a forced march in this condition—it will look like an evacuation. The Crown will ask questions. The families of the cadets will demand answers.”

“The families of the cadets will demand their children be alive,” Voss snapped. “They must leave before the sickness spreads. We have maybe a fortnight before it reaches the younger stock. I will not see this Academy become a graveyard.”

Elara’s heart hammered. Sickness. Spreads. Graveyard.

She risked a glance around the corner of the feed sacks. Voss was standing by Old Meridian’s stall now, her hand resting on the ancient dragon’s snout. The beast closed his eyes at her touch, and for a moment, Elara saw something she hadn’t expected to see on Lady Voss’s face.

Grief.

“The farewell riders leave at dawn,” Voss said, her voice quiet now. “Make sure their mounts are saddled before the cadets wake. I will not have a scene.”

Hale nodded and left. Voss lingered another moment, stroking Old Meridian’s snout, then turned and walked out of the mews without looking back.

Elara stayed crouched behind the sacks, her mind spinning. Quarantine. Evacuation. Farewell riders. They must leave before the sickness spreads—but she had just seen every dragon in the mews, and none of them were sick. Sluggish, yes. Lethargic, yes. But not sick. Not coughing, not running fever, not stumbling. Just… weak. Instead, they looked like they were drugged.

And the largest, strongest dragons had already vanished.

She thought of Ignis, waiting for her in the upper aerie. He had been quiet lately, too—not sluggish, but watchful. He’d flown with her this morning, circling the Academy walls with an almost predatory focus, his gaze tracking the gates, the road, the distant shapes of riders coming and going. She’d thought he was just enjoying the sky. Now she wondered if he had been counting, just like she had.

Something moved in the shadow of the feed sacks. Elara tensed, expecting a guard, but it was only a cat—a scrawny tabby that had taken up residence in the stables. It blinked at her, unconcerned, then trotted away.

She let out a breath and rose to her feet. She could not go to Lady Voss. She had no proof of anything, only a feeling and a few observations that might be coincidence. She could not go to Fiora, whose family had ties to the Academy and might not thank her for spreading rumors. And she could not go to Kael—not after the forge, not after the way he’d looked at her when she’d refused him.

But there was one place she knew she could go.

The library.

She slipped out of the mews before anyone could notice her absence. The corridors were quiet, most of the cadets at their lessons. She kept her head down, her steps quick, and when she reached the library doors, she paused only long enough to catch her breath.

The librarian—a withered man with spectacles thick as bottle glass—didn’t look up as she entered. He was hunched over a desk, muttering to himself, surrounded by maps.

Elara moved past him, deeper into the stacks. Royal blue and silver bindings flashed in the dim light as her fingers flew over the spines. Histories. Genealogies. Treatises on dragon care. She searched for one word, a single word that might make sense of what she had seen.

And then she found it.

A slim, unmarked volume, tucked behind a row of far grander books. Its cover was plain brown leather, worn at the edges, and it had no title stamped on the spine. When Elara opened it, the first page was blank.

The second page held a single line of text, written in a tiny, cramped hand:

*When the bond breaks, the sickness comes. But the greatest lie is the one we tell the dragons themselves.*

Below it, a date. Ten years ago. The same year Ignis had rejected his first noble rider.

Elara stood very still, the book trembling in her hands. The sickness wasn’t a disease. It was the bond breaking, dragon after dragon, losing their riders. And the biggest were being taken away before the truth could spread.

They weren’t leaving to escape the sickness.

They were leaving to hide it.

The library door creaked open behind her. Elara shoved the book inside her tunic and turned, heart pounding, to find Cedric leaning against the doorframe, his arms crossed and a sharp smile on his lips.

“Hiding in the stacks, stable girl?” he said. “I wondered where you’d slipped off to. Instructor Hale noticed you were missing from the quarantine. Thought I’d come find you myself.”

His eyes dropped to the bulge beneath her tunic, and his smile widened.

“What have you got there?”