Read Chapter 8: Missing Rider

The morning bell had barely rung when Elara slipped into the mews, still sore from her defeat at Cedric's hands—and from the grueling training session he'd dragged her through at dawn. Her arms ached. Her pride ached worse. But she'd promised herself she'd check the dragons before classes, and promises to Ignis were promises she kept.

She moved down the row of stalls, greeting each dragon with a soft touch and a murmured word. Most responded with sleepy rumblings, tails flicking against straw. Ignis watched from his stall at the far end, head tilted, eyes tracking her every move with that unnerving attentiveness he'd developed since their arrival.

She'd almost made it to his stall when she stopped.

The stall beside his was empty.

Not just quiet—empty. The straw had been cleared. The trough removed. The iron rings on the wall, where harnesses had once hung, now bare and glinting in the pale morning light slanting through the high windows.

Elara's hand went to her chest, fingers brushing the lump of her locket beneath her tunic. She'd memorized every dragon in this mews over the past week. The slate-blue female with the chipped horn. The bronze male who huffed steam when nervous. And the massive silver-grey who'd occupied this stall, the one whose rider she'd seen only twice from a distance, always helmeted, always flanked by junior riders.

Sir Aldric. That was the name one of the stable hands had used, once, before a sharp look from the head groom had cut them off.

"Where's the silver?" she asked a passing groom, a young man she recognized from her first day, the one who'd laughed at her before Ignis had intervened.

He looked at her like she'd asked where the sky had gone. "Gone."

"Gone where?"

His mouth opened, then closed. He glanced down the corridor, toward the officer's quarters, and something flickered across his face—fear, or maybe just the memory of it. "Reassigned. Patrol duty. North border."

"Both of them? The dragon and the rider?"

"Forget you asked." He hurried past her, head down.

Elara watched him go, a cold knot forming in her chest. This was the third such disappearance she'd noticed since arriving. First it had been the largest mounts vanishing from the mews, explained away by the quarantine. Then she'd overheard Lady Voss speaking of evacuation. Now this—a rider who'd been stationed here, occupying a stall she'd passed every morning, erased like chalk from a board.

She walked to Ignis's stall and leaned against the gate. The great bronze dragon lowered his head, and she rested her forehead against the warm scale of his jaw.

"Sir Aldric," she said quietly. "Do you know him?"

Ignis's eye, the color of molten amber, blinked slowly. He didn't answer—he never answered, not in words—but she felt something through the bond, a ripple of unease. As if he knew the name and didn't like the shape of it in his mind.

"Reassigned to the border," she repeated. "That's what they said. But the border patrol rotations don't start for another month." She'd read that in the Academy's own regulation book, the one now sitting half-hidden beneath her bed, alongside the anonymous volume about broken bonds and lies told to dragons.

Ignis rumbled low in his throat.

"Yeah," she whispered. "That's what I thought too."

---

Fiora was waiting for her in the dining hall, already halfway through a bowl of porridge and vibrating with barely-contained gossip.

"You look like someone who slept in the mews," Fiora said cheerfully, pushing a bread roll across the table. "And I don't mean that as a compliment."

Elara sat, taking a bite of the bread she didn't want. Around them, the hall buzzed with cadets and riders, the morning noise of spoons and chatter. Normal. Bright. No one here seemed to notice the empty stall. No one mentioned the missing rider.

"Fiora," she said, keeping her voice low, "do you know Sir Aldric?"

Fiora's spoon stopped halfway to her mouth. For a moment, her roommate's gossip-hungry expression flickered into something else—guarded, almost sad. Then it was gone, replaced by a careful blandness that looked practiced.

"Aldric the Ash?" Fiora said. "Everyone knows him. Or knew him. He was the most decorated rider under fifty in the order. Silver-grey dragon, Aether. They were legends. Ten years patrol duty, never lost a single ward."

"Was?"

Fiora leaned in, voice dropping to a near-whisper. "He disappeared. Three weeks ago. One night he was there, the next morning his stall was empty and Lady Voss announced he'd taken emergency leave for family reasons. Only his family's been dead since the plague—everyone knows that. And no one's allowed to ask." She looked around, as if checking for listeners. "The senior riders won't talk about him. The juniors are too scared to. It's like he's been struck from the record."

Elara's heart hammered. Three weeks. That would have been just before she'd arrived—just before the quarantine notices went up. Just before Lady Voss started moving dragons out under cover of darkness.

"Do you know where he was stationed before he came here?"

Fiora shrugged, but there was something careful in the motion. "Northern patrol, I heard. The passes beyond the Frostfall Mountains." She paused, then added, almost reluctantly, "That's where the last wild dragon sightings were. Before everything went quiet."

The words hung between them. Elara remembered the anonymous book's passage, burned into her memory now:

*There is a lie at the heart of our bond, and the dragons choke on it.*

Aldric had been a legend. Aldric had been stationed at the last place where wild dragons still flew. Aldric had disappeared without a trace, and no one was allowed to speak his name.

And now his dragon was gone too.

"Aldric The Ash," Elara repeated slowly. "Why'd they call him that?"

Fiora's eyes flickered. "Because of the Ashfields. The battle of the Ashfields, down in the southern provinces—wildfire started by raiders, burned for weeks. He flew into it to rescue a trapped village and came out with his wings scorched and his hair turned white." She paused. "The village survived. All of them. He's why they call the order 'the shield of the realm.'"

Elara thought of the empty stall. The silent grooms. Lady Voss's hushed orders and the coiling secrecy that seemed to wrap around the Academy like morning fog.

"A rider like that," she said, low. "He wouldn't just vanish."

Fiora met her eyes, and for once there was nothing gossipy about the look. "No," she said. "He wouldn't."

---

Elara spent the rest of the day watching. Listening.

She lingered in the mews during the dragon care class, noting how the instructors avoided the empty stall without seeming to. When one of the junior riders asked where Aether had gone, the instructor's answer was sharp enough to cut glass, and the question wasn't asked again.

She circulated through the mess hall at dinner, filling her plate with food she barely touched, listening to fragments of conversation. Most were about the upcoming trials, about sparring matches and exam scores. But once, she caught a snippet between two older riders, their heads bent together.

"...not the first. Remember the Verant man, two years back? Same thing."

"He was old. Retired."

"That's what they said about Aldric."

"Keep your voice down—"

They'd seen her watching and fallen silent.

Later, in the darkness of her and Fiora's room, Elara lay awake long after her roommate's breathing had evened into sleep. The anonymous book was beneath her mattress, and her locket rested against her chest, warm beneath the wool. Three weeks gone. The largest dragons moved out. Riders departing at dawn. Sir Aldric's name struck from the record like he'd never existed.

And all of it traced back to the north—the Frostfall passes, the last place where wild dragons still soared.

She thought of Ignis's eyes watching her, his silent consideration of every choice she made. He hadn't objected to the training arrangement with Cedric, but he hadn't approved either. She was walking a line, and she knew it.

But Sir Aldric had walked that same line. And now no one was allowed to say his name.

Elara turned to the wall, staring into the dark. The Academy wanted a cure for the dragon sickness, or at least the image of one. But if the truth was in the north—in the passes, in the wilds, in wherever Aldric had gone—

Then she had to find it.

She just hoped she'd survive the looking.