Garrick Maven's Arc

Chapter 1 of 3

Garrick Maven burned the summons before he read it twice. The royal seal curled black in the hearth of his stone cottage, but he already knew the words. The dragon corps had accepted his application. He was to present himself at the capital gate by dusk tomorrow, ready to swear the rider's oath and begin training as a royal defender against the beasts that raided the border towns. That should have been the best day of his life. Instead he sat at his kitchen table and pressed his thumbs against the pointed tips of his ears until they hurt. A small blue drake landed on the table and butted its horned head against his wrist. Garrick scratched under its jaw. "They still have the old decree," he told it. "No fae blood in the corps. One look and they arrest me at the gate." He had spent forty years keeping the ears hidden under long hair, the slit pupils behind tinted lenses in town. He had trained in secret. He had learned to ride the wild drakes that nested above his roof. None of it mattered if a guard saw his face. Garrick went to the cupboard and took down a small wooden box. Inside lay a bracelet of braided brown cord, snug and plain, the last thing his mother had made before she died. She had told him it would hide what he was when he needed it hidden. He had never dared test it. He slid the bracelet onto his wrist and tightened the weave. The change moved up his arm like warm water. In the polished side of a copper pot he watched his ears round off. His pupils widened into human circles. The faint silver under his skin dulled to plain tan. He looked, for the first time in his life, like a man who could walk through the capital gate. The drake hissed and backed away from him. It did not know him now. A scrabbling sound came from the doorway. A silver puppy-shaped dragon nosed the door open, dragging a bundle of red vine-lilies in its teeth. Garrick had asked the flower woman in the village to send a gift ahead to the corps captain, a customary offering from new recruits. The pup had beaten the courier to it. Garrick knelt and took the flowers. The pup sniffed his changed hand, whined, then licked his palm anyway. Good. At least one creature still knew him. He stood and looked at the burning summons, at the blue drake on the rafter, at the cottage his parents had built. If the bracelet slipped, or its charm ran out inside the corps barracks, he would not be arrested at the gate. He would be executed in front of the men he wanted to fight beside. He tied the flowers to his saddle and started for the capital.