Page 3 of Lightningborn

“Remy,” Crusty Bart said, making him turn back. The old man paused, then, with a sigh, flipped him something that glittered in the light. Remy caught it with a grin: a single copper coin. Not much, but enough to buy food for the night. That was worth getting chased all over the Wedge by pirates.

“The True Dragons still exist,” Bart said firmly, slipping the purse into a coat pocket. “No one believes it, but they are still here. You would do well to come back tomorrow and listen to the whole story.”

“So I can drop coins that I don’t have into your mug? I’ll pass.” Remy shook his head and turned away. Dragon stories wouldn’t keep him from going hungry. “Even if I thought there were still True Dragons out there, so what?” he challenged. “They’ll never comehere, so why worry about it?”

Bart only grunted at that, and Remy slipped out of the tavern. The sun had fully set over the distant horizon, and a chill had crept into the air, smelling of mud and frost. Shoving his hands into the pockets of his ratty trousers, Remy headed for home.

Beggar’s Row was a sector of Cutthroat Wedge that was as illustrious as it sounded: the poorest of the poor lived here, in shanties and huts stacked atop one another, balanced on stilts to keep them out of the wet. Rickety wooden bridges, stairs, and walkways spanned the narrow streets, and though the rotting planks hovered several feet above the ground, they were always covered in mud. As were all the residents who lived here.

Remy’s “house” sat at the end of a ramshackle path, balanced precariously over a storm drain that emptied into a pool of stagnant water. He had grown up in this house, but after his mother’s death three years ago, he’d expected someone to come and take it from him. But months, and then years, passed, and no one did. Perhaps no one wanted it. Perhaps no one cared. Remy didn’t ask questions. The hut was small, flimsy, and a breath away from falling into the ditch below, but it was home to a penniless mud rat like him.

The shack creaked in the wind as Remy walked up, planks and boards groaning loudly. A tattered gray cloth hung in the doorway, as there was no actual door, and the windows had been boarded up to keep out the chill. Pushing the cloth aside, Remy stepped into the tiny, cramped room. A single chair sat beside a table that was missing a leg, and a moth-eaten blanket hung from a hammock in the corner. Remy needed to sleep elevated, as the floor would become soaked whenever it rained. Brutus, the large brown rat that shared the room with him, looked up from gnawing on a chair leg, twitched an ear, and went back to chewing the wood. Remy sighed.

Home sweet home.

Picking his way across the floor, Remy gently freed the chair from Brutus’s incisors and sat down, pulling out a bundle he’d bought from Silas the food vendor on the way home. Opening it revealed a hard lump of bread and a pair of pigeon kabobs, which was what his single coin afforded him. The bird kabobs had been two for a single copper; Silas had thrown in the bread because he liked Remy. Unlike some of the other hungry residents who prowled Beggar’s Row, Remy didn’t steal from him.

Brutus the rat circled the table and sat up, whiskers trembling as he sniffed the air. Remy made a face at him.

“Nope, this isn’t for you,” he told the rodent. “You’re not the one who got chased all over Cutthroat Wedge by pirates today. Find your own dinner for once.”

The rat stared at him with large black eyes, and he sighed. “Fine. Just to stop you from chewing through my hammock ropes again.” He tossed Brutus a crust, which the rat immediately snatched up before fleeing into one of the many holes in the wall. “You’re welcome,” Remy called after him. “And stop eating my chair.”

The bread was as hard as a rock, and the pigeon kabobs were scrawny, with barely any meat on the bones, but it was food. Remy had eaten far worse. After chewing his way through the bread and sucking all the meat from one bird carcass, he wrapped the second pigeon kabob back in the greasy cloth and tucked it into his pocket for later. After all, he never knew when his next meal would be. Some days, you could steal from pirates and get away with it, but some days, luck was just not on your side. Remy knew Bart hated it when he stole things, but the old man didn’t understand. No one was looking out for him; Remy had to take care of himself.

He sighed, remembering what Bart had said earlier that evening. There was a time, a couple years ago, when dragons had fascinated him. When he would sit, wide-eyed, on the hard tavern floor, listening to every story Bart told about dragons. Remy would fantasize about stowing away on a pirate ship, or maybe joining a crew as a cabin boy and flying off to the capital, where sky knights soared on dragons and the rich held stunning aerial races to see which dragon was the swiftest. And maybe, just maybe, he would perform an act of great courage before the king, just like Sir Cloudwright, and be allowed to join the sky knights himself.

But that was before he became an orphan. Before his father departed on a ship and never came back, and his mother succumbed to some wasting sickness. His mom had always encouraged his love for dragons. When he told her his dreams of becoming a sky knight, she never told him it was impossible. When he regaled her with the stories he’d heard at the tavern, she always smiled and told him he would be a wonderful sky knight someday. After she died, Remy had been hit with the harsh reality: Mud rats like him didn’t become sky knights. They didn’t own dragons, and they didn’t go on adventures. He never blamed her for building up his dreams only to have them brutally crushed by reality, but the day she died was when he stopped listening to Bart’s dragon stories.

For a short time, he tried to leave Cutthroat Wedge, but he quickly found even that dream was out of reach. Life had been hard before, but it was harder still for an orphaned mud rat left with nothing. None of the ship crews wanted him; he was too frail, too small, too sickly. He wouldn’t withstand the hardships of ship life, they claimed, so he was always passed over for stronger, hardier boys. It wasn’t just Remy who wanted to see the capital. Everyone was trying to get off Cutthroat Wedge, and the sky ships were the only way to leave. Unfortunately, a pirate haven only attracted pirates and other cutthroats, who jeered at Remy at best and at worst took a swing at him with a fist or even a blade. Until one day, he stopped trying to become a pirate and started stealing from them instead.

Remy shook his head and rose from the chair. His bare feet landed with a muddy splat on the planks, highlighting his reality. Small-boy fantasies were just that: fantasies. His world was dirt and cold and hunger, scrounging for food and pocketing whatever coin he could get away with taking. Thieves and mud rats did not become sky knights. Crusty Bart’s stories were the closest he would ever get to seeing a world of dragons.

Outside, a flicker of lightning lit up the sky for a moment, and a gust of wind rattled the boards over his windows, making him wince. Brutus poked his head out of one of his nooks, nose twitching as it sniffed the air.

“Storm’s coming,” Remy told him. “I sure hope those boards hold, or it’s gonna be a really wet night.”

Brutus flicked an ear and vanished back into his hole. Remy bent down, picked up his single lantern, and hung it on a nail, then climbed into his hammock.

Pulling the tattered blanket over his head, he closed his eyes and listened to the rising wind outside the walls until it lulled him into a restless sleep.

In his dreams, he thought he heard something crying.

CHAPTER

TWO

“Gemillia Sunwind Gallecia, why are you in my office again?”

Gem chewed her lip. She wanted to look down at her boots, at the floor, out the window, anywhere to avoid the exasperated glare of Headmistress Idella across the desk, but that wouldn’t be proper for someone of her station. “Keep your head up,” her father had told her numerous times. “Look the person you are speaking to in the eye. That will show that you have nothing to hide, and you will be able to tell if someone is lying toyou.”

Headmistress Idella raised a thin silver brow, half-moon spectacles flashing in the dim light of her office. She wasn’t old, but like all storm mages, her hair, frizzy and unkempt, had turned pure white from decades of practicing magic. Gem’s straight black hair was mostly untouched, except for a single silver streak growing from above her forehead. She wore it proudly, for it defined her, beyond all doubt, as someone who could wield the magic of the storm.

Unfortunately, that was part of the reason that she was here. Headmistress Idella was still watching her across the desk, waiting for an answer. Several excuses flitted through Gem’s mind, but the echo of her father’s voice shut them all out. “Always tell the truth,” it said. “Even when it is painful. Honesty is vital if you want others to trust you.”

She sighed. “I was practicing my magic, Headmistress. Outside of class hours.”

“Gemillia.” Headmistress Idella’s painted blue nails tapped the surface of the desk. “We have already talked about this.”

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