Chapter 1: Also Dinner
The request comes through the duty roster, which is how you know he's being petty about it.
You find it on a cold morning at Samara, pinned to the board in the mess between the patrol rotations and a notice about frostbite. Heavy cream paper. Black ink. A hand so neat it looks engraved.
Lieutenant. Formal request for a rematch, per the challenge rules of the Riders Quadrant as adopted by this outpost. At your convenience. W.L. Riorson.
Under it, in the same hand but smaller, as if added after a long argument with himself:
Also dinner.
You stare at it for a full minute. Behind you, somebody laughs into their porridge and turns it into a cough.
"Don't," you say, without turning around.
"I didn't say anything," Garrick Tavis says, sliding onto the bench across from your usual spot with two mugs of tea. He pushes one at you. He's built like a siege tower and has the sense of humor of a stable hand, and he's been Xaden Riorson's best friend for most of his life, which means he is enjoying this in a way that should be illegal. "That's number nine, by the way."
"I know what number it is."
"He wrote eight drafts of the first one."
"I didn't need to know that."
"He made Bodhi read them all." Garrick blows on his tea. "Bodhi says the fourth one had a poem in it."
You turn around very slowly. "A what?"
"He crossed it out." Garrick shrugs. "Bodhi says it rhymed 'challenge' with 'balance.' Badly."
You take the note off the board and fold it once, neatly, and slide it into the inside pocket of your flight jacket, next to the other eight. You don't know why you keep them. That's a lie. You know exactly why you keep them, and you've decided not to think about it until spring.
Here's the thing nobody at Samara will let you forget.
Last midwinter, back when you were posted in the southern wing and had never so much as spoken to the man, the outpost held its challenge matches. It's tradition. Somebody decided long ago that riders stuck behind a mountain all winter would murder each other without an approved outlet, so once a year, the whole garrison crowds into the drill hall and anyone can call anyone onto the mat. Rank doesn't matter. Signets aren't allowed. Just you and a blade and a circle of chalk.
You were bored. You'd been snowed in for six weeks. Your dragon had been sulking for five of them. And when the master of arms read out the list of names and asked for challengers, you looked at the top of it, at the wingleader who had never, according to all available records, lost a match in his life, and you put up your hand.
You still don't fully know why. Cróga says it's because you have the self-preservation instincts of a moth. You think it's because you'd watched him fight three times that day, and you'd seen something.
He favors his left side when he's tired. Barely. Just a hitch, a quarter-second slower on the recovery after a high parry. Nobody else noticed. Nobody else had spent the whole afternoon watching him that closely, and if anyone ever asks you why you were watching him that closely, you'll say it was professional interest and you'll be lying.
The match lasted four minutes. He was better than you in every measurable way: faster, stronger, more experienced, with a reach that made you feel like you were fighting a door. He had you on the back foot for three and a half of those minutes. Then he went high, and recovered left, and you were already there.
You still remember the sound the hall made when his back hit the mat. Total silence, and then a roar.
You remember his face, too. Flat on his back, your dagger at his throat, staring up at you with those dark gold-flecked eyes like you were a dragon nobody had told him existed.
"Who," he said, very quietly, "the hell are you?"
You told him your name. He nodded once, like he was filing it somewhere permanent.
Three weeks later you got transfer orders to his wing.
You haven't lost to him since, mostly because you've refused to fight him since. And every eighteen days or so, a note appears on the duty roster.
"He's going to keep doing this until one of you dies," Cróga says that afternoon, while you're picking ice out of her talons in the flight field.
She's a brown swordtail, long and lean and the color of wet bark, with a scar down one wing from a wyvern and a temper like a kettle left on the hob. She's lying in the snow with her chin on her forelegs and the long-suffering patience of a creature who has been asked to stand still for something undignified.
"Then I'll die," you tell her. "Peacefully. Of old age. Undefeated."
"You are being ridiculous."
"I'm being strategic."
"You are being afraid," she says, and you dig the hoof pick in a little harder than necessary. She doesn't even flinch. "You won because he did not know you. He knows you now. You fly beside him every patrol. He has studied you as you once studied him, and you are afraid that if you step on the mat, you will lose."
"That's not why."
"Then why?"
You don't answer. You pick out the last chunk of ice and stand up and brush the snow off your knees, and when you turn around, Xaden Riorson is standing at the edge of the flight field watching you, with his hands in his pockets and the wind pulling at his dark hair.
You didn't hear him come up. You never do. It's infuriating.
"Lieutenant," he says.
"Wingleader."
He walks over. He has a way of walking, unhurried, all coiled weight, like the ground has agreed in advance to stay where he puts his feet. The rebellion relic curls dark up the side of his neck above his collar. Behind him, up on the ridge, a massive navy-blue dragon raises her head from the snow and fixes Cróga with a look of cool assessment, and Cróga rises to her full height and stares back. They've been doing this for months. You're not sure if it's a rivalry or a flirtation. You suspect the dragons aren't sure either.
"You got my note," Xaden says.
"I got all nine."
"And?"
"And the answer is the same as the last eight."
He tilts his head. A thin scar cuts through his left eyebrow, and it shifts when he does that, giving his whole face a skeptical cast. "You haven't actually given an answer to the last eight. You've just not shown up."
"That's an answer."
"It's a tactic." There's a glint in his eye. Faint. Dangerous. "I know the difference. I teach the difference. So I'll ask you directly. Why won't you fight me?"
You meet his eyes. It's a mistake. It's always a mistake. Up close they're not black, the way everyone says. They're a deep dark brown with flecks of gold that catch the snow light, and they're looking at you with a kind of patient focus that makes your stomach turn over.
"Because you'd win," you say.
He blinks. You've surprised him. Good.
"Probably," you go on. "Cróga's right. You've watched me fly for a year. You've seen me spar with everyone in the wing. I don't have anything left you haven't seen. If I step on that mat, you'll put me on my back inside a minute, and then I'm just one more name on the long list of people Xaden Riorson has beaten." You shrug, like it doesn't matter, like your pulse isn't hammering. "Right now I'm the only one who's ever beaten you. I'm keeping it."
The wind gusts. Snow skirls across the field between you.
"That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard," he says.
"Excuse me?"
"You heard me." He steps closer. Not much. Enough. "You think if you lose a rematch, it erases the first one? It doesn't. You beat me. In front of the whole garrison. That happened. That's carved into the stone of this place. I could beat you a hundred times and that one wouldn't go anywhere."
Your mouth has gone dry. "Then why do you want the rematch so badly?"
Something moves over his face, there and gone, like a shadow crossing the sun.
"Because I want to know if it was luck," he says. "And because I'd like to see you do it again."
You stare at him.
"Also," he adds, a beat later, with the air of a man reluctantly completing a report, "the dinner."
"You put that on the duty roster."
"Nine times."
"Do you know what the mess is saying about you?"
"I'm aware." His mouth pulls up at one corner. It's not a smile, quite. On him it does the work of one. "I'm a patient man, Lieutenant. I can keep pinning notes to a board for a very long time."
You think about the eight notes in your jacket. The ninth, folded on top. The way your chest does something stupid every time you see that neat black handwriting.
"Fine," you say.
He goes very still. "Fine?"
"Dinner first," you say. "Rematch after."
"Why that order?"
"Because if I lose the rematch, I'm not going to want to eat with you, and if you lose the rematch, you're going to sulk through the whole meal, and I'd rather be fed first." You turn back to your dragon, mostly so he can't see your face. "Saturday. The tavern in Samara town. The one with the blue door. Don't be late, and don't bring Garrick."
A pause behind you. Long enough that you start to wonder if you've miscalculated.
"Saturday," he says quietly. And then, just before he walks away, so low you almost miss it: "I wasn't going to bring Garrick."
You listen to his footsteps crunch away across the snow.
"You are blushing," Cróga observes.
"It's the cold."
"It is not that cold."
You lean your forehead against her warm scales and breathe out, long and slow. Up on the ridge, Sgaeyl lowers her head back down onto the snow, and you'd swear, if dragons could look pleased with themselves, she does.
"He's going to destroy me on that mat," you mutter.
"Possibly," Cróga says. "But I do not think the mat is what you are afraid of."
You stay there in the snow until your face cools. Then you go back inside and find Garrick in the mess and ask him, as casually as possible, what Xaden Riorson eats.
Garrick puts down his spoon. He looks at you for a long time with an expression of profound, sorrowful pity.
"Oh," he says. "Oh, you have no idea, do you?"
"No idea about what?"
"About your transfer," Garrick says. "About who signed for it." He winces. "And about how many people he had to argue with to get it."