Dragon Games Read online

  The Legion Academy

  By Marisa Claire

  Dragon Games Copyright © 2019 by Torment Publishing. All Rights Reserved.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Dragon Games: The Legion Academy

  Marisa Claire

  www.tormentpublishing.com

  www.marisaclaire.com

  Contents:

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter One

  “Dima, tell me something.” Nav said, thrusting his grizzled, red face through the tent flap. “If you ordered soup from a fine dining establishment, would you expect to receive that soup today, or tomorrow?”

  “Today,” I mumbled, skimming the rusty peeler over the bumpy skin of the sweet tuberine in my other hand.

  The rest of Nav’s squat body joined him inside the tent, and for one glorious moment a rush of fresh air cut through the suffocating smoke and heat. And then Nav yanked the flap shut because—and I’d been there long enough to know this for a fact—breathable air was not something he believed his employees deserved.

  Sweat broke out on my palms and the slick, newly naked root shot out of my grip and landed on the other side of the prep table. Nav snatched it up and examined it with a frown. Then he chunked the whole thing into the bubbling kettle with enough force to splash drops of boiling water onto my bare forearms.

  “So tell me why my customers are still waiting, you stupid girl!” Nav bellowed, slamming both fists on the prep table. “Do you think you’re so much better than them?”

  I didn’t even wince. Not at the scalding or the scolding. This was just another day in Nav’s soup stall.

  “I’m hurrying,” I said, grabbing the next sweet tuberine off the pile. This one had a weird shape to it, kind of like a leering mouth, and I couldn’t figure out where to start peeling.

  Nav leaned over the kettle, ignoring the flames that licked at the already blackened edges of his leather apron. He spooned up some soup and pressed his cracked lips to the ladle to sample it. He coughed, peppering his concoction with spittle. No one could ever say Chef Nav didn’t put a little of himself into every dish he served.

  “Tastes like piss!” Nav howled, lifting the ladle like he wanted to throw it at me. It wouldn’t be the first time, if he did.

  “It always does,” snapped Shell from the corner where she sat cracking herbalines and emptying their fat, green seeds into a basket. “Workers don’t care.”

  Nav’s mouth puckered like he’d bitten into a citrine, but he knew better than to raise his voice—or his ladle—at his wife.

  Shell heaved herself off her stool and came thumping over to the fire with her basket of herbaline seeds. She thumped because, like my sister Pali, she only had one good leg, but, unlike my sister, she’d been able to replace the bad one with a wooden peg. Shell wouldn’t say what had necessitated this switch, but some people around the village said the leg had been crushed when a surly hogsteed rolled her off, while others swore some of Nav’s soup sloshed onto an open sore and gave her a deadly infection. The only thing that could really be ruled out was the Wasting Sickness—she’d have long since been dead.

  Shell emptied the basket into the kettle, each seed popping and sizzling as it struck the water. “There,” she grunted. “That’ll help.”

  Nav took a sip and grimaced, but didn’t offer another complaint. He ladled a watery serving into a wooden bowl and hurried outside to satiate one of the many ravenous field workers who gathered here each evening.

  On the way back to her stool, Shell paused to lean heavily against the prep table. She narrowed her eyes at my clumsy attempts to remove the gnarled root’s yellow skin.

  “Just chop it and drop it,” she barked before lumbering back to her corner.

  I exchanged the rusty peeler for the even rustier cleaver and went to work cutting the leering tuberine into a dozen thin slices. I scraped the pieces into my other hand and tossed them into the kettle where they quickly disappeared beneath the pink film of melting dragon’s blossom resting on top. My stomach roiled, and I honestly didn’t know if I was desperately craving the soup or being properly repulsed by it—such was life as a peasant in Pithe.

  Back at the prep table, I picked up the next sweet tuberine and debated whether or not I should peel this one—the skin wasn’t actually all that edible—or just chop and drop again.

  And then a wave of heat crashed over me, instantly drenching my whole body in sweat. I fell forward against the table and the tuberine rolled out of my hand. Shell glanced up, frowning, and I quickly turned my dripping face away.

  The fire danced under the kettle, but no more than it usually did. I should have been relieved that the tent hadn’t really become the flaming inferno it felt like, but a cold dread seeped into my heart—where it quickly became scalding hot like the rest of me.

  No, no, no. Not this again. Nav will kill me—or worse, fire me.

  Gripping the rough edge of the table, I fought to slow my racing heart, but with about as much success as I would have had pulling on the lead rope of a stampeding hogsteed. And every thunderous pump of the uncontrollable muscle in my chest seemed to increase the temperature inside the tent.

  “Are you sick, girl?” Shell grumbled, cracking open another herbaline. The patter of the seeds dropping into her basket rang in my ears like rocks dropping from some great height. “You’re not wasting are you?”

  “No,” I ground out through my clenched teeth. My vision wobbled, distorting the shapes of the tuberines left in the pile until they were all leering mouths.

  Shell snorted. “Then back to work. You know my husband has no patience for the feminine troubles.”

  I did know that, but I also knew that these episodes had nothing to do with the so-called feminine troubles. I’d been having those since I was thirteen, and while they were unpleasant to be sure, they had never involved hallucinations or heat strokes. Those had only started shortly after I turned eighteen.

  “Dima.”

  And then of course, there was the voice inside my head.

  “Dima.” She spoke with the impossibly deep rasp of two massive boulders grating against one another. It was a sound without age or gender, yet I felt in the depths of my soul that it belonged to something female, something ancient.

  “Dima,” she called again.

  So far, my new invisible friend had not been very creative when it came to getting my attention, which I supposed meant that I wasn’t very creative since she was obviously just a figment of my exhausted imagination and not…

  Not anything that means anything.

  It was no coincident that the voice had arrived shortly after my birthday, because it was only shortly before my birthday that Mother had finally agreed to let me take over as the primary gemlink-winner for our family. But it was clear now that the fourteen ho
ur days I’d been working ever since were starting to warp my mind, much like the tuberines still shifting and quivering before my bleary eyes.

  Shaking off the sweltering brain fog, I reached for the tuberine that had rolled out of my hand, knowing that at this point, I was going to need to chop and drop all of them, even if it meant some of the workers waiting outside would spend most of their evenings in their outhouses, reeling from the mildly poisonous yellow skins.

  “DIMA.”

  The voice roared with such force that I stupidly clamped my hands over my ears, as if that could actually block her out. Invisible flames licked at me with flesh-bubbling fury and I doubled over on the prep table, scattering all the tuberines. They struck the dirt floor with earth-shaking thuds, like a flight of dragons coming in to roost.

  Wait. I don’t know what that sounds li—

  The world tilted and went black. The soup stall vanished, leaving my body suspended in air, nothing above or below or around me but a thick, swirling darkness that clogged my nose and burned my lungs.

  No, not darkness. Smoke.

  I coughed, tears streaming down my face. My feet kicked at the smoke, searching futilely for solid ground. I moved my arms in swimming motions in front of me and my body surged forward.

  “DIMA.”

  Something soared above my head in a rush of wind that made my body dip, and for one heart-stopping second I felt myself falling, but another gust of air came from below, lifting me up into my floating position again.

  A bolt of fire cut through the black smoke, close enough to singe my eyebrows. But it faded quickly, taking the smoke with it and leaving behind a brilliant blue sky smeared with wispy white clouds.

  And into that sky jutted a dark and jagged mountain, crowned with snow and encircled by a spiraling stone stairway. The steps ended at the gaping black mouth of an enormous cavern, giving the disturbing impression of a long, narrow tongue wrapping around its owner’s neck.

  “DIMA!”

  Nav’s ladle came down hard on the back of my skull, jolting me back to reality. I threw my arms over my head and rolled out of the way of his next blow, sliding off the prep table and onto my hands and toes.

  My eyes met Shell’s and she shrugged, cracking open the next herbaline with a bored sigh.

  Nav rounded the table, ladle swinging. “Stupid girl! You think I pay you to sleep?!”

  I darted around to the other side, stumbling among the scattered tuberines. My chin banged against the hard dirt floor and my vision swam.

  “Answer me, girl. Is that what you think?”

  Groaning, I rolled over like a domestic canin cub showing submission. Like it or not, groveling was my only option. I couldn’t afford to lose this job. My mother and sister were counting on me.

  Nav loomed over me, whacking the ladle into the cupped palm of his other hand. “Give me one good reason to keep a lazy girl like you in my shop.”

  “I’m sorry,” I mumbled. “But I wasn’t sleeping.”

  He gave a high-pitched laugh. “Just resting your eyes then?”

  I sat up a little, scrunching my eyes against the pain radiating from both sides of my head. “No. I passed out. I think…”

  I started to say that I was sick, but Nav would fire me for sure. Shell had already asked me once today if I was wasting, and even though she hadn’t said “like your sister” I knew that was what she’d meant. Pithe was small. People talked. With a sister like Pali, I’d been lucky to get a job in food service at all. But even Nav would have to draw the line if I gave the slightest indication of being anything but healthy as a hogsteed.

  So I went with the truth.

  The crazy, impossible truth.

  “I think I saw Drakken Peak,” I whispered.

  It was only after it was too late to take it back than I realized how utterly unhealthy that sounded.

  Nav’s mouth dropped. His small, mean eyes blinked. And then he threw his head back and laughed. He laughed until he had to lean on the table, tears dripping from his eyes.

  I took the opportunity to stand and dust the tuberine trimmings off my threadbare trousers. Squaring my shoulders and lifting my aching chin, I faced my hysterical boss. Over his hunched and shaking back, I caught a glimpse of Shell’s blank face as she cracked open another herbaline.

  “Well,” Nav wheezed at last, blotting his wet face with his stained shirt tail. “At least crazy isn’t contagious.” He waved the ladle at the kettle which was threatening to boil over. “Back to work, girl. You can stay for giving me such a good laugh.”

  My fists clenched. “It wasn’t a joke.”

  “Oh, yes,” Nav chuckled, brushing past me. “It was.”

  I turned and shouted at his back, “I saw Drakken Peak!”

  He paused and his shoulders rose and fell with a heavy sigh. “I don’t have time for this. Either go back to work or go back to whatever pile of scrap you call home.”

  Fiery rage flared inside my chest. “Don’t talk to me like that.”

  As soon as the words left my mouth, the fire inside me flickered out. What was I doing? Why had I said that? Why had I said anything about Drakken Peak to begin with? I should have just told him I was having ‘the feminine troubles’ again. He would have scoffed, Shell would have eventually stepped in, and I’d have peeled two more tuberines since then.

  Nav turned on me, his hairy upper lip curled in a sneer. “Little wench has herself a silly dream and fancies herself a Noble now, does she?”

  I shook my head, taking a step back. “No. Of course not, I just—”

  Nav advanced on me, ladle swinging ominously from his right hand. With his left hand, he plucked at the baggy linen shirt I wore. “You honestly believe a dragon would choose a girl who can’t even afford to dress like a lady?”

  My face burned. My last growth spurt had made what few skirts and dresses I owned look obscene on my long legs, so I had passed them down to Pali and begun raiding my father’s trunk instead of spending precious gemlinks on anything as frivolous as new clothing. But being shamed for it by the man who paid me just enough to buy food and Pali’s medicine hardly seemed fair.

  “Leave her alone.” Shell snorted from her stool in the corner. “It’s not like you’ve never nodded off in the middle of something and had to be poked back to life.”

  Nav’s mouth twisted sideways, cheeks suddenly redder than usual. He glared at me and lifted his ladle as though to smack me square in the face, but instead he used it to gesture at the sweet tuberines scattered around our feet. “Clean up this mess.”

  As soon as he turned away, I knelt and began gathering the yellow roots. My heart hammered in my chest. That had been a close call. What had possessed me to talk to Nav like that? Had he been right? Had I let the silly dream go to my head? Had I actually believed for a minute that someone like me could receive the call?

  Nav wasn’t the only person in Pithe who would have laughed to hear me talk like that.

  I needed more sleep. Clearly. But working in the stall for less than fourteen hours wasn’t an option, so I would have to make sacrifices elsewhere. No more lingering at the dinner table with Mother and Pali. No more riding cindragons in the Burn with Raff. Work, eat, sleep. That’s just how it would have to be.

  With all the tuberines back on the table, I stood up and reached for my cleaver. But I hesitated, noticing Shell’s hard eyes boring into me. She held an un-cracked herbaline between her motionless hands. I grabbed the cleaver and ducked my head before it became necessary for me to acknowledge her gaze.

  I quickly sliced two tuberines and carried the pieces over to the kettle where Nav stood breaking up the pink dragon’s blossom film with his ladle. I tossed the pieces into the pot. Nav glowered at me—he was still itching for another excuse to thump me with his ladle—so I slunk back to my table in a hurry.

  Nav filled three wooden bowls with his slop and placed them on a wooden tray. He paused in front of my table, smiling widely. “Dima, I have figured out what i
s wrong with you.”

  Without slowing my frantic chopping, I lifted my eyebrows to invite him to expound on his theory. I mean, he’d been right about everything else so far.

  His smiled stretched, looking uncomfortably similar to the leering tuberine I’d chopped earlier. “You are just like your father.” His mouth crumpled into a disgusted frown. “A stupid, lazy, arrogant dreamer.”

  My fists tightened around the objects they held—a sweet tuberine in the left, a rusty cleaver in the right. One of these objects was about to collide with Nav’s face.

  The cleaver lifted…

  But at the last second, some tiny piece of my brain kicked back in. I chunked the tuberine at him instead. His nose crunched. Blood sprayed all over the bowls of soup on his tray, just before he dropped it to clutch at his battered face.

  Shell’s stool clattered as she jumped to her feet—well, her foot and her peg. She came thumping over as fast as she could, her strong arms reaching toward me. I didn’t wait to find out what would happen when she caught me.

  Diving for the nearest tent wall, I hit the ground rolling and shimmied under the heavy hide and out into the busy street, narrowly avoiding having my head crushed by a hogsteed’s clomping hooves. The rider perched on its bony back shouted and lifted his steed whip.

  I scrambled to my feet, suddenly grateful for the trousers I wore instead of the skirt expected of me. I raced around to the front of the tent where the field workers hunched on benches, slurping their vaguely life-threatening soup. They glared at me from behind their masks of red dust as I shoved my way through their ranks, determined to draw any pursuers away from the direction of my home.

  Nav charged out of the tent, his apron streaked with blood and his ladle beating at the air. “Catch that wench!”

  I poured all of my energy into my pounding feet, weaving around a cart selling second-hand pots and pans still caked with old food and leaping over a handmade wooden cage stuffed with skinny, squawking, doomed rooksters.

  Finally, on the other side of the village, a cramp speared my side. Doubling over with my hands on my knees, I chanced a look behind me. No one was coming. No one was even looking in my direction. I pushed my sweaty hair out of my face and let out a sigh of relief.