“I can read it to you, if that would help,” he offered very softly. “It’s allowed. Look at the others.” He gestured to a pair and a trio working together.
“I can read,” she protested. “It’s just the print is small and my eyes are not strong.” But she handed over the sheet and allowed Callam to read to her, then pass it back for her to mark her responses.
“When the trials are done, maybe you can get eyeglasses,” he offered hopefully. “Or maybe dragon healing can help your eyes.”
She smiled, silently thanking him for his goodwill as much as his practical assistance.
Afterward, over the evening meal, they talked over the day’s trials. They spent some time discussing the written examination, which probed memory and reasoning, but also ethics and opinions - What would you do? in this or that situation taken from dragon and human history. Their debate was so lively that even a few other tributes joined in.
As the time for sleep drew near and the general discussion wound down, Edit spoke for Callam’s ears only. “You’re really good at this. Your whole heart is in it. You should be a tribute, not a proctor. Think about it.” She didn’t wait for him to respond, just pressed her hand to his, then turned away. He felt he’d been given something more than a parting gesture. Some kind of almost-tangible gift. A piece of her indomitable determination, perhaps.
One of the helmetted guards stood at a little distance - a few were always on duty, keeping unprepared humans from wandering where they’d meet a dragon unawares -- and he caught Callam’s eye and nodded, as if agreeing. Callam couldn’t read his the other man’s expression behind the closed face of the helm, couldn’t see if it was sober or warm -- or mocking. He wondered if the guard could even have overheard. More likely he had just seen the closeness and the touch, and offering a masculine approval of what must look like a budding romance. Without jealousy, because the guard himself was quite well-built enough to draw any attention he wanted.
The trials continued over the next days, swiftly becoming even more challenging. Without really intending to, Callam found himself more taking part than observing. He’d find himself at Edit’s side, meaning to help her as other tributes helped one another – only to realize that she gave as much help as she received. As the later trials subjected them to more physical and mental stress, having someone sympathetic to share the experience seemed the greatest support.
By then too, Edit was not just another (somewhat more sympathetic) tribute; she was a friend. When the tributes were made to plunge into icy water, when they were given a drug to simulate the disorientation and strange sensations the Chosen would endure in dragons’ company, Callam couldn’t bear that his friend should go through alone what he had seen so many previous tributes struggle with. He plunged in; he dosed himself as well.
Edit bore it easier than him, her harder early life a backhanded advantage. She said, “It’s just like slipping and falling off the stream bank in winter... It’s like influenza with a bad fever; you get lightheaded, just like this. But this will pass, this we won’t die of, at least.”
They talked to distract and comfort each other. She even sung to him a little, the way his mother used to do when he was young, and ill or fretful. They did the tasks that were set for them to attempt in that altered state. They got through it together, that and all the trials after.
In this way, without exactly coming to a decision about it, let alone making any formal declaration, Callam slipped into the role of tribute, and finished out the trials among their number, in as good condition as most and better than some. Edit kindly did not say a thing about it. Neither “See there,” nor “I told you so.”
In the aftermath of the last test a group of dragons approached, coming between Callam and the other tributes. The dragons were making no effort to accommodate human sensibilities; the weirdness rolled off them in waves. Their scaly hides and glowing eyes were colors Earth’s Nature never painted creatures so large. They had the coloring of lizards or insects, the bulk of draft animals—heavy horses or oxen—carried with the fluid grace of weasels. Their almost incorporeal wings shimmered and pulsed, fading in and out of visibility like roiling stormclouds.
It was the closest Callam had ever been to such a large number of dragons in their natural forms. Even with his relative familiarity he found himself badly unnerved. He froze beneath their collective stare like a rabbit freezes when a hawk passes overhead.
He wished they would shift already, take their human-like forms, so he could look at them without feeling the peculiar vertigo for which no test was enough preparation. But why should they go to that trouble, here of all places? Here, where every human claimed the privilege of not only fa
cing the truth of their kind but of living with it. With them.
Callam’s knowledge ended with the last of the formal trials. Was this another, final test? To see, after all else, if the tributes could truly bear the close presence of dragons as a companion must?
Or, horrible thought, had they come in force to take him to task for interference with the proper way of tribute testing, for forgetting his place? Callam’s heart pounded in his chest, loud beneath his frozen stillness. He felt rather than saw Edit step up to his flank, her solid, human warmth a silent reassurance. She would stand by him.
The dragons rumbled, a low, eerie noise that vibrated in the bones. It might have meant amusement, or offended rage. After centuries, most humans still found them disturbingly inscrutable; thus their adoption of humanlike form, and companions who could bear them without it. For his pride, Callam resolved not to flinch from whatever this delegation brought, be it test or censure.
The largest of the dragons, green-golden and regal, fixed its gaze on Callam and spoke in a voice like a pipe organ: “Your irregularity has been observed. You are surely aware; the testing is always observed. We know that you have been our loyal servant many seasons before this, and unlike your accomplice you cannot have acted unaware. You know well the manner that our tributes are tested, and you know the reasons this must be so. Yet you have turned from the way. What we cannot observe is your reason for doing so. How do you explain this?”
How indeed, could he make sense to a stranger –a dragon, the strangest of strangers—of the complicated muddle of feelings and impulses he wasn’t sure he understood himself? But something about the dragon’s disorienting stare pulled at him; he must try. That tiny portion of his mind that could still manage objectivity, even humor, whispered, So it is not just myth: dragons can compel the truth.
“I didn’t - ” he tried.
“It was for me,” Edit interrupted. “He did it for me. Because he knew how much I needed this chance, just the chance to try, and he is kind—”
“It wasn’t just kindness,” Callam protested to Edit more than the dragon delegation, sweating with the effort of thinking clearly, speaking clearly enough to make sure she at least understood.
“It was justice. There’s no rule that says who can or can’t be a candidate, or that they have to go blindly to the trials solely because they were sent. Edit, you’re just as worthy of candidacy as any formal Tribute I ever saw, and better than a lot of them if I could judge—but it’s not for me to choose, any more than every person who ever cast you aside. Dragons choose their companions, and their values are their own. I just—you deserve, they deserve, the chance to choose you.”
“The same is true for you,” Edit retorted, addressing Callam, but making her argument to the dragons who held fate in their scaly claws. “A man who knows the truth of the trials’ difficulty, the danger as well as the honor in being the Chosen of our strange and fearsome benefactors, who willingly serves, and without vanity quietly longs to offer of himself still more? It is justice,” she said steadily, “that he have the chance of being chosen, if it is not forbidden. And so I told him, and told him again, until he saw it as I did.” Her voice was even, but she was struggling too.
Though they were not quite touching, Callam felt her tension through the space between them. He searched for anything else to say, but the best he could do was nod assent. It was true; Edit hadn’t even had to argue very hard to convince him to break tradition to reach for his heart’s dream.
The huge green-gold dragon, and the others, looked at the two humans almost contemplatively. Deciding our fate, Callam thought. The dragons conferred among themselves in impenetrable dragonish speech. Then one, smaller and dark bronze, broke out in human words—“Tell them, Dalvenjarelarkhan! Do not you see they wait in terror while you discuss? It is cruel! Tell them, or I will!”
The great green-gold dragon—Dalvenjarelarkhan—Callam recognized the name of the most respected of the dragon councilors, though he had only ever seen her human form before-- quelled the other with a rumbling hiss. The tiny part of Callam that was not too petrified for humor imagined a parent schooling an unruly child in front of guests; it had that kind of Where are your manners? We’re going to have A Talk about this later, young man air that Callam had heard often enough from his own mother. He found himself feeling sympathy for the bronze dragon as well as gratitude for the support of speaking up for them. But he was not given long to reflect on it.
“You are fortunate,” Dalvenjarelarkhan said, turning back to once again skewer Callam with her whole attention. “Twice over. You are fortunate in finding a loyal friend who has care for your interests. And you are fortunate that your transgression was of custom, not of principle, for the one can be tolerated—even valued—and the other cannot.”