Free A Time of Darkness (The Circle of Talia) by Dionne Lister

Now all I can picture is your wrinkly behind. Okay, I’m going to have breakfast before I lose my appetite.”
    “You started it.” Agmunsten shrugged and ruffled the young boy’s hair as they left.
    After forcing down his breakfast on a stomach infested with butterflies, Arie made sure he went to the toilet. When he was done, he ran up all six flights of stairs, sliding his fingertips along the smooth stone walls as he went, his full bag jangling about on his back. He had dreamed of flying on a dragon ever since he was a small boy at home when his mother would tell him bedtime tales of brave warriors riding fierce dragons. It didn’t seem real that he truly would be high above the ground on Zim’s back in a few minutes. His face flushed with more than his exertion when he reached his destination, over ninety feet above the valley floor.
    Agmunsten greeted him at the top of the stairs, “Come this way, lad.” Arie noticed his mentor wore a heavy, black, tight-fitting cloak and thick, yamuk-skin lined boots, the sky-blue wool encircling the top of his calves. It took several minutes to walk the entire length of the hallway. When they reached the dark stone wall at the end, Agmunsten reached down to a bundle on the floor. He picked up a fawn-colored coat and handed it to Arie. “Here, put this on. It’s going to be very cold out there, and do your hood up too.”
    Arie let his bag slip to the floor before sliding his arms into the luxurious coat. He was pleased to feel that the yamuk-skin wool lined the coat too. He buttoned it up and fastened the hood over his head, tightening it under his chin with soft ribbons that poked from the bottom of the rim of the hood. He couldn’t help but shut his eyes for a moment, like a contented pussycat.
    “Enough of that, lad. Are you ready?” Arie could see even Agmunsten’s eyes glistened with childlike anticipation.
    “You bet! Have you ever ridden a dragon?”
    “Nope. This will be my first time.” He grinned and rubbed gloved hands together. “Oh, and there should be gloves in your pocket. Put them on. One word of warning, lad: dragons are not horses, or inferior animals. Treat Arcese with respect and don’t tell her where to go. Listen to any instructions she has and obey immediately.” Arie nodded, his hair rubbing against the plump wool in his hood.
    The boy turned at the faint, yet familiar, click, click on the tiled floor. Zim reached them and smiled, a minute stretching of black lips, exposing only a few teeth. Arie looked at Agmunsten, and asked, “Do you ever get used to that?”
    Agmunsten barked a short laugh. “Eventually.”
    “What did I do?” Zim pretended to be offended. “Maybe I should just smile all the time and you’d get over it soon enough ... if you didn’t die of fright first.” Zim winked a huge eye.
    “You’d better stop that, Zim, or our boy will be running back to the toilets.” It was Agmunsten’s turn to wink.
    “Sorry I’m late.” Arcese joined them, and Arie noticed, for the first time, that each dragon had a harness that wrapped behind front legs, or arms—Arie never knew what to call them and was too scared to ask—to their backs and another strap around their bellies behind their wings. Attached to these straps was a saddle. Both dragons looked uncomfortable wearing them; Arcese gave a slight torso twist intermittently—it looked like she was trying to adjust, or banish, the unwieldy contraption.
    “Are you okay wearing those?” Agmunsten knew this was asking a lot of the dragons. The other reason they didn’t like wearing saddles is that thousands of years ago, before dragons dominated, a harsher race of humans—predecessors to the Inkrans—had lived in consort with the gormons. They had control of the dragons and enslaved them, forcing them to wear similar saddles. The dragons had toiled: working the fields, building things, whatever the humans and gormons could compel them to do. This was at a time when the