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Beldaruit had been quick to teach Qifrey the basics of spellcasting, and Qifrey had been quicker to master them. With the reputation he had developed since his arrival, proficiency was the only way to justify his prolonged, troubling presence in the Great Hall. Though Qifrey hadn’t expressed his concerns about abrupt removal, his master must have suspected it was bothering him and consistently reminded him otherwise.
Now that Qifrey had found himself a companion, and they’d both proven themselves to be troublemakers, the encouragements had morphed into cheerful warnings. Don’t venture too far out, Qifrey, lest you be devoured by a dragon or some other untimely event befalls you. A smile and flourish of his fingers. Only jesting, of course. Enjoy yourselves!
“Qifrey,” Olruggio said one day in lieu of greeting, “Let’s go find some dragons.”
His head jolted up from where he’d been crouched over his desk. A faint sparkle lit up in his eyes. “Really?”
Olruggio grinned, crossing his arms. “The wyrmherders should be passing through tonight, and I thought you’d want to see them. Only a couple, since viewing season’s almost over, but we might be able to catch a glimpse of their dragons.”
Qifrey’s brow furrowed. “Isn’t that banquet tonight?” This was in reference to the feast of Saurum, a summer holiday that had originally been brought to the Hall by witches native to the portside city of Genevieve. This would be his first time in attendance, and according to Beldaruit, it was a splendor not to be missed.
“It won’t start until later at night,” Olruggio reasoned. “We’ll be able to make it back, change, and slip in without anyone knowing we were missing.”
Qifrey didn’t need a moment further to mull it over. A while later, they were trekking across the hills of Naakiwan Downs. Qifrey was fond of the place – a sea of grass, the air filled with the susurration of plants whispering in the floral breeze. The sunset cast the world in sheets of gold, drenching nearby mountains in sparkling spillage that trickled into the streams. Clouds smeared against the pink-tinged skies like a paint spill, dripping cumulous white over the horizon soil.
Olruggio found a clearing and plopped onto the grass. The two sat close, legs splayed out on Qifrey’s cape. A cricket chirped nearby, bounding over their spread limbs.
“We.. probably should’ve brought something to do while waiting,” Olruggio said sheepishly, scratching his chin.
“We didn’t bring anything to eat, either,” Qifrey mumbled. “Why didn’t you remind me?”
“How’s this my fault?”
“You’re the one always saying we have to be prepared,” he pointed out, gaze cool.
“With spells,” Olruggio defended.
“With spells,” Qifrey nodded sagely.
Olruggio huffed, leaping to his feet. “Fine. There’s gotta be something edible around here, and I’m going to find it.”
They rummaged through the fields, encountering carpets of swishing grass and the occasional honeytree, drained of its sweet sap. After walking for some time, they emerged at the cusp of a forest, its trees thin and blanketed with warm, yellow leaves. Dappled light streamed through the canopy and painted their backs in soft white strokes.
The young witches found themselves a cluster of bushes half-hidden in the shadow of a thin tree. They picked it clean, devouring the berries one by one until their hands were red and sticky. Qifrey was about to suggest finding a stream when an odd sound punctured the air.
Olruggio flinched. “What was that?”
Qifrey squinted, walking past a line of trees. “There’s something over there.”
“I don’t wanna see what it is,” Olruggio said dryly, following his friend nonetheless.
Qifrey paused as the sound came again. The leaves around them shook, spilling like a sudden rain shower. He pivoted on his feet, running towards the heart of the forest.
“Hey!” Olruggio shouted, unwittingly chasing after his friend. “What are you doing?”
Qifrey shushed him, slowing to a walk. “I know that sound. Look!”
Curled up beneath an enormous entanglement of trees were a pair of dragons. They were long, serpentine creatures covered in shining red scales, their bodies nestled together like ribbons. After the initial shock faded, the boys ducked beneath a row of bushes (fruitless, since their pointy hats gave their positions away), but soon realized that there was no active danger. The dragons were fast asleep.
“Was that sound snoring?” Olruggio gaped.
Qifrey’s focus was dedicated to the dragons’ minutiae. Their wings twitched in their sleep, sending little gusts of air fluttering towards them. Their claws, curled beneath their chins in the picture of innocence, held an iridescent sheen. With each exhale, they sent warm air and fallen leaves flittering through the forest.
“They’re kind of cute,” Qifrey admitted, a faint smile on his face. “Smaller than I thought they’d be.”
“Maybe they’re dragon babies,” Olruggio suggested. “They’re still huge, though...and where are their riders?”
“They’ve got saddles,” Qifrey observed. “They must be nearby.”
He stepped out of the bushes, boots brushing against the ground. Olruggio snatched him by the cape.
“Let me go!” Qifrey hissed, nearly stumbling onto his bottom.
“Where are you going?” Olruggio asked, incredulous.
“I just want to look at their scales.”
“And what if they wake up?”
“They’re tame!” Qifrey insisted.
“With their masters, not complete strangers!”
Olruggio halted as one of the dragons shifted in its sleep. Qifrey was watching intently, craning his neck so he could see the slow, lethargic sweeps of the dragon’s serrated tail. There was genuine wonder in his expression, something Olruggio was only privy to in select moments: when Qifrey was learning magic (even the dullest kind of spellcraft interested him) and in these moments, after they’d abandoned the Hall to go on spontaneous escapades. The outside world was a place for indulging whims, and the longer he watched Qifrey, the harder he found it not to indulge him. Of all the impulsive things they’d done together, this was the most predictable outcome.
“Fine,” he relented, pinching his nose (“You look like your master when you do that,” Qifrey had once teased, and thereafter he’d attempted to kill the habit.) “But we’re gonna do it my way.”
Qifrey’s half-moon grin was worth the anxiety building his chest. He tip-toed a few feet near the dragons and whipped out his quire. He felt Qifrey’s inquisitive stare over his shoulder as he ripped the parchment out and lowered the spell to the ground.
The dirt beneath collapsed, creating a shallow, crumbly tunnel bordered by sprigs of grass. Qifrey stared in awe. “How did you do that?”
"Just an old spell from back home,” Olruggio said, grinning. “We used it for digging people out of the snow. Guess it works just as well on soil as it does snow. Come on!”
They clambered in, holding onto the walls for balance. It wasn’t a deep tunnel by any means, just a hairsbreadth beneath the surface. Olruggio used the spell to continue clearing dirt until he estimated they were decently close to the dragons. “Now we just have to dig through here, and we’ll have a den that we can watch ‘em through and a quick way to escape.”
Qifrey peered at his quire. “Do you have a spell for that, too?”
“Nah. We’re gonna use our hands.”
“We?”
“Yes,” Olruggio repeated cheerfully. “We.”
With little reluctance, they tore at clods of dirt and spindly grassroots, getting soil beneath their fingernails and staining their clothes with blotches of brown and green. “I feel like a rodent,” he admitted as one of their fingers poked through the surface. A beam of light shone into his eye.
Olruggio playfully tossed a clod at him. “You’re kinda mousy.”
“Hopefully it eats you first,” Qifrey grumbled.
They poked their heads through the den exit. It was stooped low, allowing them to get a glimpse of the dragon’s face. The space inside was small, and normally Qifrey would have found it too tight to be comfortable, but he was so enthralled by how close they were that the discomfort hardly registered. Their lustrous eyelashes brushed against the rough, stippled skin beneath their snouts, and their horns were enormous, curling like crimson boughs adorned in thorns. Bright blue markings adorned the sharp edges of their mouths and colored the scales at their nape.
“They’re beautiful,” he whispered. “The wyrmherders are so lucky.”
“D’you think we’ll ever get a chance to ride one of these someday?”
“Maybe,” he said. Long ago, he might have puzzled over the question. There had never been a someday, and he was only recently learning how to build an idea of what that could look like. He prepended to the list: ride dragons with Olruggio. Recalling the mousy comment, he added push Olruggio off a dragon for good measure.
One dragon’s maw opened in a yawn, revealing a jaw filled with sharp teeth. When it snapped shut, its eyes slowly opened. They were covered in a wet, dewy film, and citrine yellow like the lemons brought in for Beldaruit’s teas. It noticed their hiding spot immediately, their heads the only visible thing through the hole. Olruggio’s hand was positioned in Qifrey’s hair, ready to push him down if the creature turned out to be irritable and prone to torching its meals.
The dragon studied them, then puffed out smoke from its nostrils and turned to languish away on its right side.
Silence. Then: “I told you they were tamed.”
Olruggio slapped him on the shoulder. “We could’ve been kebabs.” His voice was terribly serious. “We’re lucky it thought we were boring.”
Qifrey stifled a smile. “Uh-huh.”
“Don’t you remember when we got chased by scalewolves last time we were here?”
“I remember you falling on your face,” Qifrey recalled.
“Very helpful,” he glowered, sliding down into the tunnel and leaning his head against the wall. With a lazy flick of his thumb, he completed a minor pyreball spell. A flickering ball of heat emerged from the papery cradle, casting their faces in copper.
Qifrey crouched to sit by him, flicking his hair. “It looks like mine,” he joked. “You’ll have to comb it when we get back.”
Olruggio’s eyes fluttered open. “Oh, no.”
“What is it?”
“The banquet’s probably going to start soon,” he mumbled, noting the dirt underneath his nails. “We’d barely have time to get ready, much less sneak in unnoticed.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t, then.”
Olruggio’s brow furrowed. “But...it’s supposed to be your first. Don’t you want to go?”
Qifrey pulled a leaf out of his hair, holding it over the fire. It caught flame and grew dark, ashy, sprinkling into the soil. His expression was remote. “Maybe another day. There’s always next year, right?”
“Are you sure? I mean, a party’s gotta be a lot more fun than sitting in this hole.”
“I’m sure,” Qifrey assured. “You’re right, anyway. We wouldn’t have time to get ready.”
“There’s always the option of showing up like this,” Olruggio teased, pointing to Qifrey’s berry-and-dirt stained hands.
“I think Beldaruit would faint,” he said honestly, and Olruggio burst into laughter.
Later that evening, they climbed into Qifrey’s bed, his room dimly lit by an old seal. They kept themselves largely in the dark in the hopes that no one would check for them there. Olruggio emptied their spoils onto the blanket they’d stashed away – pastry-caps filled with cream and crushed toppings, cured meat and cheese, and fruits skewered onto cleverly twisted pieces of wood.
Above, witches danced themselves about in circles, helping themselves to cream-filled biscuits and honeyed wine. The two boys’ absence had been noted, but neither of them were in the mood to join their fellow students in the junior’s ballroom. Beldaruit would comment on it later, when they were old enough to be less embarrassed, but it seemed they were growing to prefer each other’s company above anything else.
Tonight they found their satisfaction in departing the kitchens with as much party food as they could carry in their hands. They’d come back to Qifrey’s room breathless and laughing, stumbling over each other to find balance against the walls.
“I got you something,” Olruggio said through a mouthful of pastry. “Here.”
Something cool and round brushed against Qifrey’s palm. He held it up to the light of the bronze fire. “A dragon scale,” he whispered. “How did you...?”
“It actually fell off,” Olruggio admitted. “I was gonna say I plucked it off.”
Qifrey gave him an amused look. “What made you change your mind?”
“You wouldn’t believe it.”
He stared at the smooth keratin, closing his fist around the treasure. “No, I would.”
Olruggio arched an eyebrow. “If you say so.” He bit into a piece of cheese, chewed, and paused. “D’you think they’ll be there tomorrow?”
“The only way to know would be to visit.” Qifrey tried for coy. “I guess lessons will have to wait.”
Olruggio snorted. “We’re gonna be in so much trouble.”
The young witch shrugged, licking a dollop of cream off his fingers as he matched the smile of his friend. “What’s new?”