A Knight's Dragon Oath

The law of the Dragonguard is old and simple: the dragon chooses, and a rider has no right to choose back.

Edwina Falk is nobody by every measure her order keeps. Nineteen years old, common-born, a farrier's daughter from Greyford, the only girl on the squire rolls, fined one season's pay before her first posting. At the Choosing, when six dragons walk the yard, the most feared — the one-eyed black of Hollowcliff Vale, chained for eight years since his knight's treason — answers her bow with a cough of dragonfire that melts her father's shield to silver. The whole yard laughs.

She does not laugh. She is watching his left foreleg tremble, because a farrier's daughter reads pain the way other people read weather, and she tells him so, quietly, in front of everyone. "You hurt very badly. I can hear it."

A dragon's hearing runs deeper than skin. So does hers. In the blood of Edwina Falk sleeps the line of the oath-sworn, the first riders who spoke mind to mind with dragons — struck from the codex until only a worn scratch inside a salve tin remembers what her family was. Her inheritance comes at a price: every time she opens the bond, she shares her dragon's pain, his fury — and every opening makes it harder to remember where she ends and he begins.

Stolen medicine, smuggled down a cliff at midnight to a festering wound, becomes a private oath sworn in blood — steel to scale, breath to blood — without sanction and without any way back. The bond keeps no liars. It also keeps no secrets, and something in the far north tastes the oath the hour it is sworn, and turns over, and begins to read a calendar of its own.

From the lowest courier-writ in the order to the frozen wall of the Northmarch, Edwina and her black dragon fight their way into legend one unlawful flight at a time: a tide digging in like an army, a traitor eight years dead signing his work into the hides of monsters, a sabotage trail from the garrison's own pay-chests to a seal the order's mages should never use. Every rank is paid for in shared pain; every truth points at the men who wrote the history everyone recites.

Then the tide comes nineteen days early, the council recalls the wings to save the harvest cities, and the black is condemned as rekindled taint by a tribunal that would rather kill its only weapon than audit its own past. To save him, Edwina claims the bond out loud before four hundred soldiers — and for the crime of a dragon choosing her, both of them are struck from the rolls, outlaws with a wall to hold, nine nights promised and six delivered.

Before ten thousand witnesses, on the darkest night of the north, a mocked squire and a condemned dragon will get the one thing the order never offered either of them: the chance to choose each other when it costs the most.

A story of bond and battle, of a girl who refuses to be nobody and a dragon who has to believe he is somebody — for readers who like their fantasy fierce, their loyalty hard-won, and their oaths kept both ways.