Page 91 of Tailwind

I bit my tongue.

I’d done my time. I’d spent years doing my time, more than I ever should. Sure, I loved Gottyk and looking after him, but I thought I’d been invited here to train. There were five weeks of summer break before the last race of the season and the thought of shovelling more shit than I ever had before brought a heavy melancholy crashing down on me.

Not that I could say that though. Not to him.

Bach watched me as I stared at the racks of brushes, brooms, shovels and sacks. Even from my peripheral vision I could tell those famous all-seeing blue eyes were seeing more than just my outward reaction.

So I sucked it all in and swallowed my pride.

‘Okay.’ I swept my hair up and tied it out of my way. ‘Is there a list of specific care instructions in there?’

Dragons this mature were bound to have specific needs. The Victrolia had to be at least sixteen, older than any dragon I’d heard of, let alone seen.

Bach nodded. ‘And the schedule. I recommend making a copy to take with you to your room so you don’t forget.’

My heart sank. It wasn’t just today, then.

‘Sure, no problem.’ Lucky for me I’d had plenty of practice in pretending to be fine.

So I rolled up my sleeves and got to work.

I was seriously considering giving up my love of Bach Lotiere and picking some other rider as my hero. The aviary care schedule was tightly blocked out. I was used to caring for either one adult dragon or many baby ones, but caring for six adults was a whole other world of pain. Mostly back pain.

It didn’t stop there though. When I’d finally finished the work that first day and found my room – a comfy and spacious bed and bathroom not far from the long house – there was yet another schedule waiting for me.

Every morning – which was generous as it took place before the sun was up – I had to go on a run. One hour of running laps around the ranch, then through the jungle to the aviary. That’s when I started cleaning the dragons’ home. Luckily with their free-roaming allowance there was a blessed absence of dragon dung to dispose of, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t mess to clean up.

Old bits of meat from the meals they didn’t finish. Copper chunks that had melted together over time that needed sifting out. Shed scales and talon splinters to find and remove. Balls of what I hoped were regurgitated bones from the meals and not the last keeper they’d had.

Then it was feeding time. These pampered dragons all had individual meal plans. I set up the preferred meats, supplements and serving methods. Vepari, the greatest Prevere blue from the past ten years, would only catch moving meals, so I had to haul her breakfast on to the roof via a system of pulleys and then launch it into the air with a slingshot. Surquet, the Adviant gold I still hadn’t gotten over meeting, had to have his food cubed and hand-fed over the course of half an hour to prevent bloating. The two young Kiestrals, Baknil and Vilmaren, were still ridiculously competitive and had to be fed at exactly the same time or a scuffle would break out. The younger of the two Prevere blues, Abenon, had bonded with the old Victrolia gold, Aloux, and they would only eat together … difficult since Aloux was asleep for most of the day.

By that time I was ready to have my own breakfast. So after a quick shower I reported to the long house kitchen where, thankfully, a wonderful breakfast was supplied.

As much as I hated Bach between the crack of dawn and dragon breakfast, it vanished as I ate my own food. It had everything I needed. Fruits for an immediate replenishment of energy. Some carbs to get me through to lunch and the choice of a variety of smoothies that, when I asked what they contained, was told ‘protein’. I figured follow-up questions would only make them less appetizing.

After breakfast was personal training. After breakfast I started to hate Bach again.

Behind the dorm building was a vegetable plot and manicured garden, cut away in a circle from the vast jungle around us. Every morning Bach waited for me on the patio bench, a timer augment in hand, as if he’d been tracking my breakfast.

That augment became my nemesis. It was the arbiter of interval training. One minute each of squats, lunges, bicep curls, push-ups, planks … then five minutes, then ten.

The exercises were nothing I hadn’t done before, but the quantity of them every morning … I was definitely being pushed past what I had ever done alone. Not only was the quantity being upped, but the quality too. The squats had to be lower, the lunges longer, the breaths deeper.

By the end of the first week my body was all but ready to give up on me and my mind wasn’t far behind. I rolled on to the grass and stared up at the sky. One of the dragons soared over. The bright orange scales and slight cleft in the tail fin meant it was Baknil, the troublesome but loveable Kiestral orange. My heart pinged for Gottyk. The blue of the sky filled my whole vision as I missed my dragon, letting my muscles cry uninterrupted.

Bach’s big hairy face entered my field of vision.

‘We’re done. Go study.’

This was an evil tactic, combining physical and mental torture. Every afternoon Josie lectured me on everything she could possibly think of to do with race strategy, which – given that she was a genius – was a lot. Doing it in the airy and bright library of the long house was at least an improvement from the tiny train cabins. Plus, I got to eat again.

Then, of course, it was back to the aviary to see to the dragons before sundown.

I took my frustration out on Aloux’s golden scales with the toughest wire brush available. The pretty northern dragon had proven multiple times he could sleep through anything.

‘I’d accepted Volitant was a faraway dream again, but wanting to fly during a training programme for racing dragons seemed reasonable,’ I vented to the slumbering giant.

I angled the bristles to get to the awkward gap between his back spines.