1st 5 Pages February Workshop - Boyce Rev 2

Amanda Boyce
YA Fantasy
Dragon Slayers

Pitch:
Jayde has been taught to hunt and kill dragons from the age of eight—she is a Dragon Slayer, and the first female of her kind. As protectors of their realm, Slayers should be respected by humans, but after centuries of peace from dragons their reign is failing and the people cry out for the first human king in millennia. War is coming. And dragons have returned to the land of Celedonia, burning towns and killing human and Slayer alike.

When she first meets Kail, a Slayer with a rare case of amnesia, Jayde has no idea how her life is about to change. She never expects to have the possibility of a normal life. She never expects to learn a startling new truth about dragons—or about a powerful dark magic brewing in the land.

1st 5 Pages:
A forest was ablaze with dragon fire, the air choked with belching smoke and the aroma of burning wood. Chaos reigned as people tried to find cover from the dragon's destructive wrath. Jayde watched from above in alarm, almost missing the six Slayers below the trees until they began shouting orders, trying to protect as many humans as they could. They stood their ground as a blood red dragon the size of a small house came into view, its spiked snout and multicolored scales glimmering in the moonlight.

She had no idea where in Celedonia they were; the wooden structures that peppered the trees like ornaments, connecting tree to tree were unfamiliar. A pang of shock coursed through her when she caught a glimpse one of the Slayers through the dense canopy of leaves, his radiant grass green eyes that rivaled her own shining up at her. She wanted to call out to him, tell him to run, but there wasn’t any time and she knew he would never hear her in the uproar surrounding them. Each Slayer took aim with an arrow just as the dragon shot a torrential jet of flames in their direction, blocking all from Jayde's view.

Screams of pain and horror resounded in her head and all went black. She opened her eyes to an entirely different scene: she was eight and Caius was teaching her to use a bow. The wind caressed the trees, bringing the sweet sent of blossoming magnolia and cherry to Jayde's nose before sweeping through her long auburn hair. She nocked an arrow and took a deep breath as she pulled the arrow back to her cheek. Her aim was good, the arrow whistling the sixty yards and embedding its tip in the center ring of her target.

A thought nagged at her, an idea. She let fly another half a dozen arrows then stopped suddenly to look up at Caius. His long grey beard danced in the wind. He looked down at her, waiting as though he expected her next words.

"I had another dream about a dragon," she said, confessing. "Is it wrong that I don't want to kill them?" She gazed up at the blue sky. "I want to fly with them."

The corner of Caius's mouth twitched. "Do you think it's wrong?"

She shook her head as the words, "But I'm a dragon Slayer," came tumbling out of her mouth. "How can I love dragons and kill them?"

His eyes like opals watched her for long minutes, never wavering.  "Perhaps you'll do both."

Jayde woke with a start, lurching upright and gasping for breath. She felt as though she was still in that forest with the dragon--clearly just a dream--even though her unconscious mind seemed to have conjured a nearly forgotten memory of Caius and shooting a bow in an effort to calm her. Why that memory? she wondered. And why had he been so kind in her dream? In her waking memory he was never so loving.

It hardly mattered now. She was already reliving the first dream, the vivid smell of smoke, the roar of flames and screams in her ears, and Micah's green eyes.

She shuddered.

Normally she relished her dreams of dragons, but this one, oh, Gods. Micah’s appearance had to be a coincidence. He'd been on her mind almost daily after his letter a month ago, and she'd dreamed of him plenty of times before. But this one felt different, more real somehow. Unable to bear the thought of anything happening to him, she shook the horrible vision from her mind and took a deep breath thankful the morning air smelled smoke free.

Her heart slowed as she focused on the mountains in the distance bleached of color in the pre-dawn light, Gabriel’s house a short walk away, small plumes of smoke emanating from the chimney, peaceful in its familiarity. A sparrow announced the day from one of the trees overhead; she always slept near trees when she could. It was a habit she formed early on with Caius even though her mother liked to remind her she had a perfectly good bed in her room. Caius never asked her to, but he slept outside so she slept outside. Now she almost felt claustrophobic sleeping indoors. She closed her eyes and dug her fingers into the damp earth--one of Caius's remedies to ground her after a nightmare.

She thought of Micah, his reassuring smile, his strong jaw, his comforting voice. He'd written that he had exciting news and he wanted to see her, to tell her in person. She could imagine him telling her he had requested to switch hunting teams to be with her, that he wanted to start a life with her. Daemyn stirred nearby, popping her fantasy bubble. She opened her eyes slowly.

"Another nightmare?" he guessed, his dark hair sticking up at the back of his head. She nodded and explained about the red dragon and the Slayers.

He stared at her, nonplussed. "Sounds like Cathal's team," he finally said. Daemyn was a few years older than she was, but she still felt like she might as well be his third older sister.

"Don't worry," she said. "I'm sure it's not real. It's just a dream." But then, Jayde didn't have normal dreams. Daemyn, along with the two leaders of their team, Matthias and Gabriel, had never witnessed one of Jayde's dreams come to fruition, but they all knew from Caius's explanations the previous year it was only a matter of time.

"It couldn't be real," she said more to herself than to Daemyn. "I mean, a dragon attacking U'Aste; it's not possible." The idea of a dragon openly attacking and burning down a city anywhere in Celedonia seemed absurd. Such an event hadn't happened in a century. There were still occasional sightings, of course, but the last one had been over eleven years ago when it killed Jayde's father. Caius had been the one to tell the then five year old Jayde and her twin brother Aiken that their father was never coming back.

"Why is it," she asked Caius once, "that we have to be trained as Slayers if there aren't any dragons to slay?"

He didn't respond immediately and Jayde thought she might have insulted him somehow. To her relief he set aside his bow which he had been polishing and he answered, "There will always be dragons, good and bad. There will always be some sort of threat, and humans will always need protecting. Slaying dragons is not our only duty." He paused, picked up a small pebble, and began smoothing it between his fingers brushing away the dirt, his pale eyes gazing ahead lost in some unknown recess of thought. "Do you remember what your mother said about her crops yesterday?"

"That they lost their taste," Jayde said immediately. She only remembered because she hadn't noticed a difference in the taste of the potatoes and vegetables on her plate until her mother said something.

Caius looked down a the pebble in his hand. "There may come a day when not just the people of Celedonia need protecting, but also the land itself. Healing this land may require magic only the dragons have. We'll want them on our side. They'll know whether we've passed on our knowledge generation to generation; whether we've used these gifts we've been given. Do you think they'd appreciate the waste of not using the strength and the speed and the healing abilities that their blood passed along to you?"

Jayde had never thought of her abilities in such a way before and she did well never to forget the blood of dragons ran through her veins. Only shortly after their conversation Jayde's body began to change, forever marking her as "other", making it impossible to forget where half of her blood came from, especially when she had a twin. "Your ears are pointed!" Aiken noticed one day, aghast. He reached out tentatively to touch the tip of her ear. "Like father's."

"And like Caius's," she said. "He told me my skin will change too. It will get thicker and tougher like his." She'd been excited then, but it was only the first of many changes that slowly separated her from her brother.

Daemyn cleared his throat, scattering her thoughts. "Well, even if it hasn't happened, it might still happen in the future, right?"

Jayde shrugged and brushed the dirt from her hands. "That was Caius's theory." She pulled parchment and a quill that contained a store of ink (one of Caius's inventions) from her bag and began recording her latest dream.

Months after he began her training, Caius voiced the suspicion that Jayde's dreams were prophetic. Over time they both realized that like Caius, Jayde had visions of the future. Though less intrusive than Caius's abrupt visions, Jayde's dreams were also not as obvious or as easy to remember, so Caius instructed her to keep a record of her dreams. Each of her collections of parchment were a testament to the fact that most of her occasional prophetic dreams were personal in nature--how their cat died, Aiken getting caught for stealing at the market, Caius coming to visit when she and Aiken were eight. (At the time she thought he was there to train Aiken. No one was more surprised than she was to learn she was the first female dragon Slayer.) She was not accustomed to far-reaching dreams involving places in Celedonia she'd never seen and people she'd never met. She had to admit, however, that a prophetic dream of Micah was just as personal as one of her brother, and as she finished writing all she could remember her stomach twisted painfully at the thought that there was a possibility her dream might actually happen.

She hoped to the Gods it never would.