"Ostensibly I was there for the show, and it was in fact quite good. But it just so happened that a number of highly influential people have a taste for exotic theater and a burning curiosity about strange dragons that show up to watch it." 

"You are very fascinating. - could I land on you and have a ride, do you reckon -"

"Certainly! It might be a tad uncomfortable without a combat harness, but it's doable. I'd recommend grabbing a blanket at least — or, well, you can just make one, can't you. Best spot is the thickest part of the neck, above the wing-joints." His tail pokes the indicated spot. 

"Okay!" She equips herself with a fur blanket just like her coat and alights.

He starts off slow, to let her get a feel for the new kind of flying and adjust her grip. Then he gradually accelerates, throwing in some turns and shallow dives. "Good so far?"

"YEAH!" she whoops.

"Then hold on!" And now it's a ride. He swoops, rolls, dives, loops, skims the top of the waves, rides sudden shifts in wind direction, and puts up an increasingly tricky course of fog clouds to fly through like big fluffy hoops. 

When that's done he accelerates again, making wider turns and fewer complex maneuvers just to revel in the sheer speed. 

At last, he pulls out of a steep dive, angles almost directly upward to shed momentum, conjures one more fog cloud above, and just before reaching it, freezes it with a breath it into innumerable tiny snowflakes which accompany a lazy spiral glide back down to sea level. 

(The whole experience stays within easy sight of the ship — he doesn't want to leave it both dragon-less and girl-less in the event of a monster attack. The sailors will get a nice show.) 

"WOOOOOOOOOO!"

Exactly the reaction he was hoping for! "Been a while since I had a good reason to do that," he remarks as they glide back towards the ship. "I'd missed it. What did you think?" 

"You're better at flying than I am! Is it just practice?"

"Lots of it. Flying skill lends itself well to aerial martial arts, another focus of mine, and is required for some of the more complex moves. In peacetime, the silver-flights of the Northlands used to gather every decade or so for friendly competitions, often making substantial wagers of hoard on the outcomes. It got to the point that no one would bet against me on the no-magic flying course, so I retired and started charging to train the next batch of challengers.

"Mind you, I'm only a good flier by dragon standards; plenty of more maneuverable creatures can fly circles around me with a fraction the effort, in any contest that isn't about raw speed. I bet you'd improve much faster than I did. Want to learn a few tricks?"

"I do!!" She takes off from his back, the blanket disappearing as soon as she leaves contact with it.

Then he'll take her through the beginning of Practical Aerial Maneuverability. The early lessons (slightly modified for non-dragons) emphasize getting an intuitive feel for lift, drag, and wing positioning. He shows off a handful of easy starter exercises, like "glide as far as you can" or "enter and exit a dive without flapping, keeping as much momentum as you can", and demonstrates how to identify and take advantage of updrafts and gusts. 

It's fun. She is not as naturally talented a flier as she is a singer, but she can follow instructions.

Once she's seen the basics, he demonstrates a few combat-relevant techniques, like how to combine a roll, dive, and direction change to trade altitude for speed and vice versa, and how those can be combined in turn to enable strafing. (She can practice pelting him with hailstones if she likes, using this method, it won't hurt if they're small.) 

Plink plink!

"Good shot! There's a game wyrmlings sometimes play, flying around their parents and breathing at them without getting whapped by a wing or tail, or caught in a counter-breath. They get a little too into it sometimes — I certainly did at that age — but such is youth, and agility can sometimes be lifesaving. Of course, if they find themselves in an actual fight against something that large, we usually advise them to flee." 

"Why wouldn't they be with their parents?"

"Oh, various reasons. They fly off on their own to investigate some shiny thing, or they are learning to hunt in a forest that the parent's too large to navigate, or they are getting old enough to be encouraged to explore more freely, or there's something keeping one or both parents busy and the lair isn't as safe as they thought. Oftentimes the parent won't be far, so the wyrmling just needs to get back to them, but that's not always a guarantee. Wyrmlings tend to chafe at restrictions from a fairly young age, and it's widely considered wiser to temper their independence with caution than to try to stamp it out."

"I guess I don't know how old 'wyrmling' is in human years."

"Conventionally, up to five years or so, but wyrmling growth patterns differ from human ones in many ways. They're fast, agile fliers almost from hatching, have an intuitive understanding of our ancestral tongue, and can hunt small prey on instinct alone. They're only truly helpless as eggs, and those we tend to guard with the utmost fervor."

"I guess five is old enough you can't have an eye on them all the time."

"Yes, and they'd find it stifling by that age even if you could." 

"Well, kids find all kinds of things annoying that they have to do anyway."

"Restrict a wyrmling too much, and they fly away and don't come back. I gather the age at which that's an option is different for humans."