Aerie

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

Raves for The Dragon Jousters Series:

“In Vetch’s world, Lackey gives us a wonderfully visualized society, similar in terrain, climate, religion and differing circumstances of slave, serf, and free person to ancient Egypt. Moreover, she fills the book with well-limned characterizations and convincing, detailed dragon lore to make up a whole in which Vetch’s coming-of-age becomes an integral part. Fans of McCaffrey’s Pern will love it, but they won’t be the only ones that do.”

—Booklist (Starred Review)

“In this elegant, compelling fantasy, Lackey combines meticulously detailed dragon lore with emotionally intense, realistic human characters. This uplifting tale, which contains a valuable lesson or two on the virtues of hard work, is a must-read for dragon lovers in particular and for fantasy fans in general.”

—Publishers Weekly

“It’s fun to see a different spin on dragons and the usual abused-child-makes-good story, and as usual Lackey makes it all compelling.”

—Locus

“As always, the incomparable Mercedes Lackey offers readers memorable characters, both human and animal, in exotic settings. She’s created a new fantasy world that begs to be explored and savored.”

—Romantic Times

“I like her [Lackey] more with every book I read. This new book—and it needs to become a series, because even though the story ends, people will be clamoring to find out what happens next—has a dynamic setting, lush with possibility. An interesting, well conceived concept and a nice set of characters makes Joust an easy, wonderful read.”

—SF Site

NOVELS BY MERCEDES LACKEY

available from DAW Books:

THE HERALDS OF VALDEMAR

ARROWS OF THE QUEEN

ARROW’S FLIGHT

ARROW’S FALL

THE LAST HERALD-MAGE

MAGIC’S PAWN

MAGIC’S PROMISE

MAGIC’S PRICE

THE MAGE WINDS

WINDS OF FATE

WINDS OF CHANGE

WINDS OF FURY

THE MAGE STORMS

STORM WARNING

STORM RISING

STORM BREAKING

VOWS AND HONOR

THE OATHBOUND

OATHBREAKERS

OATHBLOOD

BY THE SWORD

BRIGHTLY BURNING

TAKE A THIEF

EXILE’S HONOR

EXILE’S VALOR

VALDEMAR ANTHOLOGIES:

SWORD OF ICE

SUN IN GLORY

CROSSROADS

Written with LARRY DIXON:

THE MAGE WARS

THE BLACK GRYPHON

THE WHITE GRYPHON

THE SILVER GRYPHON

DARIAN’S TALE

OWLFLIGHT

OWLSIGHT

OWLKNIGHT

OTHER NOVELS:

THE BLACK SWAN

THE DRAGON JOUSTERS

JOUST

ALTA

SANCTUARY

AERIE

THE ELEMENTAL MASTERS

THE SERPENT’S SHADOW

THE GATES OF SLEEP

PHOENIX AND ASHES

THE WIZARD OF LONDON

RESERVED FOR THE CAT

And don’t miss:

THE VALDEMAR COMPANION

Edited by John Helfers and Denise Little

Copyright © 2006 by Mercedes R. Lackey.

All rights reserved.

DAW Books Collectors No. 1378

DAW Books are distributed by the Penguin Group (USA) Inc..

All characters and events in this book are fictitious.

All resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental.

The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal, and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

First Paperback Printing, October 2007

eISBN : 978-1-101-11815-3

DAW TRADEMARK REGISTERED

U.S. PAT. OFF. AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES

—MARCA REGISTRADA

HECHO EN U.S.A.

S.A.

http://us.penguingroup.com

Dedicated to the RPCongress for keeping me sane.

You know who you are.

(www.rpcongress.com)

ONE

KIRON, Wingleader of First Wing of the Jousters of Sanctuary, woke from a dream that his lover Aket-ten was nuzzling his ear to find that his ear was being nuzzled, but not by Aket-ten.

He sat up with a yell, startling the half-grown kitten that had been trying to nurse on his earlobe into instant flight. He felt its sharp claws dig momentarily into his shoulder as it leaped away into the darkness, and though he had certainly felt worse pain in his life, he bit back a curse.

With a growl, he turned over on his pallet and tried to get back to sleep. Below him, channeled up through the stair cut into the living stone of his dwelling, he heard Avatre snoring gently, or at least, as gentle in snoring as a dragon ever got. He couldn’t actually see anything, because it was pitch-dark in this room. He wondered how the cat could see.

Avatre was below him, not just beyond the door of the little room he’d been calling “home” for the last several months, because ready or not, the Jousters had been forced to make the move to the desert city they had initially dubbed “Dragon Court” and now called Aerie. The city they called Sanctuary, the place they had all thought would serve for years, was filling up with people, and fast. Priests, acolytes, the army of servants and slaves required to tend to them—those had come from Alta and Tia alike. The press of priests and their followers alone had shoved the Jousters out of quarters they had only just gotten used to. And that didn’t even begin to deal with the visitors . . . all eager to see the first Voice of the Gods of both Alta and Tia ever. And the first Voice of the Gods, period, in a very, very long time.

The presence of Kaleth, the Voice, gave legitimacy to Sanctuary; turned Kaleth’s plans to make it into a city of priests, for the training of priests, into something more than someone’s odd ambition.

Kiron stared into the absolute darkness of his new home. It was still a bit unnerving to wake up in the middle of the night here and see that. Or rather, not see that. Even on moonless nights during the rains back in Alta there had been some light, but here there was nothing, because he was, for all intents and purposes, inside a man-carved cave. There was a window hewn through the rock to the outside, but the shutters he had gotten made and refitted to the places where original shutters had clearly been were closed to keep the bats out. Not because he didn’t like bats; he actually liked them quite a bit. Because the cat persisted in thinking of them as mice with wings and chasing them. It never caught one, but it never stopped trying either. This meant a night full of the sound of running and jumping, and occasionally of having his body used as a launching platform. But having the shutters on made it literally as dark as a cave in here at night. For someone who had spent the best part of his life sleeping unsheltered under the moon and stars, such darkness took some getting used to.

As for why he and the rest of the Jousters found themselves being all but ordered to leave, well, the reasons were complicated. And because those reasons fed right into Kaleth’s actual plans for Sanctuary, that made it exceedingly difficult to say “no,” and, frankly, Kiron hadn’t had the heart to do so.

To begin with, Sanctuary was living up to its name. The priests of both Alta and Tia had had a bellyful of finding themselves victims. In both lands, the manipulative Magi, working through the rulers, had been able to decimate the priestly population of those who had even a hint of magic about them. The Altans had managed to save the greater part of their Winged Ones, thanks to warning by Aket-ten and a rescue by the Jousters, but the priests of Tia would be several years, perhaps even a generation, in recovering. In a city of their own, where priests ruled, this would be—not impossible, perhaps, but far less likely.

And most of the priests of both lands agreed, in principle at least, that if the peoples of Alta and Tia were to become one, it was time for the temples to merge. This was going to take some very creative work. And probably a few divine revelations. Some of the gods of Alta bore a suspicious resemblance to the evil gods of Tia, and vice versa. It was probably a good idea for this reconciliation to take place far away from the ordinary run of worshippers.

And so they had come, the teachers, the High Priests, the scholars and scribes, from temples large and small. This was not a stripping of the temples bare by any means; though Sanctuary was indeed becoming a city, it was by no means big enough to hold more than a fraction of those who served the gods of both nations. Nevertheless, there were more than enough takers for every available scrap of living space. The kamiseen winds, which had been so generous in uncovering portions of the buried city as they were needed, were scouring bare desert plain now. There was nothing more to be uncovered.

That influx of people had been more than enough to push the Jousters out.

And, truth to tell, a city full of the priestly castes was not a comfortable place to live, not for Kiron at least, and mutterings from the other Jousters made him think that they felt the same. The latest batch of youngsters, chief of which were Coresan’s hatch, were already at Aerie, and though repairs were far from complete, there seemed every good reason why the move should be speeded up. When they had first come to Sanctuary, they had taken over a temple complex that seemed to have been dedicated to Haras, or some god very like him. That had been all well and good when there were only a handful of priests, but the devotees of Haras had descended in droves, and had made it quite clear that while having dragons and their Jousters dwelling in the workshops of the god was not precisely blasphemy, it was certainly being looked at with a somewhat stern eye.

Having the Priests of Haras looking over one’s shoulder with a certain amount of impatience was more than enough incentive to find some other quarters for the dragons.

Well, now the priests had taken possession of the god’s temple. They were happy. Presumably the god was happy. The Jousters were far from the eyes of the priest, and so it was to be hoped that they were at last happy. And, truth to tell, when it was finished, and even now in some ways, Aerie was far more suited to the dragons than Sanctuary was.

Here they had good shelter from the kamiseen winds and sands, as good or better than he’d enjoyed in the dragons’ own compound in Mefis. There were cliff tops for dragons to bask on, and a hot spring for the humans to bathe in. Here, pens were set up as the bottom floor of these rock-carved “houses,” so there was no need, ever, to shelter them from the rains. They were central to all the good hunting grounds, and there was enough browse here for them to keep their own herds to supplement that hunting. Eventually, when Kaleth’s scheme to farm incense and rare plants here came to pass, they would even be self-sufficient. And here dragons could prowl or romp in the canyon bottoms that served as streets, unlike in Sanctuary, where they could scarcely fit in the narrow avenues between buildings and where an increasingly large number of people regarded a free-roaming dragon with apprehension.

There was a lot to appreciate here, even if the place had been abandoned for centuries. So had Sanctuary, and Kaleth, the original band of refugees from Alta, and the Blue People had made it livable while living in it. If they had done so to Sanctuary, the Jousters could do so for Aerie, and if the Jousters were not particularly suited to the task, well, neither were those who had initially followed Kaleth out here.

And he ought to be personally grateful for this much; as someone who had been camping out here for some little while—first when he was keeping an eye on the half-wild dragon Coresan’s nest, and later, after the destruction of Alta’s fabulous city and port in order to get some desperately needed privacy, he’d been able to lay claim to a spot before anyone else. He’d gotten one of the dwellings cut into the sides of the canyons of this place that had required the least amount of repair: two rooms with very high ceilings, one above the other, and the lower room had been hewn out to be lower than the street level, which seemed to be the case with roughly half of the dwellings. He had to wonder again if dragons had once been quartered here. The dwellings seemed designed for them, for sand wallows on the lower floors. There had been no need to do much to the place other than have the shutters made. A little subtle magic worked by one of the priests during a kamiseen and enough sand to make a tolerable pit for Avatre had been deposited literally at his door; the canyon street had been knee-deep in it. He (and everyone else who had moved to this section) only had to shovel it inside.

Shovel it inside! It was a good thing he had spent most of his life as a serf and was used to hard labor! Even with Avatre’s help—and she had been, surprisingly, a lot of help. Digging and shoving alongside him, once she understood that the sand was going to be her new wallow—it had taken a lot of backbreaking labor. At the moment, there were very few spare hands to be had in the canyons of Aerie, and the Jousters were all getting their hands dirtier than they ever dreamed possible. For most of them, it was more physical work than they had ever done in all their lives put together. There had been a lot of complaining about sore muscles, and a great many people soaking their aches in the hot spring before they went to bed.

Furniture had been problematic; it was whatever anyone could bring across the desert or could spare, and there wasn’t much of either, though more was coming in all the time. Most of it was Tian, since the priests were bringing caravan loads of things with them.

Kiron was of two minds about that. Tian furniture was more practical out here, made for a desert climate, but seeing it gave him twinges from a lifetime as a captive. At least he had an Altan-style mattress and blankets to sleep on. He could not imagine how the Tians managed with their benchlike beds and neck rests instead of pillows. It didn’t look comfortable. In fact, it looked rather like the sleeper had been laid out for the embalmers.

He had collected bits of furnishings through begging, trading, and actually fetching a few items himself when he had to take Avatre across the desert to tend to more serious matters. So far, he had collected a chair, his bed, a clothes chest, a desk, a brazier, and some lamps. Avatre had her wallow, properly heated now by magic. It looked bare, in the big, empty room, but then, he didn’t actually spend a lot of time here. There was just too much work to be done.

He punched his pillow a few times and settled back onto his side. But something in him kept listening for that pesky cat.

He was not sure how he had acquired the little beast. It seemed to have decided that he was the one privileged to play host to it. Which wouldn’t have been bad, since it definitely kept down the vermin, except for the way it kept trying to suck his earlobe when he slept and use him as a ramp to get itself into the air.

Some priests had followed the Jousters out here to Aerie, prompting a couple of snickering remarks about priests looking for captive worshippers. But it was not to be denied that there were temples here, too, and no real need for any Jousters to claim them. The priests of the cat goddess Pashet had found what seemed to be an ancient temple to their deity and had claimed it, bringing with them a veritable horde of four-legged avatars. Cats being cats, the maucats brought to Sanctuary had thrived and bred . . . cats being cats, the ones brought here did the same. Not that they weren’t useful, because the half-ruined city swarmed with all manner of things that the cats simply gobbled up, but cats did have minds of their own, and some of them were minded to find places to live other than the temple. This despite the fact that they were literally worshipped and adored at the temple, and had their pick of the daintiest portions of the kills and sacrifices that went to feed the dragons.

So they were likely to be found not only in the temple, but outside of it. Some of them didn’t seem to realize they were supposed to be in the temple at all—One of them being the mau-cat that kept trying to derive nourishment from Kiron’s earlobes.

He sighed, now wide awake despite the fact that it was so pitch-dark he wouldn’t be able to see the cat, or know where it was until it—

He refrained from leaping to his feet and screaming when it dashed across the length of his body and used his shoulder for a launch point into a tremendous jump.

He heard it land, heard a brief scuffle and a squeak, and then heard the wet sound of a cat dining on a fat desert rat.

Neither Avatre nor any of the other dragons bothered the cats, or bothered about them either, much to Kiron’s relief. He wasn’t sure how he would explain to the priests that one of their avatars had gone down the gullet of a dragon. Fortunately, dragons were too slippery for cats to want to sleep on, and most of them preferred warm human and blankets to warm sand of the wallows.

The wet sounds in the darkness ceased. And a moment later, the nameless cat strolled up Kiron’s legs to his hip, and stood there, attempting to knead it into a soft bed. Its claws were very sharp and long, and he gritted his teeth as they stung him even through the thick wool of his blanket, reminding himself over and over that one must not strike the avatar of the Goddess Pashet. . . .

He knew better than to roll over to try to dislodge it. Doing that in the past had resulted in the cat sinking its claws into his hip in an effort to keep its balance.

Finally, the cat gave up hip kneading as a lost cause and strolled down his legs again. Presumably, now that it was full, and he had, once again, proved to be a less-than-satisfactory sleeping partner, it would pad down the stairs to Avatre’s magic-warmed sands and curl up on a ledge at a respectful distance from the dragon. After all, she might not intentionally harm it, but dragons did occasionally heave themselves up out of their sands and roll over. They also were known to lash their tails in their sleep, or flail their wings. Kiron, on the other hand, was not a satisfactory place to sleep. He was too bony, and he moved too much, and he would not allow the cat the two thirds of his pallet that it wanted. Clearly, he was being ungenerous to the avatar of the goddess.

Maybe that was why he couldn’t get Aket-ten to stay here. Pashet was the goddess of love as well as cats, cats being well known for their amorous nature. Maybe he had offended Pashet herself.

That . . . could be bad. He made a mental note to find something to make the cat a warm bed with down on that ledge. And find another way to keep it from sucking his earlobe. And make an appropriate sacrifice at Pashet’s Temple in the morning.

Aket-ten was one of a handful of Jousters who were staying in Sanctuary to run courier to the new city the Great King and Queen were building on Great Mother River between Tia and Alta. He could hardly blame her for wanting to stay there instead of here. Her family was there, or at least, her mother and father were; most of her brothers had gone back to Alta to take care of the family estates and help resettle the refugees of the city. The only one of her brothers who had stayed was Orest, who was one of the first of Kiron’s wing in Alta. He was here in Aerie, though.

Maybe she’s living in Sanctuary to get away from Orest, he thought with amusement. The two had something of the usual sibling quarrels, exacerbated by Orest having decided quite on his own that, since all of his brothers were off and their father was immensely busy helping Great King Ari reconcile Altans and Tians, it was his duty to “keep an eye on” Aket-ten.

Maybe he ought to give Orest more to do.

Maybe I ought to give all of us more to do.

Maybe. But there was already too much work. That was the problem, really. It was all work they weren’t particularly good at. There were just not enough hands to make Aerie livable, to free up the Jousters to do—

To do what? Yet another problem. What was it that the Jousters should be doing? Not fighting each other. Not fighting each others’ nations. What could a man and a dragon do that half a dozen fighters couldn’t?

Honest answer: not much.

Still turning this question over and over in his mind, he finally fell asleep.

Avatre greeted him as he came down the stone stairs with a croon of pleasure. He couldn’t help but smile. Since she wasn’t bothered by the cat, he never put the shutters over her window unless there was going to be a kamiseen storm, so the light of midmorning reflected off the sands of the canyon and into the room.

It was a bit more rough-hewn than the one above it, leading him to wonder once again what the original purpose for it had been. There was no sign that dragons—domesticated ones, anyway—had ever lived here. And yet—There were the sunken, rough-cut lower rooms. What would you put in such a room if not a dragon?

Could they have been stables? Pens for livestock? Not stables; no, probably not. The first time Tians or Altans had ever seen horses, they had been in the hands of the Nameless Ones.

But pens for livestock. Goats. Maybe camels. Donkeys. That made sense. And it explained the huge doorways even a dragon could pass through. You had to have a doorway that wide or you’d have a devil of a time getting livestock to pass through it.

Now that there were no patrols to be flown, the dragons could awaken at their own time and pace. Now that they were each flying out to hunt alone, it didn’t matter that the wing never flew together anymore except during rare practices. Avatre, given the choice, was a late riser.

“Ready to hunt?” he asked her. He was never entirely sure how much she understood, but she certainly knew what that meant. She snorted eagerly, and positioned herself to best advantage for getting harnessed up.

He paused for a moment to reach his arms up toward her. She bent her head down on her long, long neck and rested it over his back while he embraced her neck. In so many ways she was his first love, and for so long she had been the best thing in his life. Truth to tell, she and Aket-ten were tied for first position now. If he lost either of them—well, he just didn’t want to think about that.

She was beautiful, and not just in his eyes. Her colors of scarlet shading to gold and topaz on the extremities only grew deeper and more intense as she grew older. When she was in the air, those colors shimmered against the hot turquoise bowl of the sky. She might not have been the most beautiful of the dragons, but everyone who saw her was struck by her combination of color and regal bearing.

He scratched the soft skin under her jaw for a bit, then patted her neck. “Come, my Sunrise. Let’s get you fed.”

He intended to go a great deal farther afield today, to give the regular hunting grounds the opportunity to replenish. And while he was at it, he was going to look for more dragon nesting sites. Though he was going to make it a condition of egg ownership that the potential Jouster have his own dwelling and pen with hot sands ready and waiting before any egg was bestowed.

And what was he going to do about the girls?

He strapped on Avatre’s saddle and flying harness, adding the flat bulk of the game bags to the rear over her haunches, just in case. He threw open the huge double doors to the outside, and she crouched, extended her neck, and eased herself out the doors. It never failed to amaze him how the dragons could stretch themselves out and make themselves thin to fit through places one would never dream of seeing them go. She didn’t even scrape her harness on the door, though in time he would probably have to saddle her outside to prevent that from happening. No one really knew how long a dragon could live, nor when they stopped growing. The best guesses were “about as long as a man” and “until they die.”

Ari’s Kashet, for instance, was still larger than any of the Altan-born dragons, and fitting him into one of the new pens here would have been a challenge. Fortunately, that was not an issue. For now, Kashet and Ari were dividing their time between Mefis, where the old quarters for the Jousters were, and the new city that did not yet have a name, with side trips to Sanctuary. Quarters for Kashet, and for The-on, Great Queen Nofret’s dragon, had been the first things finished on the new palace. The Great King and Queen were still sleeping in tents when Kashet and The-on were luxuriating in their wallows.

Those pens were built to the old plan, open to the sky, sheltered from the rains by canvas awnings that could be pulled across the top, with huge doorways. The pens were big enough that Kashet and The-on could triple in size—which wasn’t likely—without running out of room.

Kiron didn’t even need to command Avatre to let him mount now; she crouched down and extended a leg as a stepping place as soon as she was out in the open. She kept glancing up with one eye at the sky overhead; clearly she wanted to be gone and hunting.

Well, so did he. Morning and evening hunts were about the most amount of time he got to spend with her now, and it displeased him not at all that the hunts for the next several days or even weeks were going to be longer. And it actually would not have been all that bad if what he was doing was merely physical labor. No, he was spending most of his time acting as de facto leader for all the Jousters . . . except that, of course, there were those who were objecting to that on the grounds of his youth. Which he wouldn’t have minded in the least, if only they had put forward some reasonable person to take over in his place.

But Baken didn’t want the position, and neither did Haraket. The only people who did weren’t Jousters, and Kiron had had a bellyful of being ruled over by people who knew nothing about dragons, Jousters, or the unique bond the human-raised dragons shared with their Jousters.

Well, for right now, he wasn’t going to think about it. He was going to hunt with Avatre, and that was absolutely all he was going to concentrate on.

He felt her muscles tense under him, but she was on her best behavior, waiting until he checked the quiver at his knee for broad-headed hunting arrows, made sure of the tension on his bow, and that the straps holding him into the saddle were sound and cinched down tight. In the old days his dragon boy would have done all that. He didn’t particularly want a dragon boy actually. Where would he put one? In his own home? He liked having the privacy. He liked being able to be with Aket-ten, knowing that no one would bother them.

Satisfied that everything was in order, he gave Avatre the wordless order with hands and legs, and she launched herself up with a leap and a tremendous downbeat of her wings.

He was so used to the bounding surge of her flight that he didn’t even think about it now, he just automatically shifted his weight with her movement. But he never lost the thrill of flight, of watching the earth below, of soaring among the falcons and vultures. He loved feeling Avatre shifting the planes of her wings as she spiraled up a thermal, then glided down to the next. He loved the heady rush of speed when she folded her wings and dove into an attack.

Ah, but he also missed the thrill of combat. . . . He would never admit that to Aket-ten, but it was true. He had enjoyed every aspect of combat. He knew, however, that she didn’t, and that she was relieved that the only “combat” taking place now was competition to catch streamers from one another.

Well, there was still the hunt.

He took Avatre far out past her normal hunting grounds and well into scrub-covered hills. This was good territory for her to hunt in, too; the trees were twisted things with tiny leaves, and hid nothing beneath their contorted limbs. There were no canyons for game to run into and hide. There was more browse here, which should mean more game—

Just as he thought that, he saw a cloud of dust on the horizon. A cloud like that was only kicked up by the hooves of many herd animals, and sure enough, as Avatre drew nearer, he saw it was a herd of antelopes, a bit smaller than the oryx he was used to hunting. But that was fine; a herd of wild oxen this size would have been too dangerous for Avatre to tackle by herself.

He pulled an arrow from the quiver at his knee, nocked it on the bowstring, and gave Avatre the signal to make a fast pass over the heads of the beasts.

He was hoping to spook them into dividing, and it worked. He signaled Avatre to chase the smaller of the two groups, sighted carefully along his arrow, and fired.

The beast he had chosen took the arrow in the ribs, stumbled, and tumbled headfirst into the ground in a cloud of dust and tiny clods, and a moment later, Avatre’s front claws connected with her chosen victim. He braced himself for the impact as she used the momentum of her strike to spin herself around with the beast in her foreclaws as the pivot point. The rest of the herd thundered off into the distance. He dismounted and made sure the one he had struck was dead.

He let her feast, bundled the remains up in the game bags and fastened them to her harness, then glanced up at the sun and sighed. He’d be back by midmorning. Plenty of time to be cornered by half a dozen people with agendas of their own.

Oh, well. Putting it off was not going to make it go away. He sent Avatre into the air again, and prayed that today, at least, he was not going to find himself enmired in someone’s private quarrel.

As he approached Aerie, he could see younger dragons and riders practicing in the thermals now rising above the canyons. None of them had colors yet, though each of the original eight had his own wing now. Besides the population explosion of Sanctuary, there had been a population explosion of Jousters and dragons after the final battle between Alta and Tia that had ended the war with victory for no one. Many of the dragons that had gone wild when their controlling tala became useless had mated and laid clutches, then abandoned the eggs. And surviving Jousters and aspiring Jousters alike had gone out and kept watch over dragon nest sites, just in case that very thing happened. Eggs kept warm and tenderly cradled in carts full of sand were brought back to Sanctuary, then Aerie. And now there were eight wings of eight dragons each, with this year’s hatch only now taking to the sky.

Only Aket-ten had no wing of her own. . . .

Not that she didn’t want one. It was only that she wanted one composed only of young female Jousters.

And while he sympathized with her desire, he also knew what a hornet’s nest he would stir up if he gave eggs to young women when there were so many males—dragon boys, former Jousters, and warriors—who wanted to join the ranks of the new Jousters. This, despite the serious load of hard work it took to become one now that the dragons had to be human-raised.

Maybe that was why she would not move in with him. She was still angry at his last refusal.

She had a great many logical arguments. Women were smaller and lighter than men. Women tended to be more nurturing, which was what a young dragon needed. Women had good senses of balance and were good with bow and arrow and sling. And since there was not, and (the gods be willing) never would again be aerial combat between Jousters, other than ribbon chasing, there was no need for great strength.

She was right about all of that. He couldn’t argue with her on those points. But the plain fact remained that until he had satisfied every single male who wanted a dragon, he did not dare distribute a single egg to a young woman. The resulting outcry would be more than he cared to think about.

Aket-ten could only see that there were plenty of young ladies like Nofret who felt the same longing for the companionship and freedom of flight and, yes, love that the bond of human and dragon brought to the human. She couldn’t see that people still thought of the Jousters as warriors. That he was still training the Jousters to be warriors. She thought warfare was over. And so it was—between Alta and Tia.

But what about the lands to the south? And what about those to the east? That was where the Nameless Ones had come from and might come again.

And besides all of that, there were the desert raiders who plagued the Blue People and made the old caravan trails dangerous to use.

When those eight wings were wings of warriors again, well—

It wouldn’t be just incense trees and rare plants that supported them all.

But first he had to get through this.

TWO

THESE people were Jousters, at least. They let him get Avatre unharnessed and turned loose, to go and socialize with other dragons if she wished (which she did but very rarely) or fly alone, or go back to her hot sands and sleep off her breakfast (which was what she usually did). And they let a Jouster whose dragon had not been as good or lucky a hunter as Avatre come and claim the extra meat from him.

But then they descended on him with their problems.

The first to reach him was a trio of the newest Jousters, one older former rider of a swamp dragon from Alta, the other two dragon boys who had gotten themselves fertile eggs. All three of them wanted use of the few workmen they had here. Kiron listened patiently to their arguments before he made a decision.

“Resket-teren gets priority,” he said finally, and held up a hand. “I understand. All three of you have housing problems. But Resket-teren’s can be fixed the fastest. When people have all got about the same level of urgency, that’s how I’m deciding who gets priority.”

The other two grumbled a bit at that but reluctantly admitted that was fair. “You two might help each other,” he suggested to the “losers” in this situation. “You aren’t trained workmen, but there’s a lot that can be done with four hands rather than two.”

They exchanged a wry look, because this had become one of his favorite answers these days. No one could deny the wisdom of what he was saying, even when they didn’t much like it.

With that disposed of, he went the rounds to see how each of the eight wings was faring. Not, of course, that he didn’t already know how they were faring. The names changed within each wing, but each of them had the same triumphs and the same problems. In each wing there were two people who simply did not get along, mostly because of personalities. In each wing there was at least one show-off who would have to take a fall and learn his lesson. In each, there was one dragon slower to learn than the others. There were some riders who were better at cooperating than others—the recalcitrant ones did tend to be the older riders—and these would just have to get over their attitudes, or eventually form a wing of their own, which was certainly a viable proposition, and one he was considering already.

In fact, the more he thought about it today, the better the idea seemed. In the last day or so there had been two incidents of older riders flaring up at their wingleaders, objecting to serving second or third to “some jumped-up dog boy.” The older riders were, by and large, all aristocrats, and the differences in social standing were beginning to rub some of them raw. Finally, after listening to Huras sigh over his particular problem rider, he came to a decision, and as soon as practice was over for the day, he collected the wingleaders in a group while the rest of their Jousters took themselves off to work on their housing.

By now the sun was fully overhead, and it was like a furnace down in the canyons. Kiron squinted against the white-hot glare on the white sand covering the bottom of the canyon, feeling the heat reflecting from the surface as well as hammering down from the sun-disk. Small wonder that the Tians regarded the Solar Disk as a destroyer, rather than the life giver that the Altans called it. It was even hotter up on the cliffs, which was exactly the way the dragons liked it. There were jewel-bright dragons sprawled over every available ledge, wings spread out to absorb the sun, turning the cliff tops of Aerie into an abstract mosaic of color.

Avatre had forsaken the dark and her hot sands to soak up sun just like the others, a sprawl of gilt-edged ruby glistening in the sun. She had her favorite perch atop Kiron’s dwelling, and, on hearing his familiar step, she raised her head a little to look down at him with her great, golden eyes. She made a little crooning sound on spotting him, and put her head back down again. He smiled up at her, and then simply gazed around the canyon for a moment, taking in the peacefully napping dragons. Every one of them was within snapping distance of at least one other. A couple of them were even lolling side-by-side. This was normal behavior for wild dragons; unheard of in the Jousting dragons that had never been raised by humans.

Oh, yes. This was a far cry from the hissing, complaining dragons of the Jousters’ Compound in Tia . . . hissing, complaining, and at times, dangerous. The wild-caught dragons, even when drugged with tala, needed to be chained and regarded other dragons as potential rivals needing to be trounced. Though they had never hunted on their own, wild dragons classed human among the “prey animals,” and there was no telling which of the young dragonets brought in by hunters might have feasted at one point or another on a two-legged meal. Nor how many of them might remember doing just that thing, and try another two-legged morsel.

So far as these dragons were concerned, humans were fellow dragons, nestmates and parents, and the very little naughtiness they got into could readily be dealt with by a fist to the top of the nose. Not that they did very much; most misbehavior occurred before fledging, when they were still small enough to discipline easily, and when they learned that a fist to the top of the nose meant they had been bad.

And never had a human-raised dragon even snapped at a human, not even when most irritated. They were safe around adult humans; that was a surety.

Maybe not children. No one had volunteered to test the theory so far as a young child went. Though there was no reason why they shouldn’t be just as safe; with Aket-ten there to “explain” to the dragons that a child was a nestling. . . .

With that safeguard in place, so far as Kiron was concerned, it could be done. It definitely should be done before very much longer. Sooner or later there were going to be small children running about here. Once there were more workmen, more folk raising those incense trees, and yes, servants—those would attract bakers and brewers and tradesfolk—there would be families and children. They had better have the problem fixed before it became a problem.

When he looked back down at the faces of his friends, he saw that they, too, were gazing at the lazy dragons with a combination of pride and affection in their eyes. Well, all the new sort of Jousters, even the most argumentative of the “old” Jousters who had gone through the difficulty of hand-raising their new dragons, shared that pride and affection. So that much bound them all together; you couldn’t raise your dragon from a wet-winged hatchling to a flying adult without loving it, and surely that shared experience would help to sort things out, if the irritations could be brought down to a reasonable level.

They filed in the front door, crossed the little distance to the stair cut into the wall, and went up it one after the other. The upper room was full of reflected light, betraying his attempts to paint Avatre on one blank wall of his home, plastered over for the purpose. The painting looked out of proportion. The neck and legs were too long, the head too big, the wings too stretched out and too thin. Well, he was no artist and had never pretended to be. At least nobody laughed at it.

It might be furnace-hot in the canyons, but in the back of Kiron’s second room, it was cool and comfortable. Kiron half closed the shutters to cut down on reflected glare from outside. With a sigh of relief, the nine friends sprawled out in various positions of comfort, some of them taking advantage of the cool stone floor to let the heat leach out of their bodies.

Kiron didn’t exactly have a kitchen area—perhaps that was another reason why Aket-ten wouldn’t move in with him—but he did have some heavy storage jars with even heavier pottery lids that kept the vermin out. From them he took out strips of dried and cured meat and flatbread, and dipped out beer into pottery cups that he handed round. Hardly fancy fare, but none of them were complaining. Perhaps later today, though, he should stop by what passed for a marketplace and get some onions. About the only time he got cooked food anymore was when he visited Sanctuary.

“So, what is it that is buzzing in your head, Kiron?” asked Orest lazily. “Not that I mind all of us getting together for a change. We don’t do that nearly enough.” Aket-ten’s brother, like all the Altans, was of a paler skin tone than the dark Tians, though the people of both kingdoms shared the same straight black hair and dark eyes. He had matured immeasurably over the last several moons. Then again, they all had. He used to be forgetful, and could be terribly lazy when he had to do something that didn’t particularly interest him. Not anymore. Though he still had not broken himself of the habit of speaking first and thinking after.

Kiron nodded at that last with a pang. For people who had been such close friends, and had gone through so much together, it troubled him that they saw so little of each other these days. And yet, there just was not enough time in a day for them to do everything they needed to. If only they could get some workers out here, or youngsters willing to serve as dragon boys for the chance at an egg themselves one day! Or both—actually, preferably both. Then, ah then, they might have some time to themselves . . . some time to get together when there wasn’t something that needed to be talked about.

Soon, if the gods were only pleased to grant it. Well, at least Ari was not ungenerous about supplying them with funds. They could certainly hire people, if only they could find them.

He sighed.

“It’s the older Jousters,” he said carefully. Orest snorted.

“They’re spoiled,” Aket-ten’s brother said without preamble. “All they do is complain and talk about how much better it used to be. They had everything done for them in the old days, and they want that back.”

“And you don’t?” Kiron raised an eyebrow, and Orest had the grace to blush.

Old days, Kiron couldn’t help but be amused. The “old days” were mere moons ago.

“Well—” Orest began.

Huras, son of bakers who had lost everything when Alta’s capital and port were destroyed by the Magi-caused earthshakes, sighed. “We all do,” he admitted without a sign of embarrassment. “And maybe we’ll get all that back one of these days. I hope. And I don’t blame the older Jousters for wanting it either. My two—Well, I think they are doing pretty well, considering all they’re having to do and learn just to be Jousters again. Having to cope with the way things are now is hard on them. But—I’ll admit to you, I am getting tired of the complaints myself. It’s not as if we have extra workmen and dragon boys hidden away somewhere and are keeping them to ourselves, after all.”

There Huras, practical and level-headed as always, had struck the main point. They were all having to cope with a distinct lack of comfort. There were only one or two who had come from positions in life so low that the cave-houses were actually an improvement.

“Well,” Gan said, for once looking quite sober and serious, “I’ve thought about this a bit, and I’ve been keeping a bit of an eye on the old Jousters. No, they aren’t comfortable. No, they don’t fit in. Most of them are of much higher rank than the rest of us. All their lives they’ve had servants, and not just as Jousters. Our cave-houses really aren’t much better than holes dug in the cliffs.” Interesting to hear Gan saying this, ranking the situation into “we” and “them” and classing himself in the “we.” Interesting, because Gan was noble-born himself. And before he’d become a Jouster, he’d had a bit of a reputation for putting on airs. “They’re trying, they really are, but I wonder—I wonder if it wouldn’t be easier for them if they didn’t have to adjust to everything at once, and do it in the company of a lot of—ah—”

Here, he clearly ran out of words for a polite description of the motley collection of former slaves, former serfs, common-born, and noble youngsters that comprised the bulk of the new Jousters.

“A mixed lot, and most of us are quite young compared to them, and not well-born,” Kiron finished for him. “We are the sort of people who would have been their servants, and not their brothers-in-arms.”

Gan nodded.

“I’ve been thinking the same,” Kiron said frankly. “And it seems to me maybe they would be more comfortable in their own wing. Granted, that would mean a wing that’s pretty much comprised of former enemies, but—”

“Yes, but isn’t that what Ari and Nofret want? For Altans and Tians to start working together?” Gan replied with a shrug. “Anyway, they’re thrown together with former enemies as it is. Not much change for them there. It might be they’ll find more in common with each other than anyone thinks right now.”

Pe-atep, who had been yet another servant—the keeper of great hunting cats for a noble master—laughed. “At the very least, they will all of them have the same complaints about the ‘young upstarts.’ That ought to be a common bond.”

Kiron had to chuckle wryly. “Of course, I could be letting myself in for a lot of trouble,” he pointed out. “When you think about it, I’m putting all the people who would rather I wasn’t acting as leader of the Jousters in one wing.”

“Yes, but you’ll have all of them in one place then,” Orest pointed out. “With them scattered out across all the wings, there’s always a chance their grousing will have an effect on some of the new ones who look up to them. Tucked into their own wing, they can’t influence anyone but each other.”

“I also don’t want them to think I’m trying to exile them—”

Oset-re nodded, a knowing look on his handsome face. He was another well-born Jouster, and another who had matured in unexpected ways. He had been vain, and Kiron had not been sure he would last out the training at first. Now he was as steady as Huras. “They’re more likely to take advice from another noble. I can talk to them individually, find out if they would rather have their own wing, then let them finally come around to delegating me to ask you to transfer them into a wing together. And I’ll take them, if you like. I already have two of them, and they at least listen to me with respect because of my birth.” He sighed dramatically and stared with melancholy at his rather dull meal. “The gods know rank doesn’t get me anything else anymore.”

Orest snickered. Gan pouted with mock sympathy. “Oh, the tribulations we of noble blood must endure!”

Menet-ka, once so shy, flung a pillow at his head. He caught it adroitly. “Why, thank you, brother. This is exactly what I needed,” he said with a mocking bow as he tucked it under his rump. “How kind of you!”

Menet-ka made a rude gesture, and they all laughed. “Seriously, though, that is a good idea,” Kiron said, rubbing the back of his neck with one hand.

“Of course, it’s a good idea. It’s mine, isn’t it?” said Oset-re. “If you start shuffling them about, Kiron, they’ll resent it. If they think it’s their own idea, they’ll decide that ‘the whelp’ is finally learning to show some respect to his betters. Politics and people; it’s all politics and people. I’m not the expert Lord Ya-tiren is, but those are the circles I grew up in, and I do know something of what to expect from folk in those circles.”

Kiron spread his hands. “In that case, as you volunteered, I accept.” He sighed. “I didn’t really want this position anyway.”

“You’re the only one that isn’t a worse choice,” Huras said thoughtfully, in his deep voice. “I don’t mean to say that the others are not competent, or at least most of them are, but—”

“But we have a problem with some of them being truly unacceptable to the older Jousters,” Gan pointed out. “Haraket, for instance. You would think, seeing as he was the Overseer for the Dragon Courts, that they would think of him as one of them. But it doesn’t work that way. Overseers are people you hire so that you need not dirty your hands with trivial details. And Baken—he was a slave. Doubly unacceptable. The very few nobles that are not unacceptable to us because they don’t know a dragon from a doorpost are already integral members of Ari’s advisers and far too busy for anything else.”

“What a comfort, knowing that I am the least objectionable rather than the best qualified,” Kiron said dryly, and the others laughed. “I suppose that will have to do in lieu of approval. Though I would rather have Lord Ya-tiren or Haraket in charge here.”

And that was when another thing occurred to him. These were his friends. They were Aket-ten’s friends . . . who better to ask for advice about his quandary. Not the personal one, but the one that affected the Jousters.

“I have another problem,” he said, a bit forlornly, which made them all prick up their ears. “And it’s one that I can’t think of any kind of solution for. Aket-ten wants me to give eggs to—girls.”

“Why?” Orest asked, looking just a touch contemptuous. “A girl wouldn’t last ten days. Well, my sister and Nofret notwithstanding, I don’t think a girl could take all the hard work involved in raising a dragon from the egg—”

Gan and Huras rolled their eyes. Pe-atep snickered. Orest looked bewildered. “What?” he asked. “What?”

“If you ever in your life wish to have pleasurable company from a young lady, never voice that sort of opinion aloud again,” Huras said gravely.

Orest’s stunned expression made them all snicker. “I don’t understand—”

“Girls,” Huras said carefully, “become women. Women often become mothers, raising children, who are far more trouble and take much longer to mature than a hatchling dragon. You belittle that work at your peril, for all females are very well aware of this role from quite early in life.”

Orest still looked bewildered, and Huras just shrugged. Kiron sighed. His friend was unbelievably dense sometimes. Just because Orest’s mother had possessed a horde of servants to do all the unpleasant parts of child rearing for her, it simply did not occur to Orest—and this despite the fact that he himself was now having to do without servants—that other women did not enjoy similar privilege.

Or if it did, he probably thought that older children in the family would take the jobs that servants did for the well-off. And to an extent, that was true, but that only meant that common-born girls became accustomed to the burdens of child rearing at a much younger age than their well-born counterparts.

Oset-re pursed his lips. “I can see the problem. There are, well, a lot of young men and boys, most of whom have already had at least something to do with dragons, if they weren’t already Jousters, waiting for eggs. And after them, more who were warriors. Giving even one egg to a girl—That is truly asking for trouble from those who have been waiting for a very long time.”

Kiron nodded. “But she is very unhappy that I have not at least considered it.”

Gan’s eyes widened. “That kind of ‘unhappy’? I wouldn’t have thought that of her.”

“Not—exactly. But she has been making it—obvious—that she thinks I am being unfair.” He sighed heavily. “She brings it up every time I see her, and she does have some good arguments. And all I can say is that it’s impossible right now. Which doesn’t please her, needless to say.”

“Too bad you didn’t win a girl who only wanted jewels,” Oset-re said with sympathy.

“Have any of you any ideas?” he asked, looking from one to another of them hopefully. “I thought about telling her we would train any girl that managed to find her own egg or nestling, but—”

Pe-atep shuddered. “A very, very bad idea,” he said. “It’s bad enough that some of the ones on the waiting list are going out with the old fledgling hunters trying to find a way to steal hatchlings. People will shrug and think it is sad if it’s a fellow who gets hurt or even killed doing that. ‘He knew the risks,’ they’ll say. If if a girl got hurt or killed doing that, the blame would be on you. And maybe the ghost, too.”

“I wonder . . .” Menet-ka gazed off into the distance. “Now, here is a thought. Obviously, we’re trying to accommodate former Jousters and dragon boys first. They have the experience and something like the expertise, and even Aket-ten at her most stubborn would have to admit that. But when we finally get to people who want eggs but know nothing about dragons . . . I have a notion.” His eyes returned to Kiron’s and he smiled slyly. “And it will solve a problem as well. Make it known that from now on, anyone who wants to be a Jouster that doesn’t have the experience must serve an—apprenticeship, call it—as a dragon boy. Or girl. For at least a year. Six moons serving an adult dragon, and six helping with a hatchling up to fledging.”

“Oh—oho!” said Gan appreciatively. “By the gods, that is a plan!”

Kiron nodded slowly and felt himself beginning to smile as well. “Anyone who does this will find out precisely how much work an adult dragon is, and will see how much more work a hatchling and a fledgling is.”

Pe-atep pursed his lips dubiously. “We could have a very high loss of dragon boys. Some will quit within the first moon, I suspect.”

Kiron had to shrug at that. “And this would leave whoever had lost an apprentice at precisely the same point he was before he had an apprentice at all. I think all of us are used to the work now. Besides, it’s better they quit as apprentices than take on a fledgling and abandon it.”

They were all silent on that point. No one had—yet. The closest that anyone had come was when Toreth had been murdered, leaving his dragon bereft. Aket-ten had saved it, comforting it mind-to-mind so that it rebonded with her. But what would happen if a hatchling was abandoned? There were no other Aket-tens about to comfort it. No, this would be much, much better, solving a potential problem and Kiron’s own dilemma at a single blow.

Huras nodded. “Personally, any help at all will be welcome. If it is only for a short time, it will still be welcome.” Kiron smiled at him. That is exactly the sort of thing he would have expected of the easygoing Huras.

“Then that is exactly what I will do,” he said, with a nod. “And if a young woman does not feel easy being an apprentice to one of the existing Jousters, she will just have to wait her turn being apprentice to Nofret or Aket-ten. That seems fair to me.”

And hopefully it would appease Aket-ten at last.

Kiron looked up at the sky where the young dragons were soaring in the thermals of late afternoon, then back at the lists Haraket was presenting for his perusal, and sighed.

“You know,” he said unhappily, “no matter what I decide on this, someone is going to object.”

“I know,” the former Overseer said, running a hand over his shaved head. “I know it only too well.”

“Of course you do,” Kiron sighed. There were two lists. The first was of items of construction and furnishings that had just come in from the arduous crossing of the desert. The second, and much longer, was the list of who had requested what items. There were at least two and often a dozen claimants for a single object.

“So what do I do?” he asked forlornly.

“If it were me? Take a walk. Look over what people already have. Some of them have already paid for things out of their own pocket, or brought them in on their own dragons. See what they have, cross things off their list that they’ve gotten for themselves. Then start with the people that haven’t hardly got a stick. Give them each one thing, and work your way down the list. Don’t give anyone more than one thing. That’s what I’d do.”

Kiron nodded thoughtfully. This was the first “official” caravan of goods coming directly from Mefis and the vizier of the Great King and Queen. There would be more; Ari had finally gotten them scheduled. But every new arrival would mean the same clamor for what was on those camels.

He sighed. “Which means another list. Who’s gotten what from the caravan. So it all gets parceled out equally until everyone has what they need.”

“That is what I would do,” Haraket said. “It seems the fairest and wisest course of action.” Again, he ran his hand over his hairless head. “I am glad it is you who is responsible for the decisions,” the former Overseer said ruefully. “I got a belly full of the results when I was in charge of the Dragon Courts, and that was in our days of plenty.”

Kiron rubbed his hands over the heated skin of his biceps. “I appreciate the aid, Haraket,” he said, with a grimace, “But I still would rather it was you.”

“You’re getting all bound up in this nonsense, boy,” Haraket said, then grinned. “Excuse me. Captain of Dragons. Go take Avatre out. Hunt if you want to, but get in some practice, too. Combat practice, even if your targets are nothing but thorn trees. There’s an itching in my bones that says that dragons and Jousters will be fighting again, maybe sooner than we think.”

Kiron looked up alertly at those words. Haraket shook his head. “No, I’ve never been god-touched, but I do get feelings, and they’re more often right than wrong. Get some practice in. If nothing else, you’ll feel better for it.”

Since the alternative was an afternoon listening to people complain about things he could do nothing about, he took Haraket’s advice, left the lists in his quarters, and called Avatre down from her sunning post. She did not look at all loath to quit it, and kept her head up, gazing about alertly as he saddled her and added the combat weapons. He’d always had the feeling that she had enjoyed combat, too, and her reactions seemed to confirm that.

So did the fact that she leaped into the air as soon as he was firmly settled in her saddle.

He gave her no directions, however; since the other dragons of Aerie were not out hunting, it would not matter if she entered someone else’s hunting ground. It was by general agreement that no two dragons, with the exception of Avatre and Re-eth-ke, shared the same hunting ground. They were generally as good and as reliable as the best-trained hunting dogs, but—

But another thing that no one had tested, and no one wanted to risk, was having two dragons come down on the same kill. Dragons in the wild fought over kills. Would the human-raised ones? No one knew. Avatre and Re-eth-ke cooperated because Aket-ten was there to tell them to, speaking in thoughts and images in their minds. Without Aket-ten there—

They might simply posture and circle, like a pair of cats that had not yet made up their minds to fight. But if they fought, if the riders didn’t get off and out of the way quickly enough, death or severe injury was inevitable. And although Kiron had never seen a dragon fight go on to serious hurt in wild dragons, all that meant was he hadn’t seen it. That didn’t mean it didn’t happen. There was a lot that wild dragons did that he hadn’t seen, nor had anyone else. No one had known, for instance, that a dragon mother would leave her youngsters in the care of another, if she felt that other was trustworthy enough. That was how Great Queen Nofret had gotten her dragon,

It made sense, though, and it explained something that had been reported—one or more of the previous hatching’s females hanging about the nests and not being driven away. It occurred to Kiron, as Avatre spiraled up a thermal, that this was very like what common-born women did, appointing an older child as a tender for the toddlers and infant. The young female got to practice her baby tending under the careful eye of her mother, then just before fledging, which was the moment when the babies really were sturdiest, the mother could fly off, leaving her older daughter in sole command of the nest. In the next few years, this lesson might be repeated, so that when the young female matured enough to mate, she was not relying on instinct alone to guide her in rearing her first hatch—

Such philosophical thoughts were rudely interrupted by the sound of shouting and screaming below him.

Startled, his involuntary movement made Avatre go into a sideslip, and he looked down over her shoulder.

Below him, men on horseback, attacking a laden caravan. With a start, he realized he and Avatre had gone farther afield than he had planned. And that this caravan was taking the more dangerous short route between Sanctuary and Ten-hen-tes, the so-called City of Caravans.

Dangerous, not just because of the lions that roamed this area, but because of the bandits, sadly on the increase. Renegades and lawless men, and some merely desperate, but all deserters from the armies of both Tia and Alta, seeking to make their fortunes by taking the fortunes of others.

The fighter in him instinctively responded, and Avatre in her turn responded instantly to the little signals his muscles gave by going into a steep dive.

His mind was startled, but his body was already reacting, shifting and leaning forward, while his hands reached for his sling and stone bullets. As the defenders of the caravan milled in confusion, and one bandit darted in to cut lead reins of the rearmost camel and lead it off, no one looked up, until the dragon and her rider were literally on top of them.

Kiron slung a stone, but they were already past his target, what he took to be the leader, at the point where bandits and defenders alike suddenly became aware that something incredibly large, bright ruby in color, and possessed of more teeth and claws than anyone sane really wanted to confront, was rushing at them at a high rate of speed just above the ground.

The bandits scattered; so did the defenders. The camels knew this was a predator that could—and would—eat them and tried to bolt. Only the fact that their lead ropes were each tied to the pack saddle of the camel in front of them, and the fact that they all tried to flee in different directions at once, kept them from succeeding in vanishing over the horizon. The men of the caravan all went facedown in the sand, freezing in place like rabbits in hopes the dragon would overlook them.

Not so the bandits.

Some of them tried to rein in their horses to stand and fight, but the horses were having none of that. They also knew what was plunging down out of the sky at them, and were not at all willing to become dinner. Unlike the camels, they were not bound together; they could, and did, bolt in whatever direction seemed the most unobstructed. Not even the strongest bit, not the strongest rider, was going to hold back a horse in a state of panic.

Avatre pulled up, shooting straight up into the sky, as Kiron clung to her saddle and looked for the missing camel. He spotted it just under them. The rider that had tried to steal it was now on the ground, with no sign of his horse—

Unless his horse was the one currently heading north, riderless, at a high rate of speed.

Kiron sent Avatre in a wingover to make a second pass, scattering the riders further. By this point the horses were in full gallop and not likely to stop for miles.

At this point, there really was nothing more he could do to help—and in fact, landing Avatre would be rather counterproductive, given the reaction of the camels, so after that second pass he left the caravan workers to take care of the few remaining bandits themselves. He turned Avatre’s head homeward; she seemed content now to go.

But if he had needed it—there it was. The proof that there still was useful work for the Jousters.

THREE

“SO,” Kiron announced with glee to his wingleaders. “There’s still useful work for us.”

“Not just useful, I’d say it’s important,” replied Huras after a moment. “Uh—I hadn’t wanted to bring this up before, but . . . without an enemy army to fight, Jousters aren’t exactly a necessary sort of thing to have about.”

Orest snorted. “Neither are pet baboons, but no one complains about them.”

But some of the others looked thoughtful. It was Oset-re who spoke up for all of them. “The thing is,” he said reluctantly, “The pet baboons aren’t eating enough meat every day to feed an entire village. For a moon. It was one thing when we were protecting people from their enemies. Without someone to fight?” He shrugged. “Granted, the Great King and Queen are Jousters and want dragons, but . . .”

“But if we can’t prove ourselves useful, there will be all sorts of pressures brought to bear by nobles and common leaders and maybe even some of the priests,” Gan said bluntly. “We are quite visible, and quite costly and the things that go to support us could go to someplace else at a time when both Tia and Alta are trying to recover from terrible losses.” He pursed his lips thoughtfully. “Granted, it is true that with the weather no longer in the control of the Magi, this year should be a normal one for crops. But there are fewer farmers in the fields as well, at least in what’s left of Alta. I don’t suppose Kaleth has had any revelations from the gods about how the harvest will be, has he?”

Orest raised an eyebrow. “I don’t think that’s the sort of thing that Kaleth hears about.”

“Well, a fellow can ask, can’t he?” Gan was not in the least abashed. “I doubt the gods would be offended by so simple a question.”

“I want to hear about what sort of tactics we should be using,” said Kalen firmly. “Driving off bandits is not the same as fighting trained soldiers. And what do we do with any that we might capture? We won’t have an army underneath us to act as our support in the field. We need to think of these things before we have problems, not after.”

“Should we be getting permission to do this?” Menet-ka worried aloud. “This is nothing we’ve been told to do.”

“But we also haven’t been told not to do it,” Kiron told them all. “And my thought is that if we wait for permission, we might be waiting for moons, but if we just go and do it, by the time anyone thinks to order us to stop, the merchants will be so used to the protection that the howls of protest will sound like a pack of wild hounds with prey in sight.”

Gan grinned. “You’re learning,” he said smugly. “You are learning.”

Kiron just shrugged. In so many ways, the old order of things had been uprooted and they were all having to learn new paths. He looked around at them all, his friends, the young fellows he had fought beside and helped to train, and suddenly it was as if he was seeing them for the first time.

“We’ve—all changed,” he said aloud, feeling just a little stunned.

Because they really had changed, all of them, some out of all recognition. When he had first seen them, lining up before him to be told what being a raiser of dragons would be like, they had been an oddly assorted crew. There had been the commoners: quiet Huras, the baker’s son; tall Pe-atep of the booming voice, who had tended the great hunting cats for a noble; small, wiry Kalen, who had done the same with falcons. There they had stood, in their soft commoners’ kilts, no jewels, no eye paint, their hair, like Kiron’s, tied back in a tail. Common as street curs, all of them. Kiron could not boast any great bloodline, for before he had been a serf in the power of the Tians, he had been nothing more than an ordinary farmer’s son.

And the others. Orest, son of the great and wealthy Lord Ya-Tiren; Kiron’s friend, yes but under normal circumstances, they would never have met, much less become friends. So Kiron had met them because he had rescued Orest’s sister Aket-ten from a river horse—so they had become friends because Kiron had done so by flying in on the back of the first tame dragon that the Altans had ever seen. A simple farmer’s son would never have been a Jouster in Altan society; the notion was as outlandish as the reality—that a serf bound to the Tian Jousters had stolen a fertile dragon egg, hatched it, raised the hatchling to adulthood, and escaped with her. Impossible.

Yet there he was, and there they were. And he had been set the task of teaching a new lot of Altan Jousters how to have truly tame dragons, that obeyed out of training and love, instead of drugs and training.

Then there were the others, that he had not until that moment met. Ganek-at-kal-te-ronet, known to his friends as simply Gan, the oldest of the lot, handsome to a fault, with a languid air of laziness and a passion for women, with the highest bloodline of all of them but one. Menet-ka, also nobly born, though of a minor house, shy, but like the others, wearing garments and jewels, eye paint and hairstyle that proclaimed him to be far above the common touch. Oset-re, almost as nobly born as Gan, almost as handsome, with a superficial vanity that had swiftly fallen before his desire to partner a tame dragon.

Kiron preferred not to think about the one who was no longer with them. Prince Toreth, who had stood between the Magi and the power of the Altan throne, and thus, had died at their hands. . . .

Now, though . . . now, there was no telling which of them was common-born and which noble. They all looked alike. There was no eye paint, no one wore his hair in the elaborate braids of nobles. All were clad alike in the wrapped Jouster’s kilt; all were equally tanned and hardened by work. All had the hands of warriors, and some scars, too. Except for some superficial differences of face shape and size, they could have been brothers. Paler than Tians, but like Tians, black of hair and brown of eye, what marked them most was the look they all wore, what Heklatis called “the look of eagles.” Even Aket-ten had that look about her, now that he came to think about it.

They were no longer what they had been. Now they were men.

And one woman . . . no, two. Because Kaleth had crossed the threshold into adulthood before any of them, and with him, Marit, his lady, and her twin sister Nofret.

It was Menet-ka who understood at once what Kiron meant. He nodded. “We have,” he said gravely. “Now I think it is time we truly showed that.”

Orest made a face. “Alas! We must be responsible? ” he said in mock mourning. “And here I had hoped that when the wars were over, I could live my life as an idle ne’er-do-well! Ah, well. Fate has other plans for me, I suppose.”

The others laughed. With the Altan capital in ruins, even had Orest been dragonless, he would scarcely have been permitted to be an idler. For that matter, it was vanishingly unlikely that his father would have permitted him to enjoy such a path even if Kiron had never come to Alta. And he, and everyone else, very well knew it.

“So!” Orest continued, with relish. “Tactics! How will a Jouster, or a wing of Jousters, best deal with bandits?”

Kiron smoothed out a patch of sand and laid pebbles in a line on it. “Caravans always travel in single file; this makes them vulnerable to attack from one or both sides. What this means for the bandits is that they must find a place where they can wait concealed.” He heaped up sand on either side of the line of rocks, and placed more rocks behind them. “Since there are only so many places along the caravan routes where they can do this, we need not spread ourselves overly thin, nor play watchdog for the caravans as they traverse their entire routes.”

The others nodded, but it was Huras who said slowly, “For now.”

“For now,” agreed Oset-re. “Without a doubt, once the bandits realize what we are doing, they will change their tactics. But I think we can adapt. Let us concentrate on ‘for now,’ and worry about the change when they make it.”

“Against a small group, the old fighting style against ground fighters worked very well,” Kiron continued. “The horses were frightened into bolting, and none of them had the presence of mind to shoot at me. Of course, this, too, will not hold for long. So what I think we must do is this. We will begin by running patrols in pairs. For now, having two targets will keep the bandits confused enough. We will determine where the places of cover are along the caravan routes and keep them under watch.”

“We will be limited to flying no more than half a day from Aerie,” Kalen pointed out.

Again, Kiron nodded.

“For now,” he repeated. “This will change. Perhaps the merchants will suggest ways in which we can feed our dragons along the routes besides hunting. Perhaps the Great King will establish outposts of Aerie. But, for now, this will do. We will be giving the caravans some protection. And those who are now questioning the need for us will shortly be the ones insisting on such things. So. We have much territory to cover, and not so many of us. I would hear your words, wingleaders. Who shall we set to what patrolling, and still remain able to feed our dragons with hunting?”

Two days later, much as Kiron had expected, Aket-ten swooped down out of the sky on Re-eth-ke, just as he was harnessing Avatre to go out to hunt. Re-eth-ke backwinged smartly, throwing up an enormous cloud of sand, a piece of rudeness on Aket-ten’s part that Kiron found less than appealing. She flung her leg over the saddle and slid down Re-eth-ke’s blue-black flank as he dusted himself off, her face a study in anger and admiration mingled.

“Great King Ari and Great Queen Nofret send their greetings to Kiron, and compliment him on the successes against the bandits that have been raiding caravans,” she said, with an attempt, not very successful, at icy formality. “They command you to continue in these ventures, while their advisers study the results. And I would like to know—” she continued, her eyes flashing, “—why no one told me that there was going to be fighting!”

“Because you were with the Great King and Queen,” Kiron replied mildly. “I only just launched the first strike by accident two days ago. We are still working out what pairings are best, and what we will do when two dragons are no longer enough. And do not think to add yourself to the roster. Not until the Great King and Queen release you from messenger duty, at any rate. I cannot countermand their orders, and you will flout them at your peril.”

Aket-ten looked quite ready to bite something. “Any dragon past fledging could run messages!” she protested.

“But not just any Jouster has the full trust of the Great King and Queen,” he pointed out with inexorable logic.

He didn’t expect that to mollify her, and he was right. She actually growled.

But at least this had put all complaints about the lack of female Jousters right out of her head for now.

Aket-ten surveyed her handiwork and smiled.

So Kiron thought he was going to be clever about her plan for more female Jousters, did he? “Allow” it as long as they got their own dragons? He had clearly forgotten who he was dealing with. She loved Kiron, no doubt, but sometimes he drove her mad. He should have known by now that when Aket-ten made up her mind about something, she found a way to get it done.

It didn’t hurt in the least that she was serving duty as a courier between Mefis, Sanctuary, and Aerie. And there in Mefis were all those dragon pens, lying empty. . . .

And in the hills beyond the Great Mother River, all those former Jousting dragons, some of whom, at least, retained some good memories of their service to humans, none of whom were the least bit experienced in hatching eggs and raising youngsters.

It had all been a matter of patience, really. Patience, and having Great Queen Nofret’s ear. Nofret would immediately see the value of having female Jousters as well as male; for one thing, dragon courier service was proving extremely valuable to the Great King and Queen, and they certainly could use more than just Aket-ten to serve as messengers. For another, just because Jousters were very good at fighting, that didn’t mean that fighting was all they could do. Men were so single-minded! Kiron assumed that because she’d fought alongside the rest of them, that was what she wanted to do, too! She had never liked the fighting. Never. The acrobatics, the training, all of that, yes, but never the fighting. But girls could scout the borders of the Two Kingdoms without ever engaging an enemy, making the regular patrols that Tian and Altan Jousters always had, and that could free the fighting dragons to be ready to spring into action if a threat did appear! Girls could give Great King Ari regular reports about conditions within the Two Kingdoms, too, if that ever become necessary. In flood season, they could fly rescues as Kiron’s own wing had when the capital of Alta fell. They could ferry a single passenger, say a Healing-Priest, to places where he was needed—much, much faster than the fastest chariot could bring him. From the air, they could learn how to recognize blight in crops and map out the exact area that would have to be burned in order to save the rest of the crops.

And that was only what she could think of without working too hard. She was certain she could think of more things, and all of them would be tasks the men would—face it—scorn to perform. Or, well, at least the hotheaded young men, and the hidebound old ones. Probably Kiron and most of his wing would see the need. But they’d be glad to have girls around to do the jobs, so they wouldn’t have to.

Once she had girl Jousters, anyway. At the moment, she only had one . . . or rather, she had one girl and one egg, shortly to hatch. Still! it was a start!

The Palace still needed its food rooms cooled; that hadn’t changed, and the heat removed had to go somewhere. Sending it to the dragon pens as it had always been sent was the logical choice, even if there were only two dragons here to benefit from it. Or three, if Aket-ten was at the Court. But now there was another occupant here besides Kashet, The-on, and Re-eth-ke.

Secretly, Aket-ten had been very pleased when the only girl to present herself as a candidate for the lone egg she had retrieved had been a fellow Altan and a former serf, as Kiron had been. That had seemed a very good omen. Getting an egg hadn’t been trivial, but it hadn’t been impossible either. The problem had been that so many of the first-time mothers among the former Jousting dragons had laid infertile eggs and had abandoned them for that reason. It had taken a lot of patience and incubation to find one that was fertile and hadn’t sat so long that the egg had died. She must have had drovers haul in over three dozen that she’d had to discard. Only when she was sure she had a fertile one had she felt prepared to look for the right girl to play mother to the incipient dragonette.

But Peri-en-westet was definitely the right girl, someone after Aket-ten’s own heart. Gentle and patient, she nevertheless had a mind of her own and a stubborn streak that had kept captivity from breaking her.

Her history was rather interesting. She had attached herself to a woman with a feeble-minded daughter when the three of them had been acquired by the same master here in Mefis. She was by nature an affectionate person, and since her own family was gone, she had naturally gravitated into helping to care for the daughter until Ari had freed all the serfs and given them paid employment or restored them to their lands again. In this case, the woman Peri had adopted was quite skilled, thanks to her own cleverness in getting into the master’s kitchens. Her talent at baking had blossomed, and now she was one of the bakers for the stoneworkers quarrying limestone across the river. Her daughter was not so impaired that she couldn’t be set to grind flour and pat the loaves into shape. That had freed Peri from having to look after her.

Unfortunately, it had also left her without a job. She had no lands to restore, and no real skill other than child tending, something almost any slave could do. Then she had heard of Aket-ten’s search for someone to take on a dragonet, and she had answered it.

There was a complication, of course. There always was. The woman herself was pretty well determined that Peri would be married to her son, when and if she found him. But Aket-ten was confident that the young man was probably dead, and even if he wasn’t, he’d probably found some other young woman to marry. Peri herself seemed attached to the idea only insofar as it made her putative mother-in-law happy to plan for it. In the meantime, though, she was keeping the nature of her new “job” a secret from her friend, because evidently this woman was one of those who had set ideas about one’s place in the world—and a peasant girl had no place in the world of the Jousters, to her way of thinking.

Peri had moved into the pen where Aket-ten had installed the egg, living as any young Jouster did, but enjoying much better living conditions than the Jousters at Aerie. Granted, she had no servants, but as a farm girl she was used to that, and tending to her egg and learning about dragons from Aket-ten was scarcely an onerous job. Re-eth-ke had no objections to taking up a strange rider if Aket-ten asked it of her, and Peri’s riding lessons had been going very well.

There had been tapping and movement in the egg over the last couple of days, and Re-eth-ke was showing mild interest in it. If Aket-ten was any judge of things, today would be the day that the egg hatched. Aket-ten perched on the wall of Peri’s pen, looking down at girl and egg with Re-eth-ke craning her neck and head up beside her—though Re-eth-ke was far more interested in Aket-ten’s idle brow and chin scratches than in what was happening down on the sand. The egg was moving visibly.

It would not be long now, and Aket-ten waited to see if the girl was going to live up to her hopes.

Peri-en-westet waited beside her egg—her egg!—with a hammer in one hand, watching and listening as Aket-ten had taught her. Though she looked calm, inside she was anything but. As she listened to the tapping and waited for the baby dragon inside to pick the one spot it would try to break through, it seemed to her as if her entire life had been working toward this moment.

Not that such a thing had ever entered her mind before she embarked on this venture. Far from it. She had always thought that she would follow the path every woman in her family had ever followed, that of a simple farmer’s wife. Or, well, “always” as well as any small child understood the word. She had never really considered any other life, and truly, even now she would have been content with that path. But the war, which had changed so much for so many people, had destroyed any hope of pursuing the same life as her forebears.

In fact, it had destroyed her family altogether.

But not in the usual manner . . .

No, unlike Letis-hanet, soldiers had not overrun Peri’s village. Her family had not been slaughtered, nor taken away as serfs for some trumped-up charge. In fact, in a way, the invaders had been a blessing, for they had, at least, fed her and cared for her when they found her.

No, Peri’s family had fallen to the floods that had followed those terrible Magi-wrought rains. Upstream of their village, the waters of Great Mother River had risen, and kept rising, and kept rising, all in a single night while the villagers slept unaware until, just before dawn, disaster struck.

The wall of water that engulfed the village had melted the mud houses as if they had been children’s dirt forts. The unlucky had perished there, smothered by their own walls. And had Peri not been sleeping on the roof of the family home to escape the bickering of her siblings, who insisted on ending every day with a quarrel, she would have been one of them.

As it was, she woke in a panic, fighting her way out of sleep and up to the surface at the same time, by sheer good fortune catching hold of what had been someone’s roof timber. She clutched at that piece of wood with all her strength as she was whirled away under storm-racked skies, until she was fished out, nearly insensible, along with five or six others from her village. The fact that it was soldiers of Tia, the enemy, that fished her out made no real impression on her, not even when they turned her over to the Royal Slave-master to begin her life as a serf.

And even then, that life was nothing near so onerous as that of others. She had been numb and sunk in grieving for some time, so she hadn’t really paid much attention to her surroundings, but her master had not been unkind. In fact, her master was scarcely seen at all, and his cook, to whom she had been assigned, was taciturn but fair.

Perhaps all that had been due to the fact that there were no lands attached to her. She was too young to tell those who had picked her up where her family farm was, and there was no use hunting for records after the flood had swept through the place. The only other records would have been in the Altan capital, and Tians would hardly be welcome there. So there was no reason for anyone to try to be rid of her to free the property of encumbrances, and every reason to keep her alive and healthy to continue to serve. As others had noted before this, there were laws in place regarding the treatment of slaves, but serfs were war captives, and subject to much less oversight. As a consequence, for the same amount of work that could be got from them, they were much cheaper to keep.

It was in the kitchen that she had encountered Letis-hanet and her daughter Iris, and if ever there was a story of the woe of an Altan family in the hands of the Tians, it was theirs. Though Letis’ husband had never fought against the Altans, he had the misfortune of possessing fine property. A Tian wanted it. And so, spurious accusations were made, soldiers sent—

Letis was understandably less than coherent about what had happened then. All Peri really gathered was that her husband was killed on the spot, Iris was hurt, and the family broken apart, their son going with the house and the rest attached to the farmlands. Then as those lands in turn were parceled out, the remaining members of the family were further separated, leaving only Letis and her feeble-minded daughter together.

Their masters had ranged from careless to cruel until they and the remaining parcel of land they were tied to was bought by Peri’s master. “Absent” was better than “cruel,” at least. The trouble was, what to do with Iris while Letis was at work in the master’s bakery?

That was quickly solved when Iris proved moderately useful in the kitchen and the kitchen garden. Ordered to keep the girl in her charge, Peri had been perfectly happy to do just that, seeing to it that no one teased or tormented her, making sure that when she was given a task she completed it. Letis had been overwhelmingly grateful, and as time went on, the two became friends, then nearly as close as mother and daughter.

That was when Letis had started talking about her son. How he was Peri’s age. How Peri was exactly the sort of person Letis had envisioned as her son’s wife. And from that, it had drifted until the unspoken became the accepted, at least on the part of Letis—that when her son was found and the family reunited, Peri would marry him.

It seemed a harmless enough daydream. Letis had few such dreams to sustain her, and Peri was disinclined to shatter this one.

But then, without warning, at the moment in which victory was confidently expected by their captors—the war ended. The Great King was dead. His advisers were dead. Most of the Tian army was dead. And suddenly, there was a new Great King and a Great Queen, too—and she was Altan. And he ordered the serfs freed, and their lives to be sorted out, with recompense given to them.

Of course, there were thousands upon thousands of them. And it was taking a very long time to sort through records and claims and counterclaims. So while she was waiting for her claim to come up through the magistrates, Letis had been given a job that paid well, a place to live, and help for Iris. And Peri had——this!

She heard the tapping suddenly take on a new urgency, and she heard, felt, exactly the place where the dragon was trying to break through. Now she moved, the hammer in her hand tapping firmly, but carefully, against the shell. Hairline cracks started from her point of impact.

Soon, but not soon enough for her rising panic that she wasn’t doing this right, a piece of shell popped off, and a fist-sized golden snout with two flaring nostrils poked out of the hole.

She sat down hard in the sand with a sigh of relief. Now, according to Aket-ten, the baby would just breathe for a while, resting, before going back to hammering its way out of the shell. If she were a mother dragon, she would be licking the shell to weaken it. She couldn’t do that, so she had to weaken it with the hammer.

And before too long, that was what she was doing. Periodically, the baby would stop to rest, and so would she. The baby had begun her attempts—Peri was sure it was a “she”—to emerge in midmorning. It wasn’t until midafternoon that a big piece of shell finally fell away and the gold-green bundle of wet skin tumbled out of the larger half of the egg to land at her feet.

The baby raised her—it lacked the horns, so it was a female—head on a neck that seemed too fragile to support it and looked up at Peri with confused golden eyes. She opened her mouth to emit a muted squeak. And Peri fell entirely in love.

Aket-ten watched her protégée do everything exactly right, watched the moment when Peri fell into entirely besotted adoration, and smiled.

Everything was going according to plan.

Once other young women saw Peri—who was not a Great Queen, not even a noble—was a Jouster, Aket-ten was certain more would step forward, eager to join her fledgling flying corps.

In fact . . . she just might proceed with this plan without telling Kiron. Just deliver it as a fait accompli. That would show him, him and everyone else, that she knew what she was doing.

But she ought to get Nofret’s permission, formally, for a girl group. It was one thing to experiment with one girl and one dragon; quite another to invent a whole new kind of Jouster.

“You’ll need food for her shortly,” she called down to the young woman, who had the baby’s head cradled in her lap, with the wings spread out over the hot sand to dry. Peri looked up, startled, at the sound of her voice, as if she had forgotten that Aket-ten was there.

She probably had, actually,

“I’ll make sure someone brings you the sort of thing she’ll need for her first meal,” Aket-ten continued, jumping down off the wall. Re-eth-ke lost interest in the proceedings as soon as Aket-ten stopped scratching her, and stretched out to bask on her own sands.

Aket-ten hurried off, feeling uncommonly cheerful.

FOUR

THE trade routes for half a day’s flight in all directions from Aerie had been carefully surveyed. Places where ambushes were likely had been found. In fact, in the very act of making those surveys, two separate groups of bandits had been flushed and defeated, a fact which both elated and dismayed Kiron.

This meant that his plan was a good one. It also meant that the help he and the other Jousters were about to supply was more desperately needed than he had thought.

On the other hand, this development electrified even the older Jousters; he hadn’t quite realized how badly they had missed having duties to fulfill. But now that they knew there really was a need, they were on fire to begin patrolling, and had begun practicing on their own, adapting the tactics of war to a different sort of combat.

Right now, the tactics were simple: dive out of the sky and spook the animals. The riders would either be carried off with the panicking mounts, or dismount—or be thrown. Once on the ground, they were easier prey. And that was where the first difficulty came in.

No one had any compunctions about killing these brigands. The question was what to do with them if they surrendered.

If there was a caravan about, the law was clear, and Great King Ari had repeated it. Bandits were war captives, and as such, became serfs. The caravans could take them and sell them to the highest bidder, or use them as labor. With all of the Altan serfs freed, there was a bit of a shortage of that sort of labor now. More strong captives would be welcome.

The problem came if there were no caravans about. What to do then? There was no good way to transport them back to the nearest settlement. They certainly couldn’t be brought back by the Jousters; there was no way to do so safely. They couldn’t be released. That was utterly out of the question. So what to do with them? Killing them out of hand was utterly repugnant to Kiron. So was leaving them trussed up in the sunlight to die.

He still hadn’t solved that problem on the day that the first official patrols began.

But it was still a relief to lift into the sky on Avatre’s back, in charge of a flight of the “greenies,” Jousters who had never actually seen combat. He wasn’t worried about them; they were merely flying support for Orest’s wing, which was composed of very experienced Altan Jousters, survivors of those terrible days when the Magi had sent them into combat with the ruthless intention of getting rid of them through battlefield attrition. Anyone who had come through that was not going to find a few bandits at all intimidating.

Kiron’s greenies, all sporting ribbons of his signature color of scarlet, striped in colors picked randomly, were acting as scouts. They ranged ahead and to either side of the trade road in pairs, taking it in turn to fly back to Kiron and the fighting wing to report. He really, truly, did not expect any fighting this day, something he had even warned the others about. It wouldn’t do for them to become disappointed and disillusioned the very first day.

For the first half of the morning, the most exciting thing that happened was that one of the green youngsters spooked up a lone camel and decided it looked tasty. Green dragon, green rider, and a prey much bigger and tougher than even some experienced hunters would try; it was a good thing that they were flying support, for they were in trouble in moments, and it hadn’t taken the sight of the youngster’s partner flying back in a panic to let most of both wings know something was amiss.

There was a sudden cloud of dust on the ground where no dust should be rising, and most of the dragons in both wings suddenly turned their heads in that direction, as if they sensed something wrong.

Avatre did a wingover and headed in that direction on her own, but by the time they arrived, the situation was already well in hand. The camel was down, with Orest’s blue atop it, tearing at the prey, while the youngsters stood off, the dragon’s posture one of chagrin and envy. It wanted the meat. It also knew it was only going to get what Wastet left behind.

A pointed lesson for both dragon and rider.

But Wastet had eaten, and eaten well, before he flew. And Orest had no real difficulty pulling him off after he’d had the choicest bits. Not that—in Kiron’s opinion, at least—there was anything particularly choice about a camel.

This meant a delay as the rider of the offending dragon was dealt with. Finally Kiron decided that the best possible punishment would be to leave him behind.

The dragon, oblivious and greedy, gorged himself, while the rider stood unhappily by and nodded at Kiron’s orders. “Clearly, either you are not gauging how much to feed him, shirking your hunting duties, or not paying enough attention to his behavior,” Kiron said severely. “You are the human, and you have to think for two. He is a dragon and only knows what he wants to do in the next few moments. So when he is finished eating, you will butcher up what is left and fly back to Aerie. Tell Kalen that I am assigning you to his wing for more training in understanding your dragon.”

The older riders in Orest’s wing looked pleased at this. Even in the old days, when the dragons were drugged, it had been of prime importance to understand their moods and behavior. And working in the hot sun, butchering a smelly camel, was good punishment for the young man. This was a form of discipline that they strongly approved of.

For his part, that made Kiron feel a little more like a proper leader. Maybe I can make this work, he thought, as he mounted Avatre and sent her up, the rest of his greenie wing (but one) straggling after him.

There was a cloud of dust on the far horizon; from here, like a tiny smudge against the blue bowl of the sky, as if the “glaze” on the rim was not quite perfect. He signaled to one of his greenies and sent him on ahead to find out what it was, but since it was on the road, it was a good bet that it was a caravan of some sort.

A caravan . . .

There was a particular spot on this trade route that they’d already chased off one group of ambushers a day or so ago. Could it be that this had been no accident? Were the bandits actually expecting this caravan?

He signaled to Orest, who flew Wastet to within shouting distance. “I have a hunch!” he called, and gestured at the dust smudge. “We might just get some action—”

Orest grinned, teeth gleaming whitely in his dusty face. “We’re ready for it!” he shouted back. “Lead us in, Captain!”

As Orest returned to his wing, Kiron signaled the rest of the greenies, and got them in rough formation behind him. Their riders were lighter, the dragons themselves a little smaller, and hence, just a little faster than the older ones, at least in straight flight. There was always a trade-off of weight, power, and speed. Lighter meant faster in racing flight, but not in a dive. A small dragon could never be a powerful one. But a powerful one might not be able to catch him.

A powerful one might not be able to dodge an arrow.

Kiron had memorized this stretch of the road, and now led the group straight to the ambush point. For now, he doubted very much whether bandits were looking up for trouble. They had no real reason to. And even if they did, seeing the dragons in the sky would probably make them scatter, which was the point anyway—

The others might not see it that way, he realized after a moment. They might be spoiling for a fight. He made a mental note to remind them that they weren’t soldiers anymore, they were police, and preventing something from happening was just as good, if not better, than flying to the rescue.

He’d just have to convince them of that.

But not, it seemed, today. For ahead of them, in the ambush point, there were little dots that he didn’t recall being there. And Avatre began to strain forward, which told him that her superior eyesight had made out those specks to be animals or people or both. He took a chance, based on the fact that the dots weren’t moving, and waved his hand over his head in the signal for “Enemy sighted.”

And none too soon either, for the greenie he’d sent out was racing back toward him signaling “Caravan,” and he could see the dark streak against the desert floor beneath that dust cloud that told him the same.

He sent the greenies up higher, moved Avatre into a middle-height position, and signaled to Orest to bring the seasoned wing in to the forefront of the formation.

By that point, the dots had resolved themselves into riders, waiting to swoop down over the crest of the hill as soon as the caravan came within reach.

They were not looking up.

Although, a moment later, as Orest’s wing came diving down out of the sky, and their camels began to bolt, they were.

By the standards of the war it was a short, and very much one-sided, battle. Kiron even allowed his greenies to dive down and herd riderless mounts off into the desert as far as they could be chased, while the seasoned fighters concentrated on the bandits themselves. This was plenty of excitement for them.

The bandits, however, were enough of a menace that the seasoned fighters, individually, had their hands full. Some of them must have dealt with Jousters before this, for a handful of them went back-to-back in a circle, roughly half with spears, and half with bows.

The bowmen were good shots.

A deep maroon dragon bellowed in outrage as an arrow pierced his wing web, and as his rider cursed and ducked, an arrow bouncing off his helm, Kiron was glad he’d ordered the experienced Jousters into their scavenged armor today.

But rather than making them back down, the successful attack on their fellow Jouster infuriated the rest. The angry cry from their injured wingmate ignited the ire of the dragons, and as if they had been given orders from Aket-ten, Kiron watched in astonishment as they did something he had never seen Jousting dragons do before.

They ignored the commands of their riders and landed, clustering all on one side of the knot of bandits. Then, as one, they half-reared and began furiously fanning the air with their wings.

A landing dragon had always kicked up a miniature kamiseen. This was eight dragons all blowing up sand and dust and purposefully aiming it at the humans, who were not expecting it.

Blinded, uttering cries of pain of their own as they dropped weapons and tried to shield their eyes, or clapped their hands over eyes full of sand, they stumbled backward, turning away from their attackers.

Only to be felled by arrows, javelins, and slung stones and lead bullets. Accustomed now to hitting running game at long range, the cluster of incapacitated bandits at short range was no challenge. They were armored—armor that, it appeared, had been salvaged from Tian and Altan officers—but nothing covered their throats, the backs of their legs, or their eyes.

The Jousters were ruthless. When they were finished, there were none of that group left standing. It left Kiron feeling a bit sick, but—

This was war, another sort of war, and this time he had not a lot of sympathy for the enemy. They preyed on the people who were only trying to make an honest copper, who already had to contend with wind and sandstorm and all the other hazards of trade. They stole and killed without provocation. He clenched his jaw and said nothing. The bandits could have surrendered, and the gods only knew what they were guilty of precisely, but they were—at the least—guilty of trying to rob people who had never harmed them.

It was a short, hot fight, but in the end, it was one-sided.

It took longer to round up the survivors. Some lay where they had fallen, wounded, or having thrown themselves to the ground, but others—

“We have runners, Captain,” said Kelet-mat, rider of a bronze-and-yellow beast of placid nature, when a half-dozen brigands waited, trussed hand and foot, in the sun. “What should we do about them?”

Kiron pondered that for a moment. “Do you think they’ll get anywhere?”

Kelet-mat grimaced, and raked his black hair out of his eyes with one hand. “I would have said ‘no,’ since there’s nothing but sand and scrub as far as the eye can see—but these rats aren’t soldiers. They have the luck of Seft himself, and it would be just our luck that one of them would go telling what had happened in some scummy tavern and the next lot we have to deal with will be ready for us.”

“Eventually someone will tell—” Kiron pointed out reluctantly. “But it would be good if we could keep the advantage of surprise for a while longer.” He scratched his head and looked out over the horizon. “All right. You senior riders track them down and round them up. And don’t take unnecessary chances.”

It wasn’t until the caravan itself arrived that they finished, and as the astonished merchants halted their beasts to stare, Kiron was pondering the second problem; what to do with twenty-some bound captives.

It was an interesting tableau, actually. On the road, the line of laden camels, blowing and looking nervously at the dragons. The dragons, ignoring them, all lounging happily, basking in the sun. The merchants, torn between apprehension and curiosity, The Jousters in their armor, some of which had already been removed because it was so cursed hot. And the captives.

Finally, curiosity won, and one of the merchants swung his leg over his saddle, slid down the side of his camel, and headed straight for Kiron.

The merchant was nothing if not bold. “So, Captain,” he said as soon as he came within earshot. “I can see you’re Jousters, but for which side? And why’ve you trussed up these men like chicken going to market?”

Kiron smiled. “We’re Jousters for Great King Ari and Great Queen Nofret, which makes us royal police of a sort. You could say we’re on your side, come to that. As for why these fellows are trussed up—if we hadn’t been patrolling when we were, they’d have ambushed you on this very spot.”

The merchant nodded. “Then you surely have our thanks. But this isn’t the sort of thing that Jousters do—”

“It is now,” Orest interrupted, with pride written in his very posture. “The Great Royals have given us our orders. We serve the people. We’ll watch the borders, and we’ll guard the roads.”

The merchant’s eyes started to light up; it was clear he saw all of the implications of this. “Are you police, or army?” he asked carefully.

Kiron thought that over. And felt a sharp pain in his ankle. Orest had just kicked him.

His startled glance won him a grimace from his friend, and the silently mouthed word “nomarchs.”

What—he thought, and then it struck him. The army answered only to its Captains, and the captains only to the generals and the generals only to the Great King himself. But the police, Royal servants though they were, answered to the nomarchs, the governors of provinces, and their line of command ended at the Royal Vizier, not the King. Their services could be commanded at any point by almost anyone in authority down to the headman of a small village.

So the Jousters, few as they were now, could find themselves spread thin over too much territory, and dependent for the keep and the care of their dragons on people who would think that the three-day-old stinking leavings from the butcher were “good enough” food for something like a dragon.

“The army,” he said quickly, earning a nod and a flash of grin from Orest.

“Ah,” the merchant looked a bit disappointed, but then his eye fell again on the bandits, and he brightened. “Then that makes these men war captives, true?”

Kiron nodded. The merchant grinned toothily. “Well, Captain, in that case, I am authorized to take them off your hands.” He fished inside the neck of his tunic and brought out a medallion on a cord. “I am an authorized dealer in war captives.”

“Tian, I presume?” Kiron asked, peering at the circle of stamped faience. He couldn’t make heads nor tails of it—

But Kelet-mat was Tian, and Kiron waved him over. He glanced at the medallion and grinned. “Looks like our problem of how to transport this scum is solved, Captain,” he said. The faces of the captives fell.

Kiron decided that some scare tactics might be in order.

“Well, it’s a good thing this fellow came along,” he said gruffly, loud enough for the captives to hear. “The Great King gave me field authority. I was going to try and execute them right here.” He paused. “I don’t know, I still might. The dragons are hungry.”

For one moment the merchant looked horrified, but as Kiron gave him a broad wink that the captives couldn’t see, his eyes narrowed and a ghost of a smile appeared.

“That’s a waste of good workers, Captain,” the merchant protested. “You can easily hunt down their camels to feed your dragons—”

“He’s right,” Orest chimed in. “Besides, there’s more meat on a camel.”

“All right, then,” Kiron said, sounding as if he had been persuaded, but was still a bit reluctant. “What’s the procedure here?”

The procedure proved to be fully as bureaucratic as he had suspected it would. Two copies of the list of captives with names and general condition had to be written up on the spot, with Kiron taking one to turn over to whatever Royal Scribe was in charge of such things. From there, he had no idea what would become of list or captives—

But, presumably, the lists would be checked against each other and against the actual captives before they went into the market. Kiron had heard that Ari had made a few changes to that procedure, to make sure that serfs weren’t treated as Kiron—then called Vetch—had been treated. These men had no notion just how much better their lives were going to be than his own had been.

Pity they didn’t deserve it.

FIVE

“A FEMALE Jouster group?” Great Queen Nofret asked, astonished.

Mind she didn’t look like a Great Queen at the moment; she was in the same sort of linen tunic that Aket-ten was wearing, with her hair held only by a simple headband. She wore no jewelry at all, much less a crown, and she groomed and saddled her dragon, the magnificent purple-and-scarlet The-on, as well as a dragon boy.

But this was the one time of the day when she was able to relax and not be Great Queen Nofret, when she could become something she had never actually been before: something other than royal. Merely herself. In many ways, Aket-ten did not envy her at all. As she helped to wipe The-on down with oiled cloths, Aket-ten stole glances at Nofret’s serene profile and considered the Queen who was also her friend.

All her life she had been groomed to be on a throne. First, she had been one half of the female pair of Royal twins that would share the thrones of Alta with the male pair of Royals; that was the way of things in Alta, as the Great Kings and Queens of Alta were always two sets of Royal twins. As the only female pair in the bloodline of reasonable age, she and Marit had always been in the Court, schooled and trained as the probable heirs, and very well aware that their choice of mate and life had been taken out of their hands by the gods.

But Nofret and Marit had accepted it; well, it wasn’t as if they had any other course of action before them. And they had liked Kaleth and Toreth quite well—

Now here, Aket-ten wiped down the purple flank of Nofret’s dragon with a feeling of uncertainty. Marit had quite been in love with her destined mate. But Nofret?

Nofret was hard to read and always had been. Much more phlegmatic than her twin, much more practical, Nofret had clearly enjoyed Prince Toreth’s company and had not shown any sign of discontent with her prospective life. But . . . when Toreth was murdered by the Magi of Alta in the next stage of their bid to take over governance of the entire Kingdom, Nofret’s distress had not been . . . as intense as Aket-ten would have thought it would be, had Nofret loved him as anything other than a friend.

Now, coercion into a marriage with a pair of faux-Royal twins the Magi had cobbled up in order to take those thrones—that had gotten an intense reaction.

And still Nofret had been Royal, and not able to escape the ever-increasing restrictions. Until she and Marit had escaped Alta into the desert, and the lost city they called Sanctuary. And there, for a brief moment of escape, she had been something other than Nofret, heir to the throne, Royal twin.

After all, they were all too busy scraping out life in Sanctuary to think about relative trivialities like royal birth.

But with only that brief time, things returned to what was “normal” for Nofret; she was a Royal again, this time selected to marry the only other Royal—if illegitimate Royal—left of the Tian bloodline. And that had been Ari-en-anethet, who had until that moment been perfectly content to live his life as plain Jouster Ari. It was just a good thing for both of them that they were very fond of each other, very fond indeed, and fond quite quickly became loving. But it still meant that Nofret had had only brief moments of being herself, and not a title and responsibilities.

Aket-ten sighed in sympathy; Nofret had gotten a short taste of freedom, and without a doubt she treasured the few moments of freedom she still was able to garner.

No one troubled her when she was with her dragon, even though, aside from exercise, the only flying she ever got to do anymore was when she and Ari made a Royal Appearance on dragonback.

Perhaps that was why she looked askance at Aket-ten, and repeated, “A female Jouster group? What would they do? We have not got work for the wings we have—”

“Yet,” Aket-ten replied, and tried not to smirk. “Kiron is testing his idea of sending out every dragon he has to guard the trails soon, if he has not already begun. Every wing in Aerie will be flying guard on a trade road. I suspect that it will not be long before the traders and the merchants who depend on them for goods will be petitioning Your Highnesses to find more Jousters for the same duty.”

“Knee,” Nofret said absently, and her dragon obediently lifted a purple-to-scarlet leg for her to use as a stepping place to mount up to the saddle over her shoulders. Once securely in the saddle, Nofret looked down at Aket-ten. “But why a group of female Jousters? Not that I object,” the Great Queen added quickly, “but what can they do that the Jousters we have cannot?”

Aket-ten opened her mouth to answer hotly, shut it without saying anything, then opened it again. Frustrated, she finally answered, “Nothing.”

Nofret sighed, and looked down at her. “And you will incur much displeasure,” she pointed out. “Not that women should not be Jousters, though there will be some grumbling of that nature, but there will be many more complaints that you are taking dragons that should have gone to those waiting for them. And adding more hungry draconic mouths to fill.”

Aket-ten set her jaw mulishly and squinted up at her, purple and scarlet and glorious against the hot blue bowl of the sky. “I know all this. And we will not be taking dragons that should have gone to those waiting for them. We will find our own eggs, our own baby dragons. We will not be pretty priestesses flying about for no good reason except to be ornamental. We will work. We will find work.”

Nofret shook her head, then laughed. “I am the Great Queen. If I want a wing of dragons, rather than, say, a temple, I may have it,” she said at last. “All right, Aket-ten. Find your eggs and your girls. Find your work. Make me a wing of female Jousters. If nothing else, I can claim I need you to escort me on temple duties, or,” she made a face, “to escort me when I am flying at any time. You may have to play the part of pretty priestess flying about to be ornamental, at least for a while, but if you can find real work for your wing, then . . . I will release you to do it.”

Since Aket-ten had been steeling herself for more reasons why this was a bad idea, she beamed with happiness. But the next thing that Nofret said was sobering.

“I shall require you to give up courier duty, of course,” she said. “Not even the most accommodating of the old Jousters will be willing to act as the leader and administrator of this group. I can give you the full use of the old Dragon Courts, and I can lend you an overseer, but only you have the knowledge of what the dragons will need and how to train them. I doubt very much that any of the current trainers will help you. You will have to do this all yourself. And the only place besides Aerie that has the right resources for dragons is here. Mefis. You will have to remain here for the foreseeable future.”

Give up courier duty— That would mean giving up seeing Kiron. . . .

Remain in Mefis. That would mean little chance to get away. Especially with baby dragons to tend, and new Jousters and dragons to train . . . all on her own. If Kiron wanted to see her, he would have to come to her. Would his own duties allow that? Nofret eyed her with speculation as she searched within herself. What was she willing to sacrifice for this? Did she have good reasons? Enough of them?

Merely believing that it was the right thing to do was not going to be enough.

But Kiron did all this, all by himself.

Well, that was one reason. She wanted to prove to herself, and to him, that she was as capable as he was, that she could do what he had done, on her own. And maybe she wanted to prove it to other people as well; she had a sense that to her mother and father she was still the little priestess, with minor powers, who really ought to make a good marriage and settle down and raise a big family. . . .

The mere thought of that made her grit her teeth. Not that she didn’t want a family, but . . .

I’m more than that.

And before she did any settling with anyone, especially Kiron, she wanted him to know that, too.

But as the wind stirred her hair and cooled her forehead, and she looked up at Nofret and her increasingly restless dragon, she knew that this couldn’t only be done because she wanted it, nor only for her reasons. The-on lifted wings of deep purple shading to scarlet at the tips, and folded them again, and looked down at her. And her instincts told her there were good reasons for other girls and young women to do this—even if she didn’t know what they were yet.

But maybe those reasons will be as different as every girl who raises a dragon.

She felt it then, the certainty. “I’ll need that overseer,” she said then. “And the priests to make sure the sands are kept hot. And some of the old dragon hunters to help me. And a cold room and some butchers and a few servants to tend the rooms, and—”

Nofret laughed. “And, and, and!” she said. “The records for dragon keeping are extensive and exact, I believe my vizier can puzzle out what you will need. For how many?”

“Nine, including me and Peri,” she replied. Her mind was already racing. It was not too late in the season to find eggs yet to hatch, and not too late to find nests of young dragons whose parents did not know how to tend them. She would, in fact, look for those first. Nofret had shown the way there with The-on and her siblings; accustom a baby to a human as its parent young enough and it had no trouble in accepting that human, indeed, all humans.

“And I will request to Kiron that he send me one of his young and inexperienced Jousters to be our courier . . . hmm . . .” Nofret’s eyes grew distant for a moment. “If we are to have more than just four dragons here, it would be no bad thing to have more than one courier. Two, at least. No, four. Two for between here and Aerie and two for between here and Sanctuary, one at each end. If Kiron is going to start guarding the trade routes, we will need to speak with him very much more often.”

“That is something we can do!” Aket-ten said instantly, glad of the opening for one of her ideas. “We females can fly courier, and since we are lighter than the men, we can probably fly faster.”

Nofret looked down at her, and at that moment, Aket-ten saw the Great Queen, and not her friend. “That will be for the future, then. Keep thinking, Aket-ten,” the Great Queen said. “The more reasons you can make, the easier it will be for me to defend your existence. Now, my dragon is getting restless, and so am I. Go and consult with my vizier and make your lists. And think of how you are going to tell Kiron that if he wishes to see you, it will be he who must come to you from now on. Because no matter how you tell him . . . he is not going to like being told.”

Aket-ten sighed, and shielded her eyes as The-on took to the skies. Nofret was right.

That was going to be one of the hardest things she was going to have to do.

The easiest thing turned out to be finding the dragons themselves.

Two seasons on, and the freed dragons of Tia often still could not manage to grasp how to properly tend a nest full of babies. This was not so bad for the young ones when one of the parents was a fully wild dragon, but when both were former Jousting dragons . . .

Over the course of the next few days, Aket-ten went back to all those places where she had found dragon nests and marked them, hoping to find eggs that had been abandoned.

Now she looked for baby dragons that were not prospering.

It turned out that it was not at all difficult to find them. Baby dragons that were not being fed were hungry, and hungry baby dragons cried.

Now, occasionally a dragon who had laid infertile eggs would adopt the younglings; not wishing to find herself and her crew of carters staring into the face of an angry mother, Aket-ten spent time at each nest, waiting to see if the mother returned with adequate prey, or if she would fail to return at all. Once, where there had been two nests relatively close together, the gold dragon that Aket-ten remembered at the second abandoned the eggs that were clearly not going to hatch and took over the babies in the first nest. But all too often it appeared that not all of the baby dragons were going to survive being raised by indifferent or inexperienced mothers.

This was not unlike the experience that falconers had, when stealing young hawks. A good falconer would find a nest where one or two of the chicks was not thriving and take the strongest, leaving the other one or two that were left to enjoy the good feeding that the largest and greediest had been getting all for himself.

However, given the size and strength of even the smallest of young dragons, Aket-ten took the opposite approach. She and her wild-animal hunters took the weakest.

They waited until the mother and father flew off for the first of the morning hunts, then moved in. And the first thing that they did was to stuff all the babies in the nest with meat that they had brought with them. The babies were still too young to recognize a human as anything other than another moving object in their world, and when that moving object slid meat down their throats . . .

When the babies were full, they stopped whining and went almost immediately to sleep. That made extracting one from the nest trivially easy. Two strong men could carry one in a sling, and the rocking motion seemed to be soothing for them. Putting the sling between two camels for the trip back to Mefis proved to be just as soothing. Unlike captured fledglings, these babies were perfectly content to sleep in their swinging cradle and be fed when they woke and whined. Within seven days, Aket-ten had as many young dragons, and she took care to point out to her animal hunters how she had located these babies. There had to be other nests out there, with ill-tended babies. Kiron had complained that he had more would-be Jousters waiting than he had eggs or babies to give them. The Great Queen had observed that Aket-ten would incur resentment for “taking” dragons that “should” have gone to men.

Well, no one would now be able to say she had not done her best to help her “rivals.”

Besides . . . she couldn’t bear the thought of those beautiful little creatures slowly starving to death. . . .

When Nofret had approved the notion of the “Queen’s Jousters,” Aket-ten had hoped that young women would be as eager to volunteer for such a thing as the young men were. There never seemed to be any shortage of young women wishing to be priestesses, for instance, and that was equally demanding work. . . .

Not that she was going to take just anyone, but—

“I don’t understand this,” she said forlornly, as Peri helped her to feed the babies, which she had housed all together in one pen for ease in care. “Why aren’t there more people who want to train as Jousters?”

“More girls, you mean,” Peri said shrewdly. “Well that’s easy enough. How is a girl going to find a good husband if she’s riding around on a dragon?”

Aket-ten stared at her, dumbfounded. “You jest, yes?”

But Peri shook her head. “You have not spent enough time around ordinary people, Aket-ten,” she said frankly. “Ordinary girls anyway. It seems . . . even among us when we were serfs, that was what we talked about. It was what our mothers and grandmothers talked about. It was all anyone ever talked about—”

“Not among the Winged Ones!” Aket-ten protested.

“Then perhaps you are looking in the wrong place,” the girl said shrewdly. “Perhaps if you looked among the priestesses—”

Aket-ten blinked. That simply had not occurred to her. But—

But among the priestesses, her power was considered minor, uninteresting, and . . . to be honest . . . not at all useful. To be able to speak into the mind of an animal? To what purpose? Far more useful and cherished were those who could speak to another priestess at a distance, to see at a distance or the future or the past. To speak with spirits—that was another sought-for power. Most of all, to be a Mouth of the Gods . . .

All these things could serve the people. What would you learn if you spoke into the mind of an animal? Not a great deal that was useful.

Unless, of course, that animal was a dragon.

Aket-ten had been able to calm even the Jousting dragons that had gone to the wild. She could coordinate an entire wing. She could soothe fears and tell what was hurting.

What if every wing had someone like her?

“Peri,” she said breathlessly, “you are a genius.”

“I am a genius covered in bits of meat,” Peri said ruefully, looking at her bloody, sticky hands. “Let us finish feeding these little ones so we can bathe before we become covered in biting flies.”

Aket-ten laughed.

She hurried through her bath, though, a daily luxury she usually lingered over, especially in the hot days like this one. Not that she didn’t take care with it; she certainly did that. After all, when one is going to visit a temple, one does well to look one’s best.

But she also did not want to look as if she was one of those silly women who dressed to impress a man with how important and wealthy she was. Baket-ke-aput, the High Priest of Haras in Mefis, was not the sort to be impressed by what was on the surface of things.

She did pause at the Palace long enough to ask Nofret’s vizier for a note of introduction to the priest, and waited while a servant went to take her request to the overseer. The Palace was pleasantly cool, the effect of the same magic that kept the sands of the dragon pens warm. Heat was removed from the Palace, where it certainly was not wanted, and sent to the pens, where it certainly was, something that at the moment, the dwellers in Sanctuary and Aerie would probably be very glad of. Aket-ten amused herself by examining the murals here, which were many-times-life-sized paintings of one of the Kings of Tia out hunting in the marshes for ducks.

Which was certainly a subject preferable to one of the many Kings of Tia out hunting for Altans in his war chariot . . . .

A note of introduction was going to be necessary to get past all the underpriests and scribes and functionaries of the temple, who were there in no small part to keep the High Priest from being bothered. The High Priest of Haras was not the sort of person one simply walked up to—well, not unless one was the Great King—

“Aket-ten!”

She looked up, startled, to see Ari himself striding toward her, hands outstretched, his bodyguards looking very unhappy to be forced to trot to keep up with him.

“Nofret’s vizier knew that I am to have an audience with Baket-ke-aput shortly, or rather,” Ari grinned, “he is to have an audience with me. I see no reason why your business with him, whatever it is, cannot be broached at the same time.”

Aket-ten felt almost faint with gratitude. She had been anticipating, despite a note, having to spend most of the rest of the day, and possibly tomorrow, being sent from one underling and scribe to another.

This would cut all of that short.

Belatedly she remembered that this was not just Ari. This was the Great King—

And she quickly got to her feet and flung herself down on her face again.

“Oh—” she heard him say in exasperation. “Don’t do that. Or at least, don’t do it when we are private together. It isn’t necessary.”

Slowly she got back up to her feet and smoothed out her linen sheath with both hands. “If that is your will, Great K—”

“Not when we are private together,” Ari said firmly. “And, to you, in private, I am nothing more than Ari. Now come to the Lesser Audience Chamber with me. Baket-ke-aput is a good man. If what you need is simple enough, he may be able to help you this very day.”

Aket-ten had not really had very much to do with Ari back when they were all just the refugee Jousters trying to survive at Sanctuary. She was Altan, he was Tian, he was so much older than the rest of the young wing of Jousters created by Kiron, and at any rate, it had not been long before the plan of making him Great King and Nofret Great Queen had resulted in both of them being so embroiled in plans and strategies and negotiations that she had seldom seen him or Nofret. He had been Kiron’s great friend and mentor, not hers. She hadn’t really thought he had paid all that much attention to her, but—

“So I suspect this is about this plan of yours, the Queen’s Wing?” he asked, glancing at her with a hint of a smile. She started a bit, and his smile broadened. “Nofret and I do talk, you know. I was intrigued. I’m not at all clear why you want to do this, but I am intrigued.”

“I’m not sure it is a very good idea now,” she confessed, subdued. “I am having difficulty finding girls who want to be Jousters.”

“You’re having difficulty finding girls like yourself.” Ari nodded. “Not very surprising, really. People in Tia, not just girls, are accustomed to a rigid structure all about them. People expect to do what their fathers, and their grand-fathers, and their many-times-great grandfathers did. If you are a farmer, your son will be a farmer, and your father was a farmer. You might go into the army, or, if you were very clever and very fortunate, you might go to the priesthood or apprentice as a scribe. But you wouldn’t expect to leave your home village unless you went into the army. I expect it is even more rigid for girls, since girls don’t go to the army or become scribes.”

“No, they don’t.” Aket-ten frowned. “But in Alta . . . you might become a skilled craftswoman . . . or . . . or something.” But she couldn’t really think what else a woman might become. She had never been forced to look at things that way. She had always had such freedom as a Nestling, then a Fledgling—one of the special the chosen, the Winged Ones. And before that, well, as the cherished daughter of a great noble.

“Well, I really don’t know what it’s like in Alta. I do know that I was probably the only scribe ever to become a Jouster. And if I had been forced to learn to handle a wild-caught, tala-drugged dragon rather than a hand-tamed one to do so, you would probably find me sharpening my pens in the marketplace at this very moment.” He laughed at her expression.

“I cannot imagine you ever being content to be a scribe,” she finally said.

“Oh, I did not say I would have been content,” he replied. “But here we are.”

They had passed through a number of large, open rooms, most of which had been sparsely populated by people doing things at desks. Light came from ventilation slits up near the ceiling. Now they entered another large room, but this one was empty of everything but a very low dais with two thrones on it, and some stools against the wall.

“Go stand there, if you please,” Ari said, gesturing to the left side of the dais. Aket-ten quickly obeyed. As a former Winged One and the daughter of a noble, she was accustomed to standing about for long periods of time doing nothing.

She adopted the relaxed posture she had learned was best for such situations, while Ari mounted the dais, put on the Lesser Crown that was waiting on the seat of one of the two thrones, and took an equally relaxed pose.

As if that had been some sort of summons, a tall, thin, ascetic man with a faintly harried expression came out of the next room, went to his knees and bowed, then rose again. “Great King, the High Priest Baket-ke-aput craves audience with you.”

Ari looked very much as if he wanted to say, “I know that; he made an appointment.” Instead he inclined his head gracefully and answered, “Then let the High Priest Baket-ke-aput approach.”

The man who entered the room was tall and vigorous—certainly well past middle-age, but vigorous and strong for all of that. He did not abase himself—and why should he; the High Priest of any god was the equal of the Great King, and in fact, the Great King was also a High Priest as his wife would be a High Priestess. But the two greeted each other as friends, and Ari immediately ordered a stool for him.

Baket-ke-aput glanced at her curiously a time or two, but the matters of which they spoke were hardly secret. It seemed that Ari had a plan—

“—build or rebuild temples, with places for the gods of both Tia and Alta, was what I thought,” he was saying. “Two moons of every year for six years, or one year in full to belong to the King to work on these temples. Men from both Tia and Alta would be working side-by-side, sharing the same rations, living in the same barracks, putting up with the same overseers. By the end of two months . . . well, they would go home knowing that the man from the other land is no monster. You cannot share bread and beer with someone for two months and still think of him as unholy.”

Baket-ke-aput pursed his lips. “That fits in neatly with what I had come to ask you for,” the old man replied with a nod. “Some way to enlarge our temples so that the corresponding god of Alta can be set side-by-side with his Tian counterpart. But enlarging the temples would take costly labor, and costlier stone. By your scheme, however . . .”

“You like it, then?” Ari asked eagerly, leaning forward on his throne.

“I think it is a stroke of genius. Let the Great King supply the labor, the temples themselves will supply the raw materials. And now—” the High Priest nodded his head at Aket-ten. “Perhaps you can tell me why this charming young person has been standing here all this time. It is surely not because she is merely a restful place to gaze upon.”

Aket-ten blushed, as Ari gestured her forward. “Jouster Aket-ten, this is the High Priest of Haras whom you asked to see, Lord Baket-ke-aput. Let me make you known to each other.”

“Jouster Aket-ten?” Baket-ke-aput’s brows rose. “Interesting. And what can the Great Queen’s courier wish of me?”

Hurriedly, Aket-ten explained her difficulty in finding young women to join what she, in imitation of Ari, called the “Queen’s Wing.” Baket-ke-aput listened to her with interest until she ran out of things to say.

“And how do you suppose that I may help you in this endeavor?” he said, with a half smile. “I know nothing about dragons, and not a great deal about young women. That is the sign of my wisdom, by the way, Aket-ten. In my age, I have come to understand how little I know of women.”

She flushed. “Well,” she said hesitantly. “I thought . . . I thought maybe . . .” she fumbled, “If there were other girls with my . . . ah . . . the Gift of understanding the minds of animals is not a very useful one . . . and even if they didn’t have that, I thought maybe . . . priestesses would . . .”

Baket-ke-aput laughed gently. “Yes, it is true, the young women who become priestess are very often much more strong-minded and -willed than their sisters. So yes, Aket-ten, I will have the word spread, not only among the young Priestesses of Haras, but of other gods as well. This is serving the gods no less than offering incense and sacrifice and—” He smiled. “The kind of young lady who finds the notion of flinging herself into the sky on the back of a fearsome dragon to be fun is probably not suited to a life of prayer and contemplation!”

SIX

WITHIN two days, there was a rider from the merchant caravan that Kiron had saved, arriving in Aerie with a request for another overflight, and with him, two more traders who had come there themselves. Success in that first trial had caught the attention of King and Queen and merchants alike, more than he had guessed, as it turned out.

Success piled onto success, with every patrol that the wings made that ended in saving a merchant caravan or a traveler. Sometimes the successes were small ones, setting right a traveler who had lost the road, or dropping a waterskin to someone who had run out. Sometimes they were large, like that first rescue.

The Jousters responded to it as well, with growing cheer and a sense that they were, once again, worth something. Perhaps more so now than when they had been fighters. Then they had been taking lives. Now they were saving them.

And as the Tian and Altan Jousters worked more and more closely together, a grudging respect, and then in some cases, real friendship began to grow.

And so it went, with more and more traders arriving all the time, asking for the same. Send out more dragons, more riders. We need them. We need the help. The merchants and traders were making sure that people knew what the Jousters were doing. It was hard to tell what those who had been complaining about how costly it was to keep dragons were saying now, without being in Mefis or one of the other cities where the complaints had been the loudest—but the merchants who came to ask for escort for their caravans specifically did not turn up empty-handed. Some brought small flocks with them. Some brought more of the goods that were so difficult to bring across the desert, most notably camels laden down with disassembled furniture. Over the next moon or so, Aerie rapidly became a much more livable place.

Then the craftspeople started arriving.

Considering how difficult it had been to get them there initially, Kiron was shocked when the first stonecutters arrived. What was happening all became clear very quickly, though, when a single spice grower turned up with a caravan of carefully nurtured young trees and bags of seed. Aerie was that rare place in the desert, a spot where delicate plants could be protected from kamiseen, where there were no floods and storms, and yet where there was abundant water. Aerie was positioned well to be added to several trade routes, and it had the protection of the Jousters. It could not be a better place to raise incense trees and spices.

He had met with all of them. To all of them he had given the same answer. “We will do our best with the numbers we have.”

But most surprising of all had been the representative from the Bedu, also known as the Blue People, the nomads of the desert.

He was busy, but not so busy that he did not miss Aket-ten. She did not come nearly enough, and he wished he could take the time to go wherever she was but—where was she? She could be anywhere—Mefis, Sanctuary, any of the towns up and down Great Mother River. She was being used as a courier more and more often now, and while he was pleased for her, perhaps it was a good thing that he was so busy, because it was lonely without her.

The request from the Bedu, however, had some urgency. In many, many ways he and his owed them their very lives. This was a chance to pay some of that back.

He sent out all the wings today, including all but four of the youngsters that the Great King had asked specifically to be sent for courier duty. Four young hotheads that had trouble controlling their dragons . . . making boring, routine courier flights should soon steady them down. And perhaps—perhaps this would release Aket-ten to come here to Aerie. Oh, she would probably have to give them some training, but when she was done—surely she would come here.

He sighed, feeling impatience as he waited to go off with his wing until those four were ready to go. He really couldn’t understand why she was so stubborn about this. It wasn’t as if he didn’t want her here after all. . . .

“You know the way,” he reminded them, getting his mind back on the task at hand. They gazed solemnly back at him, so identical they could have been brothers; their height was nearly the same, all of them were of the same stocky build. All Tians, which meant they were darker-skinned than the Altans. All four were former dragon boys. It occurred to him that they might actually like their new assignments; they were going home, after all. They would get the use of the Dragon Courts, the quarters of the former Jousters; there would be no more need to hunt. By the standards of Aerie, those quarters were very luxurious. He found himself en-vying them. “You four must stay together. If one of your dragons decides to hunt, you all hunt. You must arrive together; this is part of wing discipline.”

He looked the dragons over as well, to make sure that all was right with them, as they lifted their heads curiously to sniff the morning wind off the desert. Oddly enough, they were all four of the same color family, variations on blue shading to green. They would look very smart with bronze trappings on their harnesses.

“Hem-serit,” he said, nodding to the most responsible of the lot. “You are temporary wingleader. Any other disposition will have to be confirmed by—” he looked at the dispatch, “—Vizier Nef-kham-het. You will be reporting to him directly when you arrive. Land at the Dragon Court, and there will be a servant waiting for you. After that, what happens and who you report to will be determined by the vizier. If he is displeased with your performance, he will send you back here.”

Hem-serit gave him the fist-to-shoulder salute of the Tians; he nodded. They mounted up—not together, and their dragons seemed inclined toward mischief, since they tossed their heads and pretended not to understand the “Knee” command until he barked it out. Yes, they had a ways to go before they were ready for any sort of responsibility on trail guarding.

He sent them off with a wave and they took off raggedly, diving down into the canyon to pick up speed, then pulling up and out of it and pumping hard for height; for as long as he could see them, they flew in tolerable formation, though blue dragons against a blue sky were a bit difficult to track after a while.

Then, finally, he was able to signal to his wing to mount up. They did much better, although they did not all mount at once with military precision. All their dragons promptly gave a place to climb up on the “Knee” command, and if there was still a little awkwardness getting settled into the saddle, that would pass soon enough. This time the signal to fly was when he sent Avatre diving into the canyon himself; he never got over the thrill, the feel of falling, hurtling toward the ground, bracing himself in the saddle. Then the sudden, hard snap of Avatre’s wings opening, the fall turning abruptly into a climb as he was pushed down into the saddle on her shoulders, the ground being replaced in front of him by sky. His skin tingled, and a laugh of delight rose in his throat.

His wing was not going to be patrolling the trade routes, however. He had another assignment for them all.

The Blue People were being raided, probably by the same lawless deserters and former soldiers that were making up the majority of the bandits. And it was not that the Bedu could not defend themselves; they most certainly could. The problem was that the raids were taking place at night, and animals were being stolen one and two at a time. Clearly the bandits were treating the nomads’ flocks as their private larder.

So Kiron and his wing were doing a different sort of hunting today. They were going to look for the bandits’ camp. It had to be within distance of the latest tribe to be raided, and since the nomads always occupied an oasis, the bandits might be filling their waterskins before helping themselves to a goat or a sheep. Or perhaps not. In the part of the desert where the Bedu tended their flock, water was not as difficult to come by as one might think.

The camp was almost certainly concealed from ground level. It might not be from the air.

After the debacle just before their first successful foray into bandit hunting, all the members of the wing were determined to carry this out with no “incidents.” The dragons were all fed, enough to be full, not so much as to be ready to laze about. Every inch of saddle and harness had been checked and checked again. Their weapons of choice were where they should be.

Kiron nodded with satisfaction, then gave Avatre the signal to fly off into the north.

Well, there they were, all right.

I was right. Hidden from the ground, but not from the air.

This part of the desert was not barren; the Blue People would not have been able to live there if it had been. There was some water here, enough to allow the occasional oasis to dot the landscape, and enough that there was vegetation outside an oasis to allow grazing. There were acacia trees and scrubby brush, which the nomads used thriftily, to start fires, but never for the fire itself.

In short, this made a good place for the bandits as well as the nomads.

Kiron kept Avatre circling in the air above the place, studying it, while the rest of his wing made wide circles around them. The encampment, clearly not one of the nomads’ nor of honest traders, was concealed in a narrow, twisting wadi below them, hardly more than a crack in the earth, and just wide enough to pitch a tent. A dangerous place to camp, because if there was an unexpected storm anywhere “upstream,” there would be a flash flood with no warning at all, one that would probably kill most of them and would certainly wash away their gear and drown their animals.

On the other hand, they could dig down below the surface and probably find water there, making a “seep well” for themselves that would ooze a cup or two of water over a reasonable period of time. Several seep wells spaced out over the wadi would produce enough water for men and mounts with patience. That would mean they wouldn’t have to raid the nomads’ oasis for water as well as food. It was a calculated risk, made all the more clever by the fact that no one who knew anything about the desert would expect someone to camp in a wadi.

Now, the question was, what to do about them? The walls were high, the canyon very narrow. In no way would dragons be able to get down there, and so far, all of Kiron’s tactics had relied on spooking the bandits’ mounts as the first attack. The bandits were entrenched there; if they had enough bows, they could do some serious harm to the dragons and the Jousters.

He waved his wing off, and pointed into the distance. They needed to get out of sight of the camp before they landed to confer. He hoped he would have some ideas by then.

He led them off to an eroded, wind-sculpted hill with a flat top. It would make taking off easier for the dragons. He didn’t dismount immediately. Instead, he fixed his gaze on the horizon in the direction of the camp, frowning, trying to think of something clever to force the bandits out. Short of finding one of the Magi to brew up a storm, he couldn’t think of anything.

But somewhat to his surprise it was one of the older Jousters, one of the Altans, who slid down off the back of his young dragon. “Captain,” he said with a formal salute. “Do you think we actually have to attack this lot now? Could it wait until tomorrow?”

Kiron pondered that a moment. “I take it you have an idea? As long as they don’t move, no, there is really no need to try and hit them when we are ill-prepared.”

The grizzled fellow nodded. “Then if you’ll dismiss me, Captain, I’ll go to Sanctuary first and talk to that Akkadian Healer, Heklatis. You see, sir, if he knows how to make it, there’s something called—”

But Kiron already knew where he was going with this. His mind leaped back to the attack he and his original wing had made on Alta, to rescue Aket-ten. “By the gods, Thesis, you’re right! No need for just you, we’ll all go by way of Sanctuary! Because, yes, Heklatis does know all about it. He’s already made Akkadian Fire—and my old Wing knows how to use it!”

Two wings of Jousters headed at dawn for the bandit nest. Yesterday, Kiron had taken the precaution of leaving one Jouster—the old veteran, Thesis—behind to keep an eye on the encampment to ensure that the bandits didn’t move it before sunset. They hadn’t, which was probably not surprising, since they were doing their raids on the nomad herds by night. Evidently, they had no fears of hungry ghosts in the night. Either that, or they reckoned that hungry ghosts were not as troublesome as empty bellies.

In any case, they probably wouldn’t move the camp in the morning either. A night raid meant that they would likely be sleeping long past sunrise.

Each of the Jousters carried two pots of Heklatis’ nasty Akkadian Fire concoction. Nasty—well, “vicious” was more descriptive of the stuff. Not something anyone he knew liked using.

But the bandits were just as vicious in their way. The Blue People lived on the edge at all times, often no more than a few goats away from starvation. By stealing from their herds, it was possible that these raiders were condemning this tribe to a slow death. . . .

Kiron hoped not, but the possibility was there. He led the way, the dragons laboring through the cool air of dawn. This was not a time of day he would have chosen to fly them into combat, had he intended them to attempt the sort of combat that they had been undertaking.

But if this went well, this would not be the usual sort of fight at all.

As the two wings approached the wadi, they split, one going “upstream,” the other, “downstream.” Although they were not flying particularly high, there was no sign that they had been spotted. And in fact, a very thin, threadlike stream of smoke arose from where Kiron reckoned the center of the camp was. The desert air held few scents of its own at this season other than dust. The scent of roast goat was faint, but clear. There was no sign of any lookout, and no indication that the dragons had been sighted. The bandits must be very confident that no one would find them here, so confident that they didn’t even trouble to leave a lookout.

Kiron and Huras lined up their wings on the wadi and sent their dragons down to fly a little above the ground, above the rim. He felt Avatre’s relief as he gave her the command, and she went into a long, shallow dive. Flying this close to the ground took less effort than wing flapping at height. With no thermals to climb, she was already a little tired; she was strong, yes, and powerful, but she had just flown a long way, and done it on flapping rather than soaring. He leaned down over her shoulder, and peered along her neck; the wadi stretched out before them like a crooked snake.

He looked back over his shoulder, making sure the rest of the Wing was lined up behind him. They had practiced this last night with bags of sand, with his original Wing showing the Jousters of his wing and Huras’ how to handle the jars of Akkadian Fire, how to drop them, and how to time the drops. The trailing dragons looked good; they were spaced properly without too much or too little distance between them. With the wind of their passage in his face, and as Avatre swiftly approached the wisp of smoke that marked the camp center, he loosened the first pot of Akkadian Fire in its bindings.

The empty wadi ripped by beneath him, flashes of thin green from a patch of tough grass or the leaves of a tree. He sighted his way down ahead of him, watching for the regular shape of a tent, a bit of color from clothing, anything that shouldn’t belong. As narrow as this wadi was, the camp could be strung out along it for quite some distance. The jar was heavy in his hand, and he held it tightly by the “handle” of tough cord wound around its neck. Then—there it was, the shape of a tent! As soon as he saw that—he threw the jar as hard and straight as he could, and signaled Avatre to climb.

He heard the crash beneath him as she banked to avoid Huras’ purple-blue Tathulan, passing the other dragon belly-to-belly as they often did in mock combat when ribbon chasing. He didn’t actually see the effects of his strike until he was high above the wadi; by then four more of his Jousters had sent their pots crashing into the camp, as had five of Huras’ wing, and the camp was ablaze.

The screaming of men and animals mingled with the black smoke, as the rest of both wings dropped their first jars. Kiron felt a jolting, and a sick feeling in his gut. This wasn’t clean. Suddenly, what had seemed like a good idea wasn’t so appealing now. This wasn’t even remotely clean.

The smell of burning hair, burning hide, and a sickly sweet smell of burning flesh wafted toward him as Avatre banked and climbed higher. His skin began to crawl. He reminded himself that these men were preying on people who had done them no harm; preying on those who had not, in fact, done anyone any harm.

But it didn’t help. Yes, he had to be rid of these men . . . but . . . by any and all means? Did they deserve this?

By then, both wingleaders were lining up for their second pass. This one was to ensure that no one escaped, at least not up or down the wadi; they all dropped their jars far earlier this time. Kiron forced himself to drop his second jar. And this time, at least, the blossoming fires were not punctuated by screams of anguish.

As Kiron sent Avatre up again, the fires seemed to be going out; the plumes of smoke were thinning, flames no longer visible above the rim of the wadi. And there was no more screaming. Maybe the men hit with the stuff had managed to smother it; water didn’t extinguish it, but sand would.

There wasn’t much to burn down there, perhaps a few cloth tents and shelters. It wasn’t going to become the kind of raging inferno a wooden house, a village of papyrus huts, or a ship would be. But anyone that stuff splashed onto—and from the screams, it had splashed onto a great many men—was going to have terrible burns.

Without a healer, they would probably die of those burns.

The only healers nearby were the Blue People. Kiron did not think that the bandits would find much of a welcome in the Bedu camp.

Both Wings landed at the oasis to rest their dragons until there were good thermals, and tell the Mouth of the People, the individuals who spoke for each tribe with outsiders, what they had done.

The Mouth seemed somewhat taken aback. Swathed in veils it was hard to tell what he was thinking, but he was silent for a long time.

“This Fire—” he said at last, as the rest of the encampment went on about its business, with curious glances at the dragons. “It is a cruel thing.”

Kiron bit his lip. He’d had second and third thoughts about this as he had led the Wings away from the burning wadi. “It is,” he admitted. “And it was not an—honorable sort of attack.”

The Mouth considered his words. “Neither was theirs,” he replied finally. “They did not kill any of us directly—but there are children going short of milk, because they stole milch goats. And we will need to call upon favors from other tribes to make up for our losses. We will not starve . . . but we will not prosper either, for some time to come.”

That was an extraordinary admission from a Mouth of the Bedu, who were so notoriously secretive that they generally had only one person in each tribe—the Mouth—to speak to outsiders.

“Starvation is a cruel death,” the Mouth said, meditatively. “It is why we left the tents of stone.”

And then he walked off, leaving Kiron puzzled at his meaning.

Kiron sent his Jousters off one at a time to hunt. He also didn’t want the temptation of the nearby flocks to overcome the dragons’ training. Once they were all fully fed, they lazed about in the sun while their Jousters napped. It had been an early morning for them, with their flight beginning in false dawn rather than when the sun was well up and the flying was good, and it was catching up to them. The Bedu went about their business as soon as they were certain that the dragons weren’t going to do anything or anyone a mischief. Huras gazed at them with curiosity, but at Kiron’s silent headshake elected not to approach any of them.

By midmorning the thermals were strong enough for the dragons to take to the air again, spiraling up them lazily, looking for all the world like bits of debris caught in a dust-demon, only moving much slower than that. On a whim, Kiron decided to lead the wings a little off the direct route back to Aerie, to cover part of the route between there and the eastern border. Not that there was an actual road; there was not enough traffic for that. There might once have been a trade route, but that had ended when Aerie had been abandoned. Now anyone who wanted to cross that expanse of wasteland did so navigating by the stars and the sun, or went farther south or north to an established route. Even the garrisons of the army there went farther south, though straight across would have been far faster.

He was glad that he had when they were roughly halfway home.

The dot of color on the bleached earth caught his eye first; curious, he veered Avatre toward it. But as soon as he was able to make out what it was, he urged her to greater speed.

Because the blot below that lay without moving was the combined bodies of a man and a camel, the man slumped over the camel’s neck, the camel collapsed sideways. And as soon as Kiron landed, slid down Avatre’s shoulder and ran to them, he knew that both were dead. But the most critical thing about the bodies, aside from the terrible arrow wounds, was that the man wore the simple kilt, headcloth, and arm-band of a Tian border guard. And the last of the trail in the sand made it clear that he had come from the eastern border.

The rest landed, and stared with him at the poor victim, most showing at least as much alarm as he felt, if not more.

“Who—who did this?” someone ventured at last.

Kiron shook his head. The bodies were hit with several arrows, wounds that the victim had tried to bind up without much success. Kiron’s heart was thudding with alarm. There had been no stirrings of trouble from the eastern border in centuries. The position of border guard was, as a consequence, not sought for. The guards were far from most of the amenities of civilized life, and spent most of their time walking exceedingly boring patrols, and occasionally sorting out the altercations in tiny villages dotted along their jurisdiction.

But now—

This—this was a very bad sign. This did not look like the result of a private quarrel. If it had been—the man would have been tended to by his own garrison healer. If he had done murder, he would not have been trying to get back to civilization. Could it be the work of bandits?

Well it could, but if they had gotten fierce enough to take down the border guards . . . it would need the army to take them.

“Whoever did it, this fellow tried to get word back—” Huras ventured.

They all looked at Kiron.

“Huras,” he said finally, “you go to Sanctuary and get a priest to look at this body, or at least someone to fetch it back there. The rest of you go on back to Aerie. I’ll take word to Mefis.”

No one argued. Kiron remounted Avatre and sent her up, his mouth dry, his heart pounding.

It wasn’t that the man was dead. Kiron had seen dead men in plenty, far more than he liked to think about. He’d killed before today; not gladly, and certainly not easily, but he had done so. No, his fear was due to the fact that this was a sign, a sign that something was very wrong on the eastern border. If this man was the lone survivor of a massacre—

Well, that was high on the list of what could have happened. He must have been the only one left, or the only one still mobile, otherwise there would have been someone else with him. Something had gone badly wrong out there, and it must have come with no warning.

He stopped only long enough to claim a meal for Avatre at a temple; he was in such a hurry that he didn’t even notice which god the temple enshrined. Once she had eaten, he pushed her ruthlessly into the sky. She was in good condition; though tired, she was far from winded, and she obeyed his commands without a protest. She did keep glancing over her shoulder at him as she flew, as if she was picking up some of his anxiety. His mouth felt dry, no matter how many times he pulled at his waterskin, and he tried to reckon how long it would have taken that border guard to get to where he had been found. It didn’t look to Kiron as if he had been lying there for more than a day—and he would have thought, with all of the dragons in the sky, someone would have spotted him if he had been lying there for much longer.

I wish someone had spotted him before he died, Kiron thought, and then, with a flash of anger at himself, he realized that someone might have. But lone riders crossed that stretch of desert all the time, and none of his Jousters had ever been instructed to examine or even make a close pass to try to identify them. If they had . . . they would have seen the dried streaks of blood on the camel, the man . . . they would have known both were dying, and might have been able to get the man to a Healing-Priest in Sanctuary in time to save him.

Now all they had was a mystery.

Just as the sun-disk touched the horizon, the first of the buildings of Mefis came into view, and recognizing that rest and food were close in reach, Avatre found a little more energy and pushed herself to a little more speed.

He welcomed her effort and urged her on, leaning down over her shoulder to help her. She recognized her old pen and backwinged straight down into it, landing lightly.

The two pens on either side of hers showed recent occupation, and those on the right both held blue-and-green dragons, two of the four he had sent here as couriers. Their Jousters were, as he had trained them, giving their charges the final grooming of the day—more for affection and bonding than for any practical purpose. They both ran into the pen as Avatre landed, clearly recognizing him.

“Find me someone who knows who is in charge of the border guards,” he said without preamble, sliding down out of the saddle.

“That would be the vizier—” said the first, Wesh-ta-he, doubtfully. “Nef-kham-het. But he is surely at his meal—”

“Kiron would not have flown here if it had not been urgent, you goose!” exclaimed Aket-ten from the doorway. “Come on, Kiron, I’ll take you to him.”

“Take care of Avatre!” Kiron ordered. “She has flown long since her last meal.”

Aket-ten turned and trotted down the long, high-walled corridor between the mostly empty pens. Even though the complex was empty, someone had still stocked all the torch holders along the walls with torches, and as they turned a corner, they passed a servant lighting them. The passages had a haunting familiarity to them; the beautiful, larger-than-life-sized paintings of gods and goddesses and dragons, the flickering torches, the smell of hot sand . . .

He wanted to ask Aket-ten what she was doing here, but she didn’t slow down long enough for him to get in a word. As soon as they left the Dragon Courts, she broke into a run, pelting down the broad avenue leading to the Palace as if she were a runner-courier herself.

She headed not for the Palace itself but for the row of Great Houses near it, where important officials lived. Kiron almost balked at that; this might not be a matter for an overseer as important as that—

But then again, it might. And it was not his call to judge.

There were a few people out on the avenue in the dusk, one or two servants trotting along, and some of those important folks in their litters, borne aloft by slaves and lit by servants with torches. None of them even glanced at the two Jousters. Those servants had errands on their minds, and the important folk were likely thinking about what they were going to say and do at whatever banquet or meeting they were going to.

Aket-ten slowed down and stopped at the gate of one of those houses, speaking briefly to the servant on guard there. By the time Kiron arrived, the servant had stepped aside, and Aket-ten waved him on to follow her.

Another servant escorted them into the house, Kiron acutely aware of his disheveled and filthy state. He hoped that the servant was not going to take them to the dining chamber—he was in no fit condition to be seen in such a place.

But as they passed through the antechamber, lined with benches for those who would be waiting on the Vizier’s attention, and painted with murals of the Vizier supervising the Queen’s household, receiving the Gold of Honor, and dictating to a small army of scribes, another servant appeared at a door, followed by the Vizier himself.

He was not someone that Kiron knew, but evidently Aket-ten did, for the man greeted her warmly.

“I know you would not have summoned me from my meal if this had not been urgent,” he said, with a wry smile. “You are not given to hysterics.”

“Actually, my lord, I don’t know what the situation is,” Aket-ten admitted. “But I do know that Kiron would not have flown all the way from Aerie himself if it was not a serious problem—”

Now she glanced at him, and there was something else in that glance that made him uneasy. Something personal.

Still nothing to be done about that. He saluted the Vizier. “My lord . . . while returning from an action against bandits, my wings discovered a body.”

He went on to describe everything that he could remember about the body and its disposition while the vizier listened carefully, arms folded over his chest. Torchlight flickering over the murals gave them a strange semblance of life, making it doubly odd to be talking to one Vizier while four more went about their business.

When he finished, the vizier nodded, face expressionless. Kiron’s heart sank. He had disturbed a very important man for nothing—

“This could be of no consequence,” the vizier said, and Kiron’s heart sank further. “But—we cannot take that chance. The gods may have placed a warning in our laps, and we ignore it at our peril. You acted properly in bringing this to me.”

Kiron felt a weight lifting from his shoulders. “Then I will leave it in the wise hands of Vizier Nef-kham-het,” he said. And he left it at that, bowing himself out, Aket-ten coming with him. He wanted to be sure Avatre had been properly tended, and he wanted a meal and a bath in that order.

However, he knew he wasn’t going to get any of those things soon when Aket-ten turned to him just outside the vizier’s gate and said somberly, “We need to talk. . . .”

SEVEN

“NOW?”he asked, wishing he dared walk on, but knowing—unless he wanted a quarrel—he had better stop where he was.

Ah, but he had forgotten one thing. Aket-ten was a Jouster as well as a young woman. She pursed her lips and shook her head.

“Not this moment. Go see to Avatre.” But she wasn’t about to let him off that easily. “Once you’re bathed, I’ll have one of the servants bring food to your room in the Dragon Courts. We can talk then.”

So he had a little respite anyway. He nodded, stifled a sigh, and tried to look something other than apprehensive. Then something struck him about what she had just said. And something that had been nagging him about the Dragon Courts occurred to him as well.

She had said she was going to have a servant bring food to his room. Now he usually stayed in one of the old Jousters’ quarters in the Dragon Court on the rare occasions when he turned up here, but . . .

But there had never been servants here. Why should there be? There was no one here. And he didn’t think that four self-sufficient young men here could justify installing servants again.

Could it?

Or was there something more going on?

Or was he just tired and overreacting to something that had no meaning?

He talked to her about little nothings as they walked together back to the dragon pens. How progress had just speeded up apace since the merchants had taken to being grateful . . . how he was even going to have a kitchen in his own dwelling before long . . . how some enterprising soul was planning to create some bathing and swimming pools . . . all of this to try and make her see just how much more livable Aerie was becoming, to tempt her back.

For her part, she responded with a neutral interest that would have been frustrating if he hadn’t been too tired to be frustrated by anything. Flying was hard work; not as hard as it was for the dragon, of course, but there were constant adjustments of weight, shifting balance, and accounting for wind resistance going on to make things easier for the dragon. A Jouster didn’t just sit there like a sack of sand. At least, a good Jouster didn’t just sit there like a sack of sand.

It was dark in the pens, but Hem-serit was waiting for him. “We gave her a quick sand scrub, fed her as much as she would eat, and she flopped down and went straight to sleep,” the courier said, anxious to assure Kiron that everything possible had been done to make Avatre happy.

“I’ll just check on her,” he replied, easing into the pen.

Had Avatre been hungry, anxious, or even just a little restless, her head would have been up the moment she heard his voice and footstep. Instead, all he heard was her steady, deep breathing. She was sleeping like a stone.

He dropped down into the hot sand and stroked her head anyway. She didn’t awaken. She had been well-tended and now she slept the sleep of the exhausted.

But then he raised his head, because he distinctly heard the mutterings and meepings of—baby dragons?

Aket-ten heard them, too, and suddenly her demeanor changed—he sensed it in the shift of her posture. Guilt?

Was this what her odd behavior had been all about?

“Why are there baby dragons here?” he asked, treading carefully. If she felt guilty about something, she would be angry, too. Whatever she was up to—

Then it struck him, what she must have done. It was the only reason he could think of that she might be feeling guilty. And why she had not so much as brought a single couriered message in too long. And why Ari would have asked for four Jousters to serve as couriers. Oh, blessed gods. She’s started her own—

“I have permission and the patronage of Great Queen Nofret,” Aket-ten said, head raised, her voice taking on an edge. She was already starting an argument that he had no intention of getting involved in; whatever was done was done, and there was no point in fighting over it.

“I never said—”

Well, he might not want an argument, but she clearly was determined to have one with or without his participation. “I got my own babies.” Now there was defiance in her voice, and challenge.

“I never said—”

Apparently, it did not matter what he did or did not say. She had the argument in her mouth, and she was going to get it all out. All that was required was his mere presence, it seemed. “And all but one of the new lady Jousters are priestesses with the gift of communing with animals!”

He gave up. She had marshaled her forces and was going to charge the battlefield. If there was no opposing force there, her chariots were going to run down warriors of air.

She went on at great length about how she was not depriving anyone of anything, not even a scrap of meat. How her little priestess-riders were so completely in communion with their charges and devoted to them that it made his young Jousters look as if they were neglecting their dragons. How Queen Nofret thought this was an excellent idea and that eventually all the Jousters flying courier duty could be replaced with the “Queen’s Wing.” These were, of course, all good points. They would do nothing to silence the mouths of those who would not approve of female Jousters; they would do nothing to still the anger of those who had been waiting to become Jousters and would see any dragon gotten by the women as one that “should” have gone to them. There might be some who would be quieted when the women began flying courier duty, but there would still be plenty who would say that the dragons were a costlier alternative to runners and chariot drivers doing the same duty. And there were probably other things she had not even considered and he had not thought of.

And none of them mattered. She had wanted this badly enough that she had found a way to make it happen and arguments for and against it were useless. The thing had happened; there were lady Jousters. Now they must deal with the complications and consequences.

But she was still staring fixedly in her mind at her arguments.

The more she talked, the quieter he became; the quieter he became, the more she talked, until finally she had repeated every one of her arguments at least three times. It almost seemed as if she needed to fill the silence, as if the very silence was an argument against her.

It made no sense, of course. No sense at all. He found himself getting angry with her for being angry that he had not argued against her. It was stupid.

But so was his anger, and anyway he was too tired to sustain it.

At last she seemed to realize that the complaint had gone on more than long enough. She finally stopped, hands on hips. He couldn’t see her face in the darkness, but he could see her silhouette. She was still angry, angry over nothing, essentially.

“Well?” she said belligerently, daring him to raise one of his counterarguments.

Not a chance he would do that.

Oh, no.

It might be time to try to placate her. Strange, that all the practice he’d been getting in handling his Jousters seemed to be giving him some ability to deal with her. . . .

At least, he hoped it was.

The soft breeze that always soughed through the Dragon Courts brushed against his skin, and he took advantage of the darkness and clamped and unclamped his jaw to ease some of the tension.

“You seem to have everything well in hand,” he said, in as neutral a tone as possible. He really could not agree with her wholeheartedly. Not even halfheartedly. He saw far too many ways in which her brilliant plan was going to make everything worse, not better. She didn’t want to hear anything of that nature; she would see his counters, not as things to be taken into account and to find answers for, but as reasons why she had been wrong. And if he agreed falsely with her, he had the feeling she would know he was being false. So the best he could manage was neutrality.

Evidently that wasn’t good enough.

“Fine,” she said waspishly, then turned on her heel and left, stalking off into the lit walkway between the pens, anger evident in every movement.

He sighed. Well, there it was. She’d had her argument. She had, in a sense, won it. But she hadn’t won it in the way she had wanted to, and now she was angrier still. He had the sinking feeling that no matter what he said or did now, unless he came to her on his knees, saying that she had been absolutely right, that he had been absolutely wrong, and that he begged her forgiveness, nothing he said or did was going to ease her anger.

And he didn’t even know why she was so angry with him, not really.

All he could think of was, I am glad I am not depending on her for a dinner, or I would be eating Avatre’s scraps.

Which was about the most sensible thing that could be said at this point.

He petted Avatre a little while longer to calm his nerves. The cooling breeze off the desert was very soothing, and the sounds of the baby dragons somewhere nearby made him smile. However she had gotten these little ones, it was a fair bet that they would have died had she not fetched them out of the desert, so that was good. In fact, he found himself curious about that, then curious about these new lady Jousters. No matter what, Aket-ten would not have taken featherheaded lack-wits for her Jousters, nor would she have risked precious babies with girls who would not care for them as deeply as she did. He waited while the night sounds of a Dragon Court soothed him, let the breeze cool his own frustration, let the smooth feel of Avatre’s slick-scaled head under his hands bring him back to an even temper, then took himself to the old Jousters’ quarters, curious to see what the changes were.

Strange to be back here, where the place was so familiar and yet so unfamiliar. The pens, the passageways between them, were all roofless, but the walls were tall and thick enough that no dragon could reach over them to savage another. It gave the same impression, actually, as the city of tombs. The pens all had canvas covers that could be pulled over them to protect the hot sands of the dragon wallows from becoming hot sand soup during the season of rains. And each section, where the corridors intersected, was denoted by enormous paintings of gods and sacred animals that seemed to stir a little with life in the flickering light from the torches that had been placed in sconces at intervals along the walls.

The silence was what struck him. Except for the section where his Avatre, Aket-ten’s Re-eth-ke, Ari’s Kashet, Nofret’s The-on, the four courier dragons and the babies were, the place was echoingly empty. As he moved toward the Jousters’ Courts, the rooms arranged around simple but attractive courtyards that had once held all the Jousters of Tia, he wondered what it would be like to hear the Dragon Courts full again.

It was somewhat unnerving to hear the chatter and giggle of feminine voices coming from the Jousters’ Courts. The first court, lit only by one torch, and by the dim light of a lamp shining in five of the eight sets of rooms was the one where his usual quarters were. By the presence of the lamps, that was where the four couriers from Aerie had been housed. He had intended to ask his fellows where he might get some food, but instead, he followed his ears to the spill of light marking the door to the second court when he realized that there were a few male voices among the females.

He smiled as he did so. He should have known, of course. These were young men for whom there were, as yet, very few young women in Aerie. The closest place to find female companions was Sanctuary, which was a good half-day’s flight away. They would have gravitated to Aket-ten’s girls like bees to flowers.

He stepped into the doorway and paused, letting his eyes adjust to the light. He found his four couriers and eight young ladies, all of them in the standard linen tunics his own Jousters wore at this time of year. They were sitting to one side of the ornamental latas pool, with dishes and cups and beer jars scattered among them. Their chatter fell silent as they saw him in the doorway, and his four couriers jumped to their feet and saluted him.

As the young women looked uncertain, as if they were not sure if they should do the same, he waved at his couriers to sit back down. “Jousters, be easy,” he said. “I am not here to inspect you. There was some important news that I needed to deliver in person, and now I am merely a weary and hungry fellow like yourselves.”

The young ladies relaxed as his Jousters sat down. He walked over to them and took a place on the pavement of the court among them.

“I trust you left something for me?” he said, with a smile. The young ladies giggled or tossed their heads, and began to pass plates and an unopened jar of beer to him. It looked exactly like the meals he used to get when he was a dragon boy here, tending to Kashet and Ari. Strips of cooked meat, flatbreads, onions, greens, thick, soured milk to use as a sauce, beer and honey cakes. It smelled wonderful, and his mouth watered as they passed the plates to him.

He made a tolerable meal, although the meat was cold. Still, it wasn’t dried, which was a distinct improvement over what he got at Aerie. Fresh bread was always very welcome, and as for the honey cakes . . . he quite forgot Aket-ten’s tantrum in his enjoyment of them.

When his hunger was finally sated, he looked around at the company. The torches around the courtyard itself and the little lamps placed on the rim of the latas pool cast a pleasing, warm light. He found himself approving of the girls as he examined them. Despite the giggles, none of them acted silly or too girlishly. All had done something equally sensible; they had cut their hair very short, right at chin level. All appeared to be Tian, with the darker skin tone than Altans had. That was a curious choice—but then again, there were not many Altans here in Mefis, so perhaps Aket-ten had no choice. . . .

None were wearing any jewelry fancier than a faience amulet on a leather thong or a string of faience beads. A glance at their hands told him they were no strangers to hard work. This was all very encouraging.

Finally, one of them got up, waved cheerfully to all of them, and left. At his curious glance, one of the other young women offered, “We have all the babies together in one pen, and we take it in turns to sleep with them through the night. That way everyone gets to sleep in a bed seven out of eight nights.”

He blinked. Why hadn’t he thought of that? It was the one complaint his young Jousters had about baby tending. Not everyone was as slavishly devoted to the welfare of a sleeping infant dragon that would not wake and would scarcely even stir all night long as he had been. . . .

Then again, they were with their babies all day long. He’d not had that luxury. He’d only had stolen moments with Avatre among all his other chores, and every moment he had been able to spend with her had been precious to him. So it rightly wouldn’t seem as urgent to any of them to be with their babies at night as long as someone was with the babies.

“It’s a good idea,” one of the boys said defensively. They all looked at him as if they expected him to object.

He sighed. When did everyone get the idea that he was a crocodile? “I never said it wasn’t,” he replied wearily. “In fact, I think it is a very good idea. Just because I spent my sleeping hours with Avatre when she was a baby, it doesn’t follow that it’s a sensible idea. Well, it was sensible for me, but only because I was afraid she might be discovered if I left her alone. That’s hardly anything any of you will ever need to worry about.”

Several of the girls exchanged speaking glances, and one of them said, with a lopsided grin, “I told you he couldn’t be the soul devourer that Aket-ten said he’d be.”

Oh. So this reputation was Aket-ten’s doing. . . .

“I devour neither souls nor babies,” he said firmly. “A good honey cake, though, stands no chance with me.” And to prove it, he boldly reached for the last and ate it in three bites.

Whatever motive Aket-ten had in darkening his reputation, now he was feeling rather annoyed with her. He then set about firmly countering the image by simply being pleasant. He supposed she must have warned them all that he was going to object to their presence, their mere existence, and probably be aggressive about it.

On the surface, there was very little to object to. The Queen’s Wing had the blessing and patronage of Nofret, and if the Great Queen preferred to have a wing of dragon couriers rather than a temple in her name, no one was going to dare say her nay. Aket-ten had found a way on her own to get baby dragons without depriving any of the men waiting for one—

Come to think of it, he was very curious about that, though, wondering just where and how she had gotten them. —and the Great Queen’s patronage ensured that the wing got support without taking anything from the existing Jousters. Aket-ten had found sensible young women who were not only capable of taking care of their dragons, but were actually better suited to the task than the young men, by virtue of their ability to understand animals and make themselves understood by them.

I must find young men who can do that. . . . Surely that particular ability was not confined to females.

As to whether or not they would actually work out as couriers, there was no saying. They probably wouldn’t have difficulty with the hard work, but the flying itself—not everyone took to it.

It looked as if she was finding them something they could do, that would actually free the male Jousters to counter the bandit threat. That could only be good for Aerie and the Jouster Wings there.

So really, there was overtly nothing to object to, and he wasn’t about to bring up.

Other than that . . . he was not stupid. It was fairly clear that the duties of training both dragons and girls were going to keep Aket-ten here. Which meant that the chances of his getting her to move back to Aerie were nonexistent. Maybe part of the reason she was angry was because she knew that.

Curses.

“Where and how did Aket-ten get nine dragons?” he asked into a lull in the conversation, going to great pains to sound interested and approving rather than accusatory.

“She scouted the nests,” said one, who had been very quiet until now, and had sat a little apart from the others. “When eggs were abandoned, she had them brought back here to hatch. That was where my dragon came from. And as for the rest, she continued to watch the nests, and had some of the old dragon-hunters come and take babies that had been abandoned, or the weakest of the nestlings when it was clear that one or more was not getting enough food to thrive.”

Clever, and he hadn’t thought of that. He had just taken it for granted that out of a hatch it was likely that there would be failures and let it go at that. This made sense. Especially if he could find young men among his Jouster candidates who shared Aket-ten’s power . . . he could do the same.

He continued to ask the girls questions, not just about their dragons and how they were taking to life as young Jousters, but about their former lives as priestesses. He didn’t have to feign interest; he was interested, and he got the impression that his four young couriers were no little annoyed with him for taking all of the girls’ attention.

Well, let them be annoyed. He would be gone tomorrow, and they would have the young women all to themselves again. In fact, it was rather amusing to see which one of them got annoyed over which young lady. And which young lady cast a glance at which young man when he spoke to her. It wasn’t long before he had who was interested in whom fairly well sorted out.

This was going to make for some complicated times, especially as rivalries were definitely a potential. He was just as glad that he wasn’t going to be the one to have to deal with them.

Oh, yes. Hurt feelings, jealousy, broken hearts . . . let Aket-ten deal with that particular aspect of having female Jousters. True, he had not anticipated those problems either, but she was the one that had wanted females in the first place. He made a mental note that if Ari asked for any more couriers, to find a reason why he should not send them.

Not that he wanted his Jousters to do without female company! By no means!

But life was complicated enough with the possibility of quarrels over young women when those young women were not Jousters. The dreadful ramifications of having to sort out female Jousters fighting over males, and vice versa—add to that the sensitivity of the dragons themselves to the emotions of their riders—it made his head spin. He was beginning to understand why the old-style Jousters had been discouraged from anything but the most trivial of affairs and trysts with “flute girls.”

Let it all be on Aket-ten’s head.

Petty revenge, maybe, but she had made him out to be a monster of sorts, and then she had gone tearing off in a temper when he hadn’t said a word against her new Jousters.

But . . . he should have a word with his fellows, before he left. Something. Warn them about letting women get in the way of their duty or—

He’d think of something.

Actually, after a moment of listening and staring at the little flame of a lamp, he realized that he wasn’t thinking of anything. Well, a bath perhaps.

Should he tell them about the dead border guard?

Perhaps—no, not yet. It might be nothing. It still could turn out to be nothing. It might have been the tragic result of a private quarrel. There was simply no way to tell.

He realized after a moment that he had fallen silent while the others kept chattering on. All but one, that one girl that sat apart from the others.

Now that he had food in him, he wasn’t as tired as he had thought. And a bath was beginning to feel like a good idea. He excused himself and walked into the shadows, into the next courtyard, aiming for the rooms he generally used as his own when he overnighted here. There were no torches burning in this court, and only a single lamp in each of the rooms assigned to him, but he really didn’t need much light. As he had hoped, the bath jars were all full, everything he needed in readiness, a clean kilt and loinwrap laid out on the bed. Whatever Aket-ten thought of him, the servants knew their jobs, and were not letting him go unattended.