Alta

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

EPILOGUE

Raves for The Dragon Jousters Series :

“As in its predecessor Joust, a clear, uncluttered style marks Lackey’s latest light entertainment about wizards and dragons and social struggle. Vivid depictions of mythical creatures and a pastoral, casual approach to magic enliven such emotionally charged themes as cultural displacement, alienation and search for self. The crises of individual characters with easily identifiable conflicts nicely mirror larger catastrophes of plot. Full of adventure, romance and political intrigue, this highly readable fantasy will appeal particularly to young adults. Fans of Anne McCaffrey’s Pern series will also be happy.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Rife with intrigue and dangerous counterintrigue, the story continues a classic quest-for-good-against-evil plot development while beautifully maintaining the world, society, and characterizations established in Joust. A very satisfying sequel with an ending that begs for another episode because the final battle is yet to come.”

—Booklist

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

—Locus

“As always, the imcomparable 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

KEROWYN’S TALE

BY THE SWORD

VOWS AND HONOR

THE OATHBOUND

OATHBREAKERS

OATHBLOOD

BRIGHTLY BURNING

TAKE A THIEF

EXILE’S HONOR

EXILE’S VALOR

VALDEMAR ANTHOLOGIES

SWORD OF ICE

SUN IN GLORY

Written with LARRY DIXON:

THE MAGE WARS

THE BLACK GRYPHON

THE WHITE GRYPHON

THE SILVER GRYPHON

DARIAN’S TALE

OWLFLIGHT

OWLSIGHT

OWLKNIGHT

OTHER NOVELS:

JOUST

ALTA

SANCTUARY

THE BLACK SWAN

THE ELEMENTAL MASTERS

THE SERPENT’S SHADOW

THE GATES OF SLEEP

PHOENIX AND ASHES

DARKOVER

Written with Marion

Zimmer Bradley

REDISCOVERY

And don’t miss: The VALDEMAR COMPANION

Edited by John Helfers and Denise Little

Copyright © 2004 by Mercedes R. Lackey.

All rights reserved.

DAW Books Collectors No. 1286

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 via 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 electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

eISBN : 978-1-101-11837-5

First paperback printing, March 2005

DAW TRADEMARK REGISTERED

U.S. PAT. OFF. AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES

—MARCA REGISTRADA

HECHO EN U.S.A.

S. A.

http://us.penguingroup.com

To Jemima Parry-Jones and Mozart

ONE

OVERHEAD, the stars that filled the night sky, the ornaments upon the robe of the Goddess of the Night, seemed close enough to touch. The kamiseen wind whined in the tops of the trees of the oasis beside him; even at night, it never completely ceased. It smelled of baked stone, with a hint of desiccated plants.

He had come to learn that the desert was not all one sort of landscape; he had escaped over stony hills into the pure sand of the desert dune country; now he was in yet another sort of desert, a place of marginal life. The sand beneath Vetch was not as comfortable to sit in as one might suppose; since this wasn’t dune country, the ground was hard beneath a surface mix of dust, sand, and pebbles. He was glad of his bedroll now since it provided a layer of softness between himself and the ground. Strange. When he had been Khefti-the-Fat’s serf, he wouldn’t have noticed how hard it was; in so short a time he had gotten used to certain comforts.

Yes, it was the time of the kamiseen, and the ever-present wind whined over the desert, carrying with it a film of dust and sucking away moisture. But this was an oasis, with carefully tended date palms, and Vetch’s camp was downwind of the palm grove. The Bedu camped within the oasis, permitting Vetch the downwind side for his own camp, so the kamiseen would not trouble him much tonight.

Vetch’s scarlet dragon Avatre slumbered at his back, her body warm inside the pit he had dug in the sand and lined with stones heated in his fire. Fuel was as precious out here as water, but tonight no one begrudged the effort of collecting it for him. Firstly, this clan of Veiled Ones boasted many camels and could afford the dried dung for the fire. And secondly, Avatre had earned the right to her fuel and more.

She had eaten well today, taking down four of the desert gazelles. The first time had been this afternoon, twice in rapid succession, enough to feed her well at midday. The second time had been with the help of Vetch’s sling, and enabled the two of them to provide an evening meal not only for Avatre herself but for Vetch and the clan of Veiled Ones who were hosting him on this last evening in the desert. There was a faint scent of roasting meat on the kamiseen tonight, the last remains of the evening feast.

He was within striking distance of the goal he had sought for so long. Soon he would cross the border that divided Tian lands from Altan. Soon he would be among his own people, and although he probably looked outwardly calm, inside he was afire with excitement—and at the same time, afraid. This moment was one he had dreamed about for so long, but dreams were one thing—reality another.

Once, he had dreamed of having a dragon, too. Now he had one, and Avatre was so much more than he had been able to imagine. She gave him freedom—and tied him to her with bonds of responsibility and love. He had never envisaged how much she would mean to him. It was a glorious burden he would never have given up for the world, but it meant that he was no longer beholden only to himself. In fact, when given a choice between his own welfare and hers—and there had been many such choices on this journey—he would always choose hers. He could not help himself. She was his beloved, after all.

Now, faced with the prospect of crossing into the land he had once thought of as his goal, he knew that no matter what his dreams had been, they could not possibly replicate what he would encounter.

Those dreams might be better than what he actually found, or they might be worse. But they would probably be different, and that alone was a reason for fear.

But this was as far as the talismans that the Veiled Ones had provided as a series of guides would take him. Tomorrow, one of them would personally take him to within sight of the Altan border, the lands where the desert ended and the swampy delta began, and leave him there.

Tonight, unlike previous evenings, he was not alone at his fire. He shared it with one of the Mouths of the Bedu nomads, an enigmatic and apparently sexless creature covered from head to toe in one of their characteristic, belted blue robes and over-vest, dyed with indigo. As with all of the others, the Mouth was veiled by a drape of cloth that showed only the eyes. Both sexes wore the veils; a practical consideration when one lived in a land where the wind never stopped, and neither did the dust. He had never heard of any of the Bedu going without their veils, but then, he had never heard of the Bedu going outside the desert. That the costume made the Veiled Ones even more enigmatic to outsiders was, he was sure at this point, a source of endless amusement to them.

He still could not tell whether these Mouths were male or female. Perhaps they were neither; it was altogether possible that they were a kind of eunuch. He didn’t find that idea as discomfiting as he might have once; if the Mouths were a sort of eunuch, it was not something that had happened against their will. And certainly there were priests of certain obscure gods even among his own people who volunteered for such a sacrifice. Some believed that those who had done so obtained the special favor of their god; others that to remove sex from one’s life opened one to visions, or granted great magical power. For some, such a sacrifice was worth the gain.

This particular Mouth was regarding Vetch from the other side of a smaller fire than the one that had heated Avatre’s rocks, watching with a direct and clear-eyed gaze over the veil. The Mouth had asked Vetch to tell his tale in full, and had been simply regarding him quietly for some time now, but Vetch hadn’t made any effort to ask why. The Mouth would tell him—or not—in good time. Vetch still wasn’t entirely certain what role the Mouths played in the lives of the Veiled Ones; they didn’t seem to be priests, quite. They weren’t exactly magicians, either, although they did work magic, the magic that created the talismans that guided him from clan to clan, for instance. They certainly were the only ones who spoke to outsiders, but they weren’t precisely interpreters, nor were they ambassadors. All bargaining with outsiders was conducted by them, yet they were not traders. And they weren’t leaders of their people either.

In fact, if he could have guessed anything at this point, it would have been that they were, literally, the voices of their clans, that somehow they knew what everyone in the clan thought, or wanted, with regard to an outsider, and they were the tool through which these wants, thoughts, and needs were expressed.

But they certainly had their own personalities, for every single one he had encountered so far was as different from the last as any two individuals could be. Some had barely spoken at all and held themselves coldly aloof from him; others had been positively garrulous, interested to hear whatever of his own story he cared to impart, and forthcoming with news of the world outside the desert, if not of details of their own lives and customs. Some had been terrified of Avatre, others treated her like a kind of giant falcon—with the respect that talons and teeth deserved, but no fear at all.

This one was somewhere in between, but operating on the “helpful” side of the accounting. The Mouth had been wary of Avatre and inclined to keep Vetch and his charge far away from the Bedu camp, but otherwise friendly enough. The Mouth had asked careful questions about Vetch’s life as a serf as well as his treatment by the Tian Jousters—Ari in particular—and about the journey that had brought them here. Perhaps Avatre’s gift of meat had paved the way for that. And this Mouth sat at Vetch’s fire now as if wishing to be there, and not as if mounting guard over the “outsider.”

“You call yourself Kiron, son of Kiron,” the Mouth said abruptly, although the voice did not break the silence so much as insinuate itself into the silence and part it. “So you have asked us to address you. And yet, you do not think of yourself as that person.”

How does the Mouth know that? It was something that Vetch himself had not realized until the moment it was pointed out.

Vetch considered that statement in silence without retorting immediately, giving himself time to analyze the thought. He had, over the course of these travels, also learned to keep his mouth shut and think about what a Mouth said before he responded to it, having shoved his foot rather neatly into his own mouth a time or two in the early part of his journey. “I have been Vetch, the serf, far longer than I have been Kiron, the keeper of Avatre and dragon rider,” he said at last.

“And yet, if you enter into your native land thinking of yourself as Vetch, your own people will treat you thuswise,” said the Mouth, with a touch of warning in the tone. “Vetch the serf is a person of no worth and no account, deserving of no consideration or special treatment.”

He felt a kind of stillness settle into his gut. This was important. He wasn’t certain why it was important, but it felt important. Once again, Vetch considered the words. Carefully. What was the Mouth trying to say to him? “And?” he ventured.

“And, perhaps, they will try to take the dragon from you.”

“She won’t go,” Vetch replied, with some heat, and yet sure of himself. She wouldn’t, of course, and this was absolutely the one thing he had no fear of. Unlike the dragons that were captured as fledglings and tamed, he had raised Avatre from the egg. She was as bonded to him as any creature could be—as no other dragon, save one, had ever been bonded to another human.

That one, and that other human, were perhaps the most important part of his past that there was. Kashet, and his former Master, the Jouster Ari. They flew in the service of the Great King of Tia. Both of them were his enemies in name, now, and yet were his friends in fact. It was Ari who had engineered his escape when Avatre had made her First Flight with him clinging to her back, all hope of concealing her existence anymore gone off on the kamiseen winds.

Ari and Kashet lay behind him somewhere, in the lands claimed by the High King of Tia. He could not think of them without gratitude, and yet it was a gratitude tinged with pain. If he could have, he would have never left them. And yet—

And yet they were Tians, and he was Altan, and if they ever met again, they would probably have to fight each other, and possibly to the death.

Still, Kashet would permit no other to ride him but Ari—and Avatre would be the same with Vetch. He had absolutely no doubt of that, for Avatre had actually tried to face down Kashet—who was many times her size—when she thought the great blue was threatening Vetch.

“Nevertheless,” persisted the Mouth, “they will try. They may starve her until she eats tala-treated meat, and is drugged into submission. Unless you make yourself into Kiron, son of Kiron, Altan Jouster. Unless you come to believe that you are that person. Then, no one will presume to doubt that you are entitled to ride her.”

Vetch closed his eyes for a moment. A Mouth never, ever said something as an idle observation. And along with all of the passage-rights that Ari had purchased for him with his Gold of Honor, had come another—the right to be instructed in whatever any Mouth thought might be useful. Some of the Mouths had honored this more in the breach than the observance, but this one seemed to be offering sound advice. “Can you teach me to believe?” he asked finally, opening his eyes.

The Mouth regarded him with solemn dark eyes above the veil. “Perhaps. I can, at least, give you a guide to teach yourself. First—among our people we have a saying. ‘Assume the attitude of prayer, and in time, the attitude will become the prayer.’ I put this to you. Already you are aware of how you hold yourself, for this tells your dragon much, and instructs her on what she should be thinking about what is around her.”

Vetch nodded; that was plain enough. Dragons were supremely sensitive to the language of body and posture.

“So—mind, now, Kiron, son of Kiron. Put yourself in the attitude of a freeborn man, or even one of wealth or noble birth. Recall how the masters of your master held themselves, and hold yourself in like manner. Behave in all ways as the Jouster-in-training of Tia would, and within Alta you will be taken as one who has authority by right. Behave in all ways in that manner, and as this becomes second nature, your spirit will come to believe what your body tells it.” A pause, as those dark, enigmatic eyes gazed at him. “To begin with, you might raise your head that you may look down your nose at those who are inferior to you. Such a posture conveys a great deal.”

He blinked at that, and self-consciously straightened. No more hunched shoulders; no more deference. He must look people in the eye as if they were at least his equals, and possibly his inferiors. And, yes—down his nose.

“Good,” said the Mouth approvingly. “Another thing. The Jousters of Alta, like those of Tia, are permitted to take what they need within reason. If you offer to pay for anything, once you cross that border, there will be suspicion. If your dragon hungers then, find a great estate, land, and take what she needs. Do not permit anyone to question you. Say you are a Jouster in training if need be, but no more.”

“But—am I properly garbed for such a thing?” he asked doubtfully. Doubt; it still ate at him, made him think, Sooner or later, they’re going to find out I’m an imposter, a thief. Sooner or later—After all, he had no armor, no helm, nothing but a selection of common kilts. He did not look the part—

Although he could not see anything but the eyes, there was a softening there that suggested the Mouth was smiling. “The chances are, the larger the estate, the less likely there will be anyone of rank about who might even consider questioning you or your rights. Go in, demand food and water, and even clothing if you will, and leave. Jousters of Alta are ranked as lesser nobles; there are fewer of them, and they are valued higher.” The Mouth’s eyes closed for a moment, as if listening to a voice only the Mouth could hear. “I believe,” the Mouth added, “Although I do not know, that this is the only way, save through the priesthood, that a man of the common folk may become ennobled.”

Vetch nodded; this was more good advice, and not something he would have thought of.

“If I were in your position—” A pause. “This is speculation. But if I were in your position, I would feign offense if anyone were to question my rights.”

Vetch sighed. That was going to be hard; what were the odds he’d be able to continue this charade for very long? He wasn’t ready for this. He had been so long the lowest of the low—

Yet, for Avatre’s sake, he would try.

No, he would not try. He would succeed. He must succeed; he had nowhere else to go right now. She was barely half grown, and they could not continue to live in the wilderness. She was doing all right, but she wasn’t prospering, and the bigger she got, the more food she would need. To raise her properly, he either needed to turn her loose among others of her kind, or take her to a Jouster’s Compound. There was no other choice.

“Do not hunt unless there are no large estates, for this will be a waste of your effort, and you should be making for Alta City, not wandering about,” the Mouth concluded. “Though I think you will find estates in plenty. And remember to act as an Altan of rank! The dragon conveys the rank—you have the dragon, therefore, you have the rank, by the very laws of the land.”

I have the rank. The dragon confers the rank. And I must do this for her. “Have you any other advice?” he asked quietly.

The Mouth’s eyes closed for a moment, as if considering. “Ah. In one thing the ruling of Alta differs from Tia. The Great Kings and Great Queens rule jointly, and there are always four of them, two sets of Sacred Twins. So refer to the Great Ones, not the Great King.

In all other ways, rulership is similar. And until you come to Alta City and reveal yourself for what you are, the tongues of Alta and Tia are similar enough that you should have no difficulty in passing yourself as some Jouster in training from a distant province. And now, it is time for sleep. Since I must come with you on the morrow, the journey to where I must leave you will be long in time if not in distance. To save time you might need to spend in hunting, I will have a child bring a beast for your dragon’s meal.”

As abruptly as the conversation started, the Mouth rose and left.

And there seemed no reason to do anything other than follow the Mouth’s advice, and sleep.

The last leg of this part of his journey began before dawn. Avatre woke and nudged him; he, after all, was supposed to get her breakfast! He sat up and blinked sleepily at a bit of movement, lighter shadow against dark, at the edge of the oasis.

The predawn light slowly turned the world from shades of darkness to a world painted in tones of blue-gray. And the Mouth had told him the truth last night; there was already a small boy with a goat waiting for him to awaken.

The Mouth had not told him to pay for the goat, and yet—yet it seemed churlish in the extreme not to do so. These people fought the desert, and fought it with all their strength and cunning to wrest a living from it. It was not fair to take and give nothing in return. He rummaged through the coins that Ari had left with him and which he had not yet used, and offered what he considered to be a fair price for the beast. It must have been, for without a word, the child pushed the halter rope at him, took the coins, and ran off. He hadn’t been required to pay for Avatre’s food the times when their hunting had been without success—that was one of the rights that Ari had bargained for—but somehow it just seemed polite to do so now, especially when he was passing out of their guidance. Being fed on the way because he had failed at hunting was somehow different from this, though he could not put his finger on how.

Avatre was not used to having her breakfast delivered alive if she was not hunting it, but she was obviously not averse to the notion. The goat, however, was petrified; feeling rather sorry for it, Vetch dragged it by the halter rope with all four hooves making furrows in the ground until Avatre got tired of waiting, levered herself up out of her pit, stalked over to them both and dispatched the beast with a single, impatient blow of her foreclaw before it had a chance to bleat in terror.

He left her alone with it, and made his own preparations for leaving; there was bread from last night, and onions and a little meat. He did not have a great deal to pack either. By the time she was finished—leaving nothing but the halter rope this morning!—so was he.

And so, apparently, was the Mouth. Vetch looked up to see the Mouth waiting in the shelter of the date palms, the halter of a camel in one hand. Once Vetch was aware of the preparations, the Mouth made the camel kneel, and mounted, curling one leg over the front of the saddle and locking a foot behind the other knee, then giving the beast the command to rise. With a groan of complaint, the camel climbed back up to his feet and the Mouth started off, tapping the camel’s shoulder with a crop to make it trot.

The kamiseen whined, filling the silence that the Mouth left behind; carried on it were the smokes of cooking fires, and the breath of the deeper desert where even the Bedu did not venture. Vetch took his time in harnessing Avatre; it wasn’t as if they would have any trouble finding their guide once they were in the air! In fact, they would probably spend a lot of time circling overhead as the camel crossed the desert beneath them at what would seem to be the pace of a tortoise compared to that of the dragon.

And that was, in fact, exactly what happened. Although the rider was out of sight by the time Avatre pushed off the ground with Vetch on her back, it was not long before Vetch spotted their guide, and it took relatively little effort to catch up.

Avatre was a fine flyer now, and Vetch was used to the bounding wingbeats that left the stomach somewhere behind. In fact, unless he actually thought about it, he never even noticed it; he was so in tune with her, it sometimes felt to him as if they were part of a single, united creature, conqueror of the air.

At first, Avatre had to do a great deal of actual flying, doubling back and forth across their guide’s path in that peculiar combination of flying and gliding that the dragons used when there were no thermals to ride. And the air of early dawn was cold enough to numb the feet and hands and nose; Avatre didn’t like it much, and to tell the truth, neither did Vetch. He shivered in the chill, and was just grateful that the kamiseen gave Avatre something to ride. If this had been still air, she’d have had to work a lot harder. It was the gods’ own gift that she had made her First Flight at the beginning of the kamiseen, for the wind had aided them all across the desert. Had it not been the season of the wind, he had the feeling that they would be making old bones together in the sand, even now.

But as the sun rose and the sand began to heat up, he stopped shivering and Avatre was able to switch from tacking back and forth on the wind to flying as hawks and falcons of the desert did, spiraling passively up one thermal, then gliding down until she found another to repeat the process, following roughly the same course as their guide. For his part, as far as Vetch could tell from above, the Mouth was singularly unperturbed about whether or not they were keeping up, but kept the camel at a steady, ground-eating lope. Fast enough to make good time and the sort of pace a camel could keep up indefinitely.

Vetch was keeping an eye on the horizon as well as on their guide, and when, shortly after midday, a thin line of green appeared along it, he was not at all surprised that their guide chose the shelter of a thicket of acacia trees to stop at, and dismounted. The Mouth didn’t wave to Vetch from below, but then again, he didn’t need to, for the message of the green horizon was clear enough. The Mouth had brought them to within sight of land claimed only by Alta; peaceful land, where he would not run into either fighting, or Tian Jousters. It was time for him to leave the desert and his guide.

Avatre drifted down to the waiting Bedu, and backwinged to a graceful landing—she’d gotten a great deal better at them than she used to be! And the Mouth nodded toward the horizon as soon as she had folded her wings.

“Half a day, and you will be where you wished to be—across the border, in Alta. I hope that this proves to be truly what you desired,” the Mouth said.

Half a day—That seemed about right. In the clear air of the desert, things were a lot farther away than they seemed to be to one who had been born in the land reclaimed from the swamp. He shaded his eyes with one hand and peered out into the western distance, the faint haze that marked the beginning of land where things could grow. He licked dry lips. “It has to be what I truly desire, doesn’t it?” he replied, as straightforward as the Bedu had been. “There’s no place else for me to go.”

“You undertake a different sort of trial, when you cross that border, young Kiron,” the Mouth persisted.

“And perhaps things will not always be to your liking. We of the desert know little of the dwellers in the marshy delta of the Great Mother River, for they have little to do with us, and we have nothing at all to do with those of the Seven-Ringed City itself. I cannot tell you what to expect other than the advice I have already given you. It may be that you go only from one hazard to another.”

“But I will be free,” he said softly, with one hand on Avatre’s neck. “And so will she. Perhaps we need remain only long enough for her to grow to her full strength and size, and if things are not as I had hoped—well, it will be easier for us to escape again, should it come to that.”

The Mouth’s head bowed slightly. “This is so.” The other stared with Vetch to that distant haze of green. “Then, I can only say, your gods go with you.”

Kiron touched his brow, his lips, and his heart in thanks and farewell. He gave Avatre the signal and, with a tremendous shove of her legs, she launched for the sky.

When he looked back over his shoulder, he saw that the Mouth had already turned the camel and was heading back in the direction of the clan’s encampment. Which was just as well, since he had no intention of following the advice about not hunting to the letter. While he and Avatre were still in the desert, they still had hunting-rights, and he was not going to assume that once they crossed into that belt of green, they would immediately find a place where he could obtain the tremendous amount of meat that she needed to sustain her.

So long as he kept that green in sight, they had a goal. They had already come so far north before turning back toward Altan lands that any interception by Tian Jousters on patrol was next to impossible. So while they would probably camp tonight inside that belt of green, before they reached it, he would be certain that Avatre had eaten her fill.

When they found an exceptionally strong thermal, he sent her up as high as she could go, remembering how the first time he had been carried a-dragonback he had sworn he would never, ever set foot off the ground again. It had been an utterly terrifying experience for one who had never been any farther from the ground than the flat roof of his father’s farm-house. To have that experience while lying face-down over Ari’s saddle, when he had never seen either a Jouster or a dragon up close before, had only made it worse.

And to tell the truth, the first few flights with Avatre had been almost as frightening. But he had known very well that he should not and could not walk across the desert, so he had gritted his teeth and tried to guide her, and somehow, they had learned to fly together.

Only on the latter half of the journey had they actually learned to hunt together, however. Their first few efforts, singly and together, had been less than stellar, and for a while, he had relied on the Bedu more than he had liked.

Now, though—he was actually rather proud of their ability to feed themselves. They had even worked out more than one technique, and Avatre had learned how to dive, rake with her claws, strike, and hover on commands that could be either physical or verbal. She had even learned to tow or carry something on the other end of a rope; a hard lesson to master, when her natural instinct was to either fight it or give in and flop down at the end of the tether.

This sort of desert—on the very edge of the fertile lands—had a lot more in the way of game than it might appear. There were wild camels, asses, and goats, animals that had escaped from the Bedu; there were also herds of gazelle (Avatre’s favorite) and smaller game.

And lions. And Kiron (he must think of himself as Kiron!) had learned that he could often rely on the lions to show him where the other game was.

So when, as they circled up the thermal, he saw a pride of lions trotting purposefully toward the north, far below them, he raised his eyes and looked for the cloud of dust that might be telling them where the game was.

Avatre had learned the same signs, and her eyes were keener than his. Before he had seen the telltale plume of slightly thicker dust carried on the kamiseen wind, she had made her turn out of the thermal and was gliding down in a new direction, north and a bit west, bringing them closer to the green horizon.

It took two more thermals, and they had left the lions far behind, when the herd of wild asses came into view, grazing slowly on the scrubby vegetation that hardly anything else could stomach. They must never have been hunted by a dragon, for they did not even seem to notice them in the sky above. Too bad for them, then.

He got out his sling, and readied a stone. One thing that had certainly made hunting easier was that the farther he and Avatre got from Tia and the wild dragons that lived and bred in the mountain valleys beyond the river, the easier it was to find unwary game. Yesterday had been unusual in that they had found two herds in the same day, but when the grazers weren’t spooked by the dragon above them, it was almost too easy to take at least one of them down, now that his skill with the sling had improved.

He picked his target carefully; wild asses were smart and tenacious and the last thing he wanted was to take a jenny with a foal at her side. The herd generally fought harder for one of those.

He gave Avatre the signal, and she began a long, slow glide at very near landing speed that would take them directly over the herd. His chosen target actually looked up, ears swiveling toward them curiously as they neared, making a perfect target.

He let fly.

The stone struck the young jack directly in the middle of the forehead; stunned, it stumbled and went down.

The rest of the herd shied away from the jack for a moment for they did not yet realize what had happened. But the moment that they worked out that this was an attack and not an accident, they could turn at bay, ready to fight for the downed member of the herd. Kiron’s stomach tightened and his pulse began to race; Avatre pumped her wings, then, fighting for height, as he stowed his sling in his belt and changed his grip to hang onto the saddle with both hands. For now, it was her turn.

Abruptly, she did a wingover, folded her wings, and plunged toward the ass herd.

Now they were spooked, if only by the sight of something so large coming straight down on them. Snorting and tossing their heads, they galloped away from the fallen one for that crucial moment as he struggled to regain his feet and rejoin them. If he somehow managed to get back to the herd, they would have lost their chance.

But he didn’t, and as Kiron held tight to the saddle, Avatre made her strike.

The hawks of the desert took rabbits in this way, plunging down on them to strike and bind with their talons, though the actual kill was usually made with a bite to the spine behind the head. Avatre struck in much the same way, though she had four sets of talons, not two. She hit the staggering ass with a force both beautiful and terrible; Kiron was thrown forward in the saddle over her neck by the impact, and only the Jousting straps holding him there kept him on her back as she grasped the jack’s hindquarters and chest.

The jack was far from finished, however. Braying frantically with pain, he bucked and kicked, trying to shake her off. They were nearly a match in body size, and the jack actually might outweigh her—in the wild, dragons hunted in pairs at least, in order to be sure of finishing off quarry that was struck.

But if Avatre did not have a dragon hunting partner, she had Kiron.

She clamped her wings tightly to her sides, and threw herself over sideways, and the jack went over with her. This gave Kiron the chance to kick free of the restraining straps and roll clear of the tangle of dragon and ass. As he came up, he had one of his knives in his hand, and he waited only a moment before dashing in, avoiding the thrashing hooves that lashed so near to his head that he felt one of them graze his shoulder, to slash the ass’s throat.

“Avatre!” he shouted. “Loose!’

And there was the true measure of her trust for him, for she did just that; she loosened her grip and allowed the ass to break free, leaping back out of reach of its potentially lethal kick. No wild-caught dragon would ever have trusted her rider enough to let go of game she had caught on command.

But the wounded beast staggered away only a few paces before going to its knees, blood spurting from the gash in its throat, pouring down its leg, and staining the ground crimson.

A moment more, and it was down again for the last time, kicking out the last of its life as the herd, scenting the blood, turned and fled. And again Avatre showed the depth of her trust, waiting until he gave the signal before pouncing on the quivering carcass. The blood scent filled the kamiseen wind; it would carry for miles. Avatre would need to eat quickly, before the lions and jackals arrived. She might be able to take one or two lionesses or jackals, but not a whole pride or pack.

Then she hunched over the body, fanning her wings out to either side in an echo of the way a hawk mantled over her prey, as she tore loose great mouthfuls of flesh and gulped them down. The metallic tang of hot blood joined that of dust and baked earth as she feasted.

This was why he and Avatre were able to take down game like wild ox and ass; beasts that could break a dragon’s leg or wing with a well-placed kick. Now that their hunting skill had matured to this point, she was eating nearly as much as she would have gotten in the Jousters’ compound. Anything bigger than that ass, though, would have needed a different sort of attack. Kiron felt they’d mastered it, but it had been something he’d been loath to use too often—he thought that if they found the right victim, he could drop a rope over its head and neck and Avatre could pull it tight until the wild ox choked. He’d even taught her how to pull something up off the ground with that rope attached to the back of his saddle, and he wasn’t sure even Kashet had been taught that particular trick.

She gorged herself; he let her feast to repletion. When she finally turned and walked away from the stripped carcass, there was not much left but the head and some bones. This was the way that dragons ate in the wild, and had she been in a compound, she might have eaten even more than this.

In a compound, she would have followed her feast with a nap; sometimes he had allowed her such a rest on this journey, but he could not today. The sun was past zenith and there were lions coming. It was time to be on their way.

He approached her, and patted her neck in the signal to kneel. She turned her long neck to look at him mournfully.

“I know, my love,” he said apologetically. “But we need to be gone.”

She sighed, a long-suffering sigh; but she knelt and let him take his place in her saddle again.

Heavy with her meal, however, she did not so much launch herself into the air as lumber skyward, and she made slow going until she found a thermal strong enough to allow her to soar upward with less effort.

He had not eaten; he was used to that, though his stomach growled sadly and hurt a little. Water from his waterskin would have to do for now.

From slow spiral up, to long glide down, to slow spiral up again, Avatre lazed her way over the desert, with that green belt growing ever nearer and clearer as the afternoon progressed. Kiron was keeping her working her way in at an angle, for he had decided, now that she’d had a proper meal, that it might not be a bad notion to look for signs of one of those great estates that the Mouth had urged him to seek. The worst that would happen would be that they would have to retreat, or even flee. But the best that would happen would be that they would be able to successfully claim the rights of an Altan Jouster and dragon.

Finally, he spotted what he was looking for in late afternoon, just as Avatre began to be a bit less lethargic and show more energy.

He spotted it when Avatre was at the top of one of her thermals: a walled compound far too large to be that of a mere farmer. It was certainly the size of a village, though it was shaped nothing at all like a village; no streets, nothing that looked like individual houses. So it must be the great house and grounds of one of those great estates that the Mouth had described.

He pointed Avatre’s head toward it with a tug on her guide rein. Obedient as ever, she broke out of the thermal and began her long glide in the direction of the estate.

Kiron gulped back fear, and straightened his back.

Now, he thought. Now. Or it will be never.

And he sent Avatre in.

TWO

BENEATH him was a green landscape, so green that after all his time in the desert, it dazzled his senses. Still, he was able to make out what the crops were, even while he adjusted to the change. Date palms. Barley fields. Onions? The closer they got to the compound and the lands around it, the more Kiron recognized, and the more certain he became that this was, indeed, a Great Estate, and not a village. Villagers each had their own little plots and usually grew mixed sets of crops, so that a field was a patchwork of little bits of this and that. The great estates had enormous fields of single crops. And now he could see people working in those fields, none of whom had the look of villagers, for all were men, and they worked in teams. A villager would work his own fields with his wife and those children who were old enough to help. No, these were servants, or, perhaps, slaves. And it gave him a moment of hot satisfaction to think that some of these slaves might be captured Tians, laboring as he had labored to the profit of someone other than themselves, owning nothing, not even the cloth wrapped around their loins. Altans did not have serfs, who were linked to the land they had once owned, for the oft-broken treaty with Tia that created the serf class applied only to those people who had once owned the captured land that they were now tied to. The Altans had been losing land, not taking it, for a very long time now. So there were no serfs inside Alta and any captured Tians became slaves, who could be bought and sold at will.

The air here smelled different; different from Tia, different from the desert. This was water-rich air, heavy with humidity, and with the scents of lushly growing plants, the scent of mud and the latas that was blooming profusely everywhere. And Kiron felt something strange stirring inside him, a feeling that made him clutch Avatre’s saddle and gulp back a lump in his throat.

This was the scent of home, of childhood. Except that his home was gone, his family divided.

No. No matter what that scent promised to his heart, his head knew that he was not coming home.

He shook off his melancholy; time enough for brooding later, when he wasn’t about to perpetrate a fraud. He clenched his jaw, and concentrated on the fields below. As Avatre’s shadow passed over them, the men looked up, shading their eyes with their hands. He wished he knew what they were thinking.

Not in the fields. Not near the cattle. Not too near the Great House either. He decided to send Avatre to land in a large yard near a herd of penned goats. Goats were not expensive, and Avatre was no longer spoiled with feeding on tender beef, sent to the altars of the gods. After her feed at their kill, she would need no more than one or two of those goats to satisfy her. He would not be greedy; he would demand animals that were easily replaced.

As she backwinged to a landing—an exceptionally good and graceful one, and he felt a thrill of pride in her—the goats milled and bleated in panic, and a man in a striped headcloth came out of a nearby building to see what was agitating them.

The striped headcloth, and the fact that he was wearing a kilt rather than a loincloth, marked him as someone with more authority than a field hand. As he approached, his face already creasing into a frown, Kiron slid down over Avatre’s shoulder and stood with one hand on her foreleg, waiting for him.

Stand like the new Jousters, he reminded himself. You are Kiron, son of Kiron, rider of Avatre. Raise your chin. Look down your nose. . . .

“What—” the man began, and Kiron interrupted him, hoping he could keep his voice from shaking or going shrill with nervousness. “Three goats for my beast, date wine and food for me,” he snapped. “Quickly! We have far to go.”

The man reddened at Kiron’s tone, and looked as if he was going to challenge Kiron’s right to anything, but at that moment, Avatre, sensing her rider’s nervousness, stretched out her neck and hissed at him. The man paled and took a step backward.

“You had better hurry,” Kiron said, narrowing his eyes, feigning annoyance, though what he really felt was a tight fear in his gut that the man would, even now, challenge them. “Or she might choose for herself. She is very hungry.”

With two goats inside of Avatre, and one slung behind Kiron’s saddle for her breakfast, together with a skin of wine and a bundle that presumably contained food, they launched into the air again, heading north and a little west, angling in toward Alta City. He was filled with elation at his success, almost dizzy with relief that he had actually managed to pull off the scam, and had to restrain himself to keep from shouting his triumph as she surged into the sky. Once in the air, Kiron picked up the river, the Red Daughter of Great Mother River, and they followed it until, just as the sun began to set, he spotted an island.

It was exactly what he wanted; mostly rock, and covered with the detritus of past floods. There was a lot of dead wood there, and that meant a lot of fuel for a fire to warm the rocks for Avatre’s bed. She was not at all loath to land, and waited with commendable patience while he picked out a hollow among the rocks for her, built the fire, lit it, tended it, let it die, and finally, with the stars bright overhead, tested the rocks to make sure they weren’t too warm for her.

Here along the river the night didn’t get nearly as cold as it did in the desert, anyway, and these rocks had been baking in the sun all day already. She settled right in and went to sleep, while he investigated his “loot.”

It wasn’t a princely feast by any means. In fact, it was basic laborer’s food of coarse barley bread, onions and goat cheese, and the wine was just short of becoming vinegar. Nevertheless, the man hadn’t shorted him, and it was entirely possible, given where he’d landed, that this was the best there was to be had without recourse to the Great Lord’s kitchens.

It was quite a change from the diet of the nomads, however, which was mostly stringy meat and unleavened flatbread, and on that basis alone, he made a good meal out of it. And perhaps, as he got better at demanding what he needed, what he got would also improve. He ate quickly and settled in at Avatre’s side, among her warm rocks. It had been a long, long day, and as he relaxed, he realized how tired he was.

Excitement, he decided. All the excitement. Making it as far as Alta, coming out of the desert, fooling that overseer. I feel as if I’ve been running all day. He yawned hugely, and felt his muscles going slack as the tension came out of them. He tried to keep his eyes open a little longer, but the warmth of the rocks was so good, and for the first time since he’d left the compound he had a completely full stomach, and before he knew it, his eyes closed of their own accord.

He was awakened before dawn, not by Avatre, but by a dead duck falling on his head.

He had always been in the habit of coming awake all at once; a good idea, since Khefti-the-Fat had enjoyed sneaking up and kicking the unwary awake in the morning. The habit had stood him in good stead in the desert; twice during their journey, lions had attempted to steal up on them in the night. Avatre had scented them in her sleep and he had driven them off with a burning brand from his fire. But a dead duck falling on him—that was different.

He jumped to his feet automatically, shaking the sleep from his eyes, and saw, all in the same moment, the duck at his feet with an arrow through it, a flight of more ducks overhead, and, coming up out of the mist, a small boat with two men in it, one paddling and one holding a bow.

They seemed surprised to see him; he was no less surprised to see them, and was not particularly happy to note that the one with the bow was sporting a pair of enameled armbands. “You!” the archer called, with the self-assured arrogance of someone of rank. “Have you seen—”

Avatre’s head came up behind him; she took one look at the men in the boat—she had never seen a boat before, after all, at least not one that was on the same level with her—and snorted in surprise.

The man with the armbands yelped with a surprise that equaled hers, and fell backward into the boat, and the man with the paddle had all he could do to keep it from capsizing.

Kiron bent and picked up the duck by the arrow. “I believe,” he said, neutrally, “this must be yours.”

“Ah. Yes,” the archer stammered.

Kiron tossed it; it fell at the rower’s feet. Neither man made any move to pick it up, and Avatre snorted again.

“You had probably better get what sport you can before the sun gets much higher,” Kiron went on, hoping he sounded less nervous than he felt. “When my dragon rises, she’ll probably frighten every duck in the marsh.”

“Ah. Indeed. Pardon us,” the archer said, and tapped the rower on the shoulder. The rower started, as if being wakened from a trance, and began digging at the water with his oars as if he could not get away from there fast enough. Soon they vanished into the mist again, and Kiron rubbed his head ruefully.

“Now I wish I hadn’t given back that duck,” he said wistfully. “It would have tasted fine for my breakfast.”

Then he remembered the fishing line in his gear; unused since it had been given to him (or rather, sent to become part of his grave goods!), it occurred to him that it was going to take Avatre some time to wake up properly, eat, and warm herself up enough to fly, and while she was doing so, he might just as well try his luck. He hadn’t had fish since the last Tian festival.

His luck, apparently, was in. With a bit of bread left over from his supper, he soon had several fish baking in the ashes of his fire, and both he and Avatre took off with full bellies that morning.

North and a little west; they followed the river while it meandered in that direction, lost it as he had expected, then picked up the Great Mother River’s second daughter shortly around noon. This was the branch known as the White Daughter, the middle of the three; for there were three, all told: Red, White, and Black, so named for the color of their water, tinted by the mud they carried. This time of year, the White Daughter was more of a pale green; she was shallow, shrunken within her banks, waiting for the rains to make her full again.

From the Red Daughter to the White, they flew over cultivated lands that were vastly better watered and more fertile looking than the corresponding properties in Tia, and between the fields was a lattice of irrigation ditches, some of them as wide as a cart and deeper than a man was tall. This fertility was no illusion, but Kiron knew it had come at a cost; every hand of farmland had been claimed from the swamp by someone, building the ditches to help drain the land, dredging up baskets of silt from the bottoms of the ditches and building fields, bringing in earth from the edge of the desert to do the same, or extending the reach of the river with a further network of irrigation ditches beyond the land that had been swamp.

He looked down on these fertile lands and their tenders, and it came to him that he had dared the bluff twice now. Twice he had passed himself off as an Altan Jouster, and twice he had succeeded; dared he try a third time? The nearer he drew to Alta City, the less likely it seemed that his ruse would pass muster, no matter what the Mouth said.

And there was that saying that his father used to use, “Third time pays for all,” that you might get away with something twice, but when you were caught the third time, the reckoning would be high.

Safer not to try again, perhaps.

And it seemed that his caution was appropriate when, as noon approached and he knew Avatre was getting hungry, he spotted the fresh carcass of a cow washed up on another of those rock islands. He knew it was fresh because it wasn’t at all bloated, and when he brought Avatre down on the island to investigate it, the gaping wound in its stomach told what it had died of.

That was a crocodile bite. Perhaps it had waded in too deep for a drink; perhaps it had been one of a herd that some farmer had sent across a ford. It could have been carried downstream by the beast that wounded it, and kicked free only to die and wash up here. For whatever reason it had gotten here, he was thankful; he let Avatre have her fill, then doze in the sun while he fished again, this time encasing the gutted fish in mud to bake in a fire until she had finished her nap. He ate one on the spot, and stowed the rest; when Avatre woke, they continued their journey.

He wished he had a map. He wished that he knew how far it was going to be before he reached Alta City. Going dragonback was infinitely faster than any other way to travel, but Alta was big; Tia was long, but it was narrow, with most of the population confined to either bank of the Great Mother River. Alta was wide; he had heard that if a man tried to walk it from the Eastern Desert to the Western Desert it would take him at least a full moon, depending on the time of year, and there were many flood-swollen streams and ditches he would have to cross.

And his goal was Alta City, which lay on the coast of the Great Salt Sea that bordered Alta on the north. He knew that he could reach it by following this, the White Daughter of Great Mother River, but how much farther would it be? Dragons flew fast—and far, in a day. Two days? Three?

His luck was out as sunset neared; there were no more islands, only sandbars, and the Great Estates were more numerous than he liked. But Avatre was hungry again. What was he to do?

It was the sight of a temple that decided him; it was a large one, and there were bulls penned for sacrifice nearby. Tian dragons were fed from the remains of Tian sacrifices; it was reasonable to think that the Altans might do the same. He signaled Avatre to land; he could hardly escape notice at a temple at sunset, and he was not at all surprised that not one, but several shaven-headed priests in their white linen kilts and enameled pectoral collars hurried up to him as he slid down from Avatre’s back. They looked nervous and apprehensive.

“Food for my lady-dragon and for me,” he said, shortly.

One of them brightened. “You are come auspiciously, Jouster,” he said, “For on this Feast of Abydesus, more sons of the Hare Nome have become men than usual, and many cattle have spilled their blood in His honor. Wait, and we will bring it, that your great lady may eat her fill.”

The Feast of Abydesus! He had completely lost track of time, out there in the desert. It had been one of his favorite feast days as a child, for the Ram God favored children, especially boy children, and those who could afford it sent bulls to be sacrificed when their sons had their child locks shaved and became men. That meant meat for a feast to which friends and relations were invited, while those who were still considered children got honey cakes and the priests’ blessings to carry them through another year toward manhood.

Though the god only required the blood, it was considered inauspicious to waste the meat of the bulls that were offered to him—and in the season of the kamiseen it could not be kept for long. Some went to the homes of those new-made men for their feasts, of course, and some to the larders of the priests. But the larders could only hold so much, and anything left outside the cold-magic could only be burned or dried. It was possible that such a small temple did not have anyone who could make cold-magic, and in such humid weather, he had the notion that beef would not necessarily dry well.

And while the scent of the burning might be sweet in the nostrils of the gods, it generally offended the neighbors downwind. The poor might get their share of the inferior cuts, but if enough bulls died on the altars, there could be a small problem with disposal.

Soon enough, several acolytes arrived trundling barrows, and at the sight of so familiar an object, Avatre actually began to dance with impatience. To the startlement of the acolyte bringing the first barrow, she shot her head out in the trick that Ari’s Kashet had used to pull on Kiron, and snatched the top piece before the poor, shocked acolyte could set the barrow down for Kiron to take.

With a yell, he jumped back, and the barrow thudded to the ground, overturning and spilling half its contents.

Avatre gave the boy a very hurt look.

“Peace!” Kiron said, holding back a laugh, and patting Avatre on the shoulder. “My lady is possessed of gentleness, if not good manners. She would not harm you for the world.”

The acolytes said nothing, though their looks of doubt told Kiron that they would rather err on the side of caution. So Kiron came and took the other two barrows while Avatre polished off the contents of the third, and brought them to her himself.

So she ate to her heart’s content, while the priests and acolytes gazed on her from a respectful distance.

“If you would care to stay the night at the sanctuary, young lord,” one of them called, “there is a room where your sky warrior may sleep warm. It is not often used, for we are a modest temple, but—”

“You make us feel welcome,” Kiron said immediately. “Our thanks, and we will stay.”

From the pleasure on the priests’ faces, although he could not recall the Ram God having any particular association with dragons, he got the feeling that the arrival of a Jouster on a feast day was considered to be a sign of great favor. If that was the case, he was going to take shameless advantage of the fact.

So he and Avatre were led to a roofless chamber where the floor was heated from below by fire, and although it was not the hot sands that she preferred, she settled down with a contented grunt. Then he was taken to a bathing chamber where he was able to give himself a good scrub for the first time in far too long, given a clean loincloth, and a proper, soft-wrapped Altan kilt (in contrast to the stiff, starched Tian variety that anyone of rank wore). His hands remembered how to wrap it, even if his mind didn’t; an acolyte braided his hair for him, Altan fashion, in a clubbed plait down the back of his neck. Then he was conducted to the feast that the priests themselves held.

And that was when he very nearly bolted; when he saw the couches arrayed around the dining chamber and realized that he was going to be a guest. And he was supposed to be an Altan Jouster!

Panic took him for a moment, and he sat down woodenly on his couch, expecting at any moment that someone would realize that he was a fraud—

But once again, his luck saved him, for the priests not only did not question him, they did not seem to expect him to be much of a conversationalist. Or, perhaps, they assumed that no Jouster would be conversant with what was, after all, merely local gossip. A few remarks were directed to him, which he answered cautiously and briefly—but most of the conversation went merrily on without him, and seemed to concern the intertemple political maneuvering here in the Nome of the Hare. In fact, the only significance his presence had was that his (and Avatre’s) appearance at this particular moment was going to put this temple up a notch or two in the ever-changing pecking order, at least for a while. Probably if he had come at a time when there was no overabundance of meat, he might have been less welcome.

And these men were truly only interested in what lay within the borders of this Nome; they were remarkably incurious about either Alta City or even their neighboring Nomes. All this worked to his advantage; all he needed to do was to be a courteous and agreeable guest.

Yet surely, before he left, he was going to be expected to make an offering to the god—and unlike a real Jouster, he didn’t have a lot to his name.

He cast his mind over his poor possessions, trying to decide if there was anything among them that was worth offering. And then it struck him.

“I have with me the captured amulets of enemy Jousters,” he said to the Chief Priest with great diffidence as the feast drew to a close. “If the God would deign to accept them as a worthy sacrifice and a sign of His power over the gods of the enemy—”

“Deign?” the Chief Priest said, throwing up pudgy little hands in delight (he was a small, round man who was clearly fonder of the pleasures of the table than he was of political machinations). “Good young Lord Kiron, it would be an honor to offer them for you! Let me send for your baggage, so that we can make the sacrifice before the midnight hour!”

It was with no small sense of irony that Kiron watched the Priest lay out the line of faience amulets upon the Ram God’s altar with a reverence more suited to objects of gold than simple glazed clay. All of those amulets, sent to be Kiron’s own grave offerings by the terrified dragon boys to prevent his haunting them. . . .

Still, most of them were Haras-hawk amulets, sign of the Jousters of Tia, and as such, were powerful symbols of an Altan victory over a Tian, if not valuable in themselves.

And, presumably, they were something no other temple within the Nome of the Hare could boast of having.

They wanted to send him to the guest quarters, but he was adamant about having a couch placed in the same chamber as Avatre. He had not slept a night away from her side since she was hatched, and he did not intend to start now.

He was escorted to his couch by yet another acolyte, who apologized so many times for the simplicity of the quarters that Kiron was weary of reassuring him and glad when he took himself out. And if the quarters were bare, well, that was his choice, wasn’t it?

And besides, when the lamp was blown out, all quarters were the same. As long as they held Avatre, he could not have cared if he slept on rock or in the Great King’s palace.

It had been a little difficult to judge accurately, but if the Ram God’s priests were to be believed in their guesses of how far it was to Alta City, he and Avatre would be there by nightfall at the very latest, and mid-afternoon at the earliest.

He did not have much of a plan, but then, perhaps he would not need one. His “plan,” such as it was, consisted of finding the Altan Jousters’ Compound, landing there, and telling his story. Or at least, an edited version of the story.

This version featured him purposefully (rather than accidentally) making his escape flight and working his way in short stages around the edge of the desert, instead of involving the Bedu. In the first place, he did not want any rumor of the Veiled Ones’ involvement to get back to Tia, and in the second place, he did not want any rumor of Ari’s involvement to get back either. Everything would be true up to the point of Avatre’s First Flight; everything would be true after the point at which he crossed the border into Alta. In fact, the stories about the happenings in between would be partly true. He could tell a great many truths about learning to hunt with Avatre, the things he had taught her, about sandstorms they had been forced to fly above, about finding tiny wilderness water sources not even the Bedu had known were there. He would just be a little vague about the locations where these things had happened. . . .

He was pretty certain it would work. And if the Altans were mistrustful of him at first, that was no great loss. Avatre was not even in the first stages of Jousting training, and neither was he. It would be years before he would actually be ready to fight, and by that time, he should be accepted without question.

Only the acolytes were awake when he and Avatre were up and ready to fly. This was not exactly a surprise; the serious inroads into the offerings of palm wine and date wine were just being made when he had left the feast, and none of those priests had looked particularly ascetic. There would be aching heads this day—which was all to the good, since he wanted to be well away before anyone thought of any questions they wanted to ask about just why such a young-looking boy was riding a dragon toward Alta City. And why such a one would have Tian amulets in his possession that he claimed to have been captured from the enemy.

Avatre ate her fill; she seemed supremely content with the chamber they’d shared, and was ready, even anxious, to be off. Perhaps she picked that up from him; with the end of the journey now in sight, he wanted it to be over. They were in the sky just as the sun crested the horizon; with the chamber heated all night long, there had been little need for the dragon to warm up her muscles before she flew.

They made excellent speed; the wind was favorable, the way clear, and there was no real need to stop until Avatre hungered again.

Below, the White Daughter showed her true nature; the water the curious color of watered-down milk, the sandy shores as white as reed paper. She seemed a placid enough river; the shortest (and hence, termed the “youngest”) of the Three Daughters. During the flood season, her waters spread out over the land gently and predictably, and she returned to her bed just as gently. In fact, the worst that could be said of her was that she was a veritable nursery for crocodiles and river horses.

For along much of her length, it was easier to dig irrigation channels than to fill or drain her swamps. And if those swamps were a haven for ducks, geese, and other desirable things, they were also the chosen shelters for the two most terrible forms of death by water other than drowning itself.

As he and Avatre flew over the marshes, it was easy to see the great river horses in their herds, looking like slowly moving boulders that would sometimes submerge altogether. The huge, fat beasts were deceptively placid-looking, and yet they could be more deadly than the crocodile. Like the crocodile, they could swim swiftly, hidden underwater for a surprising amount of time, and in the White Daughter’s murky current they were nearly impossible to see. Their huge jaws could crush a boat literally in half, or rip a man’s leg off at the hip, and their uncertain tempers meant that there was no telling if, or when, one would choose to attack. And for all their bulk, even on land, they could move very swiftly for a short distance.

And yet they were considered fine eating in certain seasons, and in both Tia and Alta it was considered a mark of great courage to take part in a hunt.

Crocodiles were harder to spot, except where they sunbathed on the banks or on sandbars. The White Daughter hid them even more effectively. The best that one could do, with regard to crocodiles, was to try to clear a ford with nets before crossing it. Still, except with the very largest of the beasts, it was possible to win in a fight with one, if you could get its jaws clamped or tied shut, for though the muscles that closed those jaws were immensely strong, the ones that opened them were weak. But one man against a river horse did not stand a chance.

Still, both tended to keep to the swamp rather than the open river. It was rare for either to attack in broad daylight.

Rare. But not impossible. Especially not when provoked.

We can’t be far now, Kiron thought, looking down at the vast swamp beneath him. The White Daughter was visible—oh, yes, clearly visible—cutting her path through the heart of the swamp, but for as far as he could see was nothing but a sea of reeds. The scent that rose from this swamp was perilously close to a stink; it smelled of stagnant water and rotting reeds, and things he couldn’t name. This was the first of the Seven-Ringed City’s defenses; Alta City had never permitted the swamp here to be filled in or drained, because it was too effective as a passive defense. There were only two ways to the city—down the White Daughter to the sea, and by ship from the port side of the city.

And the swamp itself was a source of more than just defensive measures. Papyrus cutters worked here endlessly, cutting the reeds for the paper for which the city was justly famous. Geese and ducks were actually farmed here by keeping their wing feathers clipped; wild ones were hunted. There must be a hundred sorts of fish to be hooked or netted.

As Kiron looked down, admiring the flight of a flock of birds beneath him, he saw something else; two small boats of exceptionally fine design. The reason he saw them was that the gilded prows caught the light and his attention.

There were two men in each boat; out of purest curiosity, for he could not imagine what they were doing, he sent Avatre to circle a little lower.

Two spearmen, two rowers. The rowers were in Altan kilts, but the spearmen were in short, knee-length tunics. He caught another glint of gold from each of the spearmen. Nobles?

He snorted to himself, and was about to give the signal to Avatre to circle back north and onward. Nobles, out spear fishing! In the swamp, no less! What idiocy—he hoped the midges and mosquitoes ate them alive—

But then he heard a splash, and a shout—

—and a scream.

It was not the scream of a young man, it was the scream of a girl.

Startled, he glanced down, just in time to see the huge jaws of a river horse smash down on the aft of one of the boats, crushing it and engulfing the head and upper torso of the rower who had been sitting there; he bellowed in agony, a cry swiftly cut off. The boat went over; the spearman—the girl—was thrown into the water.

With the river horse.

A crocodile would take a single victim, carry it under, and drown it, then eat it at leisure. A river horse, if maddened, would take as many victims as it could get; it would not eat them, for it was a vegetarian. No, it would maim them, crush them, kill them if it could, until it was dead, it tired of the carnage, or all the possible victims were gone.

And these were Altans. His people. He had to save them! Or save the girl, anyway; the rower was dead, or as good as, for nothing that escaped the savage jaws of a river horse lived for long.

He signaled Avatre with knees and hands; she turned, and circled back, her muscles tensing under him as she sensed his intention. There was another maneuver besides the “strike and bind” that he and Avatre had practiced out there in the desert—but not on living things that could fight back as a river horse would, only on potential prey. No matter. They had to try it now.

The river horse still had the rower in its jaws, tossing its enormous, blocky head back and forth while muffled screaming came from inside that terrible maw. The girl in the water, sensibly, was saving her breath, trying to swim away from the river horse as fast as she could before it noticed her. The river horse was between her and the other boat; the spearman was cursing the rower for trying to escape, while he tried to take aim with his flimsy little fish spear at the river horse’s head. Blood flowed from the river horse’s jaws, turning the milky water pink.

All this, Kiron saw in that single moment when he gave Avatre one of her new hunting commands.

“Avatre!” he shouted. “Rake!”

One half-grown dragon could not hope to take down anything much larger than an ass with the strike-and-bind attack she knew instinctively. But the desert falcons used a different technique to drive an enemy away—they would attack with outstretched talons, but would not close once they had struck. Instead, they would leave bloody furrows across their victim’s head; with luck, blinding it, but at least inflicting a lot of pain and giving it something else to think about than, say, a nest or a newly fledged youngster.

Kiron had not known whether dragons used this same ploy until he’d tried it with Avatre. Apparently, they did. Now she had a command word to go with the attack—but this was the first time they were using it against something that could turn on them.

And if the river horse got one of Avatre’s feet—

Too late to worry about that now. Avatre understood instantly what she was supposed to do; she folded her wings and went into a dive; Kiron leaned over her shoulder, eyes narrowed against the wind of her passage.

She struck.

She hit.

There was no shock, as there was when she hit and bound. Instead, she slowed for just a moment, as a bellow of rage erupted just below her feet, then she surged upward with a great beat of her wings.

It sounded like thunder in his ears, each wingbeat pounding the air, and the bellowing of the river horse still ringing below them. But Avatre knew she was not done, not yet. Her blood was up now, and the prey was audibly still alive. She got just enough height to stoop again, and did a wingover that left Kiron’s stomach still hanging in the air behind them, as she dove for another raking maneuver.

The girl was still in the water, fighting her way through the reeds. The river horse was only wounded; it had shook what was left of the rower out of its jaws, and was peering around with its little piggy eyes to see what had hurt it so. But before it could catch sight of the girl’s thrashing arms, Avatre struck again.

More bellows; again that surge of wings. As they climbed, Kiron looked down again.

No good. The other rower was getting away from the area as fast as his arms could take him, despite the curses of the spearman, who had somehow lost his spear. The river horse was still between them and the girl. The girl’s arms weren’t moving as fast; she was tiring. And there was blood in the water, plenty of it. It would not be long before there were crocodiles, or worse, more river horses.

They couldn’t keep raking the beast; at any moment, it would understand that attack was coming from above and dive, and then it might find and seize the girl. Time for another trick.

Except that the girl didn’t know it. So he would have to get into the water.

He signaled Avatre with hands and legs not to make a third attack, and turned her toward where the girl was. If he could just reach that coil of rope behind him—

His hand found it; he pulled it off the pack, and looped it around himself just under his armpits, and tied it in place. The other end was still fastened to the packs. He hoped he had fastened it securely. This would be a bad time to discover that he had not.

As Avatre swooped low over the girl, who ducked instinctively, then came up in a hover, he threw himself out of the saddle, tucking himself into a ball to protect his head and stomach.

He hit the water with a splash that stung his arms and legs and drove him under for a moment. He unfolded his limbs and forced himself upward, tossing his head and gasping as he broke the surface of the water and looked around for the girl.

Unbelievably, she was no more than an arm’s-length away, and before the rope could tighten around him, he had her, wrapping both his arms around her just under her arms, and clasping his hands on his own wrists.

“Pull!” he screamed at the dragon above him, and obediently, Avatre surged upward.

The rope around his chest cut into him as the dragon turned her hover into flight; the dead weight of the girl threatened to pull his arms out of their sockets, and reeds lashed his back and head as Avatre pulled them both through the swamp backward. It felt as if Khefti-the-Fat was giving him the worst lashing of his life, while trying to squeeze him in half, and tear him limb from limb, all at the same time. And meanwhile, the weight of the girl threatened to drag him underwater. It was a total, painful assault on all his senses. He couldn’t think. He couldn’t even see, not really. All he could do was to hold on, grim as a hungry ghost, hold on, and hope that Avatre would find somewhere solid to land.

Soon.

Please. Oh, gods. Soon.

He couldn’t see; he could only feel. Couldn’t let go. Wouldn’t let go. Pain turned his arms and back into hot agony, his lungs burned with the water he’d inhaled—

Don’t let go—

Hard to breathe—the rope tightening over his chest—

Don’t let go!

The world grew darker—redder—darker—as he sobbed to get a breath, just one, just another, then—

Then it stopped. The motion, anyway, if not the pain.

He gasped for a breath that didn’t have water in it; agony burned across his chest. Thought he heard something like a curse.

The wire of pain around his chest snapped, and he could breathe again, and he gasped in one huge, blessed breath of air.

Felt someone tugging at his arms, his poor, wrenched arms. “Get up!” said the high voice urgently in his ear. “Please, get up!”

“Can’t,” he said thickly and tried to shake the water, hair, and mud out of his face. He opened his eyes; everything seemed blurred.

“Orest!” the high voice called. “He can’t get up! You have to help me!”

He tried to move his leaden legs then; found that they would work, a little, so that when a second person came splashing through the shallows, he was able to at least get his own feet under him. With one person on each side, they got him to the side of a boat, and he half-fell and was half-pushed, into it. Wind buffeted them all. Somehow he rolled over and saw a blur of scarlet above as the other two clambered in beside him.

“Avatre!” he called, and coughed. It hurt to call—hurt to breathe again, but he didn’t want her attacking—“Avatre! Follow!” he managed. “Follow!”

He fell into a fit of coughing again, and his vision grayed for a moment. Small hands pounded his back, until he coughed up some muddy water, which seemed to help a little, and the high voice said, “It’s all right. She’s following us.”

“And hanged if I know how he’s making her do that,” said a new voice, admiringly. “I’ve never seen any Jouster who could make his dragon do anything like he did. Who are you?”

“Kiron,” he managed, around pain-filled gasps. “Son of Kiron—”

“Never mind that. Never mind any of that,” the young girl’s voice said firmly. “You just rest. We’ll get you back, you and your dragon. Just rest. We’ll get you help and take you to where you belong.”

Where I belong! he thought wonderingly, around the pain. Where I belong—

And he closed his eyes, lying curled in the bottom of the boat, and let them take him wherever they were going to. Because wherever it was—it was going to be home, where he belonged, at long last.

THREE

HE must have hurt himself more than he’d thought—he’d thought his life had hardened him against any and all punishments, but apparently being dragged backward through a swamp, over submerged logs and sharp sedges and who knew what all else, was a little more than even he could handle. Something happened to him after he was hauled into that little boat, because he lost a significant slice of time. One moment, he was curled with his cheek against the reed bundles of the bottom of that boat, and the next—he wasn’t.

Probably he blacked out for a while; at least, that was the only conclusion his pain-fogged mind could come up with, because the next thing he knew, he was being picked up with surprising care by two enormous men, one at his head and the other at his knees, while the girl babbled and fussed at them. And all he could think was that Avatre would surely think he was being attacked.

“Wait!” he gasped, “My dragon will—”

“Here’s the Healer!” interrupted the boy’s voice, just as the two men set Kiron down carefully on a warm, rough surface that felt like stone. And it hurt anyway. His back screamed at him, until he rolled over on his side to get what was obviously lacerated skin off that rough stone.

Kiron blinked his eyes hard to clear them from the tears of pain; as he got them to focus, he saw he was lying on stone, on a little pier, in fact, and the mud-spattered girl and boy had been joined by two enormous men in plain rough-spun tunics, probably the ones who had gotten him out of the boat. Bending over him was a woman with her hair hanging loose; she was dressed in a flowing white linen gown with no jewels at all, and only a soft white belt at the waist. Avatre had already landed at the very end of the stone pier, and was eyeing the proceedings with anxiety. He tried to say something—to warn them that Avatre could be dangerous in this situation—

But then, to his astonishment, the girl walked fearlessly up to the dragon and stretched out her hand.

Avatre started back, eyes wide—then, cautiously, eased her head forward, sniffing suspiciously at the outstretched palm.

And the most astonishing thing of all happened; the moment that Avatre’s nose touched the girl’s hand, the dragon relaxed. Relaxed entirely, in fact, and went from a pose that warned she was ready to fight, to looking as if she was back in her own sand pit with only Kiron beside her.

And she sat, then stretched out at full length on the stone. She kept her eyes fixed on Kiron, but with no signs of concern at all, as if she knew that no one was going to hurt either of them.

“She’ll be all right now, Tef-talla,” the girl said, confidently laying her hand on Avatre’s shoulder and reaching up to scratch under her chin.

Kiron would have experienced a surge of betrayal and jealousy at that moment, except that was the exact moment that the Healer chose to place both hands on his chest, and he was far too busy thinking about how much it hurt—

And then, once again, he wasn’t thinking of anything at all.

When he came to himself a second time, he was lying in a bed. It was not the sort of hard, flat couch that the Tians used; this was more like the fabric frames on low legs that the tala fruit was dried on, but much stronger, of course. And instead of a hard neck rest, there was a soft pillow beneath his head. That, and the sultry breath of a breeze that moved over his face, full of the scent of greenery and water, told him that he was not in Tia, even before his mind caught up with his wakefulness and he remembered why he was lying on a bed.

In fact, this was the sort of bed he had used as a child, when his father Kiron was master of his own farmlands, and those farmlands had been in Alta, not Tia.

There was a linen sheet over him, which was a very good thing, since he quickly discovered that he’d been cleaned up, which was good, but also that he wasn’t wearing anything beneath that sheet, which could have been embarrassing.

Well, that wasn’t entirely true; his chest and presumably his back had been expertly bandaged, so he was “wearing” bandages. But when he opened his eyes, the first thing that he saw was that the girl he had rescued was in the same room with him, and he was glad that they’d given him something to cover his nakedness.

Then his second realization was that he wasn’t in a room, it was a courtyard, open to the sky, which was made necessary by the fact that—his third realization and a great relief—Avatre was also with him. She looked as pleased with herself as could be, and she’d been unharnessed, wiped down, and seemed too contented to be hungry, so someone must have fed her.

And besides the girl and Avatre, there were three men in this courtyard, all standing at his bedside, conversing with one another in low tones.

The first had one hand resting on the girl’s shoulder as she sat beside the head of Kiron’s cot; since the familial resemblance between them was strong, he quickly assumed that this was her father. If so, well—from the gold collar and armbands, the fine linen tunic, the belt of gold plaques, and the gold circlet around his close-cropped hair, he was wealthy at the least.

The second man was robed much like the woman-Healer had been, and there wasn’t much else to note about him, except that he had kind eyes. And the third—

Well, the third wore leather arm-bracers and a wide leather belt over his soft kilt, and carried a leather helmet that was enough like the ones that the Tian Jousters wore to make Kiron think that this must be an Altan Jouster. The first, in fact, that he had ever seen.

“Oh, good!” the girl said, seeing that his eyes were open. “He’s awake! Kiron, son of Kiron?”

“That,” Kiron croaked, finding his throat strangely raw, “would be me, yes.”

The Jouster looked as if he wanted to speak, but the man dressed as a Healer held up a hand. “One at a time, please, and I believe Lord Ya-tiren has precedence?”

The man with his hand on the girl’s shoulder coughed, and looked embarrassed. “I—ah—whatever we learn here, I wish to make it plain that for saving my daughter’s life, this young man has the protection of my house. That’s all.”

The Jouster looked pained. “Lord Ya-tiren, you surely do not think—”

“A strange, bedraggled youngster appears out of nowhere with a dragon that acts like his puppy; he saves my daughter from a river horse, and all that we know of him is that his few possessions appear to be Tian?” Lord Ya-tiren replied pettishly. “And then you appear before he’s even been brought to my house? Well, what is anyone to think? Except that I do not want you people hauling him off to be ‘questioned’ as if he was a spy or a—well, I don’t know what. But he’s surely no older than my son, and I doubt he’s a spy. The last that I heard, the Tians were hardly so desperate that they needed to send boys northward to spy for them!”

Kiron decided that he liked Lord Ya-tiren; the man might not be altogether certain of who and what he was, but was willing to protect him from less delicate ways of finding out than simply asking—

“I am—I was—born Altan, and made a Tian serf and served as a dragon boy among the Jousters of Tia,” Kiron interrupted, taking tiny breaths often, to keep his chest from moving too much. “I suppose you could say I stole Avatre from them, except that without me, she’d never have hatched at all. The rest is a long story.” He eyed the strangers; the Healer looked resigned, Lord Ya-tiren interested, the girl fascinated, and the Jouster skeptical, but willing to be convinced. “If you want to hear it—”

The Healer sighed. “Send for the chairs you wanted, my lord. I can see that my patient will be allowed no rest until this ‘long story’ is told.”

So Kiron told his carefully edited tale, beginning from the time that his father’s land was taken—a little more judicious editing with those facts left them with no real idea how much, or how little, land had belonged to his family. Let them assume whatever they wished to, but if they assumed that the elder Kiron had been the holder of a large estate, well, it would do no harm to his cause. It was a cold fact that a man of wealth and noble blood would look with far more sympathy on someone of his own class than he would on someone far below him, but in a similar plight. Would Ari have been nearly so friendly to him, if Ari had been noble-born rather than common-born? While he would like to think “yes,” experience taught him otherwise.

He spoke bitterly of his father’s death, of the division of his family as a sop to the treaty agreements that meant that Tians could not own land they had taken outright without also “caring” for those to whom it had once belonged. He described his life as a serf under Khefti-the-Fat, and Lord Ya-tiren had the grace to wince more than once. He told of how Jouster Ari had plucked him from under Khefti’s nose—

And then went on at length about Ari and Kashet.

“We know this Jouster, too well,” said the Altan Jouster thoughtfully. “There were rumors that he had done something very different with his dragon—certainly the results he has are remarkable. Most said it was magic.”

“Not magic,” Kiron objected. “Just—wisdom, study, observation and a great deal of thought and care. And he made it clear that any man who was willing to do as he had done, and raise a dragon from the egg, would have the same result. Well, look!”

He pointed at Avatre, lying at her leisure, unbound, and calm as could be. “As he had done, I decided to do,” he continued, and described how he had purloined the egg from the mating of two Jousting dragons, incubated and hatched it, and raised Avatre to First Flight.

And edited again, making it seem that his escape had been planned, making no further mention of Ari, nor of the Bedu, except to claim he had traded with isolated clans, once or twice, for water-rights or food. He had to pause frequently for rest, and to let the muscles of his chest relax again; he suspected there were cracked ribs under those bandages. The sun had just about set by the time he finished, and servants had come bearing torches and lamps to illuminate the entire courtyard.

The Jouster sucked on his lower lip, consideringly. “It is a fantastic tale,” he said, judiciously. “And I would have said, fantasy tale, if this dragon’s own behavior were not just as fantastic.”

“She loves him, Lord Khumun,” the girl said simply, the first time she had spoken since she’d announced that Kiron was awake. “She loves this boy Kiron as if he was her nestmate. When have you ever heard of a dragon who loved her rider?”

And how does she know that? Kiron thought, startled. For the girl had spoken with the authority of someone who really knew what Avatre felt.

“Never. And that alone settles it, I think,” the Jouster said, and stood up. “Very well. My Lord, I leave this boy and his dragon in your care—though the Jousters will see that the dragon’s ration is brought every day—until he is well enough for me to return and enroll him. After that, his disposition will be up to you.”

Lord Ya-tiren bowed his head a little. “Thank you, Lord Khumun,” he replied.

“No tala!” Kiron interrupted, a stab of concern matching that of the pain in his chest lancing through him, as he realized why the Jousters would be providing food for Avatre. They would assume that she needed the calming, taming effects of the tala, and that was the very last thing she needed! “Avatre is to have no tala on her food! Please!”

“No tala.” The Jouster looked from Kiron to Avatre, who was now watching them all calmly, and shook his head. “Very well. I cannot argue with results. No tala. Has she eaten since I arrived?”

The girl giggled. “She told me she was hungry while the Healer was with this boy, and I took care of it, Jouster. I unharnessed her and wiped as much mud and dirt off her as I could manage to reach. She tells me she will want a morning feed, but wishes to sleep now.”

The Jouster shook his head again. “And she speaks to a Nestling-Priestess, as if she were a tame thing. No tala, then. I believe I can leave it all safely in your household, my Lord, and by your leave, I will report this to the House of Jousters and the Great Ones.”

The Lord Ya-tiren nodded, and the man rose, and took himself out of the courtyard.

“And you, Healer?” Lord Ya-tiren asked.

“I am satisfied, my Lord,” the Healer said, with a little smile. “This boy is stouter than I had judged. Call upon me if you wish, but I believe my services will not be needed anymore. If I, too, may go?”

The Lord Ya-Tiren nodded, and the Healer departed as well.

That left the girl and her father, who regarded Kiron benevolently. “Well, my young rescuer,” the lord said. “Do you think you could manage to eat something? Or is that a foolish question?”

Kiron’s stomach growled before he could answer, and the girl chuckled. Her father smiled.

“In that case, I will summon you a servant and a meal, and go about my duties. Aket-ten, I leave him in your hands. Do not overtire him, but I suspect that between you, there are several kilons of unanswered questions, and most of them are things that would not interest me. Goodnight, my children.” And with that, Lord Ya-tiren rose and followed in the wake of the Jouster and the Healer, leaving Kiron alone with the girl, who still sat like a little miniature oracle on her three-legged stool.

She had changed from her short tunic of the swamp into a robe very like those of the priestesses he was familiar with, although there were some differences.

There was no elaborate wig, for instance; she wore her own black hair cut short, like a helmet that framed her face and skimmed the nape of her neck. And the robe was not pleated tightly to her slim body; it hung loosely from her shoulders and was confined with a beaded belt. Around her neck was an enameled and beaded collar that depicted a flame with two wings, like the wings of the Haras-falcon.

“Um,” Kiron said, feeling tongue-tied. Then the one thing he really wanted to know just burst out of him. “How can you know about Avatre?”

“What she’s thinking, you mean?” the girl replied. “I’m a Nestling-Priestess; I have the Gifts. I mean, I will have the Gifts when I get older and more training and if they come to me, but I’ve always had the Gift of Silent Speech with animals. That’s how they knew I was going to be a Winged One when I grew up.”

He blinked. A Winged One? “You mean—you’re going to be a sea witch?” he blurted, then blushed. “I mean, that’s what they call—the Tians—”

She giggled again; she had a charming laugh, and he was relieved that she seemed to be the sort of girl who refused to take herself too seriously. “I know that, silly! I know that’s what the Tians call us! But no, I’m not going to be one of the Magi, people that have real magic. I’m going to be the kind that can see and hear and know things that people without the Gifts can’t. That’s what a Winged One is. The others aren’t really priests and priestesses at all. Magi, we call them. They serve the Great Ones. We serve the gods.”

He digested that for a moment, trying to sort it all in terms of the things that he was familiar with. He’d never heard of anyone who could “speak” with animals, but that might not mean anything. He wasn’t exactly conversant with the ways of priests. “It’s a good thing you can talk to Avatre. I mean, thank you for trying, and getting her calm. She must have been really scared.”

“She was, but she was fine as soon as I told her we were going to take care of you,” the girl said, with complete equanimity, as if she “spoke” to dragons every day. Well, if she “spoke” to animals all the time, perhaps that wasn’t such a stretch! “Then she was all right, but she wouldn’t be parted from you, so that’s why you’re in my courtyard instead of in a proper room. She’s very nice, a little like a hunting cat, and a little like a falcon, and I talk to those all the time. Father likes to hunt, and he relies on me to find out how his cats and birds are feeling.” She looked up at the sky, now dark, and filling with stars. “I hope it doesn’t rain—”

That was the least of his concerns. “During kamiseen? Surely not!”

She laughed. “Oh, of course not. You’re right. So—you’re Kiron, and I’m Aket-ten. And you saved my life! That was terribly brave and clever of you, and I hope you realize that I really am awfully grateful, and so is my father, and we’re terribly in your debt.” She flushed. “You really did, you know, even though I have Silent Speech. I can’t talk to beasts unless I touch them, and I think that the river horse would have bitten me in two before I could have made it calm down, so you really did save me.” She took a deep breath, her flush faded, and she sobered and bit her lip. “Poor Larion-al. I wish you could have saved him, too.”

He gulped, recalling that poor rower, engulfed and being shaken like a dog shook a rag. “So do I. What were you doing out there, anyway?”

Now, for the first time, she frowned. “We were sent to catch a special sort of fish for Magus Kephret. That is, I was sent, and my brother Orest wouldn’t let me go alone. The Nestlings all take training together, you see, so the Winged Ones or the Magi that are teachers can give assignments to whomever they wish. He said that with my Gifts I should be able to know where the fish were, and get them to come to my spear. I tried to tell him that my Gift wasn’t that strong yet, and anyway, I wasn’t sure it could be used for something like that, but he said how could I know if I didn’t try—” Now she paused, and seeing the odd expression on her face, Kiron got a strange feeling in the pit of his stomach.

She has a bad feeling about that Magus, and about why he sent her, but she can’t put a finger on what’s wrong.

“Anyway, Father went straight to the Teachers, the Teachers went to the Pedagogues who are in charge of all Nestling and Fledgling training, and they’ve said that there is to be no more sending of Nestlings out on dangerous errands like that again,” she continued, her face clearing. “I mean, it wasn’t as if it was time for my ordeals or anything, I’m not nearly old enough! So, anyway, that was why we were out in the swamp. And I didn’t realize that our boat had gotten between a river horse and her calf until it was too late, and she was charging us.”

He sighed as she gave him a long look. “I’m glad we were there when we were,” he said sincerely, and just then, several servants arrived, burdened with food, and for a time, he and Aket-ten were too busy eating for many more questions.

He was absolutely ravenous, but there was still time between bites to have a look at his surroundings. As a courtyard, this was a singularly austere spot. There was no ornamental pool, such as the Jousters of Tia shared, and hardly any plantings, just a tree in each corner in a big stone box. He was beneath the branches of one of these trees, an orange tree, he thought. Avatre was in the barren middle of the courtyard, surrounded by charcoal braziers, which must have been keeping her warm enough or she would surely be complaining. The walls around the courtyard were white stone, and there was one door in the middle of each of the four walls, making it enough like Avatre’s former pen that she probably felt perfectly secure here.

The meal was delicious; spiced lamb, hot and oozing juice, and chickpea paste with herbs in it, goat cheese pungent and tangy, sharp onions and some green stuff he wasn’t at all familiar with that went well with all of it. It came with a flat round of something that Aket-ten used to scoop up the chickpea paste and wrap around the lamb and vegetables. He followed her example and found it was a sort of chewy bread. There were also dates in honey, and a much better date wine than he’d gotten from that overseer. The head of his bed could be propped up, as she showed him, even though it made him dizzy to sit up at first. It felt quite luxurious to be sitting, eating in bed, with servants to wait on him.

Aket-ten quite sensibly concentrated on eating rather than chattering, which was something of a relief. From what Kiron vaguely recalled of his sisters, they had spent a good half of the time at every meal gabbling like a flock of hens.

She didn’t seem much like a typical girl. On the other hand, he didn’t know a great deal about girls, other than the little that he remembered of his sisters. The fact was, the only females that Kiron had even seen much of once he’d been taken into Ari’s service were the serfs, slaves, and servants in the compound’s kitchen area. And most of those weren’t girls, but women old enough to be his mother. He really didn’t know what to expect from this one; Altan and noble and female. And he certainly didn’t know what to say to her.

Fortunately, he was saved from having to make any attempt at conversation by the arrival of her brother.

“Father says our hero is awake!” called a cheerful voice from the darkened door nearest them, and the young man himself sauntered out into the courtyard a moment later. “And so you are! Did you leave me any dates, little oracle?”

“Yes, if you want them, unless Kiron needs them,” Aket-ten said.

“No, no, they’re too sweet for me,” he replied—the truth, since he wasn’t used to anything as sweet as a honeyed date after all that time in the desert.

“Hmm! Thank you! My brothers always gobble them up like locusts on a wheat field, and I never get my share.” Orest said with a grin, helping himself to a bit of flatbread and a sticky-sweet handful of dates before a servant could offer them. Orest looked like a lanky male version of his sister; they even wore their hair the same length, though he had a tunic like his father’s instead of a gown, and his pectoral collar was of plain gold and turquoise beads without the winged flame.

“Brothers?” Kiron replied, a little surprised. “There are more of you?”

“Five more boys; Aket-ten is the youngest and the only girl. And the only Winged One.” Orest made a face at her. “Well, if she had to be a girl, at least she’s going to be doing something useful with herself and her time. Not one of those stupid creatures that spends all her time giggling with a claque of others like her.”

Aket-ten sniffed disdainfully at him; this was apparently a joke of long standing between them. She tossed her head. “Whereas unless you stop skipping your lessons with your tutors, you aren’t going to be of any use whatsoever!”

“Ought to be glad I skipped today, little oracle!” he retorted gaily, and turned to Kiron with a face full of avid curiosity. “So, just how did you get a dragon? I mean, you weren’t exactly dressed like a noble or even a Tian Jouster, so how did you get a dragon like her? She’s wonderful!”

Avatre muttered sleepily, as if in agreement with that sentiment.

“I stole an egg, and hatched her myself,” he said, and found himself telling the whole story all over again. Not that he minded. There was nothing he would rather talk about than Avatre. This time, since the adults weren’t around, Aket-ten asked several of her own questions, and it was perfectly obvious from them that she hadn’t been in the least exaggerating her ability to communicate with animals. The things she asked proved to Kiron that, if she wasn’t actually speaking in words as such, she was surely getting the general tenor of Avatre’s thoughts.

And that could be very, very useful, he suddenly realized. In further training, he wouldn’t have to teach Avatre what he wanted in tiny little increments. Oh, no—he could have Aket-ten or someone like her actually tell Avatre what he wanted!

“Look,” he said, finally, after another of her questions. “I want to know something. If you can talk to the dragons, why aren’t you Winged Ones helping with the training for the Altan Jousters? It seems as if your dragons are a lot more dangerous than the Tian ones, and if you could—”

“Because we don’t have any tame dragons,” Orest answered for her. “Ours are really, really wild, maybe wilder even than the Tian dragons, because we trap ours fully grown. Truth to tell, they’re more than wild, they’re dangerous, and some of them have been killers when they aren’t drugged with tala. They’re kept muzzled when they aren’t eating.”

He blinked at that. No wonder there were fewer of them than Tian dragons! He digested the ramifications of such a system, slowly. Fewer dragons; harder to manage. Less cooperative than the wildest of the Tian dragons. Which meant the Jouster had to spend more time controlling his mount and less time in fighting.

“The only time they can be handled is when they’re full of tala,” Aket-ten added. “And then, not only is it still very hard for anyone but their Jousters and dragon boys to get near them, their minds are too dull to talk to. I’d have to touch one, anyway, and everyone says that’s too dangerous for me to try. I don’t know anyone with the Gift of Silent Speech that can talk to an animal without being really near to it.”

“Oh, she won’t say it, but young and silly as she is, she’s the one with the strongest Gift of Silent Speech they’ve seen in two generations,” Orest chuckled, poking at his sister with his elbow. “She’s afraid it’ll sound like boasting if she says it. They expect great things from her.”

She wrinkled her nose. “They can expect all they like, but if the Gods don’t put more Gifts in my hands, you’ll probably find me explaining to the horses in the Great Ones’ stables why they need to pull the chariots properly in battle.”

“But if you’re in training to be a priestess, why aren’t you living at a temple?” Kiron asked, as another question occurred to him. What was she doing here? All the girls connected with the temples in Tia were kept carefully behind the temple walls at all times. And nobody would have sent one into a swamp after fish!

“Because I’m a Nestling,” she replied patiently. “Oh, if I were from quite far away, or if my parents were poor, I’d live there. But Nestlings stay with their parents. That’s why we’re called Nestlings, you see? I won’t move into the Temple of the Twins until I become a Fledgling.”

“And I can’t wait. I’ll finally have the courtyard all to myself, and then I can have the servants build a ball court—” Orest began, a teasing look to his eyes that told Kiron that this was another joke of long standing between them.

And it relieved him to know that this was not “Aket-ten’s courtyard,” or at least, not hers solely.

“Don’t you dare even think of it!” she scolded back, her face turning pink. “It’s not just your courtyard, and I won’t be spending all my time at the temple and when I’m at home, I want to be able to enjoy our courtyard without having to worry about being hit with a hard leather ball every time I cross it or listening to you and your friends playing your stupid games of court ball! Why, you might as well move a dragon in—”

Kiron had never actually seen an idea “dawn” on anyone before this moment, but it was clear from their faces, and the look they exchanged, that at that moment they had the exact same idea.

Orest spoke first. “Kiron, what would it take to hatch a dragon egg?

He snorted. “First, you’d have to get one.” But from the look on Orest’s face, he knew that the young Altan lord had just had an epiphany. Orest had seen what Avatre was all about, and no matter what he said, Orest was not going to give up on his new dream of having a dragon just like her.

Before his own exhaustion made him beg them to leave him in peace long enough to sleep, he knew that Orest not only wanted to hatch and train a dragon like Avatre, he was willing, and probably able, to do everything it was going to take in order to make it all happen. And despite all of his sister’s scolding, the moment she realized what Orest meant, she was as eager for him to have a dragon as her brother was.

And he knew why.

Orest was the youngest son of Lord Ya-tiren, and the only one with no clear future ahead of him. The eldest son was the heir, of course, and spent all of his time at Lord Ya-tiren’s side or with his overseer, learning all that he could about managing the estates. His next-oldest brother was well on the way to a sterling career as an architect and builder, working as the right-hand man of one of the most respected architects in Alta City. Although not a Winged One, the third brother was very much a mystic and was already a priest, and the fourth enrolled in training to be an army officer. Only Orest had had no clear idea of where his place was in the world.

Until now, that is.

His one pleasure, and his single talent, was in working with animals of all sorts, though he did not have any discernable Gift. He was as good a falconer as anyone in his father’s service, was trusted by both the Houndmaster and the Horsemaster to do anything he liked with any animal in the kennel or stable, and had been thinking seriously about getting a cheetah to train to hunt as well. Being a Jouster, forcing his will upon a half-drugged, wild dragon, had held no appeal for him at all. But working with a dragon like Avatre—

Looking at him, Kiron remembered only too clearly how he had lusted for a dragon like Kashet.

His last thought on falling into sleep, and his first thought on waking with the dawn, was that if the thing could be done, then he could, and would, help Orest to do it.

The young Altan Lord must have sat up half the night thinking about it, too, for as a servant arrived with the dawn, leading another with a cartload of meat for Avatre and a kilt and loinwrap (at last!) for Kiron, he heard stirring from Orest’s side of the courtyard.

With the servant’s help, and with much wincing, Kiron managed to get up and get properly clothed. The servants did not want to get anywhere near Avatre, and given what he now knew about Altan dragons, he didn’t blame them. But Avatre was on her very best behavior, as if she understood that her continued presence here depended on good manners, and she ate her breakfast carefully, slowly, even daintily, looking up now and again at the nervous servants and trying out different looks and silly little noises until at last she startled a laugh out of them with what looked like a full-on, flirtatious wink. It probably wasn’t anything of the sort, but that was what it looked like, and she repeated it until she got some sort of relaxation from them.

“I think she likes you,” Kiron said, and the servants laughed nervously, as if they were still not quite sure if Avatre “liked” them because she wanted to eat them. Nevertheless, they began to relax a little more around her, and in the end they were no longer afraid when she was done to take the cart away, nor to turn their backs on her. So that was progress, and another step to making certain that Avatre would actually be welcome here for as long as they needed to stay.

But as soon as the servants were gone, Orest came popping out of his door, looking as if he had not slept well at all last night. “Kiron,” he said without preamble, “I want to—”

“I’ll help,” Kiron said instantly. “However I can.”

Orest stopped dead in mid-sentence. Obviously, he had been working up to a speech all last night, which accounted for his current appearance, and to have it cut short was clearly a surprise. His jaw dropped, and he gave Kiron a goggle-eyed look that made Kiron want to laugh. “But you don’t even know what I wanted to ask you!” he exclaimed.

Kiron shrugged—carefully—and smiled. “It’s as plain to me as the sun rising. You want to try hatching out your own dragon and training it. I’ll help, as long as your father agrees. I could see it in your face last night, and everything you said to me just made me more certain; you want an Avatre of your own the same way I wanted a Kashet of my own.”

Orest sighed, looking immensely relieved that he wasn’t going to have to talk Kiron into helping him. “You’re right, of course. For a moment, I was afraid you were a Winged One yourself! Was I that obvious?”

“Like a fountain in the desert,” Kiron laughed. “But what I want to know is, how do you propose to get yourself an egg?”

“I don’t know yet,” Orest admitted. “But I know who to ask.”

“Well, the first person to ask is Lord Ya-tiren,” Kiron admonished him. “I’ve had my fill of sneaking around, trying to hide a baby dragon, and that was when there were other babies around to help disguise that she was there! Besides, you need both your father’s help, and possibly that of the Jousters themselves. No, you ask your father first if he’s willing to let you try this project and become a Jouster. Then I’ll help, if he says yes.”

Orest stuck around then, to help him give Avatre a cursory grooming (the best he could do without proper sand and oil, and he wondered how hard Aket-ten had worked in order to get her as clean as she was), then harness her and help him onto her back. “I’m going to take her for—well, take her out like a dog,” he said to Orest. “I’m fit enough to do that much, and she needs both the exercise and to keep from soiling your courtyard.”

“Then take her to the waste ground just past the fruit trees that way,” Orest said, pointing eastward. “It will be just a hop for her. I have to go to my tutor now, but I’ll be back.”

Avatre had been sorely puzzled by the lack of sand or a proper corner to use; she was glad enough to see the bit of waste ground, for the ashes and cinders that were dumped there were enough like sand for her to be content to use them. It was just a hop, but by the time Kiron returned, Orest was nowhere to be seen.

Somewhat to his shock, later that morning, Lord Ya-tiren himself appeared at the courtyard, just as he returned with Avatre after another short flight so that she would not leave her droppings on the pristine stone of the courtyard.

The Altan lord watched in fascination as Avatre backwinged to a soft and graceful landing, and Kiron slid off her back, wincing, but not without patting her affectionately. She turned and nuzzled his hair as he unharnessed her.

“My guest,” called the Altan lord, a prudent distance from both of them, “My son tells me he wishes to emulate you, and hatch a dragon. Here. He tells me you can help him do so.”

Kiron took a deep breath. “If an intact egg can be brought here, warm, he should be able to,” he admitted. “And I have promised to help. But only if he got your permission first.”

Now Lord Ya-tiren’s expression was a curious mixture of emotions; wistful, as he looked at Avatre, resigned as he looked at Kiron.

He would rather not see Orest becoming a Jouster—Jousting is dangerous, as dangerous as any other fighting. But he can understand why Orest wants to do this, and if he were younger, I bet he would do the same.

“Well,” he said at last, and his words were an uncanny echo of Kiron’s own thoughts. “Though it means sending my youngest son into great danger once he is a Jouster, how can I deny him the chance to try what I would try were I younger?” He sighed “All right,” he continued, after a long pause. “You have it. You have my permission. And may the gods grant you success.”

FOUR

OF course, it wasn’t going to be as easy as all that. Putting a dream into action never was.

Complicating this was that it soon became apparent that Orest was not the only person in Alta City to want to raise a dragon from the egg. Furthermore, once Kiron’s existence was made public, he and Avatre ranked as the curiosities of the moment, and it wasn’t only Jousters who wished to see these curiosities for themselves.

In fact, beginning that afternoon, and all through the rest of the day until the evening meal, Lord Ya-tiren admitted a parade of guests who wished to see the tame dragon and the boy who rode her for themselves.

Avatre was on her best behavior, although she could not resist showing off, preening under all the attention. For most of her life, she had only had one person around; nevertheless, she was still young, and on the journey she had gotten used to seeing many who would come and look at her from a near distance when they had stopped with the Bedu clans. Now, however, there were others, who came much nearer (though none of them cared to touch her) and made admiring noises.

She loved it. Although Kiron couldn’t give her a proper grooming, he, Orest and Aket-ten had given her a good wash (though at the expense of a fair amount of pain from his cracked ribs) and he had oiled the more sensitive skin with almond-oil from the kitchen. She glowed in the sunshine as if she’d been made of jewels, the ruby of her body shading into the topaz of her extremities, her gorgeous golden eyes more beautiful than anything made by a jeweler.

Some of the visitors were Altan Jousters, and although all of them were interested in the concept of raising a tame dragon, for the most part their interest faded quickly when they discovered how much work was involved in tending to a dragon like Avatre. As Ari had already discovered among the Tian Jousters, when the aristocratic Jousters of Alta learned that all of this work had to be undertaken by the man who wished to bond with the dragon, they were very much inclined to go back to their current ways.

For a very few, it was not the work that was involved, it was the fact that a man who was already fighting would have to spend so much time out of combat. “Two to three years before she’ll be fit to fly combat!” snorted one, when Kiron told him Avatre’s age. “We can’t afford to have Jousters out for that long! The old way may be hard, but—no. Better to have as many trained men on the battlefield as we can. The old way works; imperfectly, but it works.”

But the last visitor of the day, before Lord Ya-tiren let it gently be known that he was wearied of the stream of strangers and near-strangers trotting through his courtyard, was not just any Jouster. It was the same man who had first come to look at Kiron and his dragon, but this time, he came in an official capacity, and looking so splendid that at first Kiron did not realize it was the same man.

He came strolling—not striding—in, at Lord Ya-tiren’s side. Kiron had not been in any condition to pay close attention to his visitors when he had first awakened, but that had been yesterday. Today he felt a hundred times better, and there was no doubt in his mind that he had better pay attention to this man.

The visitor was a fine figure of a man, with a nose like the beak of an eagle, high cheekbones, deep-set eyes beneath a craggy brow, and he wore his own jet-black hair cut sensibly short to fit under his helmet. This set him in stark contrast to many of the other visitors, who wore theirs fashionably long and braided into a club if they did not sport wigs. By now, Kiron could recognize the Jousters’ “uniform” of a soft, wrapped kilt, buskins to protect the shins, wide leather belt, and a leather chest harness; this man wore a completely different variation on that uniform today. His chest-harness was ornamented in bronze, and sported a medallion of a ram’s head right where the straps crossed at his breastbone. He had bronze armor plates that could not possibly serve any practical function fastened to the harness over each shoulder, and bronze vambraces. His kilt had a band of embroidery about the bottom, and the leather helmet he carried was gilded and ornamented with bronze plaques that matched the one on his chest. It came to Kiron then that one of the subtle oddities that had been nagging at the back of his mind was that thus far, everyone he had met had been several shades paler than the Tians. He had been used to being the freak among the darker dragon boys. Now, neither his longer hair, nor his lighter skin marked him as different.

This then was the man he had to impress, and his stomach tightened with tension.

“Kiron, rider of Avatre,” said Lord Ya-tiren as Kiron made a low bow to both of them. “I would like to make you formally known to Lord Khumun-thetus, Lord of the Jousters and responsible for their training and that of the dragons.”

Lord Khumun-thetus was not paying any attention to Kiron. All his attention was on Avatre, who knew a true admirer when she saw one. Kiron’s tension eased a little. If their welcome here rested on Avatre’s shoulders, then there was very little to worry about.

“You know, she gets better on second viewing, when she’s rested, fed, and clean,” said the Lord of the Altan Jousters. “I’d like to see her after a proper sand bath and oiling. And when she’s full-grown, she’ll be amazing. I don’t suppose she’d let me touch her, would she, young Kiron?”

This was the first of the Jousters, the first of any of the visitors save Orest and Aket-ten who had asked to touch Avatre, and given how positively she was acting, Kiron saw no reason to forbid the contact. “I believe she will accept that, my Lord. The soft facial skin is particularly sensitive.”

Khumun-thetus approached confidently, but with care, holding out his hand to Avatre, who stretched out her neck and sniffed it before permitting him to lay hands on her. From his demeanor, Kiron had no doubt that this man enjoyed working with animals and was good with them, and his next comment told the truth of that. “I was a cavalry officer before I became a Jouster,” he said, to no one in particular. “Though I was not reluctant to give over my dragon when I was made Lord of the Jousters, if I had a dragon like this, there would have been a fight! What a wonderful creature this lady of yours is!” As she stretched out her neck so that he could reach the soft skin just under her jawline, he chuckled. “She’s very like a horse in her enjoyment of being petted.”

“More like a great hunting cat crossed with a falcon, my Lord,” said Kiron diffidently. “She has much of the independent nature of both. I tended the adult dragon who was raised as she was. I found that Kashet was strong-willed and sometimes needed to be humored, and he was given to sly pranks, but on the whole he was as intelligent as a dog but without a dog’s fawning nature.”

“And she has the pleasure-loving nature of a great cat, too, I see.” Again the Lord of the Jousters chuckled. “It is a great pity that so few of my men are willing to invest three years of their dignity and lives in order to attain an achievement of this sort. If I had a wing of just ten fighters—”

Kiron refrained from mentioning that the same was true among the Tian Jousters. But Khumun-thetus was not finished. “However, as I have made some inquiries among the young, I have found some few who find it no hardship to become the slaves of an egg and a dragonet. Your host’s son is one among them, I am told.”

“So he told me, my Lord,” Kiron agreed, concealing his relief. Well, it appeared that they had been accepted, just as he had hoped, and with remarkably little interrogation.

“And among the young, who would not in any case be fit to fight for almost as long as three years, the loss of fighting time is of no moment.” Now he turned his head to look straight at Kiron, although he did not stop scratching Avatre. “So tell me, Kiron, son of Kiron, what does one need to hatch a dragon’s egg?”

Kiron could not help smiling in his relief. “First, my Lord,” he pointed out, “you need the egg.”

“Then come, sit, and tell me about the eggs,” the Jouster invited. Kiron took a stool from beside his cot, and began.

Carefully, and in great detail, he described what kind of egg was needed—gathered and transported carefully from where it had been laid, so as not to addle it. Brought still warm, so as not to kill the incubating creature inside, or taken freshly laid so that incubation would not yet have begun. He described the hatching sands to the best of his ability, and how the egg was mostly buried in them, yet turned at least twice daily. “The heat is brought to the sands by magic in Tia,” he added. “I am told that the heat is moved from places where things are wanted to be kept cold—storage rooms for meat, for instance, or the Royal Residences at midsummer—and moved to the sands. I did see the ceremony by which such a thing is done, but—” he shrugged. “I am no priest; I could not tell you anything except that it involves a great deal of chanting by numerous assistants, and four priests, and must be renewed periodically.”

“Hmm,” Khumun-thetus said speculatively. “Well, I expect the Great Ones will be able to persuade some of the Magi that such a task would be in their best interest. We have been using other means to heat the sands of our desert dragons, but it is clear that will not be hot enough to incubate the eggs. The Magi will complain that it is beneath them, of course, so I will have to approach the Great Ones when they are in a good mood.”

Since there was no graceful answer to such a statement, Kiron wisely kept his mouth shut.

“So. And when the dragon hatches?” the Lord of the Jousters continued his careful and exacting questions. And when Kiron finally answered all the questions that he could, the lord seemed pleased.

“Not as difficult as I had thought,” he began, and as Avatre delivered a reproachful look, he stopped scratching and began to pace. “I believe that I can find candidates for as many eggs as I can obtain. Which will be few! I must warn you that it will be difficult to collect these precious eggs of yours, but nevertheless, I believe I can get more than one. Can you train the candidates and the young dragonets if I do?”

“I can try, my Lord,” Kiron replied, feeling stunned. Me? A trainer? But—

“I am hoping we can learn something as you train the tame dragons that we can use to help us make our captured dragons tamer,” the Jouster continued, giving Kiron a penetrating look.

So, he wants to know if I really do know what I’m talking about, and if I can give him something he can use now. I can’t blame him. With the Tians building up the numbers of their Jousters, and the Altans already fewer, he needs help.

“If you think it might be valuable, perhaps I can offer you some advice on the older dragons as well,” he said, after a moment of hesitation. “Now, I do not know if this will make a difference with your current beasts, but any new ones that you trap—well, there was a trainer among the Tian Jousters, newly arrived, who had impressive success in treating newly caught dragons as if they were falcons.”

“Falcons!” exclaimed Khumun-thetus. “That had never occurred to us! He kept them hooded, then?”

“Day and night, and fed them through the hood until they accepted the presence of men. Then he harnessed them, and flew them on a rope in one of the landing courtyards, giving them food rewards, until they accepted the harness, the weight, and the commands without complaint.” He took a deep breath, then regretted it, as his chest muscles complained. “My Lord, there were a great many new dragons being trained in this way when we escaped. Almost all of the pens were full. Mind, the Tians trap only newly fledged dragons, not the adults, which they deem too dangerous—but the pens were almost all full. The Tian King has ordered that the numbers of Jousters be increased dramatically.”

Khumun-thetus frowned. “That is ill hearing. In two or three years, then, we could see double the number of Tian Jousters?”

“Or more,” Kiron replied. “But if you have men who train hawks and hounds and great cats—all of which this trainer had done—especially those who train hawks trapped as adults—you may have some success with adult-caught dragons.”

“I must see what is to be done.” Khumun-thetus’ expression had darkened. “In the meantime, if I get you eggs, hatching pens, and boys, can you show them what to do?”

“Yes, my Lord, I can,” Kiron replied confidently, knowing that none of this would happen any time soon.

“And in the meanwhile—” Khumun-thetus eyed him critically. “My Lord Ya-tiren, you extended the invitation for this boy to take lessons with your son’s tutors. Until he is needed by the Jousters, and perhaps afterward, I should like to take advantage of that invitation. Well-born he may be, and a dragon rider already, but through no fault of his own he has been educated not at all, and if he is to take a place of authority over well-born boys, he must be able to match them.”

“Surely,” said Lord Ya-tiren, as Kiron forced an impassive expression on his face. Lessons? What sort of lessons? What on earth did the Lord of the Jousters think he needed to know?

He had not been here two days, and already someone else was taking charge of his life.

Whether he liked it or not.

“Oh, it won’t be so bad,” said Orest, when he appeared with servants at sundown, bearing Kiron’s dinner. “You’ll have to learn to read, of course, but Father’s stopped my mathematica lessons now that I’m going to be a Jouster, so I expect the tutor will be let go. The rest of it is mostly listening to philosophers lecture. And answering questions afterward. And asking questions yourself. Actually, it’s better to jump right in and start asking questions; philosophers are only too happy to hear themselves talking. If you can get them going again, you usually escape having to give any answers yourself altogether.”

Well, that didn’t sound so bad. I wouldn’t mind being able to read, he thought to himself, with a wistful longing. If I could read, I could properly recite the prayers for the dead. His father had one shrine, now, but—well, it would not be bad to have another, here. As long as he didn’t end up like the boys who learned to be priests or scribes, bent over a lap-desk all day, copying texts onto potsherds until he went mad. But no, that was stupid; they wanted him to train Jousters, not copy records or write letters.

“I like lessons,” Aket-ten said, coming into the courtyard. Today, it appeared, she was trying to look more grown-up; she had on a slim-fitting yellow dress instead of a boyish tunic. For the first time, he wondered just how old she was. Eleven? Twelve?

“Well, that’s only because you know you wouldn’t be getting any lessons if you weren’t a Nestling,” Orest countered. “So just to keep getting them, you’d say you liked them even if you didn’t.”

“That’s not true! And you know that Father said after the last report from your tutors that it didn’t matter I was a girl, if I hadn’t been a Nestling, he’d have given me the same tutors as you, and I probably would have done better than you because I apply myself, so there!” There was a fight brewing, and Kiron hastened to end it before it began.

“The Lord of the Jousters was here,” he said, interrupting it. “He asked if I could teach others how to hatch and raise a dragonet, and then said that he’d get all of it organized. So I guess there’s your answer, Orest. It isn’t going to be just you, but at least you’re not going to have to try and get an egg all by yourself.”

“They might just let a couple of the fighting dragons mate,” Orest observed, popping a little dainty that he had told Kiron was a stuffed grape-leaf into his mouth. Kiron had tried them himself; they were spicy, but good, full of chopped meat and bread crumbs. “That would be the easiest.”

“No, it wouldn’t,” Aket-ten countered. “In fact, it would be stupid and dangerous! The easiest would be to tie out one of the female fighting dragons, and let a male come to her. That’s how they trap the males already, anyway, they just don’t let them mate.”

“And just what do you know about it?” Orest asked heatedly.

“I read,” she shot back. “I’ve been reading about dragons all day, in fact! Which you could have done, if you hadn’t been spending all your time telling your friends what a great Jouster you’re going to be, and how your egg is going to hatch out the biggest dragon there ever was!”

“Oh, you read all about it, did you?” Orest, his ears getting red. “And just who let a Nestling back into the restricted scrolls?”

“The librarian of the Temple of the Twins, of course,” Aket-ten said primly. “The temple has just as many scrolls as the Great Library, and no Nestling is ever restricted from reading any of them. So there.” She folded her arms over her chest and gave him a look of triumph. “I probably know more about dragons than anyone but a Jouster. I could probably be a Jouster if I wanted to.”

“No, you couldn’t,” Orest said, with such a look of smug superiority on his face that his sister flushed. “They don’t let girls be Jousters.”

“I could go in disguise,” she retorted, and looked hurt when both Orest and Kiron laughed at her. “Well, I could!”

“The Jousters train and bathe together when they aren’t fighting,” Orest said. “They wrestle naked and bathe naked. So how are you going to disguise what you don’t have?”

“It’s a stupid rule,” she said, going from triumphant to sullen sulk all in a moment. “I could raise a dragon just as easily as you.”

“No, you couldn’t,” Orest and Kiron said together. They exchanged a look, and Orest nodded.

“Dragonets eat lots and lots of raw meat,” Kiron said. “Piles of it. And hearts and livers and lungs.” Aket-ten was looking a little green at the thought, and he drove it home. “The dragonets need bone in with all of that, so you have to break up the bone so they can swallow it. And you would have to feed the baby this stuff by hand, yourself, or she won’t bond with you. By the time I got done giving Avatre her first feedings, I was bloody up to the elbows, it was in my hair, under my nails—”

“All right!” she interrupted, looking as if she was going to be sick. But her brother hadn’t had his say yet.

“And then, the bigger the dragon gets, the more it eats. And you have to clean up her messes, too, because you don’t want anyone else in the pen until she’s bonded to you! You don’t even like to clean out the cat’s sand pan, so how do you think you’d manage with a dragon?”

“All right!” she said forcefully, hot anger making her flush, her queasiness forgotten. “You’ve made your point! But I still know more about dragons than you,” she added, glaring at her brother.

“Girls,” Orest muttered under his breath to Kiron. Kiron just nodded slightly. “She is just not going to give it up,” Orest added, with a resentful glance at his sister.

Kiron nodded again. He remembered enough about his sisters to be on Orest’s side this time. Girls just got onto a fellow and wouldn’t let him alone if they got an advantage over him. He needed to distract Aket-ten, or she was just going to keep on baiting Orest.

“All right, then, since you’ve been reading all morning,” Kiron said, deciding to pacify her and learn something at the same time. “I know about the Tian dragons, tell me about the Altan ones. Where are they trapped?”

“Well.” Aket-ten bounced a little in her seat, once again looking very well pleased with herself. “You know that dragons need heat to hatch their eggs. We have two kinds of dragons, actually; we have some that use the hot sand in the desert, like yours do, and we have a smaller kind that makes a big mound of rotting plants the way the crocodiles do to bury their eggs in. Those are the swamp dragons. They’re easier to trap, so they’re the ones we have the most of, but we have some desert dragons too. In fact, we have a couple of Tian dragons that lost their riders and that we managed to catch. Both of those are female, and when the Jousters want a wild desert dragon, they take one of those two females and stake her out at the edge of the desert and wait for another one to find her. A female will come to fight her, a male will come to mate with her.”

“So the smart thing would be to take both of those females out and let them mate,” Kiron mused. “You wouldn’t have the risk of losing a mating pair, and you might even be able to trap the male after the mating is over. What about taking swamp dragon eggs, though, from wild nests?”

“You’d have to drive off the mother somehow, and instead of sand, you’d have to come up with a place that was hot and damp to incubate the eggs,” Orest said. “That wouldn’t be hard, though; there are a lots and lots of hot springs around here, or you could use rotting reeds like the dragons do themselves. It’s taking the eggs that would be difficult. Even if you took a lot of people, trying to drive a mother dragon off her eggs could get them killed. A trapped dragon is bad; a mother protecting a nest is ten times worse.

The swamp dragons may be smaller, but they aren’t that much smaller.” He scratched his head in perplexity. “I don’t know; maybe at night, when they’re torpid?”

“Trying to do it at night would be worse,” put in Aket-ten. “At night, both parents come and lay on the nest. They might be torpid, but there would be two of them. And it would be in the dark, too, when the river horses come out to feed, and the crocodiles, too. If the dragons didn’t get you—” She shivered.

Kiron was just grateful that it wasn’t his problem. “If I was going to choose, I’d stake out those females,” he said. “The one mating I saw was in the sky, but I bet they don’t always mate that way.”

“Was that Avatre’s parents?” Orest asked. “I know you told us that you’d taken an egg from one of the Jousting dragons. What happened?”

“Partly it was not enough tala in their food, and partly it was stupidity from the dragon boys and the Jousters both,” he said with scorn. “Nobody bothered to notice that they were—” he glanced at Aket-ten and modified the rather coarse language he had been going to use. “—getting interested. Finally during a practice, everything just went bad at once. The Jousters were new and kept missing strokes, and finally when one connected, because the female chose that moment to turn the practice into a mating flight, the male’s rider hit wrong. He knocked the female’s rider out of his saddle, and another Jouster, Kashet’s rider, caught him before he hit the ground and got killed. Meanwhile the female was flying free now, and the male’s rider lost control and they went into a full mating flight. He couldn’t get control of his dragon until the mating was over, and when the female tried to fly off to the hills, Kashet and his rider managed to herd her back.”

That was a very dry version of the whole incident, that had been both tremendously exciting and terrifying at the same time. If he closed his eyes, he could still see the horrifying plunge of the injured Jouster out of his saddle, and the incredible dive that Kashet made to catch him, saving him from a certain death.

“I wouldn’t have wanted to be the male’s rider,” Orest muttered, his eyes round.

“You wouldn’t have wanted to be either of them,” Kiron corrected. “The female’s rider almost died anyway; would have, if there hadn’t been a Healer there quick. And by the time it was over, both of them had their dragons taken away and given to other Jousters. They were sent back down to train all over again. The Overseer was very angry, and so was the General in charge of the Jousters.”

“Glory!” Orest exclaimed, seriously impressed now. “But how did you get the egg?”

“Because after she was mated, she got aggressive and her dragon boy actually walked out rather than tend her.” Once again, Kiron allowed his voice to drip with scorn. “I’ll tell you the truth, he was an idiot. He was at fault and in trouble in the first place for letting her go without a full tala ration and for not noticing she’d come into season. Then he decided she was trying to kill him when all that was really wrong was that she was hungry. He got so hysterical over it that he had every other dragon boy in the compound standing around him by the time he walked out. The Overseer was so angry he swore he’d see to it that the boy never got an apprenticeship with anyone, but he’d made the others so frightened before he was done that nobody wanted to take her. So I said I would, as long as they took all my other duties off my hands, and it turned out that the fool had been short-feeding her all along; if he didn’t feel like carrying as much food as she wanted, he just didn’t, and let her go hungry. So she wasn’t getting enough food or enough tala. As soon as she realized that I was going to haul enough food that she could eat until she popped if that was what she wanted, she stopped being aggressive, and the tala took care of the rest. I figured, so what if she got fat? She wasn’t going to get a rider until she’d laid those eggs, and while they were waiting for that, they weren’t going to get a new dragon boy for her either. Or, at least, not until I’d civilized her again. So I knew when she’d laid the eggs, and I stole the first one. There was an empty pen next to Kashet—they liked to keep dragons separated by empty pens before they started getting so many—so that was where I put the egg, and you know the rest.”

“That was smart,” Aket-ten said admiringly.

He shrugged. “I had a lot of time to think about what I would do if I got the chance.”

“Well, we won’t have to do all of that,” Orest said with relief.

For the first time since he came here, he had a moment of resentment. “We won’t have to do all of that” didn’t even begin to cover all of the backbreaking work he had put into caring for the breeding dragon, Ari’s Kashet, and Avatre. Orest was soft—and spoiled. A nice boy, who probably didn’t know he was spoiled, but—spoiled. He had never been beaten, never gone hungry, never been worked so hard he staggered with fatigue. You haven’t got the first idea of what I went through, he thought, as Orest and his sister argued about whether it would be better to have swamp dragons or desert dragons. He thought about the long process of getting Avatre’s mother to accept him; about watching her anxiously for the first of the eggs to appear, then agonizing over whether it would be better to take the first-laid, or the last-laid. The night he stole the egg was still vivid in his mind: slipping into the pen in the darkness, trundling the egg in a barrow down the corridor and praying that no one would happen to come along just then, and that no hungry ghosts would choose that moment to appear.

And only then did the real worries begin, of hiding the egg from anyone who might glance into the pen, of keeping it safe from the strange storms that the Altan Magi had sent, of the ever-more difficult task of hiding and feeding the hatched dragonet. And, of course, of pulling double duty, tending not only to Kashet and Ari, but to Avatre on the sly. He hadn’t had a sound night of sleep, frankly, until his first night with the Bedu clan.

No, no matter how hard Orest and his friends worked for their dragons, they would never match the effort that he had put in for Avatre.

“So how sore are you still?” Orest asked, breaking into his brooding.

“Sore enough,” he admitted, though the fact was that getting around at the moment often hurt as badly as if he was being beaten by Khefti-the-Fat, and he found himself sleeping a lot. It was quite strange, actually; though he didn’t actually remember it, all he could guess was that he had hit a great many obstacles in being pulled through the water, and had probably broken several ribs in the process. And perhaps he had dislocated his arms at the shoulder as well; the joints ached enough for it. The reeds had certainly lacerated his back; he’d seen the rags left of what he had been wearing. Fortunately, the Healer had made those cuts close over; evidently dealing with broken bones took longer.

It was equally fortunate that his body had protected Aket-ten, or she would have been as injured as he was. And he was glad he had an Altan-style cot rather than a Tian bed that would have required him to sleep on his back. He could lie on his stomach to sleep on the cot, which was the least uncomfortable of all of the possible positions.

I don’t believe I will try that sort of rescue again, he thought. Or at least, not quite in that way.

Orest sighed. “I was hoping you might be able to start lessons tomorrow,” he said mournfully. “I was supposed to have read some wretched scroll today, and I didn’t, and if you were getting your first reading lesson, my tutor Arit-on-senes might forget I was supposed to have read it. Or maybe I’d get a chance to read it while you were getting the lesson.”

“That’s what you get for spending all day next to the round pool telling your friends what a great Jouster you’re going to be,” Aket-ten said smugly.

“Look!” Orest burst out, “Just how do you know what I did all day?”

“I have ways,” Aket-ten replied, looking superior. “And don’t try to deny it, because I know, and I even know who you were talking to, and when.”

Orest crossed his arms over his chest. “All right, then,” he said belligerently. “Prove it.”

“Right after your reading lesson you met with Leto. After Leto, but before luncheon, you talked with Kaafet and Pe-katis. Then your mathematica tutor caught you and dragged you off to lessons, and he must have passed you directly to your philosophy tutor because you didn’t get back to the pool until after that, but then—”

“Stop!” Orest cried, and threw up his hands. “You really have use the Far-Watcher Gift yet, and I know you didn’t bribe anyone who does—”

“Because I wouldn’t!” Aket-ten said, scandalized. “That is a sacred Gift, and not to be used for things like sneaking a look at a bad brother!”

“So who told you?” he demanded, ignoring her outrage.

“No one. I have ways,” was all she said, looking smug again.

But Kiron had an idea that the library that she had said she used all day probably stood right near this pool that Orest seemed to favor as a meeting place. Altan buildings were not all like the Tian ones with few windows, but with slits parallel to and up near the ceiling to allow cooler air inside—but he would bet that some of them were. Such slits were very good, under some conditions, for conducting sound inside a quiet room from the outside. A quiet room such as—inside a library, for instance.

But this time he was not going to help Orest out. He liked Orest a great deal, but he already had the impression that Orest was a bit of a shirker when it came to doing his work. If he thought that his sister had some special means of knowing where he went and who he talked to, and even what he said and did, he might get into the habit of being a little more diligent. Kiron did not intend to nursemaid Orest through the hatching and raising of his dragon, and he especially did not intend to “help” him by doing the tasks he had “forgotten” because he wanted to go socialize with his friends.

But he wasn’t going to say that—at least, not yet—and he might never have to if Orest thought that his sister was able to tell what he’d been up to and was apt to tell tales to their father.

Orest frowned at her. She sniffed.

“I’m not going to tell on you this time,” she warned, “But you’d better start being more serious if you expect to be a Jouster. The scrolls I read said that the Joust-Masters are allowed to beat shirkers, no matter how high-born they are. With staves,” she added wickedly. “Like a slave.”

“What?” Orest exclaimed, taken strongly aback.

“So if you don’t start to act serious about your studies, you could find yourself with a set of stripes like a slave,” she continued. She ate a last grape then, and stood up. “Good night, brother mine,” she said. “Consider yourself warned. Good night, Kiron, I hope you’re less sore in the morning. I think you’ll quite enjoy reading when you’ve learned to.” Then she turned to the dragon in her circle of braziers. “Good night, Avatre,” she said, fondly.

The dragon open one eye, and sighed gustily. Aket-ten laughed, and padded across the courtyard to the door that must lead to her rooms.

Orest looked after her, baffled. “Where does she find out these things?” he asked no one in particular. Then he looked at Kiron, who shrugged.

“But if she’s right about those Joust-Masters, she’s also right about getting out of the habit of slipping away from lessons whenever you feel like it,” he pointed out. “Look, I’ve been a serf, and I know what a real beating feels like. I’ll show you my back at some point. Khefti-the-Fat left scars. It’s not something you want to find out for yourself.”

Orest groaned. “You’re right, and I know you’re right, but . . . well, a fellow likes to talk to his friends now and again.”

“Maybe, but all day? Or most of it, anyway.” Orest couldn’t be much older than Kiron was, but somehow Kiron felt as if he was as old as Ari, and Orest was as young as that newly liberated serf taken from Khefti-the-Fat. Younger. He hadn’t needed encouragement to do his duty once he wasn’t being abused anymore. Orest was certainly spoiled, and it was time for him to start picking up his responsibilities.

“But there was you—and Avatre—and the dragon-egg idea—” Orest protested weakly. “Everyone wanted to hear about it!”

“And tomorrow, and tomorrow, and for a lot more tomorrows I am still going to be here, and so will Avatre, and so will the dragon egg idea.” It was utterly ridiculous on the face of it, that he should be acting like a mentor and elder to one no older than he himself.

But Orest had gotten his own way quite enough—not enough to make him into an overindulged monster, but enough that he was too careless and carefree. And Kiron—

I’ve lived through a hundred times more than he has. Maybe I’m right to feel old.

“How would you feel if you ‘forgot’ to feed your dragonet because you were chatting with your friends, and she became ill with hunger?” he demanded. “Or worse, you weren’t looking in on her, and something bad happened to her? She could tear a wing membrane and bleed to death, she could break a wing bone and cripple herself, she could even wander out of her pen and into the pen of one of the Jousting dragons and be killed and eaten!”

Orest hung his head. “I know,” he mumbled. “I know you’re right. It’s just—a fellow likes to have friends.”

“Well, if they can’t adjust to you working harder, they aren’t friends worth having,” Kiron replied. “You don’t want friends who’ll encourage you to be a lay-about if you want to raise a dragon and be a Jouster, Orest. You want friends who’ll say, ‘listen, why don’t we get together after you’ve done what you need to do?’ Those are the ones worth hanging onto.”

Orest raised his head and smiled wanly. “You sound like one of my tutors. So why do I like you so much?”

“Maybe because I want you to have a dragon, and I want you to be a Jouster, at least as much as you do,” Kiron replied warmly. “And maybe because I might be the right kind of friend?”

“That might be the answer. Good night, Kiron. If I’m going to be virtuous, I had better get my sleep so I can read that blasted scroll over breakfast.” Orest stood up, and motioned to the servants to clear away the remains of dinner.

“Good night, Orest,” he replied warmly. And once he was alone again, he got up and went to his cot, which today had been placed behind a woven grass screen for a bit more privacy, and beneath a canopy for shelter from weather. As he lay down on it, he wondered at the strength of his feelings for Orest—and yes, even Orest’s rather overbearing little sister. He liked both of them a very great deal; liked them in a way that he had not felt for anyone except perhaps Ari. Was this what it felt like, to have a good friend? If so, well—it was a good feeling. And with Orest and Aket-ten, he didn’t have to worry about much of a difference in age, the way he had with Ari.

And as for a difference in rank, well—maybe he hadn’t been born into the noble class, but the Mouth of the Bedu had said that having a dragon conferred nobility, and what the Lord of the Jousters said seemed to confirm that, so there wasn’t any real difference there either.

He still didn’t own more than he could pack onto Avatre’s back, but—

But possessions weren’t everything. Look at all that Ari had owned, and how he had just given away the Gold of Honor as if it were nothing more than a lot of cheap clay amulets!

If only Ari could have come along. . . .

The regret was just as much of an ache as the pain in his shoulders, and just as real.

The latter would heal. Somehow he doubted that the former ever would.

FIVE

OREST was as good as his word. He awoke—or rather, had his servant awaken him—as soon as the meat was delivered to Kiron to feed Avatre. By that time, of course, Kiron was already up and dressed in yesterday’s tunic (for there was no point in putting on a new one that was only going to get blood on it) and Avatre was stretching her wings and making inquisitive noises in the direction of the barrow. Orest made a great deal of noise himself, groaning and grousing about it being so early, though by Kiron’s standards, he’d been sleeping quite late of a morning, and Orest was positively lounging about.

The thing was, in Tia, it had been easy to tell when dawn was coming long before it actually arrived. The air changed, the bitter cold of desert night lost its edge. Here, there was no change of that sort; the night never got all that cold, and so it was the light, and not the change in temperature, that woke him. This place was softer than Tia, with softer air and softer beds.

The scents were softer, too, but heavier; they wafted in and clung. Perhaps that was because of the humidity. And there were more of them. He wondered why it didn’t bother Avatre—but perhaps dragons had a different sort of sense of smell.

By the time Kiron was ready to bathe and change into a clean tunic and loin wrap, the servants had brought breakfast and a sleepy-eyed Orest was eating with one hand while he read his scroll with the other. Kiron hastened to get himself clean while the bread was still warm enough to be at its best, tender and not tough.

At least Tians and Altans both shared proper ideas about bathing. He’d sorely missed his twice-daily baths in the desert, and here, if he’d wanted to, he could have a bath five times a day.

“What’s that about?” Kiron asked, joining him. The servant had even brought a table and stools. How strange to be waited on, rather than being the one doing the serving.

“It’s sacred poetry,” Orest said, making a face. “All about Te-oth, the god of the scribes. Fifteen stanzas, if you please, on the glory of the god and on the superiority of those who master language and writing!”

“Maybe your tutor is trying to tell you something,” Kiron suggested, slathering honey onto some bread and taking a bite.

“He’s telling me that sacred poetry is a dead bore, that’s what he’s telling me,” Orest complained, reaching for more grapes. “But at least he isn’t making me memorize it. All I have to do is tell him in general what it’s about.” He sighed. “I hate memorizing.”

“Maybe now that you’re going to be a Jouster he’ll assign you those scrolls your sister was reading yesterday about dragons, instead of the things you have been reading,” Kiron pointed out. “Where is she, by the way?”

“Up and out before dawn, and hanged if I know how she can stand it,” Orest replied. “The Nestlings don’t have to attend Dawn Rites, but she does, and she’s wretchedly perky about it, too.” He glanced at the sun, then at a series of lines carved into the courtyard paving. It was only at that moment that Kiron realized they were the marks of a sundial that used the shadows of the courtyard walls to mark the time. The whole courtyard was one enormous sundial! No wonder the courtyard was bare! And no wonder Orest had his rooms here, if he required a reminder of the time that was so impossible to ignore. “Well, if you’re done, we might as well go take our punishment. At least you’ll be there to share it with me.”

With a great deal less trepidation than his new friend, Kiron rose and left the servants to clean up after them.

Servants! he marveled, as they left. What wonderful things servants are! No wonder everyone wants them! Oh, he’d had people to bring him food and clean his table back at the Tian Jousters’ Compound, but in everything else, he had been the servant. It was quite a different matter to be the one who was waited on.

He’d taken the precaution of having the servants bring a large kapok-stuffed leather ball, a couple of enormous leg bones, and one of the bells that were often used as wind chimes to leave with Avatre by way of toys. “I’ll be back later, love,” he called to her as he left; she gave no evidence that she was concerned by him leaving her alone, but then, she was used to being left alone by now. In fact, she seemed more interested in the leather ball than in his leaving. He hoped that she would play with it, and not rip it to bits.

They didn’t have to go far. Orest’s tutor Arit-on-senes was waiting for him in a large, airy room with good lighting from a southern-facing window that was just off the next courtyard. There were two small carpets in front of where he sat on a leather-padded stool, with a cushion on each little carpet, a lap-desk in front of it, and a jar of scrolls beside it. His appearance surprised Kiron; he wasn’t Altan or Tian. His hair was yellow and curly, and his eyes were blue. He was astonishingly handsome, and far more athletic-looking than Kiron had expected a scholar to be. His good looks were only slightly marred by the sardonic smile he wore when he saw Orest entering first, and reluctantly.

He was also clean-shaven, and his hair was cut even shorter than a Jouster’s. Kiron wondered if he was a slave—but if he was, he certainly didn’t act like one. He acted like a lord, actually.

“Well, Orest,” he drawled as they entered the room. Kiron noted a faint accent there, different from his own. “I suppose I can count on the fact that you read your assigned scroll?”

He sounded as if he meant the opposite, that he could count on Orest not having read the scroll.

“It is fifteen stanzas in praise of Te-oth, the god of scribes and the bringer of writing to mankind,” Orest replied, taking his seat on the cushion, and settling his desk on his lap. Kiron followed his example, a little awkwardly. “There are two initial stanzas about Te-oth specifically, several on how much a blessing writing and being able to write are, several more in praise of the profession of scribes and contrasting that profession with the misery of all others. I did notice that the author did not mention either Jouster or Councilor to the Great Ones as being inferior to the position of scribe, however.”

“Ah, but a Jouster is a sort of soldier, and a Councilor to the Great Ones has had to learn the craft of the scribe, so they are implied,” Arit retorted.

Orest shrugged. “The final two stanzas praise Te-oth for being the god who most consistently blesses mankind.”

All during this recitation, the tutor’s left eyebrow rose until it had climbed halfway up his forehead. “Well,” he said, when Orest was finished. “I must admit I am pleasantly surprised. If this new diligence is as a result of your association with my new pupil, I am going to revise my initial negative expectations of his influence on you. And as a reward—” Here he bent down, removed the jar of scrolls that had been at Orest’s side, and replaced it with a different one. “—here is literature you will find much more to your liking. Pick any of the three, you’ll be reading all of them and more eventually. I want you to read and then copy each of them, and since you will be needing them in your new career, I suggest you be more careful than you usually are in your copying.”

At that, Orest eagerly plucked a scroll out of the jar, unrolled it, and began scanning it. His face lit up. “Te-karna’s Natural History of Swamp Dragons! Thank you, Master!”

“Don’t thank me, thank your sister,” said the tutor, “and the Lord of Jousters. She’s the one who suggested that you would probably be more attentive if you were to concentrate on this particular subject, and she is the one who ran over after Dawn Rites with these scrolls borrowed from the temple librarian. What is more, by this time she has already spoken to the Lord of the Jousters about getting the loan of more scrolls. I fully expect him to agree. I believe he will be charmed by her audacity, which is just as well, since he is a man whom I would not care to cross.”

“Nor I,” Kiron murmured, earning himself a glance of approval from the tutor.

Orest’s face was a study in shock and chagrin. “I guess I owe her my thanks,” he said slowly.

“And an apology,” Kiron muttered, feeling as if Aket-ten was due more respect from her brother than he had seen. He had been very patronizing last night, even if she had been acting like a know-it-all, and this was how she had responded.

“You owe her more than that. You owe her the courtesy of being diligent from now on. Now, get to your work.” The tutor made an impatient gesture.

“And remember when it comes to your copying, if you mar the original—”

“—you have Father’s permission to beat me,” Orest said, with an air of having heard that before.

“No. I have the temple librarian’s orders to beat you until you will have to stand to eat,” the tutor said grimly. “She said, ‘A boy’s brains are in his buttocks; he learns better when beaten.’ I suggest that it would prove wise to take extra care and not force me to prove that theorem.”

Kiron was very glad that he’d had so much practice in keeping his feelings from showing, or he would probably have destroyed this new friendship by laughing at the expression on Orest’s face until he was sick.

But now it was his turn, as Orest bent over the scroll and the tutor turned to him. “So, boy, what do you know?”

“Nothing, master,” Kiron replied truthfully. “Or practically nothing. The little script I know is Tian.”

“Ah, chicken scratches.” The tutor dismissed Tian writing with an airy wave of his hand. “Just as well, then, you have nothing to unlearn. Well, here is your scroll, and here is a box of potsherds, and this is your pen. Take your scroll, and lay it out before you with the weights.”

It was a very short scroll, and fit perfectly across the top of his lap-desk. The weights were handsome ones, carved pale-brown soapstone images of—such a coincidence—the god Te-oth, in his bird-headed human form, his long, curved ibis bill poking out from beneath his wig.

“That’s right,” the tutor said approvingly. “Now take your pen in your hand as you see Orest doing. Good. Dip it in the ink. Not so much that you will drip, not so little that you will make an unreadable scratch.”

That was a little trickier; the reed pen had to be dipped several times before the tutor was happy.

“Now,” he said, pointing to the first symbol on the scroll with a longer reed. “This is aht.”

Slowly, the tutor took Kiron through the signs and hieratic shapes for the sounds of words. There were a great many of them, but fortunately the signs were all things that were easy to recognize, pictures of things which began with the sound in question, and the hieratic shapes were each a kind of sketch of that picture. Slowly, and with infinite care, he copied the hieratic shapes onto his potsherds. Over and over and over. When he came to the end of the scroll, he was required to go back to the beginning and copy again, forming the sound in his mind as he did so, melding shape, picture, and sound in his head. When he ran out of potsherds, it came as no great surprise to him that the tutor had another box ready for him. Bits of broken pottery were the logical thing to use to practice on; there were always plenty of them, and they served much better than precious papyrus.

It was harder work than it sounded, and by the time the lesson was over, he had a much greater respect for scribes than he had ever had before. Such a lot of shapes! He was certain he would never get them all right. And somehow, he was going to learn how to put those shapes together into words, and words into meaning. . . . Well, if Orest could manage, so could he.

Now he understood why the work of scribes was so important. Words, written words, must be magic, it took so much effort to set them down correctly. And he wondered, did scribes define the world and keep it from spinning off into other shapes with their hedge of words?

He was absolutely so mind-weary by the time the tutor declared that they were finished that he felt as if he had just done a week’s worth of work in a mere morning—

But there were, it seemed, to be a new set of lessons to replace the “mathematica” lessons that Orest had so despised.

As Orest carefully rolled up his scroll, and Kiron capped his pot of ink, the tutor addressed them both. “This will be something new for both of you, I think. You, Kiron, should have no difficulties, even injured as you are, but it is the opinion of the Lord of the Jousters that you, Orest, are in need of conditioning before you undertake to tame a dragon. Therefore, you are both to follow me, now, and I am to deliver you to the kymnasi.”

Now Kiron had not the faintest idea what the tutor was talking about; this was an Altan word that he had never heard before. But Orest looked considerably happier at that moment, so Kiron assumed that whatever it meant, it was not going to involve more scrolls and pens.

The tutor marched them out of the room, through several of the house’s public rooms, and straight out the door.

This was the first time that Kiron had been outside of Lord Ya-tiren’s house, for the ash pit where he took Avatre was well inside the garden walls. This was certainly the first time he had seen Alta City except for fleeting glances as he guided Avatre in that tricky bit of a hop, and he had to stop dead in his tracks and just look for a moment.

Lord Ya-tiren’s home was evidently in one of the outer rings of the city and stood, like its neighbors, on the top of a ridge. The ground sloped away toward the canal from this point. From here, Kiron got a good look at the area surrounding this—well, it was a minor palace, apparently. It stood among other fine homes; to the left was another palace like it, and to the right was a temple surrounded by a walled garden. He suspected that this was the temple to which Aket-ten was attached as a Nestling. These structures all stood along one side of a spacious avenue wide enough for several chariots to pass side by side. Beyond the avenue was one of the seven canals that ringed the city, and on the other side of the canal were more buildings, which seemed to be a bit smaller and crowded more closely together than those on this side of the canal. But beyond that, in the distance, was the heart and core of the city, a hill upon which the Palace of the Great Ones stood, as well as the Great Temple of Khum the Light-Bringer, and several other important buildings and temples. Built of alabaster and limestone, they shone in the sunlight as if they were gilded. And Kiron suddenly understood in that moment that no matter how big Mefis had been, Alta City was ten, a hundred times larger.

“Come along,” the tutor said, a little impatiently, but not without a look of understanding. Kiron followed down the stairs of the villa to the avenue, feeling dwarfed and altogether insignificant in the throng of humanity swirling around him. The thick walls of the villa had kept out the noises of the traffic, and the hum of hundreds and thousands of voices, but now it all surrounded him, and he for just a moment he found it a little hard to breathe.

But it appeared that this segment of the ring was a little city unto itself, for once they got past the next-door villa, there were markets, with shops and craftsmen. So everything that might be needed was here, within reach. And from the way people were acting, they were anything but strangers to one another.

All right, then, he told himself. This is just like a lot of villages all running into one another. It’s not just a giant hive. And some people recognized either the tutor or Orest as they passed, and smiled, or nodded a greeting.

Still, there were a lot of people. It looked as if, where the population of Tia was strung out along the Great Mother River, the population of Alta was mostly concentrated here. He was going to have to think about that, and what it might mean.

Meanwhile, they continued their brisk walk down the avenue, with the occasional cart or chariot passing by, and plenty of people being taken here and there in covered or even enclosed litters. There were a hundred scents in the air, and few of them were unpleasant; the ever-present scent of water, of course, and various cooking odors, and hot stone, and fires, and the scents of flowers that Kiron couldn’t identify. Most people seemed to be wearing perfume as well. There were differences from Tia, but truth to tell, Kiron would have said that there were more similarities than differences. The accent and some of the words differed, of course, enough that he had to think to understand people, though Altan was the tongue of his childhood, and he was falling back into the accent far faster than he would have thought.

They passed a cook shop, with a beer shop beside it; there were a couple of men arguing heatedly over something, while several bystanders listened as if their debate was some sort of entertainment. The tutor turned into what appeared to be another temple building, and they followed.

It turned out to be something quite different. There was a sort of entrance hall that they passed straight through; on the other side of that hall was an enormous courtyard, open to the sky, with a pool in the middle of it. Except for the pool, it looked like one of the Jousters’ landing courtyards, but this one was covered in turf, and there were young men engaged in all manner of sports spread out all over it, and more were swimming back and forth through the water.

Orest looked positively eager as the tutor summoned a white-kilted servant and requested the presence of At-alon. The servant hurried off, and came back with a middle-aged man who was as thoroughly Altan as the tutor was not; black-haired and dark-eyed, with a jutting chin, stocky and incredibly muscular.

“Ya-tiren’s boys, eh?” he said, and looked them up and down. “Thank you, Master Arit. I expect they’ll be able to find their way here from now on, when you’re done with them for the day.”

“I expect they will,” the tutor said dryly. “I’ll leave them here with you, then. Lord Ya-tiren expects them back in time for the noon meal.”

With that, the tutor left them; Kiron shifted his weight from foot to foot, wondering what was to come next.

“You,” the trainer said, pointing at Kiron, “are going to go do very light work until those ribs heal. I’ll have you myself. But you,” he continued, looking at Orest, “need all-around conditioning. See those boys over there?” he pointed to a group of boys of mixed ages, stretching and bending nearby, at the direction of another white-kilted man. “You go join them. They’ll be your work group until I say differently, or the Lord of the Jousters has orders. Hop!”

Orest hopped, without a single word of question or complaint, running off to join the group. He stopped only long enough to explain his presence to the man in charge, then took his place among the other boys. At-alon beckoned, and Kiron followed; they went around the outside of the huge courtyard until At-alon entered one of the doorways into it.

“Now don’t be alarmed; I’m not the sort that’s looking for a pretty boy,” the trainer said gruffly. “But I have to find out just where you’re hurt, and how, which means that I’ll be feeling you all over and pulling on you a bit to see what’s wrong. Hold your arms up, stand still, and if you feel pain—that’s pain, not general aches—say so.”

So Kiron was felt and poked and prodded, and it was soon ascertained that the pain was in his shoulders (still) and the rib cage at his back and left side.

“Good enough,” said At-alon. “Dislocated shoulders that are healing, and cracked ribs that are setting. Healers did a good job on your cuts, from the look of it. You’ve got fine muscle, boy, you’re going to need it, and we don’t want you to lose it while you heal up. So, since there’s nothing wrong with your legs, let’s see you do running rounds of the court until I say stop. Begin at a walk, and when you feel warmed up, increase speed to a run.”

Kiron obeyed, although it felt very, very strange to be running without having a place to be running to, and a duty at the end of the run. Still, in theory at least, he understood what At-alon was doing; since he wasn’t undergoing the strenuous work of a dragon-boy anymore, he knew that he’d better be getting some form of exercise or he’d lose all of the muscle he’d put on. So he ran.

He wasn’t the only runner; there were several boys and men doing the same thing. Some were faster than he, some slower; after a while, he began to feel a sort of pleasure in the exercise. The soft turf kept his ribs from jarring too much, and though he couldn’t run as freely or as fast as he used to because of the pain, it was still good to stretch the muscles of his legs. He could even feel them loosening as he ran.

Finally, the instructor beckoned to him to come into the center area where he was waiting. And then he did some strange arm movements with bags of sand in his hands; he supposed that they must be strengthening exercises, though for someone used to flinging big chunks of meat about and wheeling heavy barrows, they seemed a bit—feeble. After those, he did some bending and stretching, though not too much of those, because it put pressure on his rib cage. Then—carefully—some different things with bags of sand in his hands, only this time, when it began to hurt, he was to stop.

Orest was doing pretty much the same sort of things, only not as long, and not as hard, and he was getting tired much faster than Kiron was. It gave Kiron a feeling of wry satisfaction; at least here he was better than Orest at something. Or he would be until Orest toughened up.

Finally, they were sent to the baths, where they were bathed by yet more servants, massaged with oil with a crisp scent to it, and in Kiron’s case, rebandaged. Their tunics were taken away and brought back freshly cleaned. Then they were sent home, and it was time for the noon meal and a much-needed rest, for Altans, like Tians, took a rest, or even a nap, after the noon meal at the heat of the day. And today, Kiron was very happy to have that privilege that he never enjoyed as a dragon boy except during the rainy season.

They took their noon meal with the rest of the household; Lord Ya-tiren and those of his older sons who were still living at home. Orest came in for a great deal of teasing but some serious congratulation that he had been—tentatively at least—accepted as this new sort of Jouster in training. Kiron kept very quiet, and simply observed, though he caught Lord Ya-tiren watching him with approval now and again. Evidently Orest’s father felt that he, Kiron, was a good influence! Aket-ten was also much in evidence, reporting with triumph that the Lord of the Jousters had promised to lend copies of every scroll of Jousting training and dragon lore that the Jousters possessed. Kiron sighed. This was a little like hearing that the cooks were preparing a feast of every favorite food one had, at a time when toothache kept one from eating any of it!

He resolved to put more effort into learning to read.

Finally, with stomach full and the strong palm wine the lord favored at his table making Kiron a bit drowsy, he returned to the courtyard where Avatre was to discover that someone had cleverly set up a box of sand where she could deposit her leavings.

And before he could clean it out, a servant appeared.

Are they hovering just out of sight? he wondered, startled, Or are they able to know what I’m thinking? Either way, it made him uneasy; Orest might take such things for granted, but he wasn’t used to having people appear out of nowhere to take a task out of his hands before he started it.

“It is by the direction of the Order of Magi, my Lord, that the dragon’s—droppings—be taken to them, as the Jousting dragons’ are,” said the servant, with great politeness, relieving him of the shovel he had picked up. “That is my assignment, and your dragon seems not to mind.”

“Oh, she’s safe enough,” Kiron said blankly. “But I thought that—well, she looks dangerous, and your Jousting dragons are dangerous, so I thought—”

“That we would be afraid?” the servant replied, and smiled. “No, my Lord. The Lady Aket-ten told us that we need not fear the little dragon. This is all the assurance we need.”

“Well—ah—thank you, then,” Kiron replied, and once the servant and his burden were gone, after giving Avatre a great deal of attention and scratching, he went to lie down on his cot in the shade.

His dreams were full of hieroglyphs and hieratic script at first, but then the sign for “wah,” which was a pair of wings, swept under him and carried him off, and the wings turned into Avatre.

And then his dreams were full of flying.

The afternoon was given over, as Orest had said, to listening to philosophers and historians teach. Except that Avatre needed some flying exercise (though not nearly as much as a fully grown Jousting dragon did).

And since Orest was going to have to learn this anyway, Kiron decided to help his friend out by recruiting him to learn how to put the harness on a dragon, using Avatre, who would by far be the easiest he would ever handle until his own dragon got used to the weight and feel of it. The philosophers and historians would still be there when Avatre had been exercised.

“Later I’ll let you fly her, too, if she’ll take you,” he said, “But not until I’m healed, and she’s stronger, and not until I’m sure, really sure, that she’ll always obey me if I’m on the ground.”

Orest looked disappointed, but he didn’t voice it, which Kiron thought was very much to his credit.

Avatre was practically quivering with excitement, and the need to get into the sky. Kiron had to use a stool to get onto her back; his ribs hurt him too much when he tried to climb up the usual way, even with her lying down.

Finally he gave her the signal she was longing for, and she leaped up like an arrow from a fully pulled bow. And she jarred him so that he sucked in his breath in a hiss to keep from yelping and startling her. This wasn’t going to be easy. . . .

And, in fact, until she reached the height that pleased her and found a thermal to soar with, it was damnably painful.

But once she spread her wings to the warm, rising air and stopped jouncing him, and he was able to look down—he found himself thinking that the view was worth some pain.

The hot wind of the kamiseen held them aloft; up here it tasted of the arid desert, a little. Avatre stretched her wings and her neck and he could swear that he saw her smiling. From here he could see the innermost two canals of the seven that ringed Alta City, and a good part of the third. And from here, it was quite clear how the city had grown. The first canal must have been dug around a relatively high spot in the delta marshlands, and everything that was dug up had been deposited in the center, building up what eventually became the hill upon which the Great Ones’ Palace and all the important temples stood, as well as the minor palaces of all of the most important nobles of Alta. Probably everyone in Alta City had once lived there, but eventually, as the city grew, and those of rank and wealth wished more and more land, the common folk were pushed across the canal to the other side.

Where they promptly built themselves another circular canal to protect themselves, depositing what they dug out on the land they intended to occupy, exactly as the Altan farmers were doing out in the marshlands even now. So this second ring of houses, markets, and craftsmen also had its own hill, or rather, ridge, not as tall as the Royal Hill, but certainly enough to give those who lived on top of it a slightly more panoramic view than those who did not.

Then, as the nobles and wealthy grew more numerous, and there began to be divisions of rank even among the notable, the lesser nobility found themselves being pushed off the Royal Hill. They certainly would not have chosen to live among the commoners of the First Ring, and the commoners had no intentions of surrendering what they had a second time, so—a third canal was dug, forming the Second Ring, where those who could not claim divine blood in their veins settled. And again, this ring had a raised ridge of its own running down the center of the ring, which was where Lord Ya-tiren’s villa stood, as well as the temples that could not compete for status on Royal Hill.

By this time, of course, Kiron could guess the next part of the tale. With nobility now living in the outermost ring, there would be a call for protection—

He peered in the direction of the Third Canal; although the air was much hazier here than in Tia, he thought he saw a dragon in the distance. He gave Avatre the signal to send her in that direction—which was, in any case, a safer one than allowing her to head in the one she wanted, which was to try the thermals and updrafts of Royal Hill. He had an idea that overflying the Palace of the Great Ones might get him in a spot of trouble.

How she read the air, he could not guess, but she seemed to be able to see thermals somehow. She spiraled up the one she was in, then began a long glide down over the Third Canal, and caught another on the opposite side. And just as Kiron had guessed, down below were the barracks of the army, the shops and cook shops and drink shops that catered to them, the homes of those who ran and served in those shops, and the whole support structure of armories and stables, forges and supply warehouses, Healers and training grounds and practice fields that an army needed.

And here, too, were the temples of those gods that loved soldiers, and that soldiers loved, and the pens of animals waiting to be sacrificed.

And, as he had expected, the Jousters’ Compound.

It looked very like its Tian counterpart, with some differences. Three fourths of the pens had hot water wallows, not sand pits. And in those pens that had wallows, the dragons were a little smaller than those he was used to, their colors darker. They looked up as soon as they spotted him, of course, their heads weaving back and forth on their long necks. The familiar sounds of slightly irritated dragons drifted up to him from below.

Well, he didn’t want to make any trouble for anyone, especially not the dragon boys who might have to calm their charges if they got any more restless, so he angled Avatre away, curious though she was to look at these odd and unfamiliar relatives.

The Third Ring did not have a hill; whether this was by accident or chance, Kiron could not tell. It might merely have been that the Third Ring covered so much area that the ground that had been dug to make the Fourth Canal was barely enough to raise it all above flood level. Then again, since the Third Ring was devoted entirely to Alta’s military, it could be that no one had felt the need to be physically higher than anyone else.

Beyond the Fourth Canal it was quite clear that the land had been given over to farming, and Kiron had no real interest in seeing what lay there. He knew that three more canals lay beyond the Fourth, probably settled as farmers prospered and their sons desired farms of their own, and continued what had now become habit and custom, of building up farmland by digging out a canal that was as much for drainage as for protection. The canals were all linked by subchannels that cut across the rings like the spokes of a wheel; more spokes were formed by the bridges that linked the roads of the Rings. It was unexpectedly beautiful, and when he thought about all of the labor that had gone into creating the city, his head just swam.

Other than the dragons of the Jousters’ Compound, no one looked up when the shadow of a flying dragon passed over them. Avatre soared from thermal to thermal above the Third Ring to her heart’s content. There were boats out in the canals; little fishing boats, larger barges. Some were hauling cargo from the outer to the inner rings; some were clearly pleasure boats, or the boats carrying officials about on their duties. As he watched, he even saw a species of small boat that seemed to be coming in to land whenever someone on shore hailed it. After a moment, it came to him that these boats must be for hire, to take people wherever in the Rings they wished to go, like hired litters or chariots. That would be much faster than walking, though he doubted that it would be faster than driving a chariot.

The sound of a gong below him startled him, and he looked straight down to discover that he was directly above one of the temples, where a ritual was just beginning, the gong being the signal for the worshipers to gather. And that reminded him that he had an appointment of his own to keep; more lessons. He sent Avatre angling back the way she had come, crossed the Third Canal, and soon spotted Lord Ya-tiren’s manor, with Orest watching anxiously down in one of the minor courtyards. A servant was just arriving with a barrowload of meat, and seeing that, Avatre was not at all loath to land.

Nor, truth to tell, was Kiron; flying required a great deal of the rider, as he shifted his weight and balance to help his dragon. Between that exertion and the exercises of the morning, he was sore.

On the whole, he was going to welcome these lessons, if it meant he might sit at his leisure and merely listen.

Orest hurried to help him take off Avatre’s harness; all of her attention was on that barrow, and when Kiron wheeled it close enough to her that she could reach it, she dove in. He knew that when she was sated, she would want to sleep, so she would not miss him for the rest of the afternoon.

“I was beginning to wonder if you’d decided to fly off again, after seeing all the lessons you were going to have to do,” Orest said, only half teasing, as they made their way out of the manor again, this time going toward the temple next door.

“Why, because you would have?” Kiron teased.

Orest made a face. “Well, yes, actually. We’re going to the temple where my sister is a Nestling; they hold lectures on philosophy and history in the courtyards there. Which do you want first?”

Kiron shrugged as much as he could without further jarring his rib cage. “It’s all one to me; you pick.”

Orest sighed. “History, then. Philosophers go on forever unless it’s close to dinnertime.”

Kiron laughed, and followed his friend in through the gates of the temple, which featured a pair of rainbow-colored wings supporting a slender golden flame. Despite Orest’s glum face, he had a notion that this was going to be interesting. He was beginning to have the impression that Orest was not, and never would be interested in anything that required exercise of his mind, but Kiron felt rather like a sponge that had been dry all of its life and had suddenly been put into water. Let Orest sigh and look gloomy; he was going to enjoy all this “tutoring.”

SIX

KIRON remained as still as a hungry crocodile lying in wait, as Lord Khumun-thetus surveyed the group of youngsters before him in the antechamber to the Jousters’ Compound. He did not yet want to draw attention to himself. Soon enough, these boys, some of whom were actually older than he, would discover that he, Kiron-son-of-unknown-Kiron, was to be, in essence, their trainer, their Overseer, and ultimately, the one who would pass judgment on their ability to raise a dragonet. Or not. That was going to cause some resentment, he feared, but it couldn’t be helped. In all of Alta City there was only one person who knew how to raise a dragon from the egg, and that person was not going to entrust a precious dragonet to careless hands.

It was a mixed lot, drawn from every possible class. There were several boys who had been animal handlers—Kiron had high hopes for the one who had been tending to lions and cheetahs, and the one who had been taking care of some high-ranking noble’s hawks. There were, of course, quite a few nobly born youngsters, of whom one was Orest.

And there was a prince.

Or at least, Toreth-aket was a prince as Kiron understood the term. Toreth and his brother had been frequent visitors to Orest, for Toreth had been Orest’s friend long before Ya-tiren’s son had the lodestone of a dragon in his courtyard. Kiron had been astonished when he learned just who and what Orest’s friend was.

Here in Alta, succession to rule was not in a direct line, nor was it even matrilineal as it was in Tia, where the man who married the firstborn daughter of the Great King was the man who succeeded to the throne. There were several royal families or clans here, and the thrones went to the two sets of married twins in the Royal Houses who were oldest when the thrones became vacant.

Toreth-aket and his brother Kaleth-aket were currently the oldest set of male twins within the Royal Houses, and they had been betrothed in their cradles to the oldest pair of female twins (who were actually three years older than they were). When one of the current set of Great Ones died or became incapacitated, it would mean that the rest of the group would have to step down. When that happened, Toreth and Kaleth, if not already married, would be wedded and crowned all on the same day, and take over the ruling of Alta.

Now, it might seem that Toreth would have been forbidden to take his place among the Jousters on that account alone, but if Kiron understood things correctly, the Altans had very specific requirements for their princes. One of the male twins was always to be a scribe or a priest, while the other was always to take some sort of military training. Becoming a Jouster counted, evidently.