Alta

If Kiron had not known that the two were twins, he would never have guessed it. He would have known that they were brothers, of course, for there was that much familial resemblance there, but otherwise they were nothing alike. Both had eyes of the same deep brown, and thin, angular faces, and both wore their own hair and wore it long, past their shoulders, braided with hundreds of tiny braids.

For anyone other than scion of a royal family or a merchant of dazzling wealth, this little quirk would have been impossible. Such a labor-intensive hairstyle required several body servants and was a sign that the wearer was of higher status than even someone who could afford the finest of wigs. The wig always remained perfect; one’s own hair needed unbraiding and rebraiding all the time.

So both had the “royal” hairstyle. But there the resemblance ended. Toreth was strong, tall, supremely athletic, and able to make lightning judgments. Kaleth was shorter than his twin, did not give a toss for games but was a brilliant scholar, who already read and spoke five languages fluently, and would ponder every question for hours before making a decision. Both were good-natured and hard-working, and generous to a fault. If Kiron had been asked to choose the people he would most trust, next to Aket-ten and Orest, it would have been Toreth and Kaleth.

Nevertheless, Toreth might face failure here for the first time in his life, for he would have to impress Lord Khumun of his sincerity. Might—though truth to tell, Kiron didn’t think it likely that Toreth would fail.

“You are here today,” said Lord Khumun, “because all of you want to be Jousters. I suspect that eventually all of you will become Jousters, but this is a group who will become a very particular set of Jousters—you will be beginning your training years earlier than any other Altan ever has, and you will be raising your own dragons, literally from the egg.”

There were nods all around, and some sighs. Of course, all the boys here knew this; it was why they had petitioned, begged, pleaded—some of them—to be allowed to join this group. But other than Orest and the two animal handlers, Kiron didn’t think any of them had any notion how much work was going to be involved.

“This means,” Lord Khumun continued, “that you will be doing things that no Jouster of Alta has ever had to do before. And I do not,” he went on, raising an eyebrow at one particularly enthusiastic-looking lad, “mean what you think I mean. No. What I mean, just to begin with, is that you who win the way to a dragon egg, will, at least in the first year, be doing all of the work that a dragon boy normally would perform and doing it by yourselves. This means feeding, tending, cleaning out the pen, exercising, grooming, training. All of it. While a dragon boy or other servant will be assigned to you to bring the dragonet’s food to you and tend to your quarters, you will be doing all of the work in the pen. There will be no exceptions, unless you are so ill or injured that you cannot move from your bed.”

From the look of shock on one or two faces, Kiron knew that this revelation had come as a complete, and entirely unpleasant, surprise.

“I have it on the authority of the second of only two men ever to accomplish this feat that this sort of thing is an absolute requirement to achieve the goal we want, which is a tame and bonded dragon,” Lord Khumun went on, “And from my own studies of animals, I am in complete agreement with him. So, if there are any of you for whom this requirement is too distasteful to contemplate, please, feel free to take your leave of us.” He paused, and looked straight at those who had been looking the most shocked or unhappy. “You will not be considered a failure in any sense. We will need true volunteers for this, young men who will find it no burden, will even find some pleasure in taking care of their charge’s every need. Dragons are immensely sensitive creatures and they will know and react to unhappiness on the part of their riders—especially since this group will be handled completely without the use of tala. So if you have misgivings, please take yourself from the group. There will continue to be wild dragons trapped, and we will continue to train and recruit Jousters of the old sort for some time. And this will not be the first wing formed from tame dragons, so if you decide you want to try, say, next year, there will be another wing recruited. Just because you elect not to join this wing means only that you will have to wait until you are older before you can volunteer to train with the traditional Jousters, and if you change your minds, there will be other chances with tame dragons in the future.”

There was a shuffling of feet, and then, almost as if they had read one another’s minds and found reinforcement in numbers, a group of five separated from the main group. Lord Khumun gave them a perfectly friendly little nod, and heartened by this, they filed out of the room.

“Now, as for the rest of you, for those of you who do not know this young man, this is Jouster Kiron, rider of Avatre, who will be supervising you, guiding you, and training you.” Now Lord Khumun gestured to Kiron, who came forward from where he had been standing off to one side. He was wearing the Altan Jouster’s “uniform” now: the soft, wrapped kilt that covered a hardened leather, groin-protecting loin cup such as the ones that bull dancers wore; the leather harness with hardened-leather shoulder and bicep armor; the wide stiff leather belt; the hardened shin guards. His hair had been cut at chin-length, and he carried his helmet, hoping that he did not look as young as he felt.

“Kiron, rider of Avatre, only the second bonded and tame dragon in all the world, will now describe to you exactly what your duties will be—in detail—for the next year or so. And once again, any of you who believe this to be beneath their dignity, please, remove yourselves.” Lord Khumun looked them over and heaved a theatrical sigh. “I have undertaken to supply an egg to every boy who remains and passes through the initial training. Frankly, I would be just as pleased to see your ranks thinned a little further.”

There was a weak chuckle at that, as Kiron took a deep breath, reminded himself that he, at this moment, as he stood, was the equal to any of the boys here in rank. Yes, even the prince. I am a Jouster, even if I have never ridden to combat. I have a dragon who answers only to me. And without me, there will be no tame dragons to Joust for Alta. He was a unique and valuable weapon in the Altan arsenal. There were several pairs of princes. There was only one Kiron, one Avatre.

“First,” he said, “you’re going to start by becoming dragon boys yourselves, serving dragons we already have. You will take the place of the dragon boys in this compound until such time as you understand the serving of a dragon completely.”

A couple of the boys gulped. He didn’t blame them. Three of the dragons that had been here had been actual killers; they could only be handled with their jaws muzzled, which had made feeding them—exciting. These three had been handled only by men, two of them, at all times.

“There are no more killer dragons in the compound,” he announced. “Lord Khumun and I have had some success with retraining the dragons that are currently here using falconry techniques.” Was he sweating? He hoped not. He wanted to look confident. He had to get their respect now, or he could have trouble with them later. “It has taken us most of a moon, but even the killers are now on reasonably good behavior, for wild-caught dragons.”

And that had been an ordeal! But the results had been striking. Or at least, it was now possible for the dragons to be handled and groomed without the risk of a dragon boy losing life or limbs.

“But although they are no longer killers, you must remember at all times that they are still dangerous.” He swallowed, and was very glad that his voice had broken during the moon he and Lord Khumun had been doing the retraining. Having his voice crack and squeak would have done nothing to add to his air of authority. “We will be handling them with choking chains, and you will never actually be alone with your charge; the current dragon boy will always be with you to help get you out of difficulty. But make no mistake about it, you will be doing the work. And once your egg hatches, you will still be doing most of the work. We have decided that the first several moons with the dragonet are absolutely crucial, and if your dragonet sees someone else, or worse, is fed by someone else, we don’t know if she or he will bond properly to you. So you are going to have to be comfortable with doing a great deal of manual labor.” He tried to look apologetic, but he had the feeling he wasn’t succeeding. When he thought about what he’d had to go through—feeding and tending three dragons at once, one of them secretly—he couldn’t feel at all sorry for them. “So, until the eggs get here, this is how your days will go—”

He’d practiced this speech in front of Aket-ten so many times that he didn’t have to think about it anymore. He just told them, clearly and precisely, how much work they would be doing. And although they would not be tending to the Jouster as well as the dragon, nor would they be required to do all the work of repairing harness and weapons and drying tala and the rest, they would be continuing whatever studies their fathers deemed necessary. He had to hide his grin when he saw Orest’s face fall at that news—nor was Orest the only one to look disappointed.

“There will be tutors coming here, to avoid the waste of time it would take for you to come to them. Most of us will share tutors and lectures.”

But not me. I get Master Arit to myself. Lord Ya-tiren said so. He was getting a tutor all to himself to accelerate his reading ability; Lord Khumun had decided that until he knew how to read well, he would be getting the extra tutoring. Master Arit was pleased with his progress. He could read simple things now. He had a new shrine to his father’s spirit, and he could read the prayers for the dead inscribed on its side. Master Arit was certain that with the full attention of a very good tutor—and his own determination—he would pass for a boy as well educated as Orest within a year.

“Your day will begin when you rise about dawn. This is when your dragon will rise. It will take your dragon some little time to come out of the torpor of sleep, and you will take this time to ready his morning meal.”

He continued describing what their days would be like; when he was done, four more boys decided that this project was not to their taste. That left them with eight, of which the prince, looking more eager than ever, was still one. Kiron was surprised, a little, and yet, considering what he had heard about Toreth, perhaps he shouldn’t have been. He had never, ever heard anyone say that either of the princes was afraid of a little hard work.

“You’re sure, now,” Lord Khumun said earnestly, looking each and every one of them in the eyes. “You’re absolutely sure that you can undertake this, and that in fact, you want to?”

Each of them nodded soberly but with a glow of anticipation. Even Orest.

“All right.” He looked over at Kiron. “Four eggs in a clutch, you say?”

“That’s what I was told, and that was what I observed, my Lord,” he replied firmly. “Mature females always lay four eggs.”

“Then we’ll stake out our two female desert dragons and hope for the best,” the Lord of the Jousters decided. “We’ll wait to see if we need to go after swamp dragon eggs only after we find out what is going to happen with the desert dragons.”

Kiron nodded; that would be his choice, too. The swamp dragons had proved to be a bit more reptilian in nature than the desert dragons, and a bit more difficult to handle, although it had been the wild-caught male desert dragons that had proven to be the killers.

Maybe because they once ate a man. That was always problematic; once a wild dragon tasted human blood, it always knew that eating a human was an option.

The two desert dragon females that had been taken from Tian Jousters were lazy—half the reason they’d been caught was that they very much preferred to be fed rather than to hunt. Being lazy was an advantage now on a number of counts. In the past, they had proved that they were unlikely to fight their chains when staked out as “bait.” This meant, when they were taken off the heavier dose of tala, so that they would come into season properly, it would still be possible to handle them. They would probably not try to fight off their would-be mates, and in fact, might well be quite responsive. And when they finally began laying their eggs, they were less likely to be aggressive about defending the newly laid eggs than a more active dragon.

The last advantage was that Kiron knew exactly what to expect and how to incubate a desert dragon egg. Swamp dragons—that was going to be a matter of experimentation, as far as he was concerned. If they could get eight fertile desert dragon eggs—

Eight boys, eight eggs. Nine was a good size for a wing. They could learn and drill together, learn to fight as a group.

“If the gods are kind, both dragons will mate, and all the eggs will be fertile,” he replied.

“I will be making sacrifices today, and every day until hatching,” Lord Khumun said firmly, and cast a now-steely eye over his new volunteers. “And so should you all.”

And so they did. But not before Kiron put them through their first day with utter disregard for their comfort.

They drew lots for which boy was assigned to which dragon, that way no one could claim that Kiron had shown any favoritism in his assignments. As it happened, Orest and Toreth got the two easiest to handle, saving only the two captured females, which had already gone to the edge of the desert to await their suitors. One was a huge swamp dragon that Kiron suspected was actually a cross-breed, terribly lazy; the other was a small male desert dragon that, provided you didn’t move too quickly and made certain he had his full ration of tala, was no worse than any of the fledgling-caught desert dragons. The rest, however, were typical Altan Jousting dragons, which was to say, by Tian standards, difficult.

Kiron introduced the boys to their charges slowly, one each day, while the remaining boys watched during the entire day. He kept Orest and Toreth for last, so that when they actually got their dragons, they had seen (and helped with) virtually every problem that the draconic mind could come up with saving only illness and injury. They were both prepared for the worst, probably expecting that Kiron had saved the worst for last, so as a result, they were completely on their guard and unlikely to let their guard down for the moon or so it would take before the eggs were laid. Of all things, Kiron did not want them to trust their dragons at all. It had been his experience that injuries happened when dragon boys took the tameness of their charges for granted, and became just a little careless in their presence. Perhaps they pressed their charges in a way that they would never have considered with a wilder dragon. Perhaps they turned their backs one too many times. Or perhaps they made a slip they would have been too wary to do in the presence of a more dangerous beast. It did always seem to be the ones that everyone considered the best behaved who inflicted the worst injuries.

He was far from idle himself; besides keeping track of every one of the boys of his new wing, he was training Avatre, twice a day, every day. He knew at this point that there was no choice in the matter; if he was going to train the others, he had to work out how to train them himself.

He counted himself lucky that Avatre was, if anything, more sweet-tempered than Kashet. She put up with indignities from his clumsy experiments that would have left him kicking his legs as he went down the throat of a less-patient dragon.

And she was growing apace; he’d already had to have new harness and saddle made for her, and it looked as if she was going to need another set of kit before two moons had passed. Ah well, the old rig certainly wasn’t going to go to waste; the leatherworkers were using it as the pattern for eight more harnesses, and the benefit was, if the dragon fit the first harness, they’d know it was big enough to fly with a rider.

It occurred to him when he’d let out her cinches as far as he could, that he was growing, too . . . a growth spurt that had begun when he had joined the dragon boys and was still going. Lack of food had kept him stunted; plentiful food had set him growing like a weed. He doubted that he would ever be very tall, but—

And my voice just broke. Girls were beginning to look a bit more interesting to him as well.

And he wondered, in the dark of the night, just how old he really was. Older than even he had thought, he suspected, or his voice wouldn’t have broken already.

Could I be fifteen Floods old now? Fourteen, anyway? He had lost track of the Floods once he’d been made into a serf; no one ever celebrated his birthday, for what was there to celebrate in another year in captivity? One day had been like another, varying only in degrees of misery. Maybe he was fifteen Floods old now. That would make him as old as most of the others.

That would do no harm; the others would accept him as trainer and leader more readily if he was older than he’d thought.

He grew to know the boys during this time, and somewhat to his surprise, there was not a single one that he was not happy to have as a friend, and that realization, made one day as he was helping Toreth harness his charge, nearly stunned him. He, who had never had a real friend before, now had eight—nine, counting Aket-ten—

It was at that moment that he also realized that for the first time in his life, he was happy. And the revelation left him stunned for the rest of the evening.

As for Orest, his first friend had truly found his passion. He had flung himself into the work with his dragon to the point where Kiron sometimes had to order him to rest. When he wasn’t tending his dragon—which was so immaculately groomed that his scales gleamed like gems—he was reading about them, asking advice of the other dragon boys, and even (when he dared) querying the Jousters about combat. His father, from being resigned, was now as proud of his youngest son as he was of his eldest.

Where Orest was vocal and single-minded in his passion, Toreth was a little more divided. Then again, he had to be; as the likeliest heirs to the thrones, he and his brother perforce spent a lot of time in learning governance. And, though this was not what Kiron would have expected, mastering the tasks of dragon care came as easily to the prince as breathing. Perhaps it was his calmness, which seemed to have as much of a tranquilizing effect on his charge as the tala did. After the first day, Toreth had come to the pens with the royal hairstyle gone; he had opted for a cut like Aket-ten’s, just at chin length. He said nothing about it, and nothing was ever said to him, but Kiron knew that he was serious after that day.

The remaining six were a mixed bag indeed, but none of them was in any danger of failing this final test before they were given custody of a precious egg.

Two had turned out to be as competent as Kiron had expected. Ka-lenteth, the falconer, had the most fractious of the beasts, and as a result, took longer than the others to accustom it to his hand. It even tried his immense store of patience a time or two, and he was the only one to be injured. Not badly, but his dragon had learned the use of his tail to intimidate, and Kiron finally had to get the young falconer fitted with actual boots before the moon was over. Kalen (as he liked to be called) was the smallest of the boys, thin and wiry, and seldom spoke. When he did, it was in a low, soft voice. Kiron only heard him shout the once, when he got the first lash of a tail across his shins.

Pe-atep, the cat keeper, was Kalen’s match in patience, but was his exact opposite physically. He was taller and broader than the prince, with an equally broad, flat face and a booming voice when he raised it in conversation. He had no trouble with his fractious charge, actually staring it down during their first confrontation—something he said also worked on lions. He and Kalen were often found experimenting with minute changes in the dragons’ diets to see if there was any corresponding change in their behavior. Not varying the tala ration, of course, but changing the kinds of meat and the mix of meat to organs, adding things like hide and hair.

Huras was a friend of Pe-atep, though not an animal keeper. The son of a baker, he was the lowest-born of the lot. And was second to no one in his intelligence. He tore through the scrolls on dragons, Jousting, and dragon keeping twice as fast as anyone else, and anything he read stayed in his memory forever. Otherwise, he was average-looking in appearance; he probably would have run to fat if he hadn’t been working so hard.

Then there was Gan. Ganek-at-kel-te-ronet would have been the highest ranking member of their group, if the prince had not been one of them. Gan was tall, lanky, and had a languid air about him that gave the impression that he didn’t care a great deal for anything except, perhaps, food and gossip. Nothing could have been farther from the truth. He was the oldest, no longer a boy, but a young man—and his airs concealed a passion as fervent as Orest’s. Kiron had the feeling that, like Orest, he had been looking for something for his entire life without knowing what it was. And now he had found it.

Equally deceptive was Oset-re, the peacock of the group, and a friend of Orest’s. He was, to put it bluntly, the most beautiful human being that Kiron had ever seen, of either sex. No matter what the time of day or the task he was engaged in, he was always impeccably, flawlessly groomed and clothed. Whenever he ventured outside the compound, women flirted with him covertly or openly, and like Ari, there were even women who pursued him shamelessly. And he wore his peacock persona like the mask it was. Beneath the seeming vanity was a hard purpose, honed to razor sharpness. He had seen what Kiron had with Avatre on an early visit, and he was determined to have something like that bond for himself. But not at “all” costs; he would have it with honor or not at all. Even if it meant ruining his finest kilts to achieve it.

He had already made one great sacrifice: the day after Toreth cut his hair, so did Oset-re.

Last was shy Menet-ka, who never spoke above a whisper or unless he was first spoken to, who hung at the back of any group, and who seldom made eye contact. He was so successful at self-effacement that most people who knew him would have had a hard time describing him, and if there were three other people in a room, would forget he was there. He had never yet demonstrated why he was here, for it must have taken an extraordinary act of will for him to put himself forward, but part of it might have been that he had been one of Oset-re’s best friends from childhood. And the other was, without a doubt, that he, too, had seen the bond that Kiron shared with Avatre, and wanted something like that for himself with all his heart.

This was his wing; as different as it was possible for individuals to be, yet as they shared food and work, they began to forge a friendship among themselves that defied both stereotype and description.

As the eight sat together over supper, nearly a full moon into their “trial” period, Kiron approached their table carrying a jar. They all looked up immediately at the sound of his now familiar step, even Menet-ka. He put the jar down in the middle of the table.

“That doesn’t look like beer or wine to me,” said Gan lazily. “So what is it doing on our table, estimable wing leader?”

“You are each going to draw two of the pebbles from that jar to determine what your colors are going to be,” Kiron explained. “We’re going to need a way to tell each other apart in the air; the regular Jousters don’t do this, but they also don’t fight as a group because they daren’t get their dragons too close to one another. We are going to be very different; but we’ll have to know who is who in order to play to everyone’s individual strengths. So you’ll all wear your colors on your armor and harness, and we’ll probably fly streamers or something.”

“And your colors?” asked Orest.

“I pulled rank on you and chose black and scarlet,” he admitted, with a grin. “Because they go well with Avatre’s colors. You’ll get whatever you get—though, if you really hate the combination you choose, you can swap among yourselves.”

“I suspect I’ll be forced to,” moaned Oset-re. “I would rather die than be seen in colors that clashed with my dragon.”

The rest snickered, and Kiron laughed out loud. “In that case, draw first,” he suggested. “That way you’ll have the best odds for the best choices.”

He didn’t have to ask Oset-re twice; the handsome lad stood up and plunged his hand into the jar up to the elbow. And when he opened his closed fist, he heaved an exaggerated sigh of relief as the painted pebbles in his hand were revealed.

“Black and white!” he said, sitting down. “What a relief! Black and white go with everything; I can’t even imagine a swamp dragon that those colors would clash with. Well, I won’t have to kill myself after all.”

Orest was next to take the plunge into the jar, and emerged with blue and scarlet. “Well, you’ll certainly be able to see me,” was his only comment.

Toreth came up with yellow and white; Gan got green and brown. Pe-atep’s pick was black and yellow, and his friend Kalen ended up as yellow and brown. Huras got blue and black, and Menet-ka, who predictably chose last, did not seem unhappy with his green and white.

“So, why are we taking colors right now?” asked Gan. “Why not wait to see what color dragons hatch out?”

Kiron grinned; he couldn’t help it. He had some very good news for them. “Partly because of the training games I’m going to be giving you,” he said, “but mostly because Lord Khumun told me today that both females have mated with three different males, which ought to pretty much guarantee that all four eggs each lays will be fertile.”

Heads at the other tables turned as all eight of the wing broke into a cheer—even Menet-ka. “When are they coming back?” Orest asked excitedly.

“Their Jousters are flying the ladies back tomorrow,” Kiron told them, now allowing his grin to show. “They’ll be sequestered in their pens and stuffed full of as much as they’ll eat to nourish the eggs to come. Three males were also trapped, so there will be three new Jousters training with them, which will allow us to try falcon training right from the start instead of having a dragon that needs to unlearn a lot of bad habits. You’ll be observing that, by the way; no point in missing the opportunity. So, the reason you’ve gotten your colors now is because you’re going to draw lots for who gets the eggs in what order.”

He took the pebbles from each boy, and put them back in the jar. This was going to be a complicated system, but it guaranteed random chance. “Everyone take a pebble. If you don’t get one of your colors, put it back but don’t take a new one until the next round.”

Only Menet-ka got one of his colors the first time; on the second round, Gan and Orest got one of theirs, and on the third, Menet-ka made the first combination. So Menet-ka, who always hung back, was going to get the first egg. It seemed to Kiron there was a certain justice in that.

The jar went around enough times for everyone to be impatient before it was over. Orest’s egg came in the middle, and it was Pe-atep who would get the last of the eggs. Although everyone except Menet-ka moaned about the wait, no one really seemed unhappy. And Kiron was very proud of them all when Menet-ka offered to trade his place with any of the rest of them and no one took him up on the offer.

“You’re as ready as any of us, and more ready than I am,” said Orest stoutly, even though Kiron knew he was afire to have that egg in his possession.

“So, let’s go look at the pens, and get your colors up outside them,” Kiron urged; eager to put their imprint on what would be the centers of their worlds for the next several moons, they filed after him, going out into the torch-lit, open-topped corridors to a newly built section of pens.

Here were ten of the sand-pit pens (one would stay empty for now), all along the same corridor, five on either side. Avatre’s was the first, and already had a block of four squares of red and black inside a lozenge-outline painted on the wall outside it. A servant with brushes and paints waited for them at the entrance to Avatre’s pen.

They got pens in the order in which they would get their eggs; this meant that a hatching dragon would only have noise on one wall, keeping disturbances as minimal as possible. Kiron was not sure what Lord Khumun had done, but despite initial objections, the Magi had agreed to create spells that moved the heat from some of the hot springs that created water too hot and too sulfurous to use into the sands of the pens. While the adult dragons could cope with the shifting levels of heat in sand pits warmed by ovens or other means, hatching eggs needed a constant temperature. Kiron hoped he had gotten that temperature absolutely right, but the only way to tell would be if the eggs all hatched.

From the beginning, these pens had been set up with living quarters as part of them; there would be no makeshift pallets for the boys of Kiron’s wing. Eventually, of course, the dragons would be old enough to be able to sleep alone, as Kashet did, but until then, they would need their boys—their “mothers”—with them. Especially at night.

When Lord Khumun wanted something done, apparently it got done; here were thick-walled pens, (with walls, not of mud brick, but of stone) with roofed living quarters, running water (every two pens shared a room for bathing where, presumably, the boys would also get water for their dragons), heated sands, and a better canvas roof arrangement for the rainy season than the Tian Jousters had. And it had all been constructed within a moon or so.

The boys were impressed, and well they should be, for this was nothing short of amazing. The only time Kiron had heard of construction going up faster was when a Royal Tomb was being built.

“After the eggs are hatched, we will begin constructing more pens for the next lot of volunteers,” Lord Khumun had said to Kiron, “But I do not want to chance anything that might disturb the eggs.”

“Well,” Kiron said to his new wing. “Will this do?”

“I should like to move in now, if I might,” said Toreth. He looked around at the others, who nodded agreement.

“I don’t have any objections,” Kiron told them, though secretly, he was pleased. The boys were all living at their homes now; he wanted them at the compound as soon as he could get them here. The sooner they settled into their new way of life, the better, but they could hardly have gone in with the existing dragon boys. For one thing, there wasn’t really room, and for another, there was bound to be tension there before long. The dragon boys were freeborn, as in Tia, but they were mostly from extremely poor families, and there was not a single one of the new wing that wasn’t at least from the caste of craftsmen. And as for Toreth—

Well, while Kiron doubted that the prince himself would have any objections to being put in with boys from the lowest levels of society, anyone with so much as a single drop of noble blood in his veins would probably have a fit the moment word got out that a prince was being housed with the peasantry. And the screams of outrage would be heard on the top of the Great Tower of the Royal Palace.

“You could move in at any point, including tonight,” Kiron told them all.

Toreth grinned. “Then I am sending a runner for my things. Mother has an entire herd of female relatives visiting her, and the gabble and cackle is like to drive me mad.”

“And I believe I shall do likewise,” Gan drawled. “It’s going to take me a quarter moon to get these quarters comfortable anyway, and I might as well start now.”

That started the stampede, and before long, as Kiron joined Avatre in their quarters, he could hear the coming and going of numerous servants, bringing the boys’ belongings from their homes. He even overheard Toreth generously sending his servants after the belongings of Huras, Kalen, and Pe-atep, who obviously had no servants of their own.

And shortly after that, he heard much coming and going from Gan’s quarters, and heard that familiar, lazy drawl cheerfully distributing “extra” comforts “that there just is no room for, hang it!” among his wingmates. Soon, there were trades going on, as what had been personal belongings (or “supplies” pressed upon sons by anxious mothers) were distributed, through the alchemy of friendship, across the entire group.

“Listen to them! They’re acting as a unit,” he told Avatre, wonderingly. “They haven’t even got dragons yet, and already they’re a real wing!”

She nodded quite as if she understood, and dug herself a little further down into the warm sands. As far as she was concerned, life was perfect, for the hot sand was a great deal more comfortable for her than the stone of the courtyard she had been using.

And as the excited chatter and the other sounds of eight boys settling into new quarters died away, Kiron settled down himself for the night. It was an auspicious beginning, a good foundation to build on.

And with that cheerful thought in his mind, he allowed himself to drift into sleep.

SEVEN

EIGHT eggs were cradled in the hot sands of their pens. Eight anxious young men watched and brooded over them quite as if they had laid the eggs and not the dragon mothers. No longer were they playing dragon boy to the dragons of other Jousters; they knew what they needed to know about the tending of ordinary dragons. With plenty of time on their hands, they were now studying every scroll on dragons that they could get their hands on in good earnest—and short of getting their hands on the scrolls in the keeping of the Magi, they had access to every other scrap of papyrus on the subject in Alta.

Nor was that all, for thanks to Toreth’s family, there was a set of two tutors, one of them a noted scholar of history, who arrived every day to teach all the boys. As what they were learning was the history of the war with Tia, plain and unvarnished, and the history of mankind’s use of dragons, none of them objected, not even Orest.

Two things, however, had sorely puzzled Kiron since he had begun to move about the city and get to know these people who were his own. Both puzzles seemed such an accepted part of Altan life that he was not entirely sure how to ask about them.

The first was not so much a puzzle as a non-sequitur. When he first realized it, it had been something so entirely alien to his way of thinking that it had come as a shock.

And yet, it was a simple fact. The Priests of the Gods were not the ultimate authority in Alta. They did not even rank as a close second. The very notion seemed blasphemous, and yet everyone here took it for granted.

In Tia, even the Great King consulted with the Priests of the Gods on every occasion, and woe betide him if he failed to heed their words! Terrible things could, and did, happen to one who went against the will of the temples. Kings had been toppled from their thrones in the past, and it was not always the hand of a god that did the pushing.

Of course, the Great King himself was a priest, and a High Priest at that, but so far as Kiron been aware, he was a magicless man, and that made all the difference. The priests controlled all magic, for all those born with magic were swiftly taken into one temple or another as soon as their talents became evident. That included Healers, who were, in Tia, Priests and Priestesses of Te- oth, or rather, his Tian equivalent.

In Alta, Healers were a separate class that included those who Healed with herbs, with the knife, and with prayer, as well as those who Healed with their own special magic.

Things were very different here.

The only “magicians” who were not among the priestly caste in Tia were charlatans, street performers, who accomplished their “wonders” with trickery and sleight-of-hand. Male and female, young or old, whether or not they or their families were willing, once someone showed the signs or was detected by another magician, into a temple he went. So, although the priests seldom overtly exercised their power, they, and not the Great King, were the ultimate authority in Tia.

But here, it seemed, things were very different. There were those who went into the temples who had certain Gifts and Callings—the ability to see the future or what was happening at a distance, to hear the thoughts of beasts (like Aket-ten) or even the thoughts of men. There were rumors of those who were able to speak with the dead who went into the Temple of the Twins. And that was the end of priestly magicians. All the rest of the priests were entirely without magic, either devoted by reason of avocation, or having more in common with the scribes than the magicians.

As for the Healers, they stood apart from all and served no one god, but served all of them, collectively. Their enclaves, something like temples, but with less than a tenth of their space devoted to a sanctuary filled with images of every god and goddess in Alta, were distributed all across the city. And that was a shock all by itself; it was hardly to be thought of that one didn’t run to the Temple of Te-oth when one needed a Healer!

But there was a greater shock as far as Kiron was concerned, because not only did the practitioners of magic not belong to the priests, they had their very own caste. And in its way, this caste was even more exalted than that of the rulers of Alta.

They were the Magi, those Tians called “sea witches” since so much of what the Magi had once done involved the sea and water-magic. That was no longer the case, it seemed.

A Magus was one who worked—well—magic. The Magi used spells to work their will upon the world, to channel strange powers; spells that were chanted over incense, sung from the tops of towers, or murmured in hidden chambers in the bowels of the earth. Spells that did things—like the spells that called up the fierce storms and flung them down the Great Mother River to drive the dragons and Jousters of Tia to earth and ravage the countryside.

There were rumors of other spells that they had not yet unleashed. Spells to call up fire from the earth or down from the sky. Spells that not only repelled the hungry dead, but compelled them to serve or to haunt those the Magus indicated. The curse of a priest was potent—but in Alta the curse of a Magus was doubly so and doubly feared, for the curse of a priest relied on whether or not his god was moved to implement the curse, but the curse of a Magus depended only on his own power and his own will.

It was the Magi, and not the priests, that the Great Ones of Alta listened to in Council. Oh, there was a High Priest sitting on the Council as well, taken by lot from among the priests of all of the temples once a season, but he was one, and the Magi were many. Unless he had a Foretelling from one of the Winged Ones, he might as well keep his mouth sewed shut when the Magi spoke. And according to Aket-ten, there had not been a Winged One with a truly powerful ability to Foretell the future in a very long time.

This revelation rocked his world to the foundations; he understood it, but it still came as a shock. Perhaps his village had been so remote, and so provincial, that none of this had reached him as a child.

Or, perhaps everyone had known this, and he had simply been too young to understand. After all, to a child, all figures of authority are equally powerful, and anyway, the Magi never left the safety of Alta City, so there never were any Magi to rival the priests for power in his old village. Then again, how would such a thing concern simple farmers near the border? Even if they had known, it would scarcely have affected any of them. No matter who ruled or made the decrees, the seasons would come and go, and some humorless official would arrive after harvest to collect the taxes, and it really didn’t matter to a farmer where those taxes went after he turned them over. The Great Ones could have been a family of goats on the thrones for all he cared.

But for Kiron, steeped as he had been in the Tian hierarchy, it made no sense at all. And the more he learned from the scholar, the less sense it made, for in the past, the Great Ones had bowed to the will of the priests, just as in Tia. And all those who had any pretense to power had been within the temples. How had this come about? It was such an accepted part of life now that there seemed no way—and more importantly, no one—to ask.

But that was only a puzzle. And although it sometimes kept him lying in bed, trying to understand it, the situation affected him no more now than it had when he had been a serf called Vetch. The Jousters had nothing to do with the Magi, except on the rare occasion when they were asked to perform some magic like warming the sand pits. Otherwise—the Jousters were as far removed from the Magi as the sea from Tia.

But the second thing that sorely puzzled Kiron was an attitude. And that affected him.

Now, Alta had been losing land and villages to the Tians steadily, for as long as he had been alive, and yet although there was outrage, and every Altan in the city wanted revenge and “their” land back, there was absolutely no fear that the Tians would ever come here. It was as if every Altan knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the Tian army could not approach any nearer than the outermost canal.

Surely they weren’t expecting the canals to hold their enemies at bay! They knew how many Jousters the Tians had! All it took was for the Jousters to command the air, and no matter how the Altans tried to prevent it, the Tian forces could, and would, bridge the canals, one by one. All it took was time and boats and you had a floating bridge that could carry armed men straight into the heart of Alta City. How could they not be afraid?

Was it simple, blind arrogance, a false sense of surety that they could not be conquered on their home ground?

Or was there something that they knew that he did not?

He never got an answer to the question of why the priests and the Magi were two different castes, but he finally got the first clue to his second question one day when he was listening to the historian scholar. For once, the subject was not the current state of the war, but the beginning of it.

Although it was interesting to hear the story from the Altan perspective, as he had already gotten the tale from Ari from the Tian point of view, it was nothing new—until the moment that the scholar said, “. . . and then, of course, the Magi created the Eye of Light, and the direct threat against Alta City was ended and . . .”

That was when he woke up. The Eye of Light? What in the name of all that is holy is the Eye of Light? He couldn’t imagine—was it some sort of Far-Seeing Eye that any Magus could use that allowed them to keep the land around Alta City under constant watch? But what good would that do? But by the time he gathered his wits, the scholar had finished his lecture, and it was time to feed Avatre. She was putting on another growth spurt of her own and was constantly hungry, and he knew that he didn’t dare delay her dinner for even a single question.

So he hurried off, his curiosity a fire within his belly, his thoughts circling around that tantalizing bit of information. At least now he had a name for the reason why the Altans did not fear invasion of their city, even if he did not know what that name meant.

However, he was, by the gods, going to find out.

“The Eye of Light?” Orest said, and blinked. “Um—actually, I don’t know what it is. I mean, I know what it does, but I don’t know what it is. No one knows what it is, except the Magi. It’s up in the Tower of Wisdom, and no one is allowed up there except the really powerful Magi.”

Kiron sighed. “All right, what does it do, then?” he asked.

Orest licked his lips. “Mind you, I’ve never seen it myself. The Magi don’t show it off all that often—by the gods, they don’t have to! But Father has, and—you know that stretch of slag glass, right by the Haaras Bridge over the Fourth Canal?”

Kiron nodded; it was a strange feature, following the line of the canal itself, a slab of black vitrified earth about as wide as a chariot and as long as three dragons, nose to tail. He’d wondered if it was the remains of some terrible fire.

“The Eye made that,” Orest said, with lowered voice and a sidelong glance, as if he feared being overheard. “Father said this beam of light came down out of the top of the Tower of Wisdom—that’s the high tower in the middle of the Palace of the Magi—and just burned it there. They say it can reach all the way to the other side of the Seventh Canal and do the same thing there. There’s supposed to be the burned footings of a ruined bridge they took down out there; I don’t know, I haven’t gone to look.”

Kiron stared blankly at his friend; if he hadn’t known that Orest wasn’t any good at deception, he would have expected this to be some sort of joke. “Nothing can do that!” he objected. “I’ve never heard of anything that can do that!”

“Well, then, nothing melted the earth right where you can go and look at it yourself,” Orest snapped, nettled. “I can tell you this—it’s the reason why no one crosses a Magus! Once every few years, they decide to put on a show with the Eye, just to make sure that everyone remembers it, and let everyone know it still works. And that’s why, when you deal with a Magus, you are very, very polite. If they can do that, what else can they do?”

Kiron licked his lips, picturing to himself a beam of light moving across the earth, burning everything in its path—or across the sky—“Can it be moved up?”

“Can it cut a dragon and a Jouster out of the sky, you mean?” Orest asked. “If they don’t get out of its way, I should think so!”

Kiron thought about the dragons, ranked in their wings, and a light beam sweeping across the sky. Well. No wonder no one in Alta City was afraid of invasion. And no wonder the Magi were, in their way, the silent rulers of this land. He had to wonder if anyone in Tia knew about this thing. Surely they did—with all the spies and agents they had, with the Altans demonstrating it very publicly every few years, surely they knew about it!

It was very strange, though, that in all of the time he had been in Tia, he had not heard even a rumor of such a thing. So—why not? Why was it that the thing that had terrified people most was only that the Magi could send storms down on them?

Maybe because the Great King and his advisers know that as long as they stay on the other side of the Seventh Canal, the Eye can’t reach them—so unless they find a way to get rid of the Eye, or the Magi, they won’t march on Alta City. And maybe the reason the storms scared them was that if the Magi could send storms, maybe they could reach past the Seventh Canal after all?

Not that it mattered what they thought; at least, not to him. Except that he had a very uneasy sensation in the pit of his stomach, knowing that the Eye could reach anywhere inside Alta City. . . .

“They’ve been trying to make another Eye for years, one they could put on a wagon or something and carry around,” Orest went on, “Or the Great Ones have asked them to, so they say. I mean, obviously, if we could put another Eye out there, maybe even with the army, it would change things completely. But for some reason they haven’t been able to.” He shrugged. “You should ask Aket-ten; she’ll know ten times more about it than I do. I should think there isn’t a scroll in that temple she hasn’t read twice, and she’s not shy about asking to read any piece of papyrus that crosses her path. Besides that, she’s very good at not being noticed; she’s sat in the same room with dozens of important people around, listening to things she had no business listening to, and no one ever noticed she was there even though she was in plain sight.” He sounded rather cross about that; Kiron guessed, with some amusement, that his little sister had more than once been listening in on him in that way. And of course, she had also found her secret listening post as well, not that Orest was doing any lounging about these days! Still, this business of the Eye . . . he got the feeling that Orest went through life not listening to much, where as Aket-ten listened to everything. So she might well be the person to ask.

“Perhaps I will,” he said slowly. He still found the mere idea hard to believe—and yet there was physical proof that the thing existed, and what it could do.

It gave him cold chills to think about; this was like one of the weapons of the gods! And there were plenty of tales about what happened when ordinary men got their hands on those . . . most of those tales ended badly.

Even more chilling was the thought that the Magi had made sure to demonstrate the thing within the limits of the Seven Canals, proving it could be used on chosen targets inside the city as well as against invaders. A potent means of silencing troublemakers who might want to know why the Magi had so much influence . . . a reminder that such a thing was possible.

Yes, he rather thought he would have a word or two with Aket-ten as soon as he got the chance.

The chance came sooner than he thought.

It was the beginning of the season of the rains; the welcome relief from the kamiseen.

As in Tia, runners had been sent around the compound last night to warn of the coming rains, and everyone had dutifully pulled the canvas covers over their dragon’s sand pits—except for those who had swamp dragons, who would be perfectly happy to have rain pouring down into the pools of warm, sulfurous water. They’d have been even happier with mud, but wet dragons were hard enough to harness; muddy ones would have been impossible. Once in a great while they were allowed a mud wallow, but it wasn’t often, and they were cleaned off almost immediately afterward. Last night, they had all gone to bed feeling the weather bearing down on them. The wind had changed direction, coming from the sea and the north, rather than the desert and the west. It was a slow, heavy wind, bringing yet more humidity to this city surrounded by marshes, and it carried a chill with it. Kiron was happy to roll up in a woolen blanket tonight, and Avatre, born amid the rain, was so buried in the sand she was nothing more than a hummock in her pit.

The sound of thunder rolling continuously overhead was what woke Kiron. He waited for it to stop—and waited—and waited—and still nothing happened.

He opened his eyes and rolled over with a groan. There was light out there in Avatre’s pen, but it wasn’t very bright. Either the clouds were thicker than he thought, or it was just dawn. Both, perhaps. It was cold, a penetrating cold, and he knew he was going to need a woolen tunic today beneath his rain cape.

The thunder continued to growl overhead, yet there wasn’t any rain pounding down on the canvas awning. That struck him as very odd, and it roused his curiosity enough that he decided to get up and have a look around. Besides, he was awake now. Until the rain started, he wasn’t going to be able to get back to sleep. There was such heavy tension in the air, waiting for the storm to break, that dozing was impossible.

He pulled on a kilt and a tunic and tiptoed past Avatre, who was still sleeping. In fact, given how cool the air was, he doubted she’d be very happy about being awakened.

Not that he blamed her in the least; if he hadn’t been so curious, he would be back in his cot, under his warm woolen blanket, thank you.

Once he got out from under the canvas and into the corridor, he still couldn’t see anything, because the Altans sensibly had the same canvas roofs over the corridors that they strung over the dragon pens. He would have to get somewhere that was open to the sky, like the landing court.

No one else was awake and moving, though, which made him think that the continuous thunder was considered perfectly normal by the Altans. That was a bit of a comfort, anyway. He padded his way along the stone of the corridor, barefoot, until he came to the entrance into the landing court—and as he approached it, he saw, in the sky above the walls—

Lightning. Not striking the ground, but crawling across the base of the clouds, like veins of fire across charcoal-colored flesh. It wasn’t like any lightning he’d ever seen before; this was reddish, and didn’t seem at all inclined to strike the earth. Gingerly, he eased himself out from under the scant protection offered by the canvas and looked up to see that the reason why the thunder didn’t stop was that there was never so much as a heartbeat of time when there wasn’t any lightning crawling across some part of the sky.

Well, that certainly explained the thunder.

He moved out into the courtyard so he could see the whole sky, including the tops of the buildings on the central island. After a moment of watching it with the same fascination of a bird watching a snake, he noticed that it was all emanating from a central point. That point was just above the tip of the Tower of Wisdom. The clouds there were darker, much darker, completely black, in fact, and they swirled around that center point in a slow, somehow ominous, vortex. And even as he watched, a single lightning bolt, not just red-tinted but as red as blood, cracked upward from the tip of the tower into the center of that vortex. When it vanished, it seemed to Kiron that the clouds were spinning just a little faster.

There was one thing he was not mistaken about; there was a heaviness to the air, a drowsiness, warring with his sense that something was going to break loose at any moment. He had thought he could not possibly get back to sleep, but now—now he felt as if all he wanted to do was to get back into his bed.

This storm—it’s just strange, he thought, and he wondered if there was anyone else but the Magi awake at the moment to watch this. Or was it just so commonplace for the Magi to control the storms of the rainy season that no one even thought about it?

Or had the Magi done something to ensure that all of the citizens of Alta City stayed in their beds while they did their work? That heaviness in the air felt as if it was weighing him down, as if he could and should just lie down right here in the courtyard and go back to sleep. . . .

And that was not right. At that moment, he knew that this was exactly what the Magi wanted. They did not want anyone to see what they were doing. He had been at the mercy of someone who did not want others to know his secrets—Khefti-the- Fat had many secrets—and he knew the signs.

He shook himself awake just as he felt his eyelids drooping. Oh, no! he thought, clenching his jaw. If you don’t want me to see this, then that’s exactly what I want to watch!

And so he did, watching with grim determination not to miss a single moment, as the thunder rolled and the lightning raced across the sky to the horizon, and as the clouds spun, faster and faster, until the moment when a final bolt, a black bolt scarcely visible against the clouds, arced upward.

A deafening avalanche of thunder threatened to flatten him where he stood.

Then the heavens opened up, and the rain poured out of the sky, very nearly managing to flatten him, which the thunder had not.

He scrambled back under cover of the canvas, and after standing there, dripping and cold, gazing out into the sheeting rain and listening to the now-ordinary peals of thunder, he decided that whatever it was that he was not supposed to watch was over. The rains had begun, and he might just as well go back to bed.

And yet—it felt as if there was something that he ought to do. He just didn’t know what it was.

After a moment of indecision, he decided that he wasn’t going to be able to get back to sleep anyway, so he might as well put on a rain cape and see if he couldn’t find Aket-ten. She always attended the Dawn Rites at her temple, so he knew that she would be awake. He hadn’t seen her since Orest got his egg; he had the feeling that she was tired of hearing about what might be inside it.

He went back to his quarters, checked on the sleeping dragon (who was as insensible as a stone), decided that he ought to change into something drier than he was wearing, and finally, with the compound still sleeping around him, went out into the rain.

Everyone in the city slumbered just as in heavily as in the Jousters’ Compound, as far as he could tell. Then again, who would want to go out in this rain? He had the streets all to himself at any event, and he bent his head to the pounding water and sloshed barefoot down the road toward Aket-ten’s temple.

This temple was devoted to a pair of twin deities that were unique to Alta as far as he knew; the Goddess Beshet of the Far-Seeing Eye, and the God Anut the Spirit Walker. Beshet presided over those Winged Ones who had visions—of the future, of the past, of events at a distance. He was the patron of those who spoke with the dead—but also those who could act at a distance, who did not just have visions of things far away, but who could, in spirit, travel there and perhaps act on them. Between the two, they oversaw everything—save magic—that a Winged One might do. Other than that, Kiron didn’t know a great deal about the Twins; their rites were secret, reserved for the Winged Ones, the Fledglings, and the Nestlings. Interestingly, though their rites were secret, the temple was one of the most open in the city, with lectures and discussions going on in every open spot and corner, and all through the gardens, every day. There were even little side chapels devoted to some of the lesser deities: the patrons of lovers, of mothers, of luck and—hardly surprising—one to Te-oth, the god of writing. Only the sanctuary itself was closed to the public, and then only during the rites.

The water sluicing off the crest of the hill toward the canal was ankle-deep at times, and cold enough to numb his feet, but it would have been of no use to put on sandals. Not only would the rain have ruined them, but the leather soles would have been slippery; better to trust to his feet, which were harder than leather soles after all those years of going barefoot anyway.

It was just as well that he knew where he was going, since the rain was so heavy it was like trying to peer through a waterfall. The rain cape kept most of it off him, but there was a steady drip through the seam of his hood down the back of his head, trickling down his neck. It was with benumbed gratitude that he finally made out the bulk of the temple he wanted, and splashed his way up the three steps into the forecourt, where he shook out his cape in the torch-lit gloom.

He stood there uncertainly for a moment—not that he didn’t know the layout of the temple, just that he wasn’t sure where to begin looking for Aket-ten—when he heard the sound of feet running lightly toward him from behind, and turned quickly.

And before he had time to react in any way except to recognize that the runner was exactly who he was looking for, Aket-ten careened into him. She had been looking back over her shoulder with an expression of absolute terror, and hadn’t even noticed he was there.

He expected her to scream or at least gasp, but she must have recognized him the moment she touched him, for as he fought to keep his balance, she grabbed his shoulders with both hands. “Kiron!” she whispered, frantic with fear. “Help me! Hide me!”

He didn’t even think; he just flung the folds of his rain cape over her, disguising her completely, for it was made for someone his height and it covered her down to the floor. Then he led her into a side chapel where he pushed her to her knees in front of the little image of Ater-oth, Goddess of Lovers, and knelt beside her, taking both her hands in his.

Just in time, too, evidently, for a moment later, he heard heavier footsteps out in the forecourt. He wasn’t worried; the only trace that had been left was the water dripping from the rain cape, and there was no way to tell whether that had been left by one person entering from outside, or two. He was wet enough to have come here without a cape.

The steps stopped for a moment—then moved toward the chapel. Aket-ten’s hands trembled in his, and he was astonished; he would never have imagined her being afraid of anything or anyone! Yet clearly, whoever this was, she was petrified of him.

And that was enough to put a chill down his spine that had nothing to do with the storm outside.

He heard the steps stop again, just outside the entrance to the chapel. He did not turn around, and he clamped his hands down hard on Aket-ten’s to keep her from moving. In the dim light here, with both of them kneeling, there was no way for anyone to tell how young they both were, much less what they looked like. Nevertheless, he felt, rather than saw, the fierce glaring of someone’s eyes, and the back of his neck prickled.

There was no sound but the rain outside and on the roof, and the thunder cutting across the sound of the downpour. He was deeply grateful for both sets of noises; otherwise, their unseen watcher would have been able to hear Aket-ten’s frightened breathing.

Finally the footsteps began again, walking purposefully away. When there had been only silence for a long moment, he started to stand up.

This time it was Aket-ten who restrained him. “Not yet,” she whispered in a shaky voice. “Not until they’re gone.”

So he waited, while his knees began to ache from kneeling on the stone. Then, at long last, he heard more footsteps. Quite a lot of them, in fact. They shuffled across the forecourt, then out the door into the rain.

What struck him as uncomfortable and even frightening, even as he listened to the newcomers, was the lack of voices. In a group that big, someone was always talking. Even if they had been prisoners, someone would have been saying something—complaining, whispering, whimpering.

Not a word, not a noise. Only the sound of feet going out into the rain. And once again, the hair on the back of his neck crawled.

Silence descended on the temple, and Aket-ten slowly stopped shaking. Finally she stood up, and so did he, grateful to at last be off his knees.

“What—” he began.

“That was the Chief Magus and six of his underlings,” she said, fear warring with anger in her voice as she pushed back the cowl of the rain cape. “They came here to collect Winged Ones to ‘assist’ them in sending out the storms against Tia. Only they don’t allow you to say ‘no’ to them, and there doesn’t seem to be anything that the Chief Priestess, the Teachers, or the Pedagogues can do to stop them, because the Great Ones have said that we must do this. They took me yesterday, and—and when they were done, I found myself back here with no memory of coming back, no memory of where I had been, no memory at all of anything other than hearing that horrible man say, ‘You’re finally going to be of some use,’ and grabbing my shoulders.” She began to shake again. “And worst of all, I was practically faint with exhaustion, and it took until nightfall before I could Hear and See again! For a little while, it was as if I was as blind and deaf as—as Orest!”

From the way she had said “Hear” and “See,” the inflection of her voice, Kiron was pretty certain she wasn’t talking about ordinary hearing and vision. He felt his mouth firming into a grim line. “Did they just take Fledglings?” he asked. “Or do you know?”

She shook her head. “All the ones they collected before they got to me were Fledglings, but I don’t know after that. I don’t have any memory of it.”

He felt a coldness in his stomach, but there was as much anger in it as fear. “I think we need to find out—but before we do anything else, I am going to escort you to your father’s house.” He placed a finger over her lips before she could object. “I know you don’t live there anymore now that you’re a Fledgling, but I think you should stay there for a while, at least until the Magi are done doing whatever it is they’re doing with the storms. I don’t think even they would dare take a girl out of her father’s house, but—” He shook his head. “Let’s find your father, and see if we can come up with a plan.”

She nodded, and he wrapped the rain cape around both of them and they went out into the downpour.

They found Lord Ya-tiren just breaking his fast, with a scroll spread out before him and a steaming loaf beside him. “Young Kiron!” he exclaimed, getting to his feet, “It is good to see you—and Aket-ten—forgive me for greeting you in this state, but this rain seems to have made me oversleep—”

Then he peered at Aket-ten, and must have seen the fear in her eyes. “Daughter, what is wrong?” he asked softly.

She took a deep breath. “Yesterday the Magi came, and took several of the Fledglings to ‘assist’ them in their work,” she told him, her voice trembling only a little. “I was one, and I have no memory of what happened.”

“Well, daughter, the need for secrecy—” the lord began, but sounding a little doubtful.

“And,” she interrupted, her voice going a little shrill. “When I returned, I nearly fainted, and my Powers did not work, nor did they return until almost sunset!”

Lord Ya-tiren opened his mouth, closed it again, and looked thoughtful—and worried. “I like this not,” he said finally. “I can do nothing against the Magi to protect any of the others, but you, my daughter, I can shield. I believe that until the rains are over, you are going to be ill. Quite ill. Something of the female nature, I think; we will have my Healer friend Akenem here to give weight to that claim. You will remain confined to your bed.”

At Aket-ten’s stricken look, he chuckled. “My dear, the servants come and go at will. If one of them happens to look like you, well, I doubt anyone will notice! Just keep away from the temple until I tell you it is safe to return.”

She relaxed visibly.

“Far be it for me to interfere in this, my Lord,” said Kiron quietly, “But I must ask you to consider that this may not be enough. The Magi may insist upon examining her themselves. Perhaps—” he hesitated. “Perhaps before that can happen, Aket-ten should be sent to some friend or relation to recover from her illness.”

“Hmm. And a new young slave should enter my household? A wise plan. Surely no one looks twice at a slave.”

“And a slave can pass to and from the temple without being noticed either,” Kiron pointed out, “So Aket-ten can continue whatever instruction she needs from the Winged Ones.”

They exchanged somber looks; Aket-ten still looked wan and frightened; her father looked angry. “Thank you for bringing her here, Jouster Kiron,” the lord said, turning to Kiron. “You were quite right to do so. There is something about this that is deeply disturbing—yet where the Magi are concerned, it is dangerous to probe too deeply, too quickly.” Then he smiled. “If I am able to take the measure of a man, I would venture to say that you have decided to find out just what the Magi are doing with the Fledglings. Eh?”

Red-faced, Kiron admitted that was exactly what he had been thinking of doing.

“Give a father leave to make his own attempts first,” Lord Ya-tiren said gently. “Gold is a potent weapon, and a loosener of tongues. The Magi have servants. Give me time, and I will find the one who can tell us what we want to know.”

Kiron sighed, nodded, and bowed his head. Unsatisfying as it was, Lord Ya-Tiren’s plan was the better one of the two. “I will, my Lord,” he said. “And if Aket-ten wishes to go about the city, I will undertake to escort her, if she likes, just in case.”

Aket-ten’s cheeks began to glow, but she didn’t look displeased with his offer. Nor did Lord Ya-Tiren. “Now that is an offer that I will be pleased to accept. Thank you—and now, I believe, I should escort my poor, ailing daughter to her quarters?”

Well, that was as graceful a dismissal as Kiron had ever heard; he bowed, and took his leave.

But though he left Aket-ten and her dilemma behind him, it was still very much in his mind as he returned to the Jousters’ Compound, and a sleepy, but hungry, Avatre.

EIGHT

THREE days later, Orest was intercepted at breakfast by a servant with a message from his father, and Kiron saw him going about the compound shortly after with a worried face.

“Orest!” he called, intercepting his friend at the entrance to his pen. “What’s wrong?”

“Father says that my sister’s been sent to Aunt Rekeron in the farms beyond the Seventh Ring because she’s ill,” Orest told him. “I don’t understand this—Aket-ten’s never been ill a day in her life!”

It didn’t take more than a moment for Kiron to figure out what was going on. So, the Lord Ya-Tiren had taken his advice! That was extremely satisfying.

But either the lord learned something—or he discovered that the Magi were going to be impossible to refuse. That was not so satisfying.

Orest looked torn between wanting to run back home to find out what was wrong, and staying with his egg. Kiron knew what the truth was—but it seemed that Orest hadn’t been taken into his father’s confidence.

Do I tell him, or not? Kiron weighed the decision in his mind. No. No, I don’t think I had better. If Orest’s father hadn’t chosen to tell his son what was really afoot, it was not Kiron’s place to enlighten him. Though perhaps the problem was that Lord Ya-Tiren had taken thought for his son’s chattering and loose tongue. There was no telling who among Orest’s friends, including the other boys here, might talk to someone that they shouldn’t.

“Hmm.” Kiron folded his arms over his chest and gave Orest a knowing look. “You know, I’ve heard that sometimes the female Fledglings have a lot of difficulty when they first become women.” He actually had heard that often enough around the temple—though possibly Orest hadn’t paid any attention to that sort of thing. He could be very single-minded, could Orest. Some might call him dense, but not Kiron; Orest could be absolutely brilliant when he chose to exercise his mind. The problem was convincing him of the need to do so. If Orest had a fault, it was that he concentrated only on what interested him and ignored or carelessly forgot everything else.

“What do you—” Orest began, then, to Kiron’s great amusement, flushed a deep and painful-looking scarlet. “Oh. Ah. Yes, that might be it. I’ve—ah—heard the same thing—”

Well. Maybe he does pay attention once in a while.

“But of course your father wouldn’t put it that baldly,” Kiron continued, as bland as cream.

“Of course he wouldn’t. And that must be it.” Embarrassed though he might be, Orest must have been grateful for the explanation, for he seized on it with evident relief. “I hope she feels better, but if anyone can make her feel well, it will be Aunt Re. She’s almost a Healer, she knows so much, and Aket-ten loves the farm.”

Orest returned to the vigil over his egg with the air of someone who has had a great deal of concern lifted from him. Kiron, for his part, went to check on Avatre (who was not at all interested in stirring from her warm sand, so that she looked like a heap of rubies half-buried in it), and then went for a walk in the rain.

After that first torrential downpour, the rains were no heavier here than any ordinary rainy season—but rumor said that things were otherwise in the kingdom of the enemy. With exquisite timing, the Magi had—so it was claimed—arranged for terrible storms to lash the Tian countryside coinciding with the highest point of the Flood coming down Great Mother River from the lands above the Cataracts. The result—supposedly—was going to be a flood of epic proportions. Not only farmlands would be flooded, but whole villages, towns, even parts of the great cities that were too low to escape.

If this was true, Kiron felt unexpectedly sorry for the Tian farmers and villagers. The mud brick used for their homes could not stand against rising waters; people would return after the waters had receded only to find that their houses had melted away in the flood. This was going to cause a lot of hardship and it wouldn’t be to the people who were waging this war, it would be to the poor farmers and craftsmen who just wanted to get on quietly with their lives and didn’t give a toss about where the border was. In fact, it would impact the poor serfs on captured Altan land the most—their Tian overlords could escape the flooding, but they would have nowhere to go.

It seemed a very unfair way to wage a war, when the people who were responsible for it were not the people paying the price.

And he knew very well what others would say about that—it was too bad for all those farmers and serfs, but that was the way that war went. And maybe it was, but it still seemed very unfair to him.

It had seemed a fine thing when the Jousters of Tia were grounded by storms that hadn’t affected anyone else so much—but this war on those who weren’t even part of the fighting was just—wrong.

In fact, everything he had learned about the Magi in the last three days had that same faint aura of wrongness about it.

Not that he had been able to learn much.

The Magi kept pretty much to themselves, up there in their “Palace of Wisdom” or whatever they called it. As if they were the only people in all of Alta to have a true grasp of wisdom. That seemed a case of monumental hubris to him. But you didn’t see a Magus out beyond the First Canal very much; people said they were doing important things, too important to leave their stronghold. Kiron had the feeling, though, that it was because they didn’t care to mix with those they felt were beneath them. It also seemed to him that they cultivated mystery and secrecy to the same extent that the Winged Ones eschewed it.

There was one time and place where he was seeing them though. Every morning, in the predawn, collecting Winged Fledglings. Every morning, the Fledglings lined up like a column of ants and marched silently out into the rain under the guidance of four Magi. By midmorning, they were returned, only they looked—drained. Blank-faced, pale, and stumbling with exhaustion. Kiron had a notion that this was exactly what they were—drained, that is. Hadn’t there been a tale going around the Jousters’ Compound in Tia that the sea witches had found a way to combine their power to send those new and powerful storms down on Tia? Well, it looked to him as if the Magi had indeed done just that. With one small addition to the story; it didn’t look to him as if they were troubling themselves with the small detail of cooperation and willing partnership.

If the returned Fledglings felt as bad as they looked—if this was what had happened to Aket-ten—well, he didn’t blame her one tiny bit for not wanting to be taken away a second time.

As he crossed the bridge from the Third Ring to the Second, he had the road mostly to himself. No one wanted to be out during the rains—except perhaps the swamp dragons. He wondered what being drained day after day was going to do to these Fledglings. It might make them stronger, but somehow he doubted it. It was far more likely to make them weaker, or burn them out altogether. Perhaps it was ungenerous of him, but nevertheless he had the feeling that such an outcome was not going to displease the Magi one bit. If the Magi had any real rivals for power and influence at all, it was the Winged Ones. Weakening the Winged Ones would only make the Magi stronger.

As for the rest, the only way to really find out anything was to get into the Magi’s stronghold—

As if I am likely to be able to get away with something like that! he scoffed at himself, hunching his back against a gust of cold, rain-filled wind. No, Lord Ya-tiren is right. Silver and gold will loosen tongues and I don’t have much of either.

What he did have, however, was a reason to go see Lord Ya-tiren. Not overtly to find out about Lord Ya-tiren’s daughter, but to report on his son’s excellent progress. Although he made no such similar reports to the other boys’ fathers, there was a special bond of obligation on both sides between himself and Lord Ya-tiren, and no one would think twice about Kiron going to pay a visit to his patron’s household during such an idle time, in order to tell him that the son he had been concerned about was thriving and making outstanding progress. So that was what he was ostensibly going to do now.

He said as much to the door servant, and his lordship’s steward, and the servant who came to bring him into his lordship’s presence. He was enthusiastic in his praise of Orest, which made all three servants smile, for Orest was a great favorite among them.

“Kiron, rider of Avatre!” Lord Ya-tiren greeted him, with a smile, as he entered the workroom where Ya-tiren was perusing a pile of letters. His lordship had a brazier burning beside his table to chase away the cold. On his table stood a fine alabaster lamp burning sweetly scented oil. The sound of the rain outside was muffled by the thick walls of his workroom, which were painted with scenes of duck hunting with cat and falcon. Kiron recalled Aket-ten telling him how she “spoke” to her father’s cats and birds to make sure they were in good condition for just that sport. “Come and sit, and tell me how my son gets on!”

It was rather flattering to be invited to sit, as if he was an equal of Ya-tiren, both in age and in rank. He wasn’t going to let it go to his head, though. He wasn’t either of those things, and he had no intention of pretending that he was. He did take the proffered chair, though, and waited patiently while Ya-tiren finished the scroll, gave his scribe some instructions, and sent the man out of the room.

“Orest is flourishing, my lord,” Kiron began. “He is most diligent in his duties.”

“And in his studies as well, praise Te-oth; his tutors have never been so pleased. I was beginning to despair over him until he seized on this desire to become a Jouster, but it seems that being rewarded with his wish has given him the motivation he had been lacking until now,” Lord Ya-tiren said, with a smile, and without changing either his expression or his tone of voice, went on, “and you were right to be concerned about my youngest. There have been visits and—pressure—which you were correct to anticipate. I was taken off guard. I shall not be so unwary again.” And then, without missing a beat, he continued, “So when is the egg due to hatch? I assume that once it does, I shall not see much of Orest.”

Lord Ya-tiren’s eyes flicked, ever so briefly, to the door. Kiron took that as a warning that there might be someone listening there. “That is quite true, my Lord,” he replied, as cheerfully as he could. “And I believe that the eggs will begin to hatch at the end of the rains, or thereabouts. You would be welcome to visit him, of course, if your duties permit you the leisure. The youngsters need a great deal of comforting from their surrogate mothers until they are old enough to begin amusing themselves with play.”

“Play? Dragons play?” said Ya-tiren, momentarily diverted.

Since dragons in general and Avatre in particular were the dearest things in Kiron’s heart, he could always be persuaded to talk about them, so he waxed eloquent on the subject of how tame dragons—which were not drugged and numb with tala, and so required things to do when they weren’t fighting or flying patrols—entertained themselves. I’m beginning to sound like Ari, he thought, wryly, as he listened to himself babble. Dragon obsessed! But Ya-tiren gave every indication of being interested and asked many intelligent questions, until finally, a subtle relaxation and flicker of the eyes told Kiron that the unseen listener had gone.

Probably bored. Just as well. Maybe the next time I come he won’t be so keen to eavesdrop.

“Well, I have taken enough of your time, Kiron,” his lordship said, signaling that the interview was at an end—which was, in a way, frustrating, for Kiron had not learned anything much about Aket-ten. “I appreciate the time you have taken to tell me of my son’s progress.”

“It is not only my pleasure, my Lord,” he said sincerely, covering his disappointment, “It is my honor to do so. I am in your debt.”

“Not at all,” Ya-tiren replied, as Kiron rose and prepared to leave. “And—oh, by the way,” he added casually—too casually—as Kiron was halfway to the door, “I think you will find it highly profitable to pay a visit to the Temple of All Gods on this Ring. The Healers have a young female apprentice there who, they say, is learning to treat the ailments of dragons. It is said that she arrived very recently. My friends there are taking especial care of her, as she seems to be shy and reclusive. She could benefit from your experience, and perhaps you might find a way to introduce her into the Jousters’ Compound.”

The one place where the Magi have little or no reason to go—the Temple of All Gods! And furthermore, it was the one place that even the Magi would hesitate to invade with the intent of dragging someone unwillingly away. It was never wise to offend the Healers—for you might find yourself looking in vain for help the next time you were hurt or ill. Or if the help was forthcoming, it would be the least pleasant treatment available. Healers never forgot. Kiron bowed a little, but his smile of understanding won an answering smile from Lord Ya-tiren. “Thank you for that information, my Lord; it is most welcome. I shall seek out this apprentice immediately.”

He collected his rain cape from the steward, and slogged out into the downpour; the Temple was about a quarter of the Ring away, and he was going to have plenty of time to think about his conversation with Lord Ya-tiren on the way there.

Kiron presented himself to the servant at the temple door, blessing the fact that the door had a generous overhang that shielded him from the rain. Unlike nearly every other temple in Alta, this one had a doorkeeper, rather than being open to anyone who cared to walk into the antechamber. It was the difference between being a place where worshipers needed to be persuaded inside and coaxed to part with their offerings, and being a place where those who came to the door truly needed what was on the other side of the portal and would fling offerings at whoever would accept them. But of course, this wasn’t really a temple as such. It was a place where the sick and injured were brought, and because of that, it needed a doorkeeper to ensure that the sick and injured were taken care of by exactly the right people as soon as they crossed the threshold.

Actually, the place had more than one doorkeeper, as Kiron was quick to notice. There was the one that greeted him—a servant, or perhaps a slave, whose job must have been to intercept the hale and hearty casual visitor—and several more people waiting just inside, sitting on a long bench pushed up against a wall painted with scenes of men and women gathering herbs. Every one of those waiting was clad, perhaps in deference to the weather, in practical light woolen tunics that came to calf length, and there was not a hint of a wig or an elaborate hairstyle among them. All watched the door, with the look of alert anticipation of dogs about to be let loose to run.

The antechamber was relatively small, small enough for a single brazier to keep it reasonably warm. He took stock of those waiting as he explained what had brought him here to the doorkeeper. All were young, though a little older than he. Healers, newly made? Waiting for patients to be carried in, for urgent summons for those too ill or hurt to move? That surmise was borne out a moment later, when a panting slave arrived with a message of dire illness, and left a heartbeat later with one of the bench sitters, rain capeenwrapped and a box of medicines and instruments in hand.

Kiron’s own inquiry after the “apprentice dragon Healer” brought a nod and an invitation to take the seat just vacated. Now he found himself facing a wall painted with scenes of more men and women preparing medicines. At least it wasn’t scenes of Healers working on patients. He stared at the painting for a while, then decided that he really didn’t want to know what went into some of those medicines and dropped his eyes to stare at the polished sandstone of the floor.

He didn’t have to contemplate it for long, though. The slave that the doorkeeper sent off returned quickly, and beckoned him to follow.

They passed through a door in the right-hand wall of the antechamber. To his relief, they did not go anywhere near the treatment areas. A dragon boy quickly developed a strong stomach, but Kiron had the uneasy feeling that his “strong stomach” would not be proof against some of the more unpleasant aspects of human illness and injury and its treatment. Instead, the slave led him through the sanctuary with its row upon row of statues and shrines, none very large, but all carefully tended and each with an offering of flowers or incense in front of it. It was a bit disconcerting to see all these statues together, and realize just how many gods the Altans worshiped. There were no windows here; the room was lit by oil-burning, alabaster lamps that gave off a warm glow. The ceiling was painted in the image of the night sky, and the columns as giant latas flowers. They passed down the main aisle and through a small door on the other side of the room. It hadn’t exactly been concealed, but unless you knew what to look for, it was rather hard to find, for it was in the midst of a wall painting of the door into the Judgment Chamber where the hearts of the dead were weighed. So, in fact, it looked like a door—a painted door.

His estimation of the cleverness of the Healers rose.

On the other side were what were clearly the Healers’ private quarters; quiet, dim corridors lined with closed doors, painted with a long, continuous river scene that showed no humans, only birds, animals, and fish. And finally, after much traversing of corridors, the slave brought him to a small room overlooking a courtyard with a latas pool in the midst of it. It had a wide door standing open and on the other side, a window through which the pool was visible through the curtains of rain. A chair stood beside the window, and that was all he could see of the room from where he stood.

And seated in the chair, reading a scroll (as he might have expected) was Aket-ten. How he knew it was her, he could not have said, because the lady in the chair was nothing like the girl he knew.

She, who favored the simplest of robes and tunics, and wore her hair short, had been—well, the only appropriate term was transformed—rather thoroughly. The wig she wore was a copy of the “royal” hairstyle formerly sported by Toreth, made of thousands of tiny braids, each ending in three beads: one lapis, one turquoise, and one gold. Gone was her collar of a Winged One; in its place was a collar of gold, lapis, and turquoise with no representations woven into it. She wore a light woolen robe dyed a dark indigo blue that clung to her body, and a white woolen mantle embroidered with latas flowers pulled around her shoulders against the chill. In fact, she wore more jewelry than he ever remembered her wearing before; earrings, a beaded girdle that matched the collar, a beaded headband over the wig, armbands, wristbands. . . . That dress showed rather disconcertingly that she wasn’t the “little girl” her brother thought she was.

As for her face—when she looked up at the sound of their footsteps in her door, he saw that she—who hardly had the patience to allow her servants to line her eyes of a morning—now had a full set of makeup; complete kohl lining to the eyes, powdered malachite to the lids, reddened cheeks, reddened lips—

If he hadn’t known, by some inner alchemy, that it was Aket-ten, he probably wouldn’t have recognized her. Which was, after all, the point. If those who were looking for her took thought about what Aket-ten was like, they just might go looking for her among the slaves and the servants. But they would never search for a fine young lady, and even if they believed that this lady really was Aket-ten, they would hesitate to seize someone dressed in the manner of a lady of rank and privilege.

But she leaped to her feet and flung her arms around his neck the moment he entered the room, the scroll she had been reading flung aside like a bit of scrap. “Kiron!” she sobbed into his ear, as the slave took himself discreetly out. “Oh, Kiron! I am so glad you came! Oh, thank you, thank you—”

His first impulse was to pry her arms from around his throat, but his second was to put his own around her and let her cry. He followed through on the second impulse. I don’t know what’s been happening, he thought, as surprise turned to a smoldering anger, But Aket-ten doesn’t frighten easily, and she’s scared. He knew who it was that was responsible, of course.

The Magi. Her father had said something about “pressure.” Aket-ten’s fear told him just how much pressure there must have been.

It was a very good thing that her dress was a dark blue, because the kohl lining her eyes was soon running down her cheeks in streaks, and would have ruined a white gown. He just let her cry; she had obviously been having a bad couple of days. And after a while, he began to enjoy holding her, in spite of her obvious distress. It made him feel unexpectedly strong and protective and capable. It made him feel—expectedly—very angry at whoever had frightened her so. And there were some rather new and entirely pleasant sensations stirring that he couldn’t quite put a name to—

Finally, it was she who reluctantly disengaged herself from his arms and scrubbed at her eyes with the back of her hand (making the damage to her makeup much worse). She looked down at the mess on her hand and winced.

“Marit-ka is going to kill me,” she said forlornly. “After all that work—”

“Marit-ka is just going to have to do it over,” he replied, and steered her over to the chair she had been sitting on when he came in. He sat her down on it, looked about for a bit of cloth, spotted a towel beside an empty basin on a little table nearby, and took it out to hold it in the rain pouring down into the courtyard. When it was soaked, he brought it in and, with the expertise of someone who had been caring for the soft and tender skin of a dragonet for a year, scrubbed all of the streaked and ruined makeup from her face, taking care to get all of the malachite and kohl from around her red-rimmed, swollen eyes. He went out again for more of the cold rain, rinsing the towel as best as he could, and bathed her eyes again. She let him, holding still beneath his hands, her own clasped in her lap, her back rigid.

“There,” he said at last, looking at his handiwork. “I’ve at least left Marit-ka with a clean surface to repaint. Now, why don’t you tell me what has been happening to make you turn into Great Mother River in flood?”

She giggled weakly at that, which he took as a good sign. “It isn’t so much that anything happened,” she said at last. “It’s that—Father had visitors, nasty and important visitors asking after me, and afterward he was frightened. I’ve never seen Father frightened before. That was the first time they came, and it was right after you brought me home, as if they knew where I had gone.”

Kiron thought privately that the reason Aket-ten had never seen her father look frightened was probably only because Aket-ten hadn’t actually been looking—or else, because Lord Ya-tiren had never brought himself to the attention of ruthless men before. He seemed to live a quiet life, there in his villa, as remote from the world as it was possible for a landed lord to be. Well, the world had come intruding. It was probably as much of a shock to him as it had been to his daughter.

But he said none of this to Aket-ten. “What kind of visitors?” he asked. “What did they say? And what did Lord Ya-tiren do?” He wondered if the Magi had sent someone else to do their dirty work—or if it had been some high- ranking noble acting on their behalf.

“The Magi came themselves,” she replied, and shuddered. “The same ones that came for me that day you rescued me. That was when Father was frightened; I don’t know what he said, but it was probably what I told him to tell them, that I was ill. The next day, they came again. They wanted to know if I was there, and when Father told them I was still ill, they wanted to know how ill, and when I would be well, and what exactly was wrong with me.” She flushed. “I have the Far-Seeing Gaze, and—ah—I’m afraid I used it when I knew they were in the house the second time. I wanted to know what they wanted.”

He shrugged. “That’s only wise,” he told her. “Lord Ya-tiren probably meant well, trying to protect you from knowing what they said to him, but I don’t think he was doing you any favors. It was much better for you to know just how bad things were. So, go on. What did Lord Ya-tiren say to them?”

She rubbed her eyes again; despite his ministrations, they still looked very red and sore. “I think he asked one of his Healer-friends for some advice on what to say. He said that it was woman’s troubles, the kind of thing that got Afre-tatef sent home a few moons ago. They wanted to know why I’d never shown any signs of it before, he got irritated and said, ‘How am I to know? I am only a father, not a Healer or a Winged One!’ Then he told them he had sent me to my aunt on her husband’s estate outside the Seventh Canal for a rest. That maybe I would be back, and maybe I wouldn’t, and it all depended on how the gods dealt with my troubles. Then he tried to ask them why they were so interested in a Winged One when I wasn’t training to be a Magus, and that was when they got very nasty.” She shuddered again. “It wasn’t anything that they said, it was the way that they said it. That Father must be sure to take good care of me, because Fledglings like me were important to the protection of Alta, and the Great Ones took the protection of Alta very seriously, and that I wasn’t just his daughter, I was a resource that he was holding in trust for all of Alta and—well, more things like that.”

“I can imagine,” Kiron said grimly and, in fact, he could. Although he had never been on the receiving end of such treatment, in no small part because anyone who wanted to intimidate him was usually perfectly free to beat him bloody, he had seen that sort of thing at work. “Lovely pots you have. It would be a shame if they were to all be smashed because you didn’t have someone around to keep an eye on them for you.” “The Headman of the village would really like this favor. You wouldn’t want to disappoint him.” “You know that people have gotten into trouble over less.” “Such a problem your son is—all it would take is one more complaint and who knows what would happen to him—” Oh, yes, he knew the silky tone, the innocent stare, the knife hidden beneath the cloth, the threat that was never implied in such a way that it was obvious to anyone except the one who was threatened.

“Anyway, you had warned Father already, and I was already hiding in the servants’ quarters. And as soon as he was sure that they were gone, his friend smuggled me here.” She sniffed. “I’m supposed to be learning how to Heal dragons. Actually, I am. I thought as long as I was here, I might just as well do it.”

He smiled at her, feeling that a pat on the head or her back would not be accepted well at the moment, and anything—well—warmer—might lead somewhere he wasn’t yet sure he wanted to go. “Good for you! And that gives me every excuse to come visit you!”

She brightened at that. “It does, doesn’t it! That’s been the worst of it, it’s so lonely—”

“We’ll just wait until the Magi have given up on you ever coming back,” he told her soothingly. “Then maybe we can bring you back as you and we can say that your Gifts have all gone. Could the Magi tell if your Gifts were gone?”

She frowned. “Probably not. The other Winged Ones could, but—but maybe I could hide them.” Then she looked as if she was going to burst into tears again. “Oh, this isn’t fair! I’ve trained so hard to develop my Gifts, and now—”

“I didn’t say not to use them” he pointed out. “Just don’t let the Magi know you still have them.” He scratched his head in thought. “You know, you could say that your aunt taught you to Heal animals, and we can bring you in to help with the dragons. The Magi almost never come around the dragons; I don’t think they like them, much. How does that strike you?”

She sighed. “I suppose this must be my ordeal,” she said, sadly. “It certainly feels like an ordeal. And the gods send every Winged One a different sort.”

“Then there you are, that’s probably exactly what it is,” he agreed, deciding that patting her hands would probably be all right. “Uh—do you think the Magi had any idea that your father was lying?”

To his relief, she shook her head. “They haven’t got that sort of power,” she said firmly. “I’d know. I think that’s one reason why they need us. And when he wants to be, Father is very good at lying.”

For her sake, he hoped so.

He stayed with her as long as he could without interfering with his own duties, and when he left, she was more of her old animated self, determined to make the best of her “ordeal” by learning all she could about dragons and the things that could hurt them or make them sick. She had admitted to him that at this point, there really wasn’t anything that any of the senior Winged Ones could teach her about the Gifts that the gods had given her; she had been told in confidence that she was not only the strongest Animal Speaker there was, but was likely to be the most accurate Far-Seeing Eye of her generation, and that what she needed more than anything was practice.

“I can practice here as well as anywhere else,” she said after a while. “Maybe better. I can always help those who Heal animals by finding out what the animals are feeling.”

He had encouraged her to follow that path; the more she had to occupy her mind, the less lonely she would be. Aket-ten didn’t have the same knack for making friends that Orest did, but she was always willing and eager to help, and he didn’t think it would be very long before the Healers were protecting her for her own self and not as a favor to her father.

But there were a great many uncomfortable thoughts that occurred to him as he trudged through the rain, going back across the bridge to the Jousters’ Compound on the Third Ring.

If, as he thought, the Magi were burning out the Fledglings’ Gifts with their ruthless exploitation of their powers, that explained in part why they were so interested in getting Aket-ten back into their hands. First, she probably represented a great deal of raw strength for their spells. Second, and this might be the most important of the two reasons, they had every reason to want to burn her out.

He had, perforce, been learning more about the political structure of Alta lately. It would have been difficult not to, with a prince and the most likely successor to the current Great Ones as one of his trainees. Things just came out in conversation, and the one thing that had struck him more than anything else was that the Magi had become very, very powerful in this land. All but one of the advisory positions that had once been held by Priests were now held by Magi.

It seemed likely to him that the last thing they wanted was for someone who had been Gifted with reliable visions of the future to become a full Winged One—for that someone would be able to advise the Great Ones with no consideration for anything other than what he—or she—Saw. That would take a fair chunk of power out of their hands, and leave them vulnerable to contradiction in Council whenever there were things they wanted done, actions they wanted taken, that might be contrary to what was really best for Alta. Nor was it particularly in their interest to have someone who could See what was going on in Tia and on the border reporting directly to the Great Ones—not when the Magi wanted reports of how their spells were decimating the enemy where it hurt him most, whether or not those reports were true. The very last thing they wanted was someone who could say, definitively, that what the Magi were doing was mostly affecting the lot of poor farmers who had very little to do with the war.

No, that was not something that would make them very happy. He wished that he had someone he could confide in and ask advice of. . . .

Frankly, he wished that Ari was around.

But that’s not possible, he reminded himself. It’s time to start thinking on your own.

Well, there was one thing that he could do. He could start educating himself thoroughly on the intricate details of how things were run in Alta—how much power the Magi had, say, and how much the Great Ones were likely to let them get away with.

And he had just the person to help him with that—

Prince Toreth.

Provided, of course, he could do so without betraying his feelings on the subject. But then again, he had a lot of practice in hiding his feelings. With luck, all that practice would stand him in good stead now.

On the other hand, Toreth has never shown any sign of being fond of the Magi, he reminded himself. I wonder if it’s possible that I’ll find an ally there?

“The Magi—” Kiron began, in as casual a tone as he could manage.

Toreth was in the middle of turning his egg; Kiron was in the pen with him on the pretense of overseeing him.

“Just what are they, anyway?” he continued, as Toreth finished the quarter turn. “Besides the people who created the Eye, I mean?”

Toreth settled his egg back into the sand, covered all but the very top with hot sand, and gave him an opaque look. “Why are you so curious about the Magi?”

“Because they don’t exist in Tia, and that’s where I lived most of my life,” Kiron replied, trying to look as innocent as possible. “All of the magicians there are in the priesthoods of several temples. Then I come here, and there the Magi are, in their fortress right next to the Great Ones’ Palace, and—” he shrugged. “And there’s the Eye, of course.”

“Oh, yes. The Eye.” The sour tone of Toreth’s voice made Kiron blink. “The Eye—which, as we are told, is our protection. As the Magi have shown us so carefully, it can strike anywhere outside the First Canal, so we need never fear invasion.”

“I must admit, that bothers me,” Kiron replied, feeling his way very slowly. “Isn’t the point to stop invaders at the Seventh Canal? What’s the point of letting everyone know that it can do the same damage closer in?”

Toreth looked at a point over Kiron’s shoulder. Kiron knew what was there—the Central Island. And even if Toreth couldn’t see the Palace and the Tower of Wisdom peeking over the walls because the awnings had been drawn against the rain, they both knew what was there.

“Oh, yes,” Toreth breathed softly. “And my cousins are so dependent on the Magi and their wise counsel—the counsel that has caused us to lose more land to Tia every year. The counsel that tells us to close our doors to outside trade because trade brings change, and the Magi want things in Alta City to remain the same. The Magi, who demand so much, and give so little in return. . . .”

“But the Eye,” Kiron ventured.

Toreth laughed harshly. “They have never used it to defend the city. They have never succeeded in creating a second one. They claim the old one can’t be moved. And yet—” his voice dropped to a growl, “—and yet half the city’s taxes goes into the coffers of the Magi.”

That was a shock. Kiron stared at him, not quite believing what he had just heard. “Surely not—”

“Surely,” Toreth contradicted him. “And whenever someone sues for peace, or an adviser suggests that it might be time for the Magi to have a little less of city’s revenue, the Magi are in the Great Ones’ ears, whispering, reminding them of past wrongs, persuading them of future glory, egging them into a patriotic fever. Oh, yes. I have been there and heard it for myself.”

“But they do work for the good of Alta—” Kiron ventured.

Toreth stood straight up and looked directly into Kiron’s eyes. “Do they? I have seen no evidence of that. These storms they send down into Tia—are they actually weakening the Tian forces? Or are they merely making people miserable and increasing their determination to crush us? Others have suggested that it would be more effective for the Magi to accompany our army—never have I seen a single Magus in the ranks. Oh, the Magi do strive most vigorously—for the good of the Magi. And of late, I have heard uncomfortable tales of visits to the Temple of the Twins.” He lifted an eyebrow. “But perhaps you know more about that than I?”

“Come to Avatre’s pen,” Kiron said, making up his mind on the instant. “I would like to discuss some things with you.”

Toreth smiled. “I rather hoped you would.”

NINE

KIRON moved the brazier closer to their corner; he did not light a lamp, however. “The Great Ones do not rule in Alta,” said Toreth bluntly, when he and Kiron had settled into the corner of Kiron’s room off Avatre’s pen, a corner where it would not be apparent that the room was even occupied. “The Magi do.”

They had each taken a cushion and had settled with their backs to the wall. Rain drummed on the roof, and far-off thunder rumbled; inside, Toreth had dropped easily into the scribe’s erect, kneeling posture, while Kiron crossed his legs under him and put his back against the wall, the better to look the prince in the face. There wasn’t much light coming from the door and the ceiling-height air slits, but it would have to do. While this statement did not come as a complete surprise to Kiron, the knowledge had a bitter edge to it. “I think I had begun to see the shape of this,” he admitted. “Nevertheless, it is ill hearing. How long, do you think?”

Toreth grimaced, and shrugged. “It is hard to say when; rot never sets in all at once. The tree in your garden looks a bit seedy, but you think, ‘oh, it is just this or that,’ and it does not really concern you until the storm comes and it smashes the roof of your house, and you see that it was all hollow inside, eaten away. It probably began before my great-grandfather was born. I will tell you something that you, who are new-come to Alta, did not know. The Great Ones that currently sit in the Twin Thrones are well over seventy Floods in age.”

“That old?” Kiron exclaimed, shocked. In his village, the oldest person was no more than fifty when he died. Most were fortunate to attain forty. Wedded at fourteen or fifteen, they would certainly see the first of their grandchildren born, and what more did anyone need?

Toreth nodded. “And the Great Ones before them were near eighty when they died. And the ones before them were ninety.”

“But—” Kiron’s brow wrinkled as he tried to recall dim memories of adults talking about other adults—marking the generations—saying, “and Old Man so-and-so must have been—” “The oldest man I ever heard of was no more than sixty, and—”

The prince leaned forward intently. “And what would you say if you were a ruler, and a Magus came to you and said, ‘I can make you live to see your great-great-grandchildren.’ What would you grant a man who could offer you that? A position as adviser? A council seat? The post of Vizier? Positions for his friends? And if these people were the same who created a weapon that absolutely meant that this city could never be taken by enemies? What would you give him then? If all he wanted was to take some of the burden of rule from you, and leave you to deal with only the pleasant aspects of the Twin Thrones?”

Kiron blinked. “Is that the way of it, then?” he asked softly, feeling dread steal over him.

Toreth pinched the bridge of his nose as if his head pained him. “I have no proof,” he admitted. “I have not even a rumor. But at some point three hundred years ago, the Magi began to live to see eighty, ninety, or even a hundred Floods. And about a generation later, the Great Ones of Alta did the same. Kaleth has searched the records, and from the time that the Great Ones began to see such long years, the Magi have had greater and greater say in things, until now—” He shrugged. “What does any man want, if you ask him and he answers without thought? Wealth, power, and a long life. The Great Ones have always had the first two. Now, for the last three reigns, they have the second. And all they had to give up,” his voice turned mocking, “was a little responsibility.”

Kiron tried to reckon up the years in his head. “Toreth—does it seem to you that the war between Alta and Tia began about that time?”

Toreth’s eyes narrowed. “As a matter of fact,” he said slowly, “It does. There is a thought in your head. What is it?”

“The Magi can take heat from one place where it is not wanted, and put it in the sands of our pens,” he said, feeling his way to the heart of the thought. “But where does one get extra years of life? Except that in war. . . .”

Toreth rocked back on his heels, eyes wide. “I like that thought not at all!” he said, and though it was a whisper, the shock in his tone made it as “loud” as a shout.

“No more do I,” Kiron replied grimly. “But it is one way to ‘profit’ from a war.”

“There are others,” Toreth said, after a long silence. “Yet were I to examine things closely, I doubt not that I should find the Magi’s hands outstretched there, too. They are wealthy men; wealthy enough to be above such things as mere noble blood. And when one has the ears of the Great Ones, there are many ways of obtaining more wealth. Theirs is shadow power, but the shadows can hold many things.”

Kiron thought silently of all the ways that one could profit from war. The making of weapons, certainly. The supply of tents, of food for the army, of horses, of other gear, from cooking pots to the linen for bandages. And he wondered; certainly the Great One of Tia was a man of no more than middle years, and there were no Magi as such in Tia. But had he not heard of a certain adviser, a little man, a crafty man, a man to whom the Great Onelistened more often than to others, who had remarkably served in the same capacity to his father, and his father’s father? How long before that adviser whispered in the Tian’s ear, and was heeded and believed—being, in fact, his own best evidence?

He could not be sure. The thought made him ill.

It also had a terrible logic. How else to explain something as senseless as this war, unless someone profited by it?

“I wonder who began it.” A peal of thunder punctuated the question.

He did not realize he had said the words aloud until he saw Toreth shrug.

“I do not think that it matters now,” Toreth replied. “The question is, how to stop it?”

The words hit Kiron like a hard brick, and stunned him nearly as thoroughly. Once again, he spoke without thinking, as his mind put handfuls of bits of disparate thoughts together. “So long as the Tians have more Jousters than we, there is nothing Altans can do to stop it. If the war were fought man to man—”

“Then they could advance no farther, and might be driven back.” Toreth nodded approvingly. “Kaleth thinks that if the Tian Jouster advantage could be nullified, so that we could say to our people ‘there is no more to fear from the Jousters of Tia, let us have a truce,’ then no matter what was whispered in whose ear, the Altans, common and noble alike, would support a truce. The Priests would support a truce; no few of them have lost brothers, fathers, and children to the armies. If the Priests were united, and the Great Ones fostering it, even the Magi would not dare to oppose it. And he believes that if the Tian Jousters no longer ruled the skies, that they could no longer descend upon a village and terrorize it, then the Tians would begin to think on the possibility that it might soon be one of their villages that is served the selfsame dish, and support a truce.”

“But what of those who poison wells and burn fields by night?” Kiron asked reluctantly.

Toreth sighed. “We had not thought that far,” he admitted. “But we have a start. And the Great Ones are old. They grow no younger, and stolen years are not healthy years, they only prolong life, not turn back the sands of time. Eventually, Kaleth and I will take their places, and then—” his eyes gleamed. “—then the Magi had best look to themselves. We will not be gulled by promises of stolen years. We are not greedy. We will content ourselves with power and wealth, and let the gods send as long a life as they may.”

“And in the meantime?” Kiron asked.

The prince tilted his head to the side and shrugged. “We think. We plan. We gather friends to support us when the time comes. Friends of all sorts,” he added meaningfully.

Once again, Kiron felt as if he had been stunned, as the pieces came together. “Like a wing of a new sort of Jouster?” he asked dryly. “Am I the last?”

Toreth laughed, although it was a laugh with a great deal of irony in it. “No, not quite. Is Orest to be trusted, do you think?”

“With my life, yes,” he replied honestly. “With my secret—I am not so sure.”

Toreth shook his head with mock-sadness. “Gossips worse than a girl, that one. Perhaps raising a dragonet will steady him. Right now, I would sooner trust his sister. And I wish that she were one of us; she has sense, that Aket-ten, and she is as good a scholar as my brother. And if she grows into the promise of her powers—I could do far worse than have a Far-Sighted Winged One who is not afraid to speak the truth as an adviser. I hope she recovers from her illness and returns to the city soon.”

It was on the tip of Kiron’s tongue to tell the prince the truth about Aket-ten, but he bit it back. This would be a bad time to spill someone else’s secret. Nevertheless—“I might find someone as useful,” he said instead. “A Healer, perhaps. I have a friend in the Temple of All Gods.”

“ ‘Trust your wife with your household, your brother with your purse, and a Healer with all,’ ” Toreth quoted the old proverb. “A Healer would be a good addition to our cadre.”

“Well, I will wait and speak with her, and perhaps bring her to you.” Kiron decided to commit to no more than that.

“Oh, a she is it? You sly young jackal!” Toreth grinned and winked. Kiron blushed, which only made it worse. Fortunately, Toreth was not the sort to pursue it any further, except to say, “Well, if she has a sister or a pretty friend, think on me.”

“And you a betrothed man!” Kiron chided.

Toreth shrugged and grinned further. “I do not prevent my betrothed from seeking things she finds pleasurable, and she makes no demands upon me. Which is just as well, since I would pay no heed anyway. It was our parents made the arrangement, not us.”

That seemed to be the end of the dangerous revelations, but Kiron was perfectly satisfied to leave many more questions unspoken and unanswered. He had more than enough to think on as it was.

Looking back on that conversation a few days later, he could point to it as the moment when his life took another unexpected direction. He seemed to have passed some sort of test, and been accepted into a fellowship that he had not, until that moment, known even existed, a fellowship of which Toreth and Kaleth were the tacit leaders. Nevertheless, when it came to the dragons, he was still the trainer and the leader, and if anything, the others tendered him even more respect.

Perhaps that was because he was earning it. Knowing that he would have to show them what to do, even in the midst of the rains, he was training with Avatre. She did not like it, not in the least, but he insisted that she fly in the rain, and learn to handle the tricky currents of the storms. He would not fly her when there was lightning, or up into or above the clouds, but otherwise they were going up once a day at least.

With Toreth’s plan already in his mind, he was looking for all the advantages he could find. The Tian Jousters did not fly in the rain; therefore, Altan Jousters would learn how to, beginning with himself and Avatre, for every tiny advantage was something to be snatched. He knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that no one could force even the most heavily drugged wild-caught desert dragon into the sky in the rain, but the tame ones—well, that was another story. And in this, at least, the Altans were better equipped, for the swamp dragons found it no hardship.

He had figured that he could coax Avatre into it, for certainly even the desert dragons living in the wild had to fly and hunt no matter what the weather, so the thing was possible. And Avatre complained, but cooperated.

He did make sure to reward and praise her lavishly whenever the task was done.

Lord Khumun was astonished—but a handful of the riders of swamp dragons watched them with speculation, and soon began taking their mounts up for short practice flights as well. Rain flight was dangerous; everything was slippery, leather straps stretched and loosened, and the wind was hard to read. Sudden downpours could leave you blinded at a critical moment, and the really important thing was to make sure to get the dragon back down before she was chilled, or she would start to weaken. And a chilled dragon could sicken, even die.

Rain flight was miserable, too; it was not possible to wear a rain cape, of course. It wasn’t hard to remember to get the dragon out of the sky before she chilled, when the rider was getting numb in the fingers and toes long before that point.

Still, it was an advantage, and the riders of swamp dragons were able to go out on patrol and even thwart some Tian raids by being “where they shouldn’t be.” Lord Khumun was pleased. The swamp dragon riders were more than pleased; finally they were getting their own blows in, and though the victories were small, the effect on morale was enormous.

Kiron was now getting the respect of the older Jousters that he had not gotten before. First, his training (or in some cases, retraining) suggestions, using falconry techniques, had made intractable dragons a bit easier to handle. Now, it was clear that his tame dragon was not “spoiled” since she was doing for him what no other desert dragon was willing to do. He had, with his experiments, given them victories at last. And he was taking the punishment of riding in this miserable wet weather, learning how to do it all the hard way, since there were no other examples. He sensed this new respect in the changed ways that the older men looked at him at first—then the demonstrations went from covert to overt. Someone would have their dragon boy waiting in the landing court with a flask of hot wine when he came down. The best table—the one nearest the kitchen—was left open for him and whoever cared to sit down with him at meals. Greetings went from a cool nod to a slap on the back and a hearty “Saw you up today, good flying, boy.”

These were, after all, veterans, and men as much as ten or fifteen years his senior. They were hardly going to socialize with him, and he didn’t expect it—nor particularly want it. But the respect, after all those years of being kicked and beaten and regarded as low as the lowly weed he’d been named for—that was victory for him, and it tasted as sweet as the victories over the Tians.

And by extension, the boys of his new wing got some of that respect, too. If they didn’t have the background required to savor it as much as he did, they still appreciated it. He had proved that they were not some crazed experiment doomed to fail. And some of those older Jousters who had come to see him and Avatre when they were recovering in Lord Ya-tiren’s villa were now speculating enthusiastically about the day when there would be enough of the “youngsters” up and flying that these old veterans could afford the time to raise a tame dragon of their own.

Well, he thought, when he first overheard one of those conversations at mealtime, I will make a point of seeing you get a fine egg on that day.

He watched the prince watching these scarred veterans, and now that he knew Toreth and Kaleth’s long-term plans, he could see Toreth weighing the men in his mind. At some point, the prince’s cadre would have to expand beyond the dozen or so of his peers that he had taken into his confidence, and the logical place to start was here, among the Jousters. Of all of the inhabitants of Alta, these men were the ones who had the least fear of the Magi, and possibly the most (though carefully veiled) contempt—though Kiron suspected that if one was to investigate, probably most soldiers felt the same. And of all of the fighters of Alta, these were the men who saw the most combat. Front-line troops would face Tian troops for short periods in pitched battles; Altan Jousters faced Tian Jousters every day outside the season of Rains. And this had been going on for generations—while the Magi sat safely in their tower and did—what? They said they were working their spells against the Tians, and protecting Altans, but how could you tell? Until recently, that is—there was no doubt with the new storms that they were sending that they had hit upon something that obviously worked.

But still. They were safe in their tower while they did it. There were probably few fighting men who could view that with less than contempt.

So the prince’s plans would probably meet with a great deal of approval here.

“But not now,” Toreth said calmly, as he, Gan, Kalen, Oset-re and Kiron gathered one night in Can’s pen. It was no kind of formal planning session, but whenever any of the cadre got together, talk tended to drift toward the future, and often a good idea or two came out of it. It was Gan, not Kiron, who suggested seeking support among the older Jousters, and Toreth met the idea with approval. “But not now,” he repeated. “First, we have to prove ourselves. All we are this moment is mother hens, sitting on our eggs. Kiron hasn’t even proved himself yet, except as a flyer and someone who knows his dragons. Until I am a fighting Jouster, and can talk to them as an equal, I won’t have respect that I have I’ve earned for myself.”

“But you have the rank,” countered Gan, with the unconscious air of superiority of the noble-born. Kiron wondered when he would see how much that rankled those who were of more humble birth. That he would, eventually, Kiron was sure; that languid manner covered a keen mind. “That demands respect!”

“You cannot demand the respect of the common man, Gan,” said Kalen, from where he sat in the pool of light cast by Can’s lamp, stitching a giant version of a falcon’s hood, for use with new-caught wild dragons. “You can demand obedience and get it, and deference, surely, but you can’t demand respect, you have to earn it. Actually, that’s exactly how Toreth earned my respect.” He looked up with a lazy smile. “At the age of eleven, he and Kaleth had already figured that out, and came to where the hawks were mewed, working side by side with me, learning how to care for, tame, and train young falcons exactly as I had. Thus earning my respect. Clever lads.”

“Say rather, observant,” Toreth replied. “Having a father who is a Commander of Hundreds with a low level of patience makes you observant rather quickly.” He pitched his voice to a growl. “Boys! Princes you may be, but until you are Great Ones, I can whip you from here to the Seventh Canal if you don’t care for that hound properly!”

“Oh, I recall another bellow altogether,” said Gan, and put his voice into the same truculent tone. “I will drown you in the First Canal with my own hands if you do not return my seal ring!”

“And just what were you doing with your father’s seal ring?” asked Oset-re, amused.

“Trying to forge letters making us Captains of Tens, of course!” Toreth replied. “With chariots of our own, plumed helmets, and honey cakes in perpetuity.”

Gan choked on his beer, laughing, and Kalen had to pound on his back until he stopped coughing.

Sometimes Kiron could only marvel at the prince’s patience, working out plans that could not possibly come to pass in less than a decade. First, he would become a Jouster, while his brother insinuated himself into an administrative position where he would have access to the kinds of documents that would, in Toreth’s words, “map out the rot and tell us how far we have to burn.” Then he would make sure that no matter what else happened, the Jousters were built up until their numbers equaled or bettered those of the Tians, so that when he and Kaleth rose to the Thrones, they could call for that truce without sacrificing the safety of their people. Meanwhile, Kaleth would be collecting information, finding who among the powerful and the noble could be counted upon to back Toreth against the Magi, and slowly revealing to them some of their plans. Not the end of the war, however. That was to remain a carefully guarded secret within the inner circle until Toreth and Kaleth were securely in the Twin Thrones. Then would come the overthrow of the Magi, and the signing of a truce with Tia. The farther into the future, of course, the vaguer the plans became, until they were goals rather than plans—but for the near-term, Toreth and his twin had a great deal already mapped out.

Perhaps, especially given their suspicions about the long lives of the Great Ones, other young men would have been plotting the overthrow of the current Great Ones, not a peaceful transition. Not Toreth and Kaleth. “That would undermine everything—and probably get us caught and strangled,” Toreth confided to Kiron later that evening. “No. We will have the thrones legitimately, in our time. The only thing that anyone will ever be able to prove, even if someone betrays us, is that we wish to restore some of the power that the Magi took back to the priesthood. There is naught wrong with that—and much that would be considered pious.”

“Have the Magi tried to cultivate you?” Kiron asked, curiously. He could not imagine the Magi not trying so obvious a ploy with the next in line to the throne.

Toreth laughed aloud, and the others glanced up from the game of hounds and jackals they were playing. “What?” asked Can.

“Have the Magi tried to cultivate my brother and me?” Toreth asked aloud.

Oset-re snorted. “Like experienced old whores sidling up to drunken sailors!” he replied. Once again, he exercised his talent for imitation, somehow making himself look both haughty and oily at the same time.

“Has my Lord Toreth any need for my humble services?” he oozed. “A spell to catch a young lady’s attention, perhaps? A talisman for gambling luck, or one against drunkenness?” He flared his nostrils delicately. “Or perhaps you, my Lord Kaleth—I have some scrolls you might find of—interest.” He pretended to unfurl a scroll.

Toreth mock-gagged. “I tried to play the cocky—and none too bright—spoiled brat, who is so certain of himself that he mocks the very idea of needing any arcane help. I hope I didn’t overplay it. Kaleth simply looked myopic and horrified. He was horrified, and properly so—as erotic scrolls go, that one was singularly awful.”

Kiron managed to find time to visit Aket-ten twice more during the next half moon. He actually wanted to visit her more than that, but he was afraid that if he went too often, he would draw unwelcome attention to her.

As it was, he took care to pick a time when the rains were particularly heavy—heavy enough that he had the bridge and the streets to himself. Furthermore, he took the precaution of stopping in a very popular food and beer shop on the way. If anyone was following him, they’d be hard-put to distinguish which of the patrons of the place he was when he came out. As a Jouster, he was paid just like any other soldier, even if he hadn’t actually fought yet, so he had some money in his pouch. That allowed him to stay just long enough to have some duck sausage and hot wine, and when he left, it was at the same time as two other men.

Once again he presented himself at the door of the Temple of All Gods, but this time the slave took him into another part of the private quarters.

A library, of course.

Niches lined the walls, scrolls piled in them, and characters written on the wall beneath each niche told the category. Care for these precious objects was a constant battle between damp and fire, so there were no open windows or open flames here. All the lamps were carefully shielded, but the lack of windows meant that there had to be a great many of them.

The girl who was seated at a distant table, bent over a scroll, looked a lot more like the Aket-ten he knew, though the woolen gown was enough like the one she’d been wearing the last time to be its charcoal-colored sister, and it clung to her young body in a very interesting fashion. Again, as he watched her before she became aware of his presence, he had to think that she was not Orest’s “little” sister anymore.

The slave went to her and whispered in her ear; she looked up, and this time, both to his relief and his disappointment, she did not leap up and fling herself at him.

She took the weights off the scroll and let it roll itself back up, stored it in its niche, and only then did she rise to greet him.

She did hurry toward him, though, her face alight with pleasure at seeing him. And she seized both his hands and squeezed them as soon as she was in reach.

“Where’s the disguise?” he asked. She was wearing more makeup than usual, but not as much as the last time. He thought she looked very pretty this way.

“One of the Akkadian Healers, my friend Heklatis, is also a Magus,” she said. “He didn’t tell anyone about it until I arrived, though, because he didn’t like what our Magi were doing and he didn’t want to have to put up with them trying to get him to join them. He gave me an amulet that he says will make their spells slide off me, and he says that as long as I don’t leave the temple without a physical disguise, they won’t find me.” She made a face. “I don’t understand all of it; magic works differently from what a Winged One does. Father gave the Temple money to buy me a body slave and a fan bearer, so when I go out, I’m all wigged and painted and escorted. It’s such a bother that I only did it once.” She sighed. “Still, it’s not a loss. Kephru does wonderful massages, and Takit is useful running errands, so most of the time they’re working for the Healers.”

“Are you able to practice your skills?” he asked, knowing how strongly she felt about her abilities. The panic in her voice when she had described being temporarily without them made him think that not being able to use them would be very like being cut off from some essential part of her, or having her soul cut in half. “Is it safe?”

“Heklatis says it is,” she replied, and shrugged. “Certainly no one has come running here looking for me after I’ve used them—though I haven’t dared to try to See what the Magi are doing or to See the Temple of the Twins. I’m afraid that—” she bit her lip. “—I’m afraid that if another Winged One feels me Watching, the Magi will be told.”

Would the Winged Ones actually betray one of their own to the Magi? “You think it’s that bad?” he asked soberly.

“I don’t know,” she replied, looking profoundly unhappy. “I just don’t know. Someone is allowing them to take the Fledglings every day, and as far as I can tell, no one is objecting to it.” Her brows came together and she looked as if she was holding back tears. “And even if the reason they’re letting this happen is not that they’re on the Magis’ side but that they’re afraid of the Magi and what they can do, it doesn’t make much difference in the long run. People who are afraid would tell on me, too.”

Now it was his turn to squeeze her hands, as comfortingly as he could manage. There was hurt in her eyes as well as unhappiness and that lurking fear. She’s been betrayed by the people she thought she could trust the most, and now she is not entirely sure what the truth is, or who she can trust. And a little thought followed that. But she trusts me . . . oh, gods, my thanks, she trusts me!

“I wish there was something I could say or do to help,” he said aloud. “I wish I could visit you more often—but Aket-ten, not only have I work I can’t neglect, but if I come here too often when I never did before, someone might take notice.”

She nodded, and smiled wanly. “And I haven’t sent for you for the same reason. I’m keeping busy. The library is where I spend a lot of time. I’ve mostly been helping the animal Healers though, and just trying to See that Father is all right. He seems all right. I don’t think they’ve done anything to him.”

“I’ll check on him myself on the way back,” he promised, and tried to move the conversation to a more cheerful note. “Well, this looks like a place after your own heart! You don’t seem so—unhappy as you were last time.”

She brightened, and looked more like her old self. “I’m not. The library here is wonderful; I haven’t run across more than a handful of scrolls that I’ve seen before. When I think of something I can do to help, I try to do it, and the rest of the time I stay out of the way. I’m learning what I can about the dragons.” Then her jaw jutted a little, stubbornly. “I still think I could be a Jouster. Think of how easily I talk to Avatre! I wish you and Father would have let me hide with Orest.”

He suppressed a snicker to avoid hurting her feelings. “Let’s find somewhere warm where I can dry off. I want to tell you something. Do you remember Prince Toreth?”

“I think so,” she said, leading him out of the library and back to her room. Someone had put up tightly woven reed screens up on the window, which darkened the room and cut off the view of the garden, but which also cut off the draft. Her brazier had made the place comfortably warm; she lit a splinter at it, then went around lighting all the lamps until the room was filled with a warm, golden glow. He hung up his rain cape to dry, then both of them took stools on either side of the brazier.

And he told her all about Prince Toreth and his plans. “And he spoke about you, actually,” he finished. “He said that he would much rather have you in his cadre than Orest, because Orest’s tongue is a bit too loose, but that you are sensible and intelligent, and he thinks it would be no bad thing to have a Far-Sighted Winged One who is not afraid to speak the truth to advise him.”

“Oh!” she exclaimed, putting one hand to her lips in surprise. “I—I am not certain what to say!”

“At the moment, you’re supposed to be on a farm beyond the Seventh Canal, so you don’t need to say anything,” he reminded her. “There is no way you could know this if you were where you were supposed to be.”

“That’s true,” she admitted. “I want to think about this.” She paused. “Did you mean that—about my becoming a Healer for the dragons and going to the Jousters’ Compound once the Magi stop being interested in me?”

“As long as Lord Khumun and your father agree,” he replied. “We don’t need a Healer for the dragons much, but it would be very useful to have a Far-Sighted Winged One about. And it would be very useful to have someone who could talk to the dragons. You might get somewhere in soothing the wild-caught ones, now that we’ve got them to where they can actually be handled safely, and you can help us train the little ones.”

She frowned in thought. “I need to think about this,” she repeated.

He decided it was time to drop the subject, and instead went on to tell her about flying in the rain, and the sorties that the swamp dragon riders were doing.

“Their dragons are smaller than the desert dragons, and I think it’s the first time some of them have gotten a taste of victory,” he concluded. “If there were more of them, it would be all right, because two of them could take a rider on a desert dragon. But being outnumbered and riding smaller beasts makes things hard for them.”

“You’re making a real difference, then!” she exclaimed with pleasure. “Oh, how wonderful! I wish I was doing half as much.”

“And what is it you always told Orest when he started fretting about not being a soldier?” he asked her, with a raised eyebrow.

“ ‘The job of a student is to be a student,’ ” she sighed. “I suppose I’m a student all over again, then.”

“You might as well be,” he agreed. “But why don’t you tell me why it is that the Healers do not care for the Magi? Because, obviously, they don’t or you wouldn’t be safe here.”

She pursed her lips, and rested her chin on her fist. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “I never thought to ask.”

“Then why don’t you ask?” he suggested. “I’d start with that Akkadian you talked about.”

“All right,” she agreed. “I will.”

The remainder of the visit was confined to inconsequential things, and he left her feeling much better about her situation than he had when he had seen her the first time. As he had promised, he looked in on her father on the way back, and with a few carefully chosen words and glances, Lord Ya-tiren indicated that he thought there was still a spy in his household, but that no further pressure had been brought to bear on him to produce his daughter.

The second time he went to visit Aket-ten, he had no news other than that, but she had enough information to make up for it.

“I’ve asked about,” she told him, “though I have tried to be—um—circumspect. And all I’ve gotten were hints as to the quarrel the Healers have with the Magi. Very mysterious hints, too, with a lot of anger in them. I did find out one thing, though. Partly it’s because the Magi are at least half responsible for the war with Tia, and you know how Healers feel about war.”

Actually, he didn’t know, but he could well guess. You could not be a Healer without feeling a desire to cure the sick and repair the injured so deep it often ran counter to self-preservation. So war must be entirely offensive to a Healer, at the same deep level.

Especially this war, which, the more he learned about it, seemed less understandable. As far as he could tell, it did not serve a purpose now for either side. The Tians could easily expand to the south, going up the Great Mother River instead of down, and the Altans did not seem to have any real interest in the land outside of that needed to support their city.

“How did you find that out?” he asked.

“I’ve been reading some of the personal commentaries and diaries that got stored in the library,” she replied. “I mean, at least they were more interesting than recipes for curing impotence and spots! I found an entire rack of them rolled up in jars at the back of the library, and it turned out that each jar held the personal accounts of each Chief Healer here for—oh, hundreds of years. And right in the middle of one of them was a long tirade against the Magi, because the Magi had managed to persuade the Great Ones to use some trivial border incident as an excuse for war!”

So—there it was. Part of the speculation that he and Toreth had made had been borne out. “Who was in the wrong?” he asked.

She shrugged. “There was no telling. It was in a border village, and by the time it was over, anybody who might have known was either dead or too frightened to talk. The Magi blew it up into a treacherous attack on one of our patrols, unprovoked of course, and the irony is that they must have been looking for an excuse, too, because their declaration of war was delivered to us about the same time as ours was to them. But it was quite clear from the tone of the scroll that the Chief Healer was certain that if the Magi hadn’t been egging on the Great Ones, it could all have been smoothed over.”

He rubbed his ear thoughtfully. “Are there other reasons?”

“I think there are,” she told him. “But no one will tell me. They hint at it—and it has something to do with something that the Magi are doing either with or for the Great Ones, but they won’t tell me. They act as if—well, partly I think it’s that they aren’t entirely sure that what they think is happening is what is really going on. And partly it’s that if what they think is happening is the truth, it’s so horrifying to them that they don’t want to think about it. If I’m making any sense.”

“Oh, you are,” he said, and paused. Should I tell her?

He stopped, tried to clear his mind of all of his notions of what Aket-ten was, and tried to look at her objectively. It didn’t take more than a moment to come to a resolution; he wasn’t going to help her by protecting her from things he “thought” she shouldn’t know. She had been growing fast in the time he had known her, and that had been accelerated by her recent experiences.

“Toreth and I have been talking about this,” he said, slowly, and outlined the whole nauseating scenario. The war, as an excuse to cut lives short—the stolen years from those who had died—

Aket-ten’s eyes got bigger and bigger as he went along, and her face grew paler and paler. When at last he finished, she was as white as a lily.

“That’s worse than necromancy,” she whispered. “But it makes a horrible kind of sense—”

“And if that is what the Healers suspect?” he persisted.

“It would explain a lot.” She blinked, as though her eyes were stinging, and now he knew she was trying not to cry. “This is really horrible, you know. I don’t think you have any idea how horrible this would be to a Winged One.”

“Or a Healer,” he agreed. “No, I don’t.” And really, he didn’t, perhaps because so much of his own life had been stolen from him that—well, stolen years, a stolen childhood, a life spent in bondage—they all seemed equally wretched. Men died in fighting all the time, whether it was in war, or in a fight over a woman. That someone would plan for so many deaths was sickening, but so were poisoned wells, burned fields, and jars of scorpions tipped into granaries.

“I suppose you couldn’t,” she said, swallowing. “It—well, it’s hard to describe. But—to someone like me, it seems like the most horrible and vicious sort of rape.”

He nodded. That made sense. To her it would be much worse than “theft,” he could see that. “There’s even more to it than that; I think there’s something else being stolen by the Magi. I think that they are getting the—the—whatever it is they put into their magic to send the storms against Tia, I think they’re stealing from the Fledglings. I think that is why the Fledglings come back drained and exhausted. I think that is why they wanted you so much—because whatever it is, you have a lot of it.”

Now she looked angry as well as sick. “Heklatis—the Akkadian—hinted as much,” she admitted. “Though he wouldn’t come out and say so. But why don’t they just ask?” That last came out of her in a kind of wail.

“However the war began, we’re loyal Altans, if they’d just ask, we’d do whatever was needed!”

“Probably because they aren’t the sort of people who ask. They’re too used to taking,” he said bitterly. Oh, yes. I know that type. “Anyway, taking is easier. Asking requires that you admit that you need something; taking means you’re the strong one and you can have whatever it is that you want.”

But this was getting him angry, and that was counterproductive at this moment. He forced himself to calm down. “Anyway, now you know. Or at least, you know the best guesses. You might want to see if you can’t get something more out of the Healers; letting them know that you have some idea of what’s going on might loosen their tongues. If the Healers have some proof that this is what’s going on—well, as the next in line to the Twin Thrones, I think Toreth has a right to know.”

“I intend to,” she said grimly. “ ‘It is better to have a scorpion out in the open than under the bed,’ ” she quoted one of the proverbs that he remembered his mother using.

“True,” he agreed. “But it’s better still to have it dead beneath your sandal.”

TEN

“KIRON! Kiron!” The frantic shout from the pen ‘next to his startled Kiron out of a sound sleep, and it was only thanks to his “training” at the hands of Khefti-the-Fat that he came awake all at once. “Kiron!” the shout came again, and this time, amid the startled replies and complaints all around him, he knew where it had come from and who it was that had called him.

And he grinned, in spite of the panicked tone of Menet-ka’s voice. There was only one reason for that level of panic at this particular time, coming from Menet-ka.

The first egg was hatching.

Kiron had actually been expecting this for the past couple of days, and had advised Menet-ka to move a pallet down into the sand next to the egg so that if it began to move, he would know immediately. Not that this would make a great deal of difference to the hatching egg, but it would to Menet-ka, whose hair had begun to stand on end from the shy boy’s new habit of constantly and nervously running his fingers through it. So, like Avatre, these babies would be born amid thunder and rain. He considered that a good omen.

And another good thing—though not an omen—was that Menet-ka had begun to come out of his shell since the hatching was so near, to ask questions of Kiron without whispering or mumbling them.

He pulled on a wrap and kilt, ducked under the curtain of water pouring off his awning, went out into the corridor, and poked his head through the door to Menet-ka’s pen.

“So the youngsters will be born amid lightning, just like Avatre! That is a fine omen!” he said heartily.

Menet-ka just stared at him, as if he hadn’t any idea of what Kiron was talking about.

With a sigh, Kiron ducked through a second curtain of water and waded out into the sand to see Menet-ka hovering over the rocking egg, looking very much as if he was going to start pulling his hair out in handfuls next. It might be the middle of the night, but there was no problem seeing him or the egg; Menet-ka had surrounded the pit with lamps nestled into the sand.

“Besides being a good omen,” he added helpfully, when the other boy looked at him in doubt, “the one big problem with any kind of hatching egg is drying out in the middle of the process. And it certainly isn’t going to dry out in this weather!” He waved a hand at the water cascading down off the awning into the deep channels cut especially to drain it away from the hot sands. The sheeting rain glinted like fabric made from glass in the flickering lamplight. In fact, it looked almost as if he and Menet-ka and the egg were entirely enclosed in a room hedged in by water.

Why is it, I wonder, that babies of all sorts always choose to arrive in the middle of the night, in the middle of the worst weather possible?

This time, he had a hammer—something he had not had when Avatre hatched. He listened carefully to the egg, putting his ear down against the rocking shell, until he found the spot where the tapping was coming from inside.

“Here,” he said, handing the little stone hammer to Menet-ka, and tapping the spot with his index finger. “Use that here. Just tap, don’t hit. Remember what I told you, and how we practiced on ostrich eggs. You want to help him crack the shell; he’s trying to make an air hole.”

“But—!” Menet-ka wailed—but he took the hammer in a hand that shook like reeds in the wind, and he gave the shell a tap. Not too hard, and not too gently. Kiron was proud of him.

The tapping from inside stopped for a moment, then began again, with renewed vigor.

This was the problem with something as big as a dragon egg. In order to protect the dragonet growing inside, it had to be thick and hard. But when the time came for hatching, it was too thick and hard for the baby to break out unassisted. Dragon mothers helped their eggs to hatch, though no one had ever seen exactly how. They didn’t have beaks to hammer at the shell with, nor did they have hands that could hold a rock. But when Ari had spied on the nests of the wild ones, he had heard them working at the outside of the hatching eggs, so he had known that he would have to help Kashet when the time came.

Ari had in turn told the story any number of times to anyone who would listen. Foremost among the listeners had, of course, been his dragon boy—then called “Vetch,” now called by his proper name.

The moment when the egg actually cracked all the way through was marked by a sudden change in the tone of the hammer strike. “Stop!” Kiron said, holding up a hand, but Menet-ka had already stopped, and was watching the “soft” spot breathlessly.

A moment, and then the egg rocked violently, a little triangle of shell popped up, and the end of a snout poked out.

The lamplight was too dim to make out the color, but it was dark, so the dragonet was probably going to be dark, too. “Is he all right? Is he breathing?” Menet-ka asked, on fire with anxiety.

“He’s fine; he’s got his air hole now, he’ll take a rest for a little. Won’t you, my lad?” Kiron crooned. In the lamplight, the tiny nostrils flared and relaxed, flared and relaxed, as the dragonet took in his first lungfuls of air.

While the last of the night ebbed, and the sky gradually lightened to gray, Kiron directed Menet-ka in the hatching of his egg. Once the others were awake, they gathered around to watch, each of them knowing that when the time came, it would be he who hovered over the rocking egg with a hammer, listening intently to discover where the dragonet within was chipping now, and adding carefully measured hammer blows to the outside.

And at last, as Kiron had known it would, the egg rocked violently one last time, and broke into two uneven halves, and the new dragonet sprawled out of it and into the sand. Menet-ka gave a cry of joy, and Kiron plucked the hammer out of his hand as he flung himself at his new charge.

“Right,” he told the others, who were crowding closer for a look. “Out, all of you. This baby needs one mother, not nine, and he—” he took a look back over his shoulder and corrected himself, “—she won’t know who it is if you’re all shoving your faces at her. Don’t worry,” he added, as he herded them out before him. “You’ll get your chances soon enough. In fact—Gan, your egg isn’t that much younger than Menet-ka’s and I’d be surprised if yours didn’t start to hatch by tomorrow morning.”

That at least sent Gan scrambling back to his pen, and the rest of them realized that in the excitement they had all forgotten about breakfast.

The baby would be fine for a bit without food, and so would Menet-ka, even though the latter didn’t have a yolk sac to absorb. Kiron had his own leisurely breakfast, and went to check on Avatre, who was trying with all her might to find out what was going on in the next pen without shoving aside the awning and getting her head wet. He remembered how she had looked when she first hatched, like a heap of wet rubies and topaz. He had known then that she was going to be beautiful, and she was certainly fulfilling his every expectation.

She whined at Kiron as soon as she saw him. He grinned. “All right, my love. Come along, I’ll show you.” He put a hand on her shoulder—it was so ingrained in her never to leave the pen without him that he didn’t need to chain her—and led her to the pen next door. She didn’t like going through the dripping water—but then again, she wanted to see what was going next door so badly she put up with it.

Cautiously, she craned her head and neck around the door, and snorted with surprise at the sight of the baby. Menet-ka was oblivious; he had the dragonet’s head in his lap, and its wings spread out on either side of it atop the sand to dry, utterly absorbed in his new charge.

“So,” Kiron asked his own charge. “What do you think?”

He had been right; this baby was going to be one of the dark ones, an indigo-blue shading to purple on the extremities and in the wing webs. Avatre stretched her neck out a little farther, without going one step more into the pen, and snorted again, then turned her head to look at him.

“Oh, no!” he told her, smothering a laugh at the sight of her widened eyes. “That’s Menet-ka’s baby, not mine!”

She snorted a third time; then, evidently content and having seen enough, she pulled her head back and nuzzled his hair, relaxing all over. He patted her shoulder, and was momentarily nonplussed to realize just how much higher it seemed than the last time he’d patted it. Great good gods, she’s putting on another growth spurt! At this rate, she’ll be big enough to fly combat within a few moons! He didn’t recall the Tian wild-caught dragonets growing that fast. Perhaps tala did slow their growth.

But he put that thought aside, and led her back to her pen. “No fear, my love,” he told her, making a caress of his voice. “No one could ever take your place.”

She gave him a look of renewed confidence with a touch of arrogance, as if to say, “Well, of course not!” and flung herself back into the hot sand of her pen. He laughed, and went to get a bucket of finely chopped meat and bone for the baby’s first meal.

They all had dragon boys, of course—not that Kiron ever called on his very much—and the first order of the day was to show Menet-ka’s boy exactly how small to chop up the baby’s meal. “And make sure to get plenty of bone into it,” he advised, “and some hide and hair. Do you know why?”

The dragon boy shook his head, but looked attentive; that was a good sign, evidently Lord Khumun had made a point of picking out boys who were actually interested in the dragons, and not just taking this as another job.

“The baby needs bone to make bone of his own,” Kiron explained, “And the hide and hair help keep his insides clean.”

“Oh—like a falcon!” the dragon boy said, brightening. “And like the hunting cats eat grass.”

“Exactly.” Kiron beamed at him, and the boy flushed with pride at getting the correct answer. “You should also add clean organ meat, too. I know it’s a nasty job, but it has to be done. Avatre likes hearts especially,” he added as an afterthought.

“Falcons need organ meat too,” the boy said, nodding as he chopped the meat into the right-sized bits. “I used to take care of falcons. That is, I did the cleaning and feeding, I never got to handle them—”

“Well, I was a dragon boy, and my master was a dragon boy, so do your work well and one day there may be an egg for you, too,” Kiron said, and the boy’s face lit up. He carried the bucket of bloody bits off to Menet-ka with the air of one carrying a holy relic, and Kiron had to repress a smile.

“Lan-telek!” he called, gesturing to his dragon boy, who was waiting hesitantly just beside the door of the butchery. “Avatre’s putting on a growth spurt. I think we’ll need two barrows each today if she is. Chores don’t stop because there’s a new dragonet in the pens.”

“Yes, sir, Jouster Kiron, sir,” said the dragon boy, bobbing his head awkwardly, and trundled a barrow up to the butcher.

No, chores didn’t stop. Dragons were whining for their breakfast. And today there was one more than there had been yesterday.

A good omen.

Just before the rains ended, there were eight new dragonets in the pens. All of the eggs had hatched successfully. Menet-ka’s female was the indigo-purple, Orest ended up with a brilliant blue male the color of a beetle’s wings. Kalen got a brown-and-gold female, Pe-atep a scarlet-and-sand male. Gan found himself with a solid green male, Oset-re with a coppery female shading to red. Huras the baker’s son got the biggest and most striking dragonet of all, a blue-to-purple-to-scarlet female that weighed almost twice as much on hatching as the others—Jousters were still coming to have a look at her, for she was a real beauty, and no Altan had ever seen such a dragonet before. And Toreth got the quietest, another female, a blue-black shading to silver-blue, who, if she was not the largest or the most brightly colored, already showed a striking level of intelligence.

All of them were demanding. All of them were constantly hungry. Kiron was getting a good idea of how lucky he had been to get Avatre, who had been quiet and good compared to this lot. They certainly kept their “mothers” on the run.

Now the boys were finding out exactly how much work it was going to be to raise a dragonet.

There was not one complaint out of the lot of them. Not even a whisper of a complaint. Not even from Orest, who was now so busy that all of his “outside” friends never saw him anymore, unless they came to the compound—and even then, they found themselves playing a poor second to Orest’s beloved Wastet. Orest was as utterly besotted as Kiron had been, and it was his friends who were doing the complaining that Orest was “not amusing anymore” and “had no time for gossip.”

Toreth might have missed this new maturity, but his twin Kaleth—without the preoccupation of a dragonet—did not. So after the first moon, with no sign of lapsing on Orest’s part, not even when he was so tired by the time the sun went down that he was staggering, Orest became the last of Kiron’s Wing to be taken in and made privy to Toreth’s plans for the future.

For by then, the first growth spurt was over; with Avatre’s history in mind, and comparing all the dragonets, Kiron had the notion that this was the point where the first “failures” generally occurred in the wild. If parents couldn’t manage to bring enough to satisfy all of the dragonets during the point where they were the most vulnerable and needed one parent with them constantly, it would be the smallest and the youngest who failed to compete for food and died. That was perhaps why there had been so much whining and begging in the first moon—although they were not sharing the same nest, they could hear each other, and every time one started begging, it would set the rest off. It was competition to live, competition for the next mouthful, because things might thin out at any moment, and the dragonet that got the most food now was that much closer to making it to fledging.

Now, though, they all had put on enough weight that they had a small reserve, and the constant begging eased off, much to the relief of their riders and all those who had to come anywhere near the pens.

All nine human members of the wing gathered in Avatre’s pen—Avatre regarded them with a sleepy, indulgent gaze, too old now to be disturbed by voices and lamplight if she chose to sleep. They had discovered that although the rains were over, it was still necessary to keep the awnings up over the pens after dark, for every night, a great storm would sweep across the city, coming from the sea, speeding southward and growing in strength as it moved. These, Kiron had to presume, were the out-of-season storms that had so crippled the Tian Jousters; the Magi had, predictably, not troubled themselves to warn the Jousters of the little fact that the storms would be continuing after dark. It was just a good thing that everyone had felt the storms building and had rushed out to cover the pens before much rain came down. They were, however, relatively minor, coming as they did in the night, without the added energy that the heat of the day generated farther south. The Altan Jousters were hardly affected at all, except for needing to draw the awnings over the sand pits. Not so the Tians; Altan patrols found the storms raging over Tian territory vicious enough that they had to turn back at the border.

And not so the poor Fledglings. They were still being taken, but now it was under cover of darkness, rather than just after dawn. Kiron tried not to think about their plight too much. There wasn’t anything he could do for them—though Toreth had told him in confidence that Kaleth was going to try to find out, if not what was being done to them, at least how they were faring. But he couldn’t help thinking about them, even tonight when he was enjoying the company of the others, when the storms rolled overhead, moving for the south.

“Kiron,” said Gan, recapturing his attention, “when do you think the dragonets will fledge?”

He shoved his concerns to the back of his mind. “I think, given how fast the babies are growing, that you’ll be riding them when the kamiseen starts,” Kiron told them all. “They seem to be growing faster than Avatre did. I think it’s the amount of food they’re putting away.”

“They’re certainly doing that,” Huras said ruefully; his little one was eating half again as much as the others, and growing proportionately faster.

“Now, brother, you had better be glad of that,” Pe-atep said jovially, slapping him on the back. “You are no lightweight! It is a good thing that your little lady is going to be the biggest of the lot!”

“I may well be a lightweight before this is over and she is fully grown,” groaned Huras. “It seems all I do is run back and forth with her food!”

“Well,” Menet-ka said in his quiet voice, “according to Kiron, they’ll be doing more sleeping and be less demanding now. Since they’re bigger, they’ll be able to hold more food and can go longer between meals, I suppose.” He looked at Kiron, who nodded. “So we’ll have some freer time to read and plan what’s coming next?”

“More to the point, I think we need to begin Jousting training on the ground,” Kiron told them. “That was why I asked you to come here tonight. If the dragonets are up to flying by the time of the kamiseen, then once they get their skills, we must be ready to train them. You, Huras—there is something in particular I want you and Tathulan to train in—or to be more precise, there is a particular task I want you to train for.”

They way he said that got all of their attention. “Oh?” said Huras.

“You’re thinking of your mentor, Jouster Ari, and his Kashet, aren’t you,” said Toreth shrewdly. “You know we’re going to have to face him and I have the feeling that you don’t want him hurt.”

Kiron nodded. “Ari is honorable, and he has a conscience, and I know for a fact he has never harmed anyone who was not fighting him,” he replied. “And he is my friend. In fact—he is more than my friend.” He looked around the little group. “It is time that I told the true tale of my escape from Tia.”

As all of them hung upon his words, he softly related how Avatre had unexpectedly fledged, and how he had been pursued by Tian Jousters—how they managed to outdistance all but Ari—and how, seeing Ari, he had tried to fall to his death rather than be captured and see Avatre taken from him. It had been long enough now that all of them were as besotted with their dragonets as he was; he could see it in their faces that they understood when he told them that he would rather have died than lose her, and rather die than see her torn from him and given over into the care of someone who saw her only as another weapon of war.

He told them how Ari and Kashet caught and saved him—and then how Ari became the co-conspirator in his escape, even to giving his own Gold of Honor to the Bedu to pay for their help.

When he was done, he saw a change in their faces. Until today, even Jouster Ari had been just another faceless Tian enemy. Now, though they did not know Ari as he did, they did know that none of them could kill him.

“There was not a dragon alive that could best Kashet, until now,” he continued. “But Huras, when she’s full grown, your Tathulan can. She’ll outweigh Kashet for certain. I want to work out some way that we can drive Kashet to the ground and take Ari out of the combat without killing him.”

“All well and good,” said Toreth, “But then what?”

“If he’s grounded, it won’t matter,” Kiron said firmly. “And if, every time he flies to combat, he finds himself grounded, either he will stop flying combats and start doing something else, or the Captain of Jousters will find another job for him.” He shrugged. “The point is, he’s the equivalent of three Jousters; take him out, and we take out a third of a wing.”

Toreth nodded slowly. “I’d like to capture him, actually. If he’s as honorable as you say, we might be able to get him to swear to take himself and Kashet out of Tia altogether until the war is over.”

Kiron heaved a sigh of relief. “I was hoping you would suggest that,” he said. “I don’t want either of them to suffer.”

“Honestly, neither do I,” Toreth admitted with a smile. “I had much rather meet him, and one day learn from him. The first man to raise a tame dragon! I want to hear his story from his own lips.”

Kiron thought of Ari—how very lonely he had seemed to be, and how well he would fit in with this group. If only fate had not placed them on opposite sides of the conflict. It wasn’t fair.

Well, now, at least, he had the wing on his side. It would not be hard to persuade Lord Khumun that Huras should devote himself to taking the infamous Jouster Ari out of the sky. And after that—well, he very much doubted that the Lord of the Jousters would care what happened, so long as Ari and Kashet were no longer a factor in the fighting.

“The rest of us need to learn some new techniques, too,” he continued. “It seems to me that we ought to be able to outfly the Tians; I’m not entirely sure that we need to engage in close combat with them if we can find some other way of dealing with them. And it ought to be possible to train our dragons to put up with missiles going past their ears, too—Avatre has certainly learned.”

“You’re thinking of using bows?” Orest said, looking nervous.

He shook his head. “No. I was thinking of slings and clay pellets. Dragons have an instinct to snap at things going by their heads, and they tend to catch arrows in mid-flight—and the truth is, I would rather not interfere with that instinct. It might save our lives. But Avatre ignores clay pellets. You wouldn’t have to hit a man hard enough in the head to knock him out or kill him—all it would take would be a hit; he’d be distracted, or you might get a good hit on the arm and he’d lose his lance. Avatre learned to tolerate the sling whirling around quite quickly out in the desert. New techniques are going to make us ten times more effective than the Jousters who are not going to be ready for them.”

“For a while, at least,” Can said thoughtfully. “A Jouster being pelted could start to carry a shield. . . .”

“So you sting his dragon’s rump!” countered Oset-re. “No wild-caught dragon, no matter how much tala is in her, is going to react well to that!”

“As tough as their hide is, it would have to be a stone rather than a clay pellet,” mused Menet-ka. “Still. It’s a good idea, and it will nullify their numerical advantage faster than just getting equal numbers out there. Without the dragons giving the Tians the advantage, our casualty rate is going to drop, on the ground as well as in the sky.”

Toreth raised an eyebrow, and exchanged a significant look with Kiron. Kiron thought he knew what Toreth was thinking.

If the casualty rate drops, what happens to the Magi who are counting on a certain number of deaths to prolong their lives? Who will they allow to run short first? Themselves? Ha!

If the Great Ones were depending on magic to keep them going, and the magic ran out—well, they could very well die. And that could mean that Toreth and Kaleth would be on the Twin Thrones—and in a position to stop the war altogether—a lot faster than they had thought.

“That can only be good,” was all he said, and Toreth nodded.

The talk might have gone on long into the night if they had no one to think about but themselves—

—but of course, they didn’t.

“I have a hungry dragonet to feed in the morning,” Orest said, getting to his feet and stretching.

“As if the rest of us didn’t?” retorted Gan. “You’re right, though; morning is going to come far too quickly.”

The rest of them said their good nights and went back to their pens. All but Toreth, who lingered for a moment.

“Were you thinking about the Magi?” he asked, coming straight to the point.

Kiron nodded. “But don’t forget, they aren’t to be trusted,” he warned. “They could find some other means of gathering years. They haven’t resorted to outright, cold-blooded murder yet—”

“—that we know of—” corrected Toreth.

Kiron shivered involuntarily. “That we know of,” he agreed. “Still. If they were desperate—”

“Then we have to deal with them before they realize they are that desperate,” Toreth replied grimly. “Just so you know.”

And with that, he returned to his pen as well, leaving Kiron to put out his lamps and climb into his own cot.

His mind played host to some very disturbing thoughts before sleep finally claimed him.

“Father says they’ve taken the spy out of the household,” Aket-ten announced happily, the next time he came to visit her. “And the priest in charge of all of the Far-Sighted Winged Ones came to visit him right after.”

“Really?” he said. “I’ll tell you what, let’s take this into your garden. Just to be on the safe side.”

With the coming of good weather, it was possible to actually enjoy that courtyard with its latas pool that lay just outside her room. It was his considered opinion that she spent far too much time in the library, or otherwise indoors.

She nodded, and opened the door into the green space. It was a distinct improvement over being inside, especially on such a warm, pleasant day, with the scent of blooming latas in the air. The courtyard was covered in grass, not pavement, and the two of them were able to sprawl at their ease in the sunlight. Aket-ten brought a bread loaf out with her; it wasn’t long before she was breaking off crumbs to feed the fat carp that lazed in the pool.

“Now. This important priest came to see your father. Is that good or bad news?” Kiron asked warily.

“Good news,” she assured him with a laugh. “He told Father that none of the Winged Ones had sensed anything from me, and they were sure that if I still had my powers, I would have made every effort to Speak from afar with my teachers.” She giggled; he sensed it was because she was a little giddy with relief, rather than that she actually thought it was funny.

“So they don’t know that you don’t trust them anymore. Good,” he replied.

She nodded, and dusted the last of the crumbs from her hands. “He offered Father his condolences; Father said it made for an interesting conversation. It seemed as if—Father said—that he was disappointed and relieved, all at the same time.”

“Maybe he was,” Kiron said, thinking aloud. “If he’s really unhappy about the way that the Magi are using the Fledglings, he could be relieved that they aren’t going to be able to use you anymore. But on the other hand, since everyone thought you were going to be so strong in your powers, and now they think that you aren’t, he’s disappointed.”

“Well, he can just go on being disappointed,” she replied tartly—and resentfully. Not that he blamed her. He’d have been resentful and holding a grudge if he had been in her place. “And if he’s upset about the way the Fledglings are being used, why doesn’t he stop them? Anyway, Father thinks it’s safe for me to go back.”

Kiron sucked on his lower lip a moment. “It could be. But let’s think about how. I wouldn’t bet that the Magi are going to take the word of the Winged Ones as true. I don’t think the Magi trust anyone. I think that as soon as you are back in your home, they’ll send someone to have a look at you.”

“So?” she asked, hesitation creeping into her voice.

“So I think you ought to be ready to give them a show,” he told her, and he pushed himself up out of the grass. “Let’s go find that crafty Akkadian Healer of yours, and see what he thinks.”

The Akkadian—who was a short, bandy-legged fellow with a knowing look to him and a full, bushy head of silver-streaked, curly black hair—had plenty of ideas and was just as suspicious of the Magi as Kiron was.

“You’ll keep those amulets, of course,” he told Aket-ten, brusquely. “I don’t care how good those Magi are, my amulets will make them think you are a perfectly ordinary girl.”

It took them a little while to put the “show” together, but when they were through, even the suspicious Akkadian was satisfied that it was going to hold up to scrutiny. Furthermore, he agreed to be there the next time that Lord Ya-tiren came to visit, in order to add his weight of authority and experience to Aket-ten’s pleas for caution. Kiron went back to the compound feeling that Aket-ten’s safety was in capable hands.

Kiron was not there at Lord Ya-tiren’s villa when the cart from the country brought Aket-ten “back home” again, but as it happened, by purest chance he was visiting Aket-ten a day later, sitting with her in her courtyard, when a servant came and requested her presence in her father’s chamber. “My Lord said to tell you that there is a distinguished visitor to see you.”

Kiron and Aket-ten exchanged a glance; they both knew that “distinguished visitor” meant that one of the Magi had, as Kiron had predicted, decided to come to see for himself if Aket-ten really had lost her powers. “Tell my father that I will be there shortly,” she said.

“I’d like to come along,” said Kiron when they were alone in the courtyard again. “I’ve never seen a Magus. And Lord Ya-tiren didn’t say that you were to come alone.”

“No,” she admitted thoughtfully. “He didn’t. And he knows you’re here. I think that’s a good idea, and I have the feeling that he would like you to be there.”

So when a rather different version of Aket-ten emerged from her chamber, he got a chance to see what his suggestions and the Akkadian’s looked like in practice.

If he hadn’t known what was going on, he’d have been shocked to his toes by how wretched she looked.

Firstly, Aket-ten looked shrunken and unnaturally thin—which was the effect of wearing a gown that was two sizes too big for her, with a belt to match. That had been the Akkadian’s idea, to make it appear that she had lost an enormous amount of weight and might still be weak and sickly. Her hair was dull, lank and stringy (a bit of oil combed through it and dirt dusted in afterward). There were dark shadows under her eyes (a touch of kohl smudged beneath them) and her skin looked sallow (effective use of a very expensive bit of saffron rubbed into the skin to make it yellowed). The Akkadian had coached her on how to move; Kiron hadn’t seen that part of the preparations, but the clever Healer had evidently done a fine job of teaching her, for she looked timid, uncertain, and lacking in all self-confidence. He escorted her to her father’s private audience chamber, and had the satisfaction of seeing a startled look on the face of the stranger who was waiting there.

As he had said, he had never seen one of the Magi before; somehow he had gotten the image of a wizened, oily, unpleasant little sneak.

The stranger was indeed unpleasant, but it was because he oozed arrogance. Some might have considered him a handsome man, save for that. He was neither oily nor wizened, and gave no impression of being a sneak. Rather, he was out of the same mold as the most obnoxiously proud and self-assured Tian Jousters that Kiron had known.

He thinks that whether or not we know it, he knows that he is the master here. He knows that he can take whatever he wants, whenever he wants it, and there is nothing that we can do about it.

The man’s attitude put his back up, but Kiron controlled his reactions and his temper. The last thing he wanted the Magus to know was that he had the measure of the man.

He assumes I’m just a foolish boy, like Orest used to be. I want him to go on assuming that!

Aket-ten stood before the visitor with her head bowed, her shoulders hunched. The Magus looked down at her with a dissatisfied expression, but his words were pleasant enough.

“I am told that your powers have faded, young Fledgling?” he said, in a voice that would have sounded kindly if you hadn’t been aware of the anger beneath it.

“Yes, my Lord,” Aket-ten whispered. “I am sorry. All that I have left is the Speech of Beasts. I tried and tried, but—after that morning when—when the Magi came—to test us, they said—it was gone, all gone—” she shook her head, and her shoulders shook. The Magus hopefully took that for silent sobs, but Kiron had a feeling that she was shaking with rage. “I was so sick, after. . . .”

“I hope,” the Magus said, accusation in his voice, “that you are not implying that the Magus who came to test you somehow stole your powers from you.”

“Oh, no!” she whimpered. “No, I never intended that! No, it was something else—woman’s troubles—my own weakness—”

“A pity,” the man said, and his lip curled with contempt. It was just a momentary lapse, but Lord Ya-tiren saw it as well as Kiron, and although his lordship kept his face impassive, Kiron saw one hand curl involuntarily into a fist before Lord Ya-tiren relaxed it. “A pity indeed. Those who flower early often fade quickly, it is said. Too bad.” His voice held not only contempt, but anger, and perhaps a hint of irritation. “Well, the Speech of Beasts is hardly going to be of much use to your people and your country, girl. I suggest you get yourself a husband, then. This boy, perhaps, would do, if he is a friend of yours.” His eyes flickered over to Kiron, passing over him with no interest. “Pass your powers on to your children, and if the gods favor you, they’ll have more staying power than you did.”

Kiron found his jaw dropping at such cold, calculated rudeness, and even Lord Ya-tiren gasped with anger. But the Magus was turning away. “My thanks, and my condolences, my Lord,” he called over his shoulder. “I can find my own way out.”

Kiron held his breath; Aket-ten remained with her head bowed for a very long time—then, finally, raised it with a face full of mischief. “It’s all right,” she said, with some of her old merriness. “He’s gone, the arrogant pig!”

“For half a debek I would follow after him and beat him like a thieving slave!” Lord Ya-tiren snarled. “The nerve! To so insult my own daughter. In front of me, and in my own house!”

“You have your revenge in that you’ve successfully stolen what he wanted right from under his nose, my Lord,” Kiron reminded him. “And in fact, he has given you and your daughter every excuse you need to send her to the Jousters’ Compound. No one will think twice that she seeks to use the last of her Gifts there, and most will believe it is because she wishes also to have my company, and that you are not opposed to this.”

The moment the words were out of his mouth, he flushed. Not that he would have taken them back—

But Aket-ten gave him a significant look, and her father a speculative one, and when Aket-ten murmured, “And who is to say that I do not?” her father’s look of speculation turned to a sly smile. Kiron felt a wave of heat pass over his entire body, and the fact that he knew he was blushing only made him flush the more.

“That is a good plan,” was all that Lord Ya-tiren said, however—for which he was very grateful. “It takes her far from the Temple of the Twin Gods, so that there is little chance our ruse will be detected as she hones her powers in secret. The Magi visit the Jousters’ Compound so seldom that it is unlikely she will ever be forced to endure the company of one again. And she will be with her brother and her—friends. I will call upon Lord Khumun this very afternoon and arrange it.”

“Her help will be very much appreciated, I promise you, my Lord,” Kiron said hastily. “And with that in mind, perhaps I should return—tell the others—make preparations—” He knew he was babbling, but he couldn’t seem to stop his mouth from spouting nonsense. “She’ll be—we’ll be—good morning, then, to you both—I’ll take my leave—”

And with that, he turned and fled, and was only grateful not to hear Aket-ten’s giggles joining her father’s amused laughter.

When he got back to the compound, he found it in an uproar, but since virtually everyone was smiling, or even laughing, any alarm he had felt at the noise faded to nothing. And, eventually, he found out what the cause was.

Menet-ka’s imperious little indigo-purple dragon, living up to her royal colors, was not inclined to wait patiently for anything she felt she was entitled to. And when Menet-ka had not appeared the moment she bleated for her afternoon meat, she had elected to go and find it—and him—for herself. She had wandered the whole of the compound before she was through, sticking her nose into pens and demanding her “mother” and her food of whoever or whatever was in there. The wild-caught dragons all knew what a baby was, and even the swamp dragons began bellowing on her behalf for her mother, for although no dragon would tend the offspring of another unless its own young had died, all dragons protected and defended any dragonet. This in turn brought the dragon boys and anyone else within hearing, but since not one of them was “mother,” Bethlan ignored them. And they all wanted to see what she would do next. So Bethlan toddled up and down the pens, leaving noise and confusion in her wake, until, at long last, she found her “mother” Menet-ka in the butchery, helping his dragon boy chop up her meal. By this time she was so tired that Menet-ka and the boy had to load her up into a barrow and trundle her back to her pen. She was very tired, and a little cold, but no worse for wear, fortunately.

“If she’d gotten too cold, I think she would have joined an adult dragon in its pen,” Menet-ka told Kiron, still scarlet with chagrin.

“I think you’re probably right. She had the wit to come looking for you, I think she would have had the wit to go lie down somewhere warm,” Kiron agreed, covering his mirth. “I’m not sure I want to go putting barriers across the doors, though, just yet. Let’s wait and see if she does it again, before we think about doing that.”

“She won’t,” Menet-ka said firmly, ears still red. “I won’t let her get hungry again.”

In stark contrast to imperious little Bethulan, Pe-atep’s scarlet-and-sand Deoth was the shyest dragon Kiron had ever seen. When all the fuss had died down, and he checked on all the little ones to make sure they were in their pens, he found Pe-atep in the farthest corner of his, crooning over Deoth, who was shivering with fear and hiding his head in Pe-atep’s tunic.

“What’s wrong with him?” Kiron asked, but very, very quietly; he didn’t want to upset the little one more than he already was.

“Nothing really,” Pe-atep said, with far more calm than Kiron would have felt, it this had been Avatre. “He’s high-strung and sensitive, and I am glad it’s me that has him and not Menet-ka.”

“Why?” Kiron asked. Pe-atep raised his eyebrows.

“Well, the shyest rider with the shyest dragon? Think about it! We’d never get them off the ground!” Pe-atep ran his hands down the baby’s sides. “Poor little fellow. This happens in cats, sometimes; lions mostly, but sometimes cheetahs. One is born that just jumps at everything. You just have to coax them, and make sure that they never fail badly enough at anything to frighten them off it.” He chuckled, as the dragonet relaxed and stopped shivering. “There now, you see? It’s all right. Nothing bad happened, little one. I’ll want you lot to start coming into the pen at odd times, and bring a nice little tidbit with you every time you do. He has to start learning that new things can be nice things. It’s the only way to get him through this stage. But once we do, he’ll be as brave as a lioness, won’t you, my handsome fellow?”

“I’ll pass the word,” Kiron promised, and walked out softly but confidently.

As he told the others what Pe-atep had requested, he reflected that here, if he wanted it, was another omen. So far, it seemed that the dragonet was matched perfectly to the boy who had gotten it. Menet-ka had the boldest—who was pulling him into the center of attention, which was good for the boy. And Pe-atep, experienced handler of big hunting cats, had the shyest—he who was best equipped to handle such a problem baby out of his own vast experience.

So Toreth has the quietest but the smartest, I’ve seen that, too, already. And for someone who doesn’t particularly want to draw attention to himself right now, that is the ideal combination. I wonder if that means that Oset-re’s Apetma is going to shred his best tunics and kilts so that he loses some of that vanity? He already knew what Gan’s dragon meant to him—Gan, who had never taken anything seriously before his dragon hatched, was utterly, completely, wholeheartedly besotted. He was just as in love with the gentle Khaleph as Khaleph was with him. And as for Orest—well, Orest’s Wastet was, next to Bethulan, the most demanding of the lot. Everything had to be just so for Wastet—his meat chopped to a certain size, his pen cleaned at once, his water absolutely pure and fresh. There was no longer room in Orest’s world for “close enough.”

As for Huras—that was a perfect match, too. The huge Tathulen was so good-natured that the perfectionist was learning to slow down and relax a little. Huras was coming to understand that sometimes “close enough” was good enough.

Wiry little Kalen had brought all of his experience as a falconer to taking care of Se-atmen, who repaid his impeccable care with an outpouring of single-hearted love—which you just did not get from a bird of prey. So even Kalen, who Kiron had thought was probably the perfect candidate for taking care of a tame dragon without having to be taught anything, was learning something. . . .

And I am learning something from all of them, he thought, as he stood in the doorway of Avatre’s pen, and listened to the little sounds coming from all of the pens. Indeed I am. Now as long as I can keep a little ahead of all of them, we’ll be all right!

ELEVEN

THREE days later, Aket-ten made her first appearance in the Jousters’ Compound. She was accompanied by Lord Khumun, who told Kiron’s wing that he wished to see how she would fare in communicating with the dragons for himself.

The boys had been singularly uninterested in “Orest’s little sister” and had not been enthusiastic about leaving their precious charges to greet her. That all changed the moment they set eyes on her.

“By the gods!” Gan whispered to Kiron, as all of the boys of Kiron’s wing gathered to greet her. “What happened to Orest’s ‘little’ sister?”

“She grew up,” Kiron replied shortly, a little dismayed at Gan’s words, and surprised to feel a surge of jealousy. Aket-ten looked—well, wonderful. She had somehow achieved a compromise between the hoyden she had been and that elegant, slightly over-painted “lady” he had first seen in the Temple of All Gods. She looked quite comfortable in her skin, and yet there was no doubt whatsoever that she had, in very fact, grown up. Even Toreth was giving her an interested and intrigued look.

Yes, every one of the boys was eyeing her with varying degrees of speculation and interest except Orest himself. Orest was apparently oblivious to the change. He still looked bored, and clearly wished himself elsewhere.

“I have work to do,” he whispered irritably to Kiron. “You’d think they’d leave me out of this welcoming-party!” He shook his head. “She’s bad enough now as a know-it-all; this is just going to swell her pride like a toad in the rain!”

That his wingmates did not share his impatience didn’t seem to register with him at all.

Aket-ten didn’t look like someone whose pride was going to swell over all the attention. She looked like someone who knew she had a job to do and was determined to do it well. The encounter with the Magi had changed her profoundly, Kiron decided at last. It had dispelled some cherished illusions, and had forced her to look at the world around her with a high degree of skepticism. He felt sorry for her; the confident child he had rescued back in the swamp was gone.