Joust

Still, when he took his place in that out-of-the-way corner tonight, he wished she would move to doing the late serving. The slave who left him a jar of beer and a platter of bread did so without even looking at him. He sighed, reached for a loaf, and tore off a piece with his fingers, hoping that there was someone still grilling fresh meat, and he'd get a plate of that, instead of cold leftovers. And that thought made him realize just how far he'd come. Last year at this time, he'd have done nearly anything for a scrap of meat, burned hard enough to need pounding between two rocks before he could actually eat it!

A shadow fell over his table; a tall one. He looked up.

"Well, Vetch," said an unsmiling Baken. The slave must have just gotten a bath; his hair was wet, and slicked neatly back, his hands were clean, his kilt fresh. Vetch noted without surprise that Baken wore a hawk-eye talisman made, not of the usual pottery, but one like Haraket sported, cast from silver and inlaid with enamel. Never had it been so obvious that Baken was not from Tia—he had a Tian's black hair, but it was curly, and not all the water in the world could make it lie straight on his head. His eyes were a disconcerting blue, and his complexion, beneath his tan, was a fine olive-color rather than Tian bronze or Altan ivory. His features were mathematically symmetrical; deep-set eyes, prominent cheekbones, small nose, generous mouth, chiseled chin with a cleft in it. Definitely not Tian, nor Altan.

Vetch blinked at him, taken by surprise by the young man's appearance at his table. "Well," he replied, not knowing what else to say. Baken seemed to take that as an invitation to sit down, because he did so, sliding onto the bench opposite Vetch's.

"So, you're Kashet's boy, I'm told," the young man said, taking a small loaf, but just holding it in his hands, rather than tearing it open to eat it. "You're the serf. The first serf to be made a dragon boy. The one that gave serfs a good reputation as dragon boys."

Vetch nodded warily. What was this leading up to? Did he have something against serfs?

"So it's largely thanks to you that I'm here at all." Baken regarded him steadily, the torchlight in the court illuminating only one side of his face, and once again Vetch nodded, feeling even more alarmed.

"So why do you hate me?" Baken asked, as calmly as if he was asking why Vetch was eating bread instead of an onion.

Vetch started. "I—I don't hate you," Vetch protested, feeling horribly guilty, and caught completely off-guard by the unexpected question.

"Then in that case, just what is it that makes your eyes go so dark and angry when you see me?" Baken persisted, pressing his advantage like a hunting cat trying to flush a pigeon, and with every bit of that intensity. "I'd like to know. I don't make enemies, and if someone has decided on his own that he wants to be my enemy, I want to know why."

Since Vetch had thought he was keeping his feelings securely to himself, Baken's accusation made him tense and nervous. What else wasn't he keeping secret? And why was Baken confronting him about this, anyway? It wasn't as if he was trying to make himself into Baken's rival. He didn't want to be Haraket's assistant—he didn't even want to be here! "I'm not your enemy," he said brusquely, looking away. "I don't wish you ill. How could I? You take better care of the dragons than anybody but me!"

Baken's head lifted at that, like a hound on a scent, and Vetch felt another pang of alarm. Now what had he given away? "Anybody but you. Is that jealousy I hear?"

"No!" Vetch snapped. Then honesty drove the truth out of him. "Well—not jealousy. Envy."

Baken's eyes lit, and he nodded; at that moment, he looked like one of the falcons he had once taken care of, with prey in sight. And Vetch already knew what prey felt like; it was a familiar sensation, a helplessness that—oh, yes—he was certainly feeling now. "Ah… envy. Let me see—what have you learned or seen or heard that could possibly make you envious of me? I'm not your rival for Kashet. Jouster Ari would never accept another boy even if Kashet might. You're far too young to consider yourself as a potential assistant to Haraket, but Haraket offered me a great deal else besides that position…"

Vetch winced a little at the mention of Haraket's promises, and the falcon stooped on the prey that had just been flushed before its eager eyes.

"Ah. I see. In that case—would it be that promise of freedom that Lord Haraket made me?"

Freedom. Vetch felt his gut twist up inside him, and he set the bread aside, uneaten. Why was Baken tormenting him like this? It wasn't fair! "Yes," he replied, biting off the word, making it a challenge. Leave me alone! he thought angrily. Why twist the knife in the wound? What have I done to you to deserve this?

The falcon looked at the prey in its claws—and then, unexpectedly opened its grip. Baken sighed, relaxed, and shook his head. "I'm sorry, Vetch," he said, sounding genuinely apologetic. "I can't help what I am, nor what you are. When a slave is offered freedom, well—

"I'm more of a slave than you are, or ever could be," Vetch grated. "A serf is less than a slave, for all that the masters pretend otherwise. I don't hate you, but don't expect me to love you for it either."

Baken closed his eyes for a moment, and there seemed to be a pocket of unexpected stillness holding both of them. "I know that. 1 also know why our masters will offer freedom to a slave, but not a serf, though I doubt it would be of any interest to you. Still." He pondered a moment, then continued. "I'll try and explain it to you, as my last, and most worthy master explained it to me. Slaves are either born that way, from those Tians who are born into slavery, or are Tians sold into slavery to pay debts, or they are brought as slaves from countries Tia has never conquered. Take me, for instance, I come from a very distant land indeed, so far that there is no chance my people could ever be the enemies of the Tians, so it is safe enough to free me. I have always been treated well, and have no one to revenge myself on. I've nowhere to go, freed—no reason to go to Tia's enemies, and every reason to stay here and continue to serve at the same place, but for a wage. Whereas you—" He shrugged. "Serf, you are an enemy. Freed, you are still an enemy, but there is no control over you or your actions anymore. I am sorry. If I could change things, I would."

Vetch's gut twisted a little harder. "It's not fair," he whispered.

"No," Baken agreed. "It's not. It's even less fair, because I am certain that Lord Haraket would offer you freedom if it was in his power, for how you took over the dragon Coresan and tamed her without frightening or hurting her. You are the one who has the reputation for making dragons love him."

The knot in Vetch's gut eased. "You know about that?" he asked. He hadn't thought Baken cared, actually. The young man had been very much involved with his own doings.

Baken smiled, and his set of large, even, and very white teeth gleamed in the torchlight; they were startling, not the least because Vetch had never seen Baken smile before. "Lord Haraket is very much impressed with your dedication and abilities; he told me all about it when he told me why he changed his mind about having serfs and slaves as dragon boys."

"Oh." Now Vetch felt guilty all over again, and felt he had to defend himself. "Well, I don't hate you, Baken. But you can't blame me for—

"Of course I can't, and I don't," Baken replied, interrupting him. "1 just didn't want the most skilled dragon boy in the compound to be my enemy, that's all. Here. In my country, when men agree to be comrades, they shake hands." He thrust out his hand.

Vetch shook it, gladly—and gladder still that Baken hadn't said "friends." Of all of the people in the entire compound, Baken was the last one he dared to have as a friend, for he was the one most likely to uncover the secret of Avatre's existence. "I don't mind that you're getting all the attention, that Haraket's depending on you, and that—well—you've taken over the new boys," he said, earnestly. "Honest, I don't. The freeborn boys probably do hate you, though."

Once again, that gleaming, toothy grin. "Let them. The boys I've picked are all like you and me—well, maybe without our gods-bestowed gift for understanding animals, but they're just as hardworking and they like their charges. They aren't freeborn boys with plenty of choices ahead of them, and plenty of arrogance to match their choices. They already know that there are many, many worse places to serve, and they're learning that this is one of the best, and they do not want to lose their places. Pretty soon, our kind will outnumber theirs, and I know we'll outlast them. So let them stew in their own juices until they can't even stand themselves. Just so long as you and I have gotten things straight between us. There shouldn't be any animosity between men of our kind."

Men! That was sheerest flattery, and Vetch knew it. Still, it was sweet to hear, even if it was flattery. "You need to meet Ari," Vetch said at last. "He's—different. You'll admire him, you know, he's not like any other Jouster in the compound, maybe not like any other, ever."

"So Lord Haraket says." Baken nodded. "He seems very different, and everything I've heard is good. He might change my mind about—

He stopped abruptly, but now it was Vetch's turn to pounce alertly on an incautious phrase. If Baken had forced him into an uncomfortable place, well, turnabout was fair play. "About Joust-ers, you mean? Just why don't you like the Jousters?"

He whispered that; he didn't want to get Baken in any trouble, just because he wanted to know one of Baken's secrets. Baken frowned, fiercely, but he couldn't conceal his own unease.

Ha! Got you!

"What makes you think that I don't—" Baken began aggressively, but stopped, and gave a self-conscious laugh. "You're pretty observant as well as clever, Vetch."

"Maybe. But I want to know," Vetch replied, not allowing himself to be deflected. "Ari is—I don't want anyone around him who doesn't like Jousters and might do or say something that would give him trouble. Unless you've got an awfully good reason for it."

And it had better be an astonishingly good reason.

"You have a point." Baken studied him for a moment. "And all right; I think I can trust you, so I'll tell you—though it isn't merely that I don't like Jousters, it goes further than that. It isn't because of what they do, it's because of what they are." He paused a moment, and signaled to a server, who plunked down a platter of still-sizzling meat and another of onions between them, with an undisguised look of hero worship for Baken, who answered it with a wink. "You eat, though, while I talk. You look starved enough as it is."

"All right," Vetch agreed—since now that his gut had unknotted, it was growling. He plucked a hot piece of meat from the platter and dropped it quickly on the bread, adding an onion slice; he waited only a few moments for it to cool before biting off a mouthful.

"It isn't that they're the masters either. It's more complicated than that." Baken took an empty beer jar from the table and brooded down at it. "As I said, I've always been treated well; I don't think anyone ever realized how I feel. As I'm sure you've noticed, no one ever pays any attention to the feelings of serfs and slaves."

Vetch waited, patient as a cat at a mouse-hole with only one entrance.

"What do you call a man who calls up his servants, has hunting birds brought out to him, takes one on his fist, unhoods and casts it, and basks in the admiration of his peers when it takes a fat duck?" Baken asked, after a time.

"Um—" Vetch replied, and shook his head. "Um—a noble? A rich man?" he hazarded.

"Ah. Good answer. But not the one that makes me angry." Baken's lip curled. "You see, what he calls himself is 'falconer.' He has not caught the birds nor taken them at great hazard from the nest, scaling the cliffs to find them and bring them down. He has not tended them, he does not feed them, he has not trained them." The bitterness in Baken's voice made Vetch blink in surprise. "If the bird flies away, his wrath is only for the loss of a valuable possession, not because he is losing something he has invested a part of his life and self in. If it is recovered, he is pleased only because his possession is returned to him, not because he has gotten back something that is near as dear as a child. But the man who has done all those things, is all those things, is not called a 'falconer.' He is called slave, servant, and he has not even the right to challenge the master when the master says 'I will have this bird,' and he knows that the bird is not fit to fly that day."

There was a story behind that—perhaps many. Vetch didn't want to know them. There was already enough pain in his own short life; he didn't want to add the burden of Baken's to his own. Already he had three people besides himself in his prayers—his father, Ari, and Avatre. If he added any more, the gods might begin to wonder what was wrong with him, that he assailed their ears with so many pleas.

"Now—at least there is a separate name for the man who takes a dragon who is cared for by someone else, trained by someone else—who mounts into the saddle and flies it off, caring nothing except that it do what it is trained to do and bring him glory," Baken continued, his jaw rigid. "And at least he is named for what he does, and not the good beast that he treats as he would a mere chariot."

Vetch started, hearing his own thoughts echoed so exactly.

"He takes a creature that would, on its own, serve him in— say—hunting, and he turns it into a weapon, a horrible weapon, and exposes it to the spears and arrows of enemies with his only thought being where he would get another if this one fell." Baken's gaze smoldered. "And which of these Jousters truly knows his dragon, or has studied its ways and made it his friend, or has even cared for his own beast for so much as a day?"

"Ari has," Vetch said, stoutly, raising his chin. "Ari raised Kashet, trained him all by himself, and comes to be with him nearly every night. And he would tend Kashet himself, now, if he had the time. And he doesn't trust Kashet's care to just anyone either!"

Baken's rigid expression softened, and he patted Vetch on the head like a small child. Vetch bristled a little, but kept his resentment on a tight leash. To Baken, doubtless, he was a small child. That was the hazard of being so little. "So I have been told, and see no reason to disbelieve it. So your Ari is a single paragon among the Jousters, as the Commander of Dragons is a paragon among the nobles, given that he has taken, cared for, and trained his own birds, dogs, and horses." Now there was plain admiration in Baken's voice, and Vetch guessed that of all of Baken's masters or the men those masters consorted with, the Commander of Dragons had been the only one who had earned Baken's highest regard. "Such men are worth serving, and serving well. Our Haraket is another such. But such men are few, and often given names they do not deserve, when they take the praise that is rightly given to men that they think beneath their notice."

Oh, there are many stories there, Vetch thought, somberly, and now wanted to hear them even less. Stories—and heartbreak. And I have troubles of my own. "Thank you for explaining," he said, carefully. "I—I won't tell anyone."

Baken nodded, accepting his word. "Now, that isn't the only reason why I wanted to see you," he continued, his tone now so light, his expression so casual, that Vetch could hardly believe what he'd looked like mere moments before. "I have need of your help, you see. I'm training one of the dragonets myself."

Vetch blinked. "You are?" That was unheard of! Trainers were trainers, and dragon boys—whether or not they were Haraket's assistants—were merely dragon boys, not to be entrusted with the training!

"Haraket wishes to see if my methods—things that I have learned from training both horses and falcons—produce a better beast than the methods used now," Baken explained, with an ironic lift of his eyebrow. "As I said, another remarkable man, our Overseer. He does not answer a question of 'why' with the answer 'because we have done it thus-and-so for ten hundred years'."

Vetch stifled a laugh with his food.

"I need you, young Vetch, because you are four things. You are brave, you are agile, you know and like dragons, and you are small," he continued. And smiled. "And if you will agree to take time to help me, you will see why I need someone who is all these things."

Vetch could ill spare the time—but—

But he was going to have to begin training Avatre himself in another moon. And if he could learn how to do so by helping Baken…

"What's more, Haraket says that there is absolutely no need for you to keep on with the leather work and the weapons' inspection. You know very well how to do both, and there are more than enough new boys who need to learn to make up for you not being there." Baken cocked his head to the side. "Will that give you time enough?"

This time, he did not even need to think for a moment about his answer. "When do you need me?" he asked.

The blue dragonet that Vetch and Baken now faced—the very first one brought to the compound—was an entirely different creature from the hissing, snarling thing that had been brought in a mere handful of days ago. Vetch would not have believed it, if he hadn't seen it with his own eyes.

Mind, it was no Avatre, much less a Kashet, but although it eyed both of them with an expression both alert and wary, it was not prepared to rip off their limbs and eat them. Instead, it accepted their presence and eventually was relatively relaxed as first Baken, then Vetch handled it. This one was a solid, sky-blue from nose to tail, the same color, deepening on the extremities, rather than shading into a different color altogether. Sky-blue, latas-blue, he was a wonderful beast to look upon.

"I've got him used to saddle, harness, and guide straps," the young man said, as he buckled those accouterments in place. "I've even got him used to bearing weight on his back. But that was a sack of grain, and a sack of grain is not a human—and a stranger, at that."

Now Vetch understood entirely what Baken had meant last night by "brave, agile, and small." He would need to be brave, because this dragonet didn't know him and might turn on him if he tried to mount. He needed to be agile to get out of the way if it did. And he needed to be small, because, big as this blue dragonet was, it couldn't bear the weight of a man yet, or probably even one of the larger dragon boys. Their growing spines were surprisingly fragile, and could not bear too much stress.

The dragonet's harness had been fastened to four ropes that were in turn fastened to four rings in the pen wall. Vetch wasn't sure what those were for—

Well, he was about to find out. He'd made friends with the dragonet as Baken had shown him. Now he was about to shock it. As Baken stood back from his handiwork, Vetch strode across the sand with confidence and calm, both of which were going to be very important to keep the youngster from feeling uneasy as he approached. He greeted the dragon as Baken had shown him, as an adult greeted a subadult, with a breathy trill and a head bump, then without a pause, he vaulted up into the saddle.

He had to vault—this dragonet hadn't learned "down" and "up" yet, and he stood about as tall as one of the great god bulls. Baken had taught him the maneuver this morning, practicing on a saddle strapped to a beam supported on legs, mounted at about the right height out in the landing court. Both hands on the saddle, a jump, and a twist as he shoved his own weight up with his arms—

—and he was in place, balanced on the thin pad of leather, for the first time, with a dragon underneath him and him in the saddle instead of face-down over it.

Then, with another quick movement, he wedged his legs under and around the leg-hold straps, and grabbed the front of the saddle with both hands. There were no guide straps yet to hang onto; Baken deemed this confusing and disorienting enough for the poor young thing.

The dragonet went rigid with shock. Vetch felt its muscles tensing under his legs, and braced himself for its inevitable reaction.

It was as well that he did, for it tried at that moment to take off.

Thanks to the ropes, and the fact that it really wasn't old enough to fledge yet, it succeeded only in crow-hopping upward a few feet, flapping its wings clumsily. But that was unnerving enough—clearly another reason why Baken wanted someone brave!—and Vetch was very, very glad of the restraining ropes! It bounced about at the end of the ropes, bucking very much like the family's little donkey when startled, and Vetch clung on with grim determination and teeth rattling in his head. He couldn't even think, really—his very thoughts were bounced out of him! The straps cut into his legs with every bounce, and the saddle felt as if it was going to pop off at any moment.

But it couldn't keep such fighting up forever, though, and the moment it stopped, in a flash, Baken was at the dragonet's head, soothing it, comforting it, telling it what a wonderful beast it was. It didn't want to be soothed, but gentle hands, a soft voice, and a liberal allocation of tasty tidbits made it stand still, though it trembled like a leaf, and kept rolling its eye and twisting its head to look at him.

"Now, then, handsome one— ' Vetch murmured, when he was sure it wasn't going to go off again under him, and added one hand—one—to Baken's caresses. Baken gave him an approving look. "Now, then, you'll be used to this soon enough. It will all be fine—

He murmured other such nonsense, reaching places to rub that Baken couldn't from his stand on the ground at the dragonet's shoulder. And, slowly, the dragonet relaxed.

"You see?" Vetch murmured to him. "I'm not some strange monster on your back. I'm not up here to hurt you—I'm not a lion, come to break your neck and eat you! I'm just Vetch, you know me now, don't you?"

"Slide down now, Vetch," Baken murmured after some small time, while the dragonet was engaged in getting his eye ridges rubbed. "Then get back on him again."

Vetch unwrapped his legs, threw the right over the dragonet's neck, and slid down even faster than he'd vaulted up. The dragonet reacted to his absence with a start of surprise, but didn't hop about this time.

And before it could get too used to him being gone, Vetch jumped back into the saddle again.

This time, it only hopped once, and when it stopped, it wasn't shaking. Now it only looked indignant, and that was a great improvement over terrified.

They played this game four more times, until Baken decreed that the dragonet's developing spine had gotten enough stress for the day. He unharnessed and freed the youngster of everything but the single chain holding him around his neck, rewarded and praised him a little more, then both of them left the pen.

Once outside, Baken slapped Vetch on the back with a hearty grin. "By the gods, it works! I thought it might, but I wasn't sure. I'd like you here just before feeding, twice a day, so he's good and hungry, and he'll work for his tidbits; we'll play this little game on him until he takes you as easily as Kashet takes Ari, and until we've taught him 'up' and 'down,' and how you'll use both to mount, and we've taught him the use of the guide straps. Then, when he can actually get off the ground with you on his back, I'll get one of the heavier boys to help me, and work my way up until he can carry a very light man."

Hmm. Like you, Baken?

Well, why not? If Baken wanted to add himself to the roster of trainers, why not?

Vetch nodded, seeing the good sense in the planning. Trainers did something like this, only they started much, much later, when the dragonet could carry a man, and they didn't precede it with the gentling process. They just tied the dragonet down, threw a saddle on him, and jumped on, letting the dragonet wear itself out on the ropes and "breaking" it to saddle.

Small wonder that dragons did not love their riders…

And now, thanks to Baken, Vetch knew how to train Avatre without having to ask Ari. Exactly how to train her. Only he would be starting very early indeed, with nothing more than a few straps to get her used to things being bound around her body.

And when she flew—it would not be with ropes holding her to the earth.

Gods willing. Gods willing…

THE expected sea-witch-sent storm did not come that day, nor the next. The tension built once again; fear and anxiety becoming as much or more of a weapon wielded against the Tians than the storm itself. Finally, another one—again, with a great deal of wind and lightning, but with less rain than the last— struck on the sixth day after the last storm had ended. And the next storm arrived seven days after that.

Were the sea witches getting weary of their sport? Or were they only toying with the Jousters, hoping to set them off-guard? Vetch dreaded both, and yet at the same time, hoped this was so. That Alta at last had the strength to fight back! The sea witches had not been as numerous or as strong as the magicians of Tia within living memory. Had something happened to change this? Had they learned new magics, had their numbers increased? Or had the priests of Alta also found a way to add their magic to that of the sea witches, as the priests of every Tian god could join their forces into a massive whole?

Or was this only a brief, hectic flare of power before the end, like the dying of a fire? Something that could not be repeated?

Were the sea witches' powers once again on the wane? This was what Vetch dreaded.

The rumors spread throughout the compound, causing at least as much unease as the storms themselves. The priests said nothing, perhaps fearing that if they took credit for the weakening of the storms, the witches would turn their words to ashes in their mouths and prove their boasts to be lies.

The Jousters were reluctant to go farther afield despite the changing conditions, and it seemed that the Commander of Dragons agreed with them, for he issued no new orders. But further rumors told of convocations of the priests in every temple on Temple Row and throughout, not only the city, but all of Tia, as magicians and Seers attempted to pierce the veils of magic concealing the seats of Altan power, and discover what their counterparts in Alta were planning. Evidently, however, no matter what the strength of the sea witch power was, the protections still held; there were no revelations coming from the Seers of Tia.

And in the end, it was that most necessary of creatures that brought the real news—

—a spy.

It was Haraket that spread the word of a massive, compoundwide meeting to the dragon boys, at morning feeding, as each of them collected the meat for their dragons. "Everyone to the landing-court at noon," he repeated, over and over. "No exceptions. The Commander wishes to address us." And of course, that only created more rumors rather than stilling the existing ones.

If some of the others had time enough to buzz and whisper over the rumors, Vetch did not. The only time he might have said anything was to Baken—and Baken was not inclined to talk about anything other than the progress of the blue dragonet.

"So much smarter than a horse—" he was muttering cheerfully as Vetch arrived to help him, only to find him harnessing the youngster. He looked up when Vetch arrived with a satisfied smile on his face. "Vetch, you have no idea. The best qualities of a falcon, with the intelligence of a fine hound, and you can tame him like a wild horse—look at him! Mere days since he was brought in, and look at him!"

Indeed, the dragonet regarded both of them with aloof tolerance, standing calmly, and registering displeasure with a hiss only when he didn't care for something that one or another of them did. Sometimes, it was when Vetch moved a little too quickly, once, when Baken accidentally pinched a fold of skin while harnessing him. "I might gentle a wild horse that fast, but I wouldn't lay money on it," Baken continued, "And a horse is not a hunter, it is a social animal that craves its herd around it. It is harder to tame a creature that takes prey; by their nature they are competitive and wary. It is also harder to tame one that, in the wild, is not part of a herd."

"You wouldn't have been able to if he'd ever eaten man," Vetch reminded him. "You got a chance at him while he was still impressionable. He thinks we are mightier than he—if he'd ever eaten man flesh, he'd still be thinking of us as dinner."

Baken nodded, knowing, as Vetch knew, that anything as small as a man was generally killed and carried whole to the nest by the mother dragon, so the young dragonets got a good idea what their prey should look like.

"All the more reason to start taking youngsters earlier than first flight. What's happened here with him, by the accident of the Jousters going out and robbing nests far earlier than they've ever done before, is to repeat what we falconers usually do with eyas falcons," Baken replied. "We take them old enough to know that they are falcons, but young enough to tame quickly."

"Well—yes, it's true that's successful. But it was at the cost of eight Jousters so far," Vetch reminded him. "Mother dragons aren't like falcons. When they defend their nests, it's the humans that lose the fight."

Baken snorted. "And there are two would-be Jousters eager to replace every one stupid one that tries to haul off a dragonet with the mother too near," he replied. "It is easy to replace Jousters.

It's a lot harder to replace a dragon, especially a properly-tamed one. Better that they get themselves killed off now, than that they get themselves killed in a joust or accident and lose a trained dragon."

It was clear that his opinion of the Jousters hadn't changed. Well, Vetch shared it. As far as he was concerned none of the fools who'd become dragonet dinner was much of a loss.

Besides, every one that goes down a dragon's throat is one less to attack Aha…

"There!" Baken said in triumph, and stood a little away. "Last strap. Now—today, we'll teach him 'up' and 'down.'%%" He laughed. "This isn't my training, though. I asked the other trainers how they do it. But I need you, Vetch, because this is a two-man job."

He passed the end of a jousting lance to Vetch, holding onto the other end himself. "Now, we fit this right into the crook of the elbow on his front legs. When I say the command, push down and in on his lower legs. They'll collapse, especially since he won't be ready for this, and he'll go down. When he does, get the lance away so it doesn't hurt him or stop him from going all the way down, and shove down on his shoulders."

That was clear enough, and clever, too. Vetch nodded. Together they pushed the lance in on the dragonet's forelegs. "Down!" Baken ordered, and they both pushed the blue dragonet's legs with the lance shaft. Now, if they had tried to force him down, starting with a shove on his shoulders instead of with the lance, he would have fought them—and he'd have won. Young as he was, he was still stronger than they were. But this caught him off-guard, like a man tackled from behind at the knees. With a snort of surprise, the dragonet felt his own legs giving way underneath him, and he was too startled to fight. He went down—and to Vetch's pleasure, he also folded his rear legs under him as well. It was accidental, but this would set the mark for what "down" meant.

"Good boy!" Baken crowed, rewarded the young beast with a tidbit immediately. "Very good boy!" He caught the slight movement of the dragonet as it prepared to scramble back up to it's feet, and shouted "Up!" just as it made up its mind to get up. More praise, another tidbit, and the dragonet's eyes were suddenly very bright. Was it too much to say, there was speculation in them? He'd been taught here that there were things he would have to do that he didn't necessarily think of for himself. Did he now realize that here were two of those things that he actually needed to learn?

Again, Baken signaled to Vetch to use the stick. "Down."

"Up."

"Down."

"Up."

Dragons didn't have very expressive faces, but Vetch had learned to read subtle signs in the skin around their eyes, and the set of their heads. The dragonet was definitely thinking, and thinking hard.

But this would be the first time that it had been asked to learn that those strange sounds coming from its captors meant that it was supposed to do something. That was a difficult concept for an animal to learn, for in the wild, they certainly didn't issue commands to each other…

It was too much to hope that the youngster would learn "down" and "up" in a single session, but he did understand the physical part of the command by the time they finished with him for that session. The moment he felt pressure on the lance shaft, he went down, and when the pressure went away, he came up.

"That's good progress for a morning," Baken said in satisfaction, when the dragonet started to show signs of waning interest and irritation. "I'll see you before afternoon feeding."

"Have you named him yet?" Vetch asked, curiously, for Baken had never yet referred to the dragonet by anything other than "the youngster," or some other generic name.

"No," Baken replied instantly. "And I won't, until he first flies free and comes back. I never name a falcon that hasn't made a free flight."

Well, Vetch could understand that, because that moment of free flight was the risky one, when the falcon or dragonet realized that he was free and he could fly off, never to be seen again. Names had power.

But a name can pull something back to you again. He'd felt that instinctively when he named Avatre; he had bound her to him with a name—or so he hoped. Well, maybe that was on purpose, too. Maybe Baken was unwilling to use anything to pull a falcon—or dragonet—back to him, other than training and whatever affection was possible from a falcon.

He'll find, if he can win it, there's a lot more coming from a dragonet…

"Did you ever try to tame flappers?" he asked curiously, referring to the winged lizards of the desert that looked so much like miniature versions of dragons.

Baken laughed. "What boy hasn't?" he replied. "But boy or man, there is no taming those wretched beasts! All you ever get for your pains are lacerated fingers and a view of it vanishing into the sky the moment the cage door is open. I suppose, if you could actually find a nest, you might be able to get one to fix on you the way a baby chicken can, if you hatch it yourself—but I wouldn't even bet on that. There's no room for anything in those heads but killing and meanness."

Vetch had to laugh, for although he had never had the leisure to try and catch and tame a flapper, every one of Khefti's apprentices had tried, and every one of them had gotten the same result— fingers slashed to the bone, and eventually, an empty cage, since the little beasts could never be kept confined for long. He'd never seen anything for the ferocity of a flapper; it was a good thing that they were uncommon, shunned humans, and lived only where people didn't, or no domestic fowl would be safe.

"Don't forget the meeting," Vetch reminded Baken, who grimaced, but nodded. Vetch glanced up at the sun; it was near enough to noon that he decided to make a quick run of food to Avatre, then sprint for the landing court.

In stark contrast to the wild dragonet, Avatre was overjoyed to see him, and it occurred to him that he had better find something for her to do when he wasn't around. She was old enough now that she could get bored if he wasn't there to play with. He needed to find dragonet toys. Perhaps she'd enjoy gnawing on a bone, like a dog?

The butchery was deserted, the butchers already at the meeting place, which gave him a free hand there. So when he got her meal of the usual small pieces, he also took possession of a huge leg bone from an ox and brought it with him. It had been stripped clean by the butchers already, which made it ideal for his purposes; there wasn't any meat on it to putrefy and make her ill. Once she was stuffed, he left the bone beside her, and she was already tentatively biting at it out of curiosity as he left.

He was one of the last to reach the landing court, and as he entered the gate, all he could see were the backs and heads of people in front of him. As short as he was, he hadn't a prayer of actually seeing anything but the backs of heads. He looked around for something to stand on, and decided that his best bet was to climb up on the base of the pillars carved at either side of the gate itself. The sandstone was smoothed as well as sandstone could be, but he was used to climbing, and swarmed up it like a monkey. It didn't take long to get himself up there on the top of the pedestal that supported the pillar, and once in place, balancing on the tiny ledge where the square base ended and the round pillar began, he gaped in astonishment at the sheer number of people gathered within those four, high walls. He'd had no idea that there were that many people housed within the compound!

Obviously, the Commander of Dragons knew, though, which was why he had set the meeting here, for there wouldn't have been any place else able to hold all of them all at once, not even the Jousters' Hall where Vetch had been freed from Khefti.

The sun shone down on a sea of heads—heads in simple, striped headcloths, shaved heads, heads with the hair cut short and precise, and here and there, the shaggy, long-haired head of a serf. The colors of the wall paintings blazed in the sun, and there was a murmur of voices, a hum that filled the space between the walls.

At the far side of the court, a simple, head-high platform had been set up. Standing up there were the Commander of Dragons and several priests in formal attire—the sort of robes and jewels and regalia they had worn when they had led spell-casting processions around the compound after the first storm. Other than the wall paintings, they supplied the only spots of color in the courtyard, for the garb of nearly everyone from the compound itself was uniformly made of sun-bleached linen. Very few wore ornaments other than the hawk-eye talisman either.

The Commander stood with his hands on his hips with the bright sun shining full down on him, surveying the crowd below him, looking remarkably casual and completely at ease. Once again, he was dressed simply, with none of the showy jewels usually sported by the nobility, and only the Haras pectoral spreading jeweled wings at his bare throat, and the royal vulture at the front of his blue, close-fitting war helmet, marked him as any higher rank than a senior Jouster. Seeing him so very calm evidently was having an effect on the inhabitants of the compound; some of the tension was out of the air, and the murmurous sound of many conversations did not have that frantic edge to it that Vetch had expected.

Finally, the Commander held both hands up peremptorily for silence, and he got it, as the crowd hushed.

"Hear the words of the priests of the gods of Tia," the Commander said, his words ringing out, strong and deep, into the quiet. "The gods of Tia are stronger than the gods of Alta; her priests are wiser and more powerful, and in no way can the Altan magicians hope to prevail over those of this land. The gods of our land will prevail."

"Which only means the shave-skulls haven't figured out what the sea witches are doing, nor how to prevent it," someone muttered below Vetch, and his neighbors nodded in agreement.

Vetch had to agree with that; if the priests had successfully countered the sea witches' magic, they'd have boasted about it here and now. If they'd been able to find Seers who could get past the protections that hedged in Altan places of power, they'd have trumpeted their findings. This was all empty air.

But the Commander wasn't finished. "The priests of our land are wise, learned, and powerful," he continued, and Vetch thought he heard just a tinge of irony in the man's voice, "But no man goes hunting with only duck arrows in his quiver, when he does not know what other quarry he might encounter. The Great King, may he live a thousand years, also sent eyes and ears that walk upon two bare feet into the land of the Altans, and this is what he found—

Vetch found himself leaning forward and holding his breath, and he was not the only one.

"The sea witches have a new magic, but as it is Wind and Water magic, it is subject to the season and the conditions of the season," the Commander told them, making sure each word was plain and unambiguous. "As the season progresses from Growing to Dry, there will be less water in the air, less-favorable winds. The storms will come farther and farther apart, and lose strength as the days pass and the Dry comes upon us, until at last, they will fade to a memory and we need cope only with the Dry, as ever. Perhaps the Dry holds terror for the enemy of the North, but we know it as an old neighbor. And our priests strive to see that we can learn to turn it against them, as they have sent their sea-born storms against us."

A collective sigh of relief arose from the crowd; if, like Vetch, some of the other Altan serfs felt disappointment, they were careful not to show it.

Now there were some murmurs beginning, and in a moment, they would probably be in full roar of conversation. Once again, the Commander raised his arms for silence.

"This is not to say that the sea witches may not find ways of raising storms in the Dry," he cautioned. "I do not need to do more than mention the Midnight kamiseen, I think…"

His words had a chilling effect upon the crowd. The Midnight kamiseen was so named, not that it arrived in the dark of the night, but because it threw so much sand in the air, with such terrible winds, that it blotted out the sun. When such a storm blew up, it was as dark as midnight at midday. There was little hope for anyone caught without shelter in such a sandstorm, for it was literally impossible to breathe. One could actually drown in sand.

"Nevertheless, this is a magic of Wind only!" the Commander added. "And the sea witches' power has ever been that of Water, not Wind alone. Haras of the all-seeing eye is the guardian of the winds of Tia, and of the Jousters, too, and you can rest assured that His hand is over the Jousters and their dragons, and all those who serve them! And since it is a creature of Haras, the priests of Haras intend to learn to turn it northward, and give the witches a taste of true power!"

Small comfort, that, to those gathered below Vetch. Still, it did not do to say so aloud. The priests might hear—and withhold their protection from the grumblers.

It was always a chancy thing, to arouse the enmity of the priests. They might choose to ignore you, or they might not.

Vetch knew, however, as did every other Altan-born serf, that the sea witches' power was so integrally tied in with water that it was highly unlikely they could call up a Midnight kamiseen. Still—if the storms that had been brought had kept the dragons close to home, perhaps the threat of powerful sandstorms would do the same.

"The Great King," the Commander continued, "has mighty plans for us, my Jousters. I may not tell you what they are, but I am certain you may guess that as your numbers increase, you become a still more powerful weapon in his quiver. So I will leave you with that. Trust in the gods and their priests, and dream of the Gold of Honor!"

That was enough to evoke a cheer from the assemblage—all but Vetch, who was covering the fact that he was not cheering by climbing down from his perch. He knew, as did everyone else here, what those "plans" were. The truce, which was being eroded at every possible opportunity by both sides, would fill. And once again, Tia would hammer northward, with the Jousters at the forefront of the challenge.

But if the gods are with me, by then I will be gone…

Eventually, as the storms weakened and took longer and longer to appear, he pulled back the awning over Avatre's pen. That gave Kashet a good look at her, and she at him, and within a day Kashet got bored with his neighbor and stopped spending so much time peering at her. His one regret was that he didn't dare ask Ari for advice. If only he could have! But he could take no chance that anyone might learn of Avatre, and of all of the people in the compound, he had the most to fear from Ari. Avatre was in the pen next to Kashet's, Ari knew very well that he had not been assigned a dragonet to care for, and—Ari was Tian. There was always that. So Vetch had to blunder through on his own, with common sense, what he learned from Baken, and what he overheard from the trainers.

He learned by eavesdropping that the dragons weren't allowed to carry a grown man until they were three, but that even a male fledgling, smaller than a female, could carry the weight of a small boy. By the time the dragon could fly, its backbone could bear up under that much weight with no problem.

In the old style of training, for the first two years that they were in captivity, the young dragons were given saddles and harnesses, then taken out on long leads and goaded to fly with the dead weight of sandbags in the saddle. This strengthened their flying, and got them used to harness, saddle, and weight on their backs.

Baken, of course, was going for a much more tractable dragon. He had no intention whatsoever of using goads on the new dragonets, and after a lot of convincing (and based on his success so far) the other trainers agreed to follow his lead.

Baken would follow their example, insofar as using the long leads and the sandbags went for early flying practice—but in the safety of the pens and on the four tethers, he would keep putting boys on the dragonets' backs to get them used to living weight. Furthermore, he was going to use a technique of flight training from falconry, and he planned to teach the dragonets to fly on those long leads from one end of the training field to the other on command. His plan was to teach them to fly between him and another trainer, as a dog was taught to "come" on command; this would be in return for rewards, rather than goading them into the air. This was a training technique he knew well, and the dragon trainers were mightily impressed with the ploys that Baken had used so far.

Vetch was not going to be able to do that; he could hardly take Avatre out of the pen without being discovered. He would have to strengthen her in some other way, so that her first flight would be a strong, high, and fast one. Because, by necessity, it would be with him…

This would be an all-or-nothing cast of the bones. They would either succeed, or fail horribly.

He would not think of failure, or its consequences.

So as soon as she was romping around the sands of her pen, he began getting her used to a weight on her back, improvising a harness and a small sandbag at first, then when he discovered where the dragonet harnesses were kept, purloining one and using that. He actually kept a weight on her for about half of the day when he was sure it wouldn't tire her.

She certainly was anything but quiet; in fact, he had to make her, not one, but several toys to keep her amused. He brought her bones. He made her a big ball of rawhide stuffed with grasses, which she would pursue like a kitten with a ball of thread. Taking a cue from kittens, he rigged a rope with a scrap of silk on the end to a pole he stuck in the sand of her wallow, so she could bat at it with her foreclaws as it moved in the wind. He wrestled with her, teaching her to stop attacking when he commanded her to do so, and enforcing that she must be gentle with him, because he knew that if he did not do this now, while she was small, he could never control her behavior when she was big. The closer it got to the Dry season, the faster she seemed to grow, strong and agile.

The complement of dragonets was now at the fifty that the Great King had stipulated, with as many new boys—at a cost of thirteen Jousters and several dragon hunters that were not themselves Jousters. There was talk, now, of enlarging the compound—because the Great King had gotten wind of the new training techniques, and if they worked, he wanted still more Jousters and dragons…

This did not bode well for Alta. Vetch could only pray that the Altans had spies abroad to hear such things.

At just about the time when the magic-spawned storms stopped altogether, Baken stopped needing Vetch's help, for now there were two or three of the new boys that weren't any larger than he was that he could use as "riders" to get the youngsters used to the presence of a human on their backs. Half of the dragonets had learned "up" and "down," and the blue dragonet was at the stage of learning to fly short distances on a lead. Vetch stole time to watch whenever he could get a moment, trying to make out how he could adapt all of this to training Avatre.

It was just as well that Vetch didn't need to help Baken anymore because Avatre was taking more and more of his time. He had thought he had been busy when all she did was sleep. Now that she was active, she needed attention.

Fortunately, Ari didn't know that he wasn't helping Baken now, and Vetch didn't intend to tell him. As long as Ari presumed that he was off helping the other dragon boy whenever he was missing, there would be nothing at issue.

He never saw Haraket anymore and Ari only in passing. He was worried about Ari, though; the Jouster was thinner, and looked as if he was not sleeping well. But there wasn't much that Vetch could do to help him—

—and besides, if Ari learned about Avatre—

Vetch slept entirely too well, but that was hardly surprising, considering how much work he was doing over the course of the day. He was so used to doing things at the run, that he wasn't sure now if he'd ever be able to do them at a more leisurely pace without feeling that something was wrong.

He sometimes surprised himself by how strong he had gotten, when he found that he had absentmindedly lifted some weight that would have been so far beyond his strength a few moons ago that he would not have considered trying to heft it. He hadn't gotten all that much taller, and he certainly wasn't a little barrel of muscle in the way that one or two of the other boys were. He was still wiry and lean, but it seemed that all the good food and hard work had strengthened every single muscle fiber to an amazing degree.

Avatre was also a great deal stronger than he would have guessed; when he loaded her with a sandbag that was nearly his equivalent, she hardly noticed the weight, and there was nothing to tell by looking at her that she hadn't been wild-caught like the others. He had to wonder, given how lively and big she was, if giving tala to the growing youngsters did more than simply make them easier to handle—if, perhaps, it actually slowed their growth. Certainly Kashet was the biggest male in the compound, nearly as big as any of the females, and he had never gotten tala. Avatre was going to be huge; bigger than her mother Coresan, for certain, and females were always bigger than the males.

She was not as vocal as the other youngsters either; they meeped all the time, their tone rising in shrillness the closer it got to feeding time. Avatre only gurgled happily when he appeared in the doorway, hissed if something alarmed her, and made no other sounds but a soft chuckling when she settled down for a nap with her head in his lap. So the last of Growing season was spent, with Vetch so busy that he could not have told how many days had passed from storm to weakening storm.

At last, one day, he woke to find that all of the tala bushes planted within the compound had blossomed overnight. The air was filled with their peculiar fragrance, sweet, but with a bitter undertone, like myrrh, carried through the corridors by an arid wind that must have begun in the night, coming from off the desert.

The kamiseen———the Dry just began—he recognized with a start, as he awoke with the scent in his nostrils, out of an uneasy dream of laboring at Khefti's wells, and heard the wind whining around the corners of the walls of Avatre's pen. He had been here a year!

Although these pampered bushes within the compound always blossomed a day or so before any others, this, and the wind, were the signals that the Dry had officially begun. Unless the sea witches had some new and profoundly powerful magic, there would be no more storms to keep the dragons inside the borders of Tia.

The Commander took the coming of the Dry as his sign as well, and ordered that the Jousters resume their overflights of Altan territory.

He sweetened this order with another: to signal the start of the new patrols, he decreed a two-day festival within the walls of the compound, and provisioned it himself, from his own treasure houses.

Work hardly stopped, of course, but the Jousters were not to go on patrol at all during the festival, and the servants and dragon boys were given leave to partake when their duties were done. Anything in the way of chores that did not immediately pertain to the care of the dragons was suspended for those two days—no leather work, no housekeeping (Palace slaves were brought in to take care of it), even the dragonets were given a reprieve from training (somewhat to Baken's displeasure). The landing court was laid out for the celebration with a bazaar full of merchants selling trash and treasures, and food and drink tents, jugglers, acrobats, musicians, and dancers, games of chance and games of skill.

The Jousters had their own games, out on the training field, in which they were to compete with each other. They made passes at a ring suspended from a thread which they were to catch on their lances, they swooped down to snatch up bags of straw which they were to drop again on a target painted on the ground, they had races for speed only, and races where speed and agility counted equally.

The landing court was set up the day before, and on dawn of the first festival day, the entertainers were in place, the tents set up, and food of every sort was set out temptingly. The festival began at dawn exactly, with a fanfare of trumpets from the musicians, as those servants who had been freed from duties entirely— and the Jousters, of course—were summoned to the celebrations. Vetch was already awake, of course, but the trumpets startled and frightened Avatre, and he began the day feeling annoyed and irritated.

Then Vetch found himself dodging boys who were suddenly as quick as he to get their feeding and cleaning chores done. Never had the corridors been so congested, so early. And worse was to come—so far as he was concerned, who had no reason to love this festival. The kitchen court was closed, all the servants, serfs, and slaves getting their own holiday, with everyone expected to go to the festival site to get their meals. Once he was out of the area of the pens—which swiftly emptied, as the dragon boys finished their duties and fled to the delights in the landing court—the place was full of strangers.

Once he sent Ari and Kashet off, he slouched off in a sour mood to get himself breakfast. He didn't even trouble to get a bath—he wasn't going to compete with the little popinjays who were using up all the water in order to try and impress some girl or other! No, he would wait until the afternoon, when there was no one to compete with, and he could get a bath without some stranger poking his nose in the door and staring at him.

For his privacy was gone along with the quiet; nobles practically swarmed the place, especially the Jousters' quarters. It was a repetition of the usual scene at the training field, only within the compound itself. The glitter of gold, the gleam of jewels, and the sheen of expensive fabrics made him glower with disgust at the amount of show. There were so many women, young and old, draped in flowers, with perfume cones atop their elaborate wigs, that the air was sometimes chokingly sweet with their scent. He was glad that all visitors had been barred from the pens on account of the dragonets, who were easily startled. The fluttering ribbons, the high, shrill voices, and the idiotic babbling would have left the place in an uproar that would take a week to undo.

The only place where Vetch could get away from the press of the curious and the fawning was in the pens themselves. Not feeling in the least like celebrating when he knew very well that what was being celebrated was the start of more aggression on his own people, he found the pens far more congenial.

So that was where he took himself, after a brief visit to the landing court where he got fried fish—a delicacy that seldom graced the tables of the dragon boys—and some date-stuffed honey pastries for breakfast. The corridors were, by then, thankfully, echoingly, empty.

He wasn't surprised to find Kashet still gone. Ari was a senior Jouster, and at this point his skill and Kashet's were near-legendary. He would, no doubt, be competing in the games for most of the day—or perhaps demonstrating that falling-man-catch trick for an admiring audience, but done with a dummy instead of a man. But as Avatre was finally having a nap, worn out from fretting at the unaccustomed noises, and he didn't want to disturb her, he settled down in Kashet's pen for his meal.

He had just about finished it and was licking the last of the honey from his fingers, when, much to his surprise, a shadow darkened the sun above the pen, and when he looked up, he saw that Ari and Kashet were returning.

He leaped to his feet—very glad now that Ari had found him here, and not in the other pen. He sent a brief thanks to the gods for sending Avatre that bout of sleepiness as he waited for Kashet to settle, then trotted over to the great dragon's side.

"Unharness him," Ari said, with shocking brusqueness, as he threw his leg over the saddle and slid down to the ground. "We won't be going back out. The cursed games can go on without us. And I hope they all choke on fish bones."

Vetch stared at him with an open mouth; Ari's face was white, his mouth pinched, and that last had been said with such savagery that Vetch was sure Ari meant every word. "Why?" he blurted.

"You don't want to know," Ari replied, and started to stalk off.

But something inside Vetch made him act without thinking; he grabbed the Jouster by the elbow and wouldn't let him go. "Yes, I do," he said firmly, shocking himself with this insane act of audacity, but unable to stop himself. "Or maybe I don't—but if you don't tell someone, you're going to snap, and then where will Kashet be?"

Perhaps nothing other than the stark truth that if Ari failed, his dragon would suffer, got through to him. He resisted for just a moment, then his shoulders sagged, and he turned back to Vetch. His eyes were bleak, his mouth twisted, and his skin so pale beneath his tan that it looked as if every bit of blood had been drained from him.

"You don't want to know. And I want you to know that I didn't have anything to do with what happened. If I'd been ordered to do it, I swear, either I would have stopped it, or I would have flown Kashet into the wilderness instead and never come back—

That shocked Vetch even more. Ari? Threatening to desert? "Tell me—" he just barely managed.

Ari took a deep breath. "There's a date orchard, just over the border. The Altans haven't bothered to even try to protect it for seasons and seasons, I don't know why, I suppose it isn't profitable enough. There's a Tian village of settlers right on the edge of the orchard right across the border; when the dates ripen, they harass the Altans and grab the dates for themselves. It's happened every year, like the Flood. But this year—maybe because of the sea-witch-sent storms, the rightful owners got up some courage, they fought back. I mean, really fought; they chased off or wounded most of the Tian settlers who tried to steal their fruit, and even killed two. So yesterday, instead of going out on patrol, one of the senior Jousters decided to teach them a lesson. He led an entire wing of Jousters to the village, where they stooped down on the villagers in their fields, grabbed whoever they could get, carried them up—and dropped them."

Just like on the battlefield, Vetch thought, his heart growing cold inside him. Only—these weren't enemy commanders being smashed on the rocks. These were simple farmers, who'd done nothing except defend what belonged to them, who had only tried to protect what had been stolen year after year, in defiance of laws and treaties.

"They didn't stop until there wasn't anyone left in the open. They—weren't even all men—" Ari got out between clenched teeth. "There were women. And some children."

Dropped, to plummet to the earth and die, smashed like eggs. They hadn't had a chance. Vetch wanted to scream, weep—he couldn't even breathe.

"I didn't find out about it until today. When the target game started." Ari grated, each word wrung from him, each phrase drenched in pain and anguish. "When they started boasting about it—and saying that the next time they went out—they should stop long enough to paint a target on the ground for more sport!"

Vetch's anger, so long dormant, erupted within him like a volcano, and filled him with such rage, that if Ari's voice hadn't been flooded with outrage and pain that nearly matched his, he'd have gone for the Jouster's throat, just because he was Tian. As it was, he swayed where he stood, going cold and hot by turns, red mists passing between him and the rest of the world as he tried to hold the anger in check.

"I will not make war on children!" Ari shrieked—and broke away from Vetch, and ran.

Vetch felt his knees giving, and he dropped to the ground like a stunned bird, his pain finding vent in a howl of his own, and a flood of tears that he could not stop, and did not want to.

He came to his senses only when his eyes were swollen and gummy, his cheeks raw, and he was so dehydrated from weeping and the kamiseen that his lips were cracked and his tongue cleaving to the roof of his mouth. Something snuffled his head—and the back of his neck.

He looked up through blurring eyes, to see that not only was Kashet whuffing at his hair in concern, but Avatre had managed to make her way out of her own pen and into this one. She whimpered in sympathy and no little fear, though not of Kashet, apparently, who was dividing his attention between Vetch and her.

"It's—all right—little one," he said thickly, even though it wasn't, but she couldn't know, couldn't understand what had happened, and neither could poor Kashet, who only understood that the center of his universe had screamed and run away, and the other source of his comfort was suffering, too.

He got unsteadily to his feet, and went over to Kashet's trough, and plunged his entire head under the water, keeping it there for as long as his breath held out. He came up with a gasp, and wiped his eyes.

He couldn't help Ari; Ari would have to find his own solution to his conflict. But certainly his absence from the games would not go unnoticed.

What Ari does about it is Art's business.

He finished unharnessing Kashet with fingers that shook; he tried to comfort the unsettled creature as best he could. Avatre kept butting her head against him, anxiously, and he had to pause frequently to try and give her comfort, too.

What comfort he had to offer, anyway.

Snatches of raucous music came wafting incongruously from the landing court; muffled shouts from the training field where the games were still going on. His stomach turned over. He was glad that he didn't know the names of the Jousters who had participated in the atrocity; he didn't think he'd be able to restrain himself from trying to take some sort of revenge if he knew. Which would gain him nothing, of course; he'd be caught and probably executed, and then what would happen to Avatre?

Poison? Where could he get hold of poison? Or at least, where could he get hold of poison that he could actually use? Nowhere, of course; there were plenty of things in the compound that were poisonous, but they tasted or smelled foul, or were only poisonous in such large quantities as to make their administration impractical. Knives in the dark? He snorted at that. As small as he was, even an ambush was out of the question, and he was no trained assassin, to sneak into the Jousters' quarters undetected to slit the throats of sleepers—

—though the vision conjured up by that thought was vastly satisfying.

No—he could do nothing for revenge.

And he could do nothing for his own people either, not as he was now.

But if he and Avatre could get away—

I hold the knowledge of how to raise and train the most superior Jousters and dragons in the world in my head. What would happen to the Tians if every Altan Jouster was as good as Ari and Kashet?

Until this moment, he'd had no real idea of what he was going to do with Avatre besides escape. Now he had a goal, a mission. He would go north, to Alta, to Bato, the heart of the ringed capital of the kingdom. He would present himself to the Altan Commander of Dragons. They surely knew about Ari already; tales of such a legendary Jouster would have come not only from their spies, and their Seers, but from their own Jousters who encountered him. Vetch would have the proof, in the form of Avatre, not only of how Ari had trained such a perfect dragon, but that the training could be duplicated.

"It's all right," he reassured the anxious dragon and dragonet, taking a deep, unsteady breath. "Or, at least it will be."

IF Vetch had little stomach for the festival before, he had even less now. He could not bear to look at those cheerful faces and wonder which one of them knew what Ari had just revealed. Or worse—which ones had participated in some way.

Or worse still, which ones approved.

He led Avatre back to her pen, and as she settled anxiously back into her wallow, he wondered briefly if he was going to have to begin tethering her there to keep her from following him. But he soon realized, when she displayed no further interest in the entrance, that she had only come looking for him because she had heard his deep distress and had followed the sound of his voice; she had wanted to comfort him as he had so often comforted her.

The very echoes of the celebrations made him feel ill. How could there be a festival going on, how could people be having a good time, when a massacre of innocents had just taken place? How could the people who had participated in it be joking about it and planning to make a game of killing the next time? How could they even bear to imagine a "next time?" And the part of him that longed for revenge writhed inside, urging him to go do something, now, while his enemies were all unwary.

Was it weakness, or was it wisdom, that offered the counter to that anger in his soul? I'll do that, I am no better than they are…

He hoped it was the latter, for the thought held him for a moment.

Suppose he should go and do something horrible, not to the Jousters who had been the murderers, but to ordinary folk? That would be exact revenge—but that wouldn't be right either. And if he did something horrible, just how much worse would the next Tian atrocity be to "make the Altans pay?"

He saw poor Kashet peering anxiously over the wall, and resolutely turned his heart away from vengeance. Ari's dragon was just as distressed as little Avatre; his rider had acted quite out-of-keeping with anything Kashet had come to expect, had run off from the games, been in deep anguish, had not paid any attention to Kashet, and had run off after shouting at Kashet's dragon boy. The bottom was out of Kashet's universe.

Fortunately, Vetch knew what would make things at least partially right again, at least for the dragon and the dragonet.

Because the butchers were going to have a holiday along with everyone else, priest-magicians had come yesterday to create the reverse of the magic that they worked on the dragon sands, taking the heat away from a huge room at the back of the butchery, presumably sending that heat into one of the pens. Or—perhaps putting it into one of the cook tents, to keep the hot food there warm without the use of charcoal or other fire. The butchers had worked at a frenzied pace to fill that room, and the result was that two days' worth of dragon fodder was stockpiled in the ensorcelled storage area, a curious place in which it was so cold that one could see one's breath, hanging in the air! This was no new thing, or so Vetch had been told; the Palace kitchens had such a place. But the magic was seldom used outside of the Palace, except for occasions such as this; it was much simpler just to have butchers to deal with the steady stream of carcasses that always came from Temple Row.

The way to soothe a dragon's heart ran through his belly. Vetch went to get Kashet's favorite treats.

He brought some for Avatre, too, the hearts of smaller beasts than cattle. Although it was not feeding time, Kashet always had room for beef hearts, and his favorite food relaxed and comforted him. When he finished his snack, he looked up at the sun speculatively, and yawned—then waded out into his wallow, and instead of burying himself as he did during the winter rains, he spread himself out to bask in the hot sun, with his wings stretched to their fullest extent.

This was a contented dragon, and Vetch knew it was safe to leave him.

He returned to Avatre, and introduced her to the delights of Kashet's favorite. She was dubious at first, but one taste convinced her. Rather than relaxing her, though, the snack energized her, and she began exercising her wings, flapping hard and making little jumps into the air.

Unlike birds, who had to grow feathers and skin and bone before they could fly, dragons only had to grow enough skin and bone—the bone forming the support, the skin forming the wing surface. And unlike birds, whose feathers were fragile while they were growing, dragonets began hopping and flapping fairly early in their development. But they hovered far better than most birds could, and Vetch knew, from watching the older dragonets, that at some point Avatre would be able to hover for a few moments in place, even with extra weight on her back. When that happened, he would know that the moment for first flight was close.

He watched her closely, and realized that the day was not far off. It was time to keep the harness on her during daylight hours, except when he was giving her a bath. And it was time to start edging the weight she was carrying upward, until it was heavier than he was.

That way, when she actually made that first flight, she would have built up her strength to carry more than Vetch, and as a consequence, she should be able to go higher and farther than a dragonet of similar age. He had to plan on pursuit; he hoped it would not come until he and Avatre were out of sight, and those who came looking for him would cast their nets far short of where he and she eventually had to come to ground. With luck, pursuers would assume they had no more strength and endurance than the average dragonet at first flight, and as a consequence, would never guess how far they could go.

The best way to strengthen her was through play, so until she grew tired and wanted another nap, he resolutely closed his ears to the unwelcome noise of celebration and chased her around the pen until she tired of that, then let her chase him. The play was good for him, too—though he felt guilty at playing when he knew what he knew…

But Avatre didn't know, and wouldn't understand if she knew. There was no reason to deprive her of the fun and exercise she needed.

Like a puppy or a kitten, her energy seemed boundless right up until the point where she suddenly tired, flopped down where she stood, and was instantly asleep. At that point, he left the pens for what (he had already decided) would be his last foray out to the landing court until the festival was over.

He brought a clean barrow with him, and wandered among the food tents, picking out items that would not need to be eaten warm. No one questioned him, oddly enough. Perhaps they assumed he had been sent to get provisions for several of the other boys over at the games. When he had enough to hold him for two days, he returned to the pens, and went straight to the butchery, stashing his provisions in that cold room. There he would not need to worry about them spoiling—and he would not have to venture among the celebrants in order to eat.

Which was just as well, because to do so would have put the temptation to wreak anonymous harm too near to resist. It had come very, very close, as he had made his way around all of that unguarded food…

The easiest, and safest route to revenge would be at the festival, through the medium of poison. If the droppings of dragons burned the skin, what would they do if ground as fine as flour and stirred into food? Put into a stew heavily flavored with pepper, onion, and garlic, it probably wouldn't even be tasted until too late.

Ari was far away from the festival—and he could be certain that the only people who ate the poison would be those from within the Jousters' compound.

But what if I poisoned Baken by accident? Or Haraket? Or one of the other serfs? That was the problem with such a plan; he knew the people who might be hurt, and there was no way to strike at the perpetrators without knowing who they really were. And if he went after them specifically, he couldn't act anonymously. It all got very complicated, and he could entirely sympathize with Ari's anguished cry of I do not make war on children!

And he couldn't help remembering another plaint of Ari's. Haraket says I think too much.

Maybe that was Vetch's problem, too. People who didn't think didn't seem to have any complicated and inconvenient problems of conscience.

Kashet had gotten a full holiday out of it, after all; Ari did not return to the dragon pens until after the celebration was over. And when he did, he was close-mouthed and grim. Vetch wondered where he had been all that time; he hadn't been in his quarters when Vetch went to look, and Kashet had missed him sorely. He appeared, as usual, one of the first Jousters to come for his dragon on the morning after the festival. What was not usual was that he was wearing his helmet, rather than carrying it. It was difficult to see his face, impossible to make out his expression, but he didn't say anything at all as he inspected the harness and lance. Vetch didn't mind that—how could he? He knew Ari, and knew what it was like to have no recourse to the world's hurt but to retreat from it, put on a mask, hide anguish within. He couldn't blame Ari at all for retreating even (or especially?) from him. But what did bother him was that Kashet had so clearly missed those evening visits these past two nights, and Vetch had a good idea that the reason Ari had not come was because of his presence in Kashet's pen.

What was more, he would be willing to hazard that Ari was in desperate need of the silent comfort of his dragon, too. As long as Ari thought he had to avoid Vetch, he wouldn't come to Kashet. And he wouldn't ask Vetch to absent himself either. It was up to Vetch to give Ari a way around the problem that salvaged his self-esteem.

So before Ari could mount up and fly off on patrol that first morning after the festival, Vetch caught his Jouster's arm long enough to make Ari pause for a moment, his foot on Kashet's shoulder.

"Sir, Baken wants me to sleep in the pen of one of the dragonets," he lied. "He doesn't want just anyone, he wants someone who's used to it, so that the dragonet isn't startled by someone who doesn't know how to act around them in the dark. It's the one they put in next to Kashet, so I'll still be here if Kashet needs me. He thinks she's so young that she'll tame amazingly if she accepts me as a kind of nest mate."

"The little scarlet, over there?" Ari replied, with a tilt of his head, as he considered the request for a moment. "Well, I suppose I've no objection. I wanted you sleeping in here initially both to keep Kashet company and to keep you out of the reach of the other boys so they couldn't easily torment you—but Kashet will be able to scent you over the wall, you will be here if he calls out, and you'll still be out of reach of the other boys." He paused a moment. "Yes, I've no objection at all. Go ahead and move your gear."

"Thank you— ' Vetch began, but Ari had already mounted, and before he could say more than that, Kashet was in the air.

Huh. He thought that, under that veneer of coolness, he'd sensed relief in Ari's voice. Well, now he had every excuse to be with Avatre between sunset and sunrise, which was a help to him, too. This wasn't entirely bad; in all of the wretchedness he and Ari were feeling, there was one small grain of good, for at least he wouldn't have to wake up before first light to be in Kashet's pen by the time the sun crested the horizon anymore.

And hopefully, Kashet would get his Jouster's attentions again. No matter what he felt, or Ari, the poor dragon shouldn't have to suffer. How could Kashet understand what was wrong? All he knew was that something was the matter, and that he was lonely.

That night, as he lay along Avatre's side, waiting for sleep, he thought he heard Ari's footsteps outside in the corridor—and a few moments later, he definitely heard the Jouster's voice murmuring on the other side of the wall, though he couldn't make out the words. He sighed, and felt some tension move out of him. That was it; either Ari was embarrassed at having betrayed his feelings to a mere serf and dragon boy, or he was still so ashamed of what had been done to that Altan village that he found it difficult to face Vetch, another Altan. Or probably it was even more complicated than that, but whatever was wrong, it had been Vetch's presence that was keeping the Jouster from his nightly visits to the dragon.

Vetch certainly found it hard to face Ari. No matter what Ari had said, the fact remained that he might well be in the next party ordered to "pacify" an Altan village in the same way. It was possible that, despite his anguished outburst, Ari would countenance such an atrocity if only by passive silence. Vetch didn't think he would—

But he couldn't be sure.

How much was Ari bound to his duty? How far did loyalty to orders go? What would really happen when he was caught between obedience and conscience?

And Vetch was caught on the horns of a dilemma, because if that happened, on one hand he didn't want to know what Ari's ultimate decision about obeying such an order would be, but on the other—

Knowing the truth about someone was important.

But having your illusions smashed was painful.

He couldn't pretend that nothing had happened if Ari did simply go along with more horrors.

But losing what you thought was a friendship—even if it was only an odd sort of friendship—was more painful still.

But did he want to maintain it when it was based on false perceptions? He didn't know what decisions Ari had come to, all by himself, over the past two days. Ari was clearly not going to tell him either. Except that he was going out on his usual patrol—

—a patrol intended to keep innocent Tian farmers and their crops safe—

—but at what cost?

He had to concentrate on what he could affect, or he would go mad.

And maybe that's how Ari feels.

At least now Kashet wasn't being deprived of Ari's attentions. That was something, anyway. It wasn't enough for Kashet to "just" get general petting and attention—a certain amount of that petting and attention had to come from his person, the one he had bonded to from the moment of hatching. And if the only way that Kashet could get that attention was for Vetch to absent himself into the next pen—well, that was all right. Curious, though, that Ari had known about Avatre, even identified her by her color. He wouldn't have thought that Ari'd had time to notice.

I wonder if Ari guesses about Avatre— he thought, suddenly, alarm making him sit straight up in the darkness. Avatre murmured her objections to his movement, and he lay back down again, mind racing, as he went over every question or comment that Ari had made in the last few days, trying to divine whether there was a clue in what he'd said, some hint that Ari was probing, trying to discover if Vetch had followed in the Jouster's footsteps and hatched his own dragonet. Ah, don't be stupid, he thought at last, after he'd been over every detail that he could remember at least twice. As busy as the Jouster had been, how could Ari possibly guess? He just saw Avatre over the wall when he came in at some point. He hasn't said a word about her, and he hasn't caught me here with her. How could he guess that she's my hatchling?

Still, it would be a good idea to take extra care from here on in. Ari saw more than most, and was disconcertingly good at putting facts together into a whole. Vetch filed that in the back of his mind, for caution was now certainly the order of the day.

But as time went on, the Dry progressed, and the days got hotter and hotter, Ari said nothing. Vetch elected not to return to sleeping in Kashet's pen, and Ari said nothing about that either. The fact was, Ari wasn't talking about much of anything, not to him, not to Haraket—but he was doing something. What, Vetch couldn't guess, but he was spending every waking moment when he was not in the air or with Kashet off somewhere.

That was all to the good. It was keeping the one person who was likeliest to guess just what the "little scarlet in the next pen" was far away from the scene.

He was increasingly afraid of leaving Avatre alone, lest she make that first flight in his absence. He rushed through the chores that took him away from the pens. Heart in mouth, he listened all the time for some sign she had been discovered to be something other than one of the "official" dragonets, or worse, that she had made her flight without him.

And yet, though that would be "worse" for him, it was not necessarily so for her. At least she would be free, even if he were not.

He was so close to his goal, and yet, at any moment, the prize could be snatched away from him.

And for the first time since his father had been killed, he prayed, not only to the Altan gods, but to any god that would listen, that she not be discovered and taken from him—or that, if she was discovered, at least let it be that she escaped into the free skies—

Even if he could not.

And perhaps the gods, aloof in the Land Beyond the Horizon, actually listened to him.

Because the moment of discovery—and the moment of first flight—both came at the same moment, and it was when he was with her.

He was, in fact, sitting on her back—in a purloined saddle. That saddle was one of the small ones in the compound, made precisely for dragonets, and one that he had been eying for days, waiting for the dragonet who was using it to outgrow it. He had his legs braced in the harness, his hand locked into the hand brace at the top of the saddle, the guide straps, which she had learned to obey beautifully, tied to the brace, while she made little bounds up and down the sands of her pen, flapping her wings enthusiastically the whole time. He had come to enjoy these wild rides, even though he'd been terrified at first, for unlike the dragonets that he had ridden for Baken, she was not tethered. He remembered, all too well, his very first ride a-dragonback, face-down over the front of Ari's saddle. He'd sworn then that he would never, ever ride on a dragon again, but that had been before Avatre. Now—well, he was guiding the dragon, the exhilaration had overcome the terror and now he was able to join in the sense of fun she had in these exercises.

He thought that she was building up to that burst that would take her truly up into the air, but he wasn't actually expecting anything other than her first hover. She was right in the middle of her pen, about to make a really big bound; he thought that this might be the moment when she really went airborne with him, rather than just jumping about with wing-assistance, and he was braced for it—

When a wild shout from the doorway of the pen startled them both.

"Hoi!" shouted one of the older dragon boys, staring at them. He knew Vetch, he knew very well that Vetch wasn't assigned to a dragonet, and he knew that Vetch should not have been sitting in the saddle on an untethered dragonet's back. He didn't know what Vetch was up to, but one thing he did know. It wasn't what Vetch was supposed to be doing.

"Haraket!" he shouted. "Haraket! Come quick!"

Vetch didn't even think what to do; he just reacted, by punching Avatre in the shoulders with his heels. She, already startled and alarmed by the shout, and even more so by a strange human in her pen, a thing she had never seen before, also just reacted—by leaping, not jumping; leaping for the sky, eyes focused up, neck outstretched, and wings working purposefully. She was frightened now, truly frightened, and she wanted away before any more people shouted at her and jammed their heels into her! One wing flap. Two.

She was off the ground, with him still on her back. Not a hover, this; no, it was the first wing beats of real flight.

"Dragonets are often startled into their first flights," he heard Ari's voice in memory. "They get very nervy about the time they're about to take that big leap. Maybe it's the gods' way of making sure they get off the ground that first time, because if nothing startled them into flying, they'd be too afraid to try. …"

She was making good, strong wing beats now, not flaps. And she wasn't just fleeing, she was climbing, with determination. She wasn't afraid to fly, not Avatre! She surged upward in that way he recalled from riding Kashet, a jerky, lunging motion, throwing him back each time she made another wing beat, until he bent over the saddle, crouching, to get himself in balance with what she was doing. He was just the rider now; Avatre was the one in control. All he could do was to hold on and try not to hamper her.

She was above the walls. Then higher than the walls—

There was more shouting down below; he clutched at the harness in sudden fear—

He heard Haraket's voice; he heard the voices of other men, loud, excited, angry, down below and behind him; he looked back and saw a crowd of men in Avatre's pen, Haraket at their center, gesturing and shouting—but not at him.

That sent a chill down his back.

They weren't calling his name.

Instead of ordering him back, demanding he return then and there, as they would have been if they thought this flight was purely accidental, they were shouting at each other, issuing confusing and probably contradictory orders. But none of those orders was shouted at him.

That was when he knew he was in deep trouble.

They knew what this was about; they knew—knew he'd "stolen" a dragonet, though they didn't yet know it wasn't one of the new ones. They knew that this wasn't just the result of a wager or a boyish prank.

They understood that he was going to try to escape, that he intended to fly off on Avatre in order to do so.

And they weren't going to let him get away. He wasn't a dragon boy now; he was an Altan enemy, stealing a precious dragonet.

Avatre craned her neck around and looked down at the waving, yelling humans below her as she beat her wings down in a stroke more powerful than the last had been. Then she glanced back at him, her eyes pinning with alarm; she seemed to understand the fear in him, and redoubled her efforts, which were showing more skill with every passing second. For the first time, Vetch was glad, glad that he was such a skinny weed. He was lighter than the sandbags he'd been training her with, and she was having no trouble carrying him. He felt her deep, easy breathing under his legs; he felt powerful muscles under his hands driving her upward. The compound spun away under him; she caught sight of the hills in the east, and they must have awakened some deep instinct in her, for she drove for them.

Now she was over the city, wings pumping furiously as she continued to seek for height and the winds above. The kamiseen would aid her in this direction; it drove for those same eastern hills, giving her speed she could never have reached on her own. He clung on to her back more by instinct than skill, crouching down over her neck, trying to move with her. He told himself not to look down.

He couldn't help it, though; as she leveled out and stretched her wings in a gliding stroke, he looked down and saw only the broad, flat, gray-green expanse of the Great Mother River below, a boat like a child's toy being towed against the current, going upriver, pulled by a team of oxen seemingly as small as the ones in his father's funerary shrine.

The shrine—

Too late to think of that, too late to consider all the things that he'd hoped to take with him. If they escaped, he would have to survive and keep them both alive with what he had with him.

If they escaped.

They had to.

Then they were over the fields, once green, now brown in the dry, with here and there a small square of dusty green still being irrigated by hand to provide some special crop. Vegetables, or perhaps even tola.

Tala—for dragons.

The only way anyone would be able to catch him would be on a dragon.

How many Jousters had been in the compound? How many could get their dragons saddled and into the air quickly? How many were just back from a patrol, or about to leave on one? Ari wasn't back yet, but he'd been due out of the north at any moment. There were others who had surely beaten him back in; Ari was generally the first to leave and the last to return.

That alone might save him; this was the end of a patrol, not the beginning, and dragons were coming in tired and hungry. It might be hard to get them into the air, and they'd be irritated, sluggish, and reluctant to obey.

But he had to look back over his shoulder and saw behind him what he'd feared to see—the bright vees of color against the hard blue of the sky—dragons and Jousters in pursuit. Tiny in the distance, but there were several of them who'd managed to get their mounts airborne; experienced fliers, experienced riders.

If they caught him—they would never let him keep Avatre. They'd never let him near another dragon again, probably, even if my some miracle he convinced them that this had all been an accident…

If he claimed that, could he make them believe him? But then, how would he explain purloining the egg and hatching her? That he was raising her for Ari, as a surprise?

Would anyone believe a tale that tall?

Even if they did, how could that make any difference? They'd still take Avatre from him!

Nothing mattered against the enormity of losing Avatre.

He would rather die than give her up. She was everything to him now; without her, it wouldn't matter what they did to him.

He made up his mind at that moment that if they caught him, if they started to force them down, he would jump. Better dead than lose the only thing he loved, the only family he had now. The harness and saddle were not of such tough stuff that she could not eventually get them off; without tending, the leather would quickly dry out and become brittle in the sun. Within weeks, at most, the last pieces would fall off her.

He would never let them take her. He would rather die and set her free.

Sobs welled up in his throat, he choked them down. His heart felt as tight as if there were copper bands around it, and he prayed wordlessly. Surely the gods had not brought him this far only to snatch everything away from him!

He looked back again; there were three dragons in pursuit of him now, for all the rest had dropped out of the race. But these three were obeying their Jousters, and he thought they looked a little nearer, though not near enough to tell who they were. Just the colors; a scarlet, a green, and a blue.

He looked down; they were over the desert, which undulated beneath them in waves of pale sand, broken by rocky outcrops.

The breath of the desert, hot, dusty, and so arid it parched his lips, wafted up to them. He bent over Avatre's neck, and shouted encouragement to her.

He'd had no idea where to go, but she, guided by instinct alone, was heading for the same hills that her mother had sought at the end of the mating flight. Those hills were riddled with caves and rich with game—and they marked the boundary of the lands that could truly be called "Tian." Out there, although Tia claimed the earth, it really belonged to the dragons and the wild, wandering tribesmen of the Baydu, the Blue People, the Veiled Ones who called no man "king." If they could reach the hills, they could hide there. They could stay under cover until the hunters had given up.

But the hills were a long way away, and there were three trained dragons in pursuit. He crouched lower over Avatre's neck, and willed his own strength into her. His long hair whipped into his face; he ignored it, and tried to wish himself lighter than he already was.

When they were halfway between the hills and the Great Mother River, he looked back again. Avatre was still flying strongly, showing no signs of tiring. And now there were only two dragons following. One, the scarlet, had dropped down and was gliding behind the other two, making a long, slow turn to return to the compound.

His heart leaped. One gone—could they outdistance the other two?

"Go, my love, my beauty!" he shouted at Avatre's head. "Go! We are small and light as down; ride the wind, my heart! Take us to freedom!"

He thought she responded to his encouragement with a little more power.

One gone—two to go.

But they were two Jousters, and he was only a dragon boy on First Flight. They had strength and experience on their side; all he had was hope and heart, and the valor of a very young dragonet.

He looked down again; the sand was interrupted by more and larger outcroppings of rock. They were getting closer to the hills. He redoubled his prayers.

With every wing beat, they drew nearer to escape. When they reached the hills, he looked back again.

One of the two remaining dragons had turned back!

But the third was still in hot pursuit, and was closing the gap between them.

And now he could see, with pitiless clarity, that the third was Kashet.

His heart felt as if it was being squeezed, and for a moment, he was blinded by tears. But he leaned over her neck again and begged Avatre to fly faster, harder—

She heard him, and he felt her trying to do as he asked. They topped the first set of hills—

But below them he saw the ground of the second rising to meet them, closer than it should have been—

She was losing relative height and real height as well. He felt her muscles beginning to tremble, and knew then that she was running out of strength and endurance.

And a shadow passed over them, between them and the sun, the superior position for a Jouster to force another dragon to earth.

He knew without looking up that it was Kashet.

It was over.

Ari had caught them, and he would force them down, take them both captive. The teams of trainers and soldiers that Haraket had surely sent after them would come and take them back, bound and chained.

They would take Avatre away from him, if he allowed that to happen. Avatre was at the end of her strength, and there was nothing more that she could give him.

It was time to give her a gift—her freedom.

And with a sob, he pulled his legs free of the harness, he leaned down over her neck.

"Good-bye, beloved, my light, my love," he murmured to her. He squeezed his eyes tight; he couldn't look at the ground. But this was the only way. Better this, better lose life, than lose everything that made life worth having.

Let me wander as a hungry ghost. Better that, than a slave without her.

He took a long, last, deep breath.

Then he deliberately overbalanced, and let go.

It was horrible.

He screamed in utter terror as he fell, tumbling over and over in a macabre parody of an acrobat. The screaming just burst out of his mouth without any thought. He waited for the scream and the horror to end in a terrible blow, and blackness.

Something hard struck him in the stomach instead, knocking what was left of his breath out of him and ending his scream in a gasp. He slid face-down along something hard and smooth and hot—then impacted a second time, and felt a strong arm grab him around his waist.

And he screamed again, this time in thwarted rage and heartbreak, as he realized that Ari and Kashet had plucked him out of the sky, as they had saved Reaten. Only he didn't want to be saved, and they had rescued him only to haul him back to a wretched existence not worth the living!

He screamed and tried to fight, but he was lying in a difficult position, he could only strike at Kashet. Ari was three times his size and double his strength, and was not about to let him land a blow. He cursed the Jouster in every way he could think of, tears blinding him, as he changed his tactics and tried to squirm out of Ari's grip to resume the plunge to death that they had interrupted.

That was just about as successful as trying to fight them.

He felt Kashet sideslipping and losing height quickly; his stomach lurched with the renewed sense of falling, but he knew that this "fall" would not end in blessed blackness, but in captivity, and he howled his anguish.

Avatre cried out above him—he'd never heard her cry before, it sounded like a hawk—and she followed them down, floundering wearily through the air, as Ari and Kashet brought him down to the earth. As they spiraled down into a little valley, he just gave up and went limp. He was crying, uncontrollably, sobbing with rage and thwarted hope, and the death of everything he had hoped for. He couldn't see, blinded by the tears as they landed, as Ari slid off first, then pulled him down to the ground—

—and held him while he wept.

He wanted to fight, but all the fight was out of him. There was nothing, literally nothing left but grief and hopelessness. He was all alone, and there was nothing left to him but a bleak future of pain and emptiness.

Or so he thought—until Ari took his shoulders and gave him a good hard shake, stopping his hysterical sobs for just an instant.

And that moment was all that Ari needed. "Stop it!" the Jouster commanded into the hot silence. "You don't really think I'm going to take you back, do you?"

For a moment, the words made no sense. Then when he did get the sense of them, he was so shocked that all he could do was stare, eyes still streaming, throat still choked on a sob.

"I have no intention of bringing you back," Ari repeated, wearily. "Especially not after seeing you try and kill yourself to keep from being caught. I may be a monster, but at least I'm not that sort of monster."

He might have said more, but just then Avatre came charging toward them, knocking Ari aside with her head, and clumsily putting herself between the Jouster and Vetch, hissing defiance. Ari put up both his hands, placatingly, but laughing all the same, as Vetch instinctively threw his arms around her neck.

"There. How can I possibly take you back? She'd only come and carry you off again, and probably tear the rest of us to shreds doing it!" he chuckled.

Vetch held his arms tight around her neck, to steady himself as well as to keep her from some clumsy attempt to attack Ari. He still couldn't believe what he'd just heard.

He's not taking us back? How can he not take us back? Isn't it his duty?

But it was Ari, who had never told Vetch a lie—

Then Kashet, full of dignity and twice the size of Avatre, interposed himself between the dragonet and his Jouster, looking down at her with an expression of weary condescension. Avatre, who had never seen another dragon but Kashet except as a head over a wall, or a shape in the sky overhead, just hissed at the bigger dragon, defying him along with his Jouster.

"Very brave," Ari chuckled. "I hardly think I need to worry about you encountering trouble. She'll certainly protect you from anything and everything, or die trying. And at the moment, there isn't much that will be able to take her on except humans."

Vetch swallowed. Hard. "You're—" he began.

"I am not taking you back. I never intended to," Ari replied. That was when Vetch's legs failed him, and he sat down hard on the ground.

Avatre stood over him, making it very clear that she was not going to allow anyone or anything near him.

The Jouster looked at both of them for a long moment, then sighed, shaking his head. "Look," he said. "We're in the middle of the Dry, practically midday, and it's damned hot out here in the sun." He beckoned. "If you can get up, follow us."

Vetch struggled to his feet. Ari and Kashet were already halfway down the slope, heading for the dry streambed that cut down the wadi. Evidently, he knew where he was going, and Vetch took hold of Avatre's harness and followed behind. Avatre resisted at first, not wanting to follow the creature that had threatened Vetch, but at his insistence, she reluctantly and suspiciously plodded after Kashet.

Ari turned down a crack in the earth so narrow that Kashet's folded wings brushed both sides of the wind- and water-sculpted passage. The sun might be right overhead, but here, everything was still in shadow, and it was a lot cooler. It was deep, too; they might have been going down one of the corridors between the pens, except that the farther they went, the taller the "walls" became.

The sandstone was carved in weird, smooth, many-layered curves that twisted and turned without any rhyme or reason. This tormented, contorted passage was far wider at the bottom than it was at the top; above them, the crack couldn't be wider than a two feet or so, while down below Kashet was able to squeeze along without too much difficulty. The floor was a thin layer of sand over a harder rock; Vetch felt it under the hard soles of his bare feet. It was strangely beautiful here, and completely without the mark of man on it.

Then, with no warning, the walls opened up into a sort of pocket about the size of a dragon pen, again, with only a small opening to the sky overhead. The rock of the ceiling framed the irregular oblong of turquoise sky like a gold mounting surrounding a gem. At the far end of the pocket was a patch of green where sun must fall during some part of the day—a twisted, ancient tree, a few flourishing bushes, some grasses—all surrounding a tiny pool of water fed by a mere drip of a spring that trickled down the side of the rock through that hole above.

Ari bent and drank a palmful; he gestured to Vetch to come up beside him. With his tongue cleaving to the roof of his mouth and his eyes as dry as sand, and sore with weeping, Vetch didn't have to be asked twice.

But first, he let Avatre drink her fill.

She drank down the basin to about half its depth, and only when she was satisfied did he drink, and take a handful of water to carefully wash his eyes.

Ari watched him with tired satisfaction; Kashet with benevolence.

When he had drunk and cleared his eyes, Vetch looked up at the Jouster with one question in his mind. He felt such a whirlwind of contradictory emotions that he literally shook with them—relief, anger, gratitude, defiance, hope, disbelief-He distilled it all down to one word.

"Why?" he demanded.

Ari sighed, and looked around for a place to sit, choosing eventually a smooth outcropping wind-sculpted into a shape vaguely like a toad. He sat down on its flat top, and Kashet folded his own legs underneath him.

"That's two questions, I think. Or, perhaps three. Why did I save you, why did I follow you, and why did I do so, intending to help you make your escape?"

Vetch nodded; his legs were still shaking, his knees still weak, so he followed Ari's example, except that since there was no outcropping to sit on, he sat down on the ground.

"I was just coming in as you took off," the Jouster said meditatively. "I'd had my suspicions about that little scarlet dragonet ever since you asked to sleep in her pen, by the way. How did you manage to purloin her away from Baken?"

Vetch managed a shaky smile of triumph. "I didn't," he said proudly. "I hatched her from Coresan's first egg, just like you did with Kashet."

"Great Haras!" Ari exploded, looking astonished and delighted at the same time. "No wonder she follows you like a puppy! Is that why you volunteered to take Coresan in the first place? And she's been in the pen next to Kashet all this time?"

He nodded, and smiled. At least he had managed to deceive Ari in that much! That was no mean feat.

"By Sheshet's belly! I can scarcely believe it! And you tended and hatched the egg and tended Kashet and Coresan? When did you sleep?" the Jouster asked incredulously, then waved off the answer, while Avatre gave a huge sigh and flopped down beside Vetch. "What do you call her?"

"Avatre," he said proudly, and she raised her head at the sound of her name.

"Fire of the dawn—" Ari smiled at the dragonet. "Well… to continue, we were coming in to land after our patrol; Haraket waved us off, after another couple of Jousters, and pretty soon it was clear enough why we were in pursuit. I recognized you, of course, and the little scarlet, and at first I thought this was some sort of accident, that you'd been exercising her for Baken and she'd broken the tether or something. But by the time we were halfway across the desert, it was clear enough to me that it was no accident, and that you were trying to escape with her." He took a deep breath, and shook his head. "What was going to happen when you were caught—well, it was pretty obvious, too. So when the second rider dropped out of the chase, I kept it up; I'd already decided to help you, but I wasn't sure yet what I was going to do. I figured I'd force you two to ground and work that out once I got you down. I didn't expect you to do what you did."

He leveled an accusatory look at Vetch. Vetch matched him with defiance. "I would rather die than lose her," he said, quietly. "She's all that I have."

"You made that abundantly clear," Ari said dryly. "And you nearly turned my hair white when you rolled over her shoulder like that. I wasn't sure we could catch you."

Vetch remained silent. Ari examined him closely; Vetch put his arm over Avatre's shoulder, and wondered what, if anything, Ari saw in his expression.

"Well, no one is going to find us down here," Ari said at last. "You can overfly this place as much as you like and you'll never spot it. I only found it by accident because I was following a dragonet one day and I couldn't work out why he had dived into a crack in the hill. So, we have time enough to work out what we're going to do."

"We?" Vetch repeated, incredulously.

"Yes," Ari replied, settling back against the rock. "We. Let's start with where you think you're going to go from here."

WITH those words, Vetch wondered wildly if Ari was going to come with him, and a strange, wild hope rose within him. It was not just that it would be so much easier to make his way northward with Ari—no, it was that he would not lose his friend—

But Ari's next question dashed that thought, and that hope, to the ground and broke them.

"First of all, where are you going?" Ari asked. "To the—ah— 'Great Devil, Alta,' I presume?"

Ah. Of course. He can't go with us to Alta; he wouldn't be welcomed, he'd be killed. So unless Ari had a different destination in mind for both of them, though what that could be, Vetch had no clue, Ari would not be making an escape along with Vetch.

And Vetch felt horribly trapped by the question. Once Ari knew that Alta was his final destination, surely now Ari would stop him—

But Ari only shrugged, and answered his own question, as if it had been entirely rhetorical. "Of course you are; what else is there for you? They'll welcome you, certainly—an escaped serf with a dragonet bonded to him—I can guarantee that they'll welcome you. Now, you'll probably have to prove that Avatre won't fly for anyone else, because they'll assume she's like every other dragonet and try to take her from you, but I don't believe you'll have any trouble convincing them that the two of you come only as a pairing."

Vetch shrugged, helplessly, but underneath it, he was dismayed, because he hadn't considered that possibility!

"Don't worry too much about that, Vetch," Ari said, in a kindly tone. "You're both still youngsters. Now, if she was Kashet's size, they'd make more of an effort to take her, but as it stands, they'll know very well she won't be useful to them as a fighting dragon for another couple of years, and by then—well, so will you."

Unless I can be useful to them in another way altogether, Vetch thought somberly. Still, Ari was right; they probably wouldn't fight too hard over a dragonet. And if the Altan Jousters were as reactionary as the Tian ones were, well, it would probably take years to convince them that hatching dragons made more sense than catching dragons, anyway…

"So, it's Alta. Unless you plan to wander with your dragon in the wilderness—" Ari shook his head. "Take it as read, don't even consider that option. I do not advise that course at all, because sooner or later one of us will run across you, and you can't expect to outrun us twice."

Vetch nodded, knowing that Ari probably was a better judge of that than he was, given his years of experience.

But I'd try it anyway, if he'd come with us…

"First things first," Ari continued briskly. "Do you even know how to get across the Border from here without following the Great Mother River?"

Vetch could only shake his head.

"Have you provisions? Clothing? Tools?" Ari persisted. "What were you going to eat? What were you going to feed her?"

"I thought we'd hunt," Vetch said weakly. Ari shook his head ruefully.

"Mind, since I know you must have had a lot of experience in foraging for yourself, you aren't as ill-prepared to fend for yourselves as some of those idiot boys back at the compound," he said graciously. "And I know you weren't exactly thinking that this would be First Flight when you got on her back this morning, so how could you be prepared? Still—no, this is no way to send you off. You need a great deal more than you've got." He stood up. "You two stay here, and don't move from this place. I need to make some arrangements, and neither of you are going to be able to help in the least."

"Arrangements?" he asked weakly.

"Arrangements… and one is going to have to be immediate." Ari glanced over at Vetch's exhausted dragonet. "First thing of all, we need to do something about little Avatre—she's expended a lot of energy, and when she gets over being too tired to move, she'll be hungry."

He stood up; Kashet took that as a signal, and got to his feet. "Don't move," Ari repeated, as he led Kashet out down that twisting passage.

Vetch had known the first time that Ari said "stay here" that his knees were too shaky to hold him. As if I could move. … he thought ruefully.

Then Vetch and Avatre were alone. He looked down at her, and saw that she was asleep in the pool of sunlight that came down through the hole in the ceiling. He slid to the ground and lay down beside her, feeling absolutely drained to the point of numbness. He couldn't even think properly, and the silence down here was so profound that it seemed to echo in his head. The hills broke up the kamiseen winds, so that there was nothing down in this crevice, not even that omnipresent whine. Even that trickle of water slid over the rock without making a sound.

It was never silent in the compound; it had never been silent on the farm. He found it a novel experience, and closed his eyes, trying to pick out anything besides his own breathing and Avatre's. And in listening to the silence—silence of a quality that he had never before experienced—he fell asleep without having any intention of doing anything of the kind.

He woke to a strange, grating, dragging noise; he shoved himself upright in alarm, as Avatre beside him shot her head up, eyes pinning.

But it was Ari who emerged into the pocket, followed by Kashet—who was wearing only the collar of his harness as a harness, as the rest of the straps had been unbuckled and reassembled into a peculiar sort of drag arrangement. That was the scraping sound—Kashet dragging three very dead goats underneath him.

"It's not Jousting fare, but if she's hungry—" Ari began, as he unbuckled the first and dragged it into the pocket, leaving it on the ground while he went to get the next.

He didn't get a chance to finish that statement, for Avatre pounced on the carcass and began tearing into it as if she ate whole wild game every day.

"Evidently," he chuckled, "she's hungry."

Vetch blinked, for there wasn't a mark on any of the three bodies. "How did you—

Ari laughed, and took off his belt—which wasn't a belt at all, but a sling.

"Maybe other people have trouble using missile weapons on dragonback," he said, with something as close to a smug look as Ari ever got, "but 1 don't. Then again, our Noble Warriors do think that a sling is beneath them to use…"

"The more fools, they," Vetch replied, with scorn.

Ari smiled. "And I strongly suggest that if you haven't already got skill with a sling, you acquire it. Well, that takes care of your little girl. Are you starving?"

He shook his head; curiously, he wasn't even hungry. Then again, his stomach was still roiling from all he'd been through and the gamut of emotional states he'd run.

"That's just as well; wild goat broiled on a knifetip over a scrap of fire bears a close family resemblance to burned sandal, and that's all I have to offer you," Ari told him, with a raised eyebrow, inviting his reaction.

Vetch blinked at him for a moment, then managed a smile.

"You just let her eat and doze in the sun; you drink plenty of water, and wait for us to get back," Ari ordered. "Rest, if you can, because it will be the last uninterrupted rest you'll get for a long while. Your journey is going to be long and hard, even with my help."

Vetch couldn't imagine what Ari was going to do, but he nodded, and helped Ari drag the corpses of the other two goats over to Avatre, who was nearly finished with the first.

Once again, Ari and Kashet vanished down that tall crack in the earth. Avatre was busy with her meal—the first she'd ever eaten that hadn't been cut up neatly for her, but she was doing perfectly well, and didn't need his help. Evidently there would be no need for a "how to eat whole wild goat" lesson.

Vetch lay back down on the ground to watch her with his back against the crevice wall, and pillowed his head on his arms for just a moment. He really didn't intend to sleep, but his eyes were still sore, and he still felt as drained as a wineskin of the first vintage at the end of a festival. No, he really didn't intend to sleep…

When he woke, the pool of sun was all the way across the floor, and what woke him was the sound of voices overhead.

His heart leaped in his chest with fear. Voices! Can anyone see down here?

He pressed himself back against overhanging wall of the pocket, and peered up. He couldn't see anything, but some peculiarity of the shape of the pocket brought the voices clearly down to him.

"… saw him fall about there," came Ari's voice.

The terror of discovery held him pinned against the wall.

And his first thought was that Ari had betrayed him, betrayed them both—

He should have lied! He should have told Ari that he was going west, east, south—anything but admitting he was going to try to make it to Altai Now Ari had brought people from the compound, guards or soldiers—

But before he could move a strange voice answered.

"Not a sign of him. Not that the jackals would leave anything, and they probably dragged the body off to a den, anyway," came that other voice. "And the dragonet flew off?"

Ari again. "That way."

"Towards the breeding valleys. Well, she'll be back with her mother by now, and we won't see her again. By now, the other dragons will have chewed the harness and saddle off her, and no captured dragonet ever gets caught twice. You're right, Ari. It had to have been an accident, poor boy, and we jumped to an unwarranted conclusion. If he'd been planning to steal a dragon, he'd have taken one of the older ones, not an unflighted dragonet."

"Of course he would have; of what use is a first-year dragonet to the Altans? They can't carry a man for at least another two years," Ari replied, sounding mournful. "My Kashet would have carried him. I wouldn't be the least surprised to find that Coresan would have, or a half dozen others. What's more, you saw for yourself that there was nothing about his gear that looked as if he was getting ready to run away. There were no provisions, nothing packed, and he didn't even have a firestarter or a waterskin. He didn't even take the funerary shrine."

"No, he didn't—and if nothing else, that's a pretty convincing argument for pure accident. Poor child. He must have underestimated how close that dragonet was to First Flight. Baken is shattered; he thinks it's his fault, showing the youngster how to train the dragonets to carry a man. He thinks Vetch was trying to find a way to prove to Haraket that he deserved the same sort of reward that Baken had been promised."

"It's more like to be mine," Ari said, and if Vetch hadn't known better, he'd have believed in his own demise, Ari was doing so good a job of sounding guilty. "If I'd just followed at a distance instead of chasing him, when the dragonet got tired, I could have retrieved him. Instead, I frightened her into throwing him before 1 was close enough to catch him. Which is why—

A long silence.

"Ah. I'd wondered. Well, the Great King is hardly likely to begrudge you that."

"Indeed. Well, I've brought the shrine, and I got another figure for it. You head on back. I'll see if 1 can find something like remains, and even if I can't, I'll still place the shrine and the offerings for the boy and his father. It's the least I can do."

"And you don't want to find yourself haunted either," the voice said shrewdly. "1 don't blame you. No, get that shrine placed out here so his spirit won't try to come back to the compound. I don't want to see any wandering ghosts in the corridors! See you back at the compound."

Vetch sat there with his mouth falling open, hardly able to believe what he was hearing. Was—Ari had reported him dead? And had he just heard Ari and another Jouster agreeing that he was?

A shadow passed across the opening above, and the familiar sound of dragon wings echoed down where Vetch waited.

And for some time, nothing more happened, as Vetch strained his ears and his nerves went tight as lute string. Then, when he was ready to scream with the tension, he heard something in the passage. It sounded like footfalls. Two light feet, and four very, very heavy ones.

That "something" was indeed Ari and Kashet. The dragon had a large bag strapped across the back of his saddle.

"Ah, awake. I don't suppose you overheard me up there?" Ari said cheerfully. "Down, Kashet."

The dragon stretched himself alongside Avatre, who was still sleeping.

"Uh—most of it. I'm dead?" Vetch hazarded.

"As the god-king Arsani-kat-hamun," Ari agreed. He took the bag from the back of his saddle and tossed it to Vetch; it was a lot heavier than it looked. "Your grave goods. I told everyone you'd been thrown and the dragonet escaped, then suggested that I ought to go set up a funerary shrine to you and your father where I last saw your body. So to avoid having you come back to haunt us, virtually everyone in the compound rushed to put together a rather motley assortment of funerary offerings. I, of course, put together a very select assortment of my own choosing as well, but I saw no reason to refuse their gifts. There might actually be something worth keeping in them."

He felt rather as if he'd been run over by a chariot. Why had he not confided in Ari in the first place? His fears seemed baseless now. Ari had taken a chaotic situation in hand, and had taken care of every possible consideration. "You want me to leave these things for my father?" he hazarded.

"Some of them," Ari said cryptically. "There's another bag back up there—" he jerked his head at the opening, "—where the obliging Dethet-re left it. And yes, I did bring your father's shrine, but I strongly suggest that you set it up here and leave it, or you'll only have to hunt a place to leave it later, and that place will not be nearly as secure. You'll find, I think, that it isn't the sort of item you can afford to take along on a journey the length of the one you have elected to make."

"I can always set up another for him when I get there," Vetch said, after a pause.

"Indeed. Now, I'll go get the other bag, you rummage through that and see what's useful. What isn't—that, you can just leave for your father's spirit."

Ari strode off down the crevice. Kashet remained where he was, since Ari hadn't ordered him to his feet. Vetch knelt down beside the coarse canvas bag and opened it.

On the top of the bag was a roll of his own bedding, with something hard and squarish in it. The shrine? Yes, he discovered as he carefully unrolled the bedding, that the shrine was wrapped in it, so his first act was to deal with it. Ari had been marvelously careful; he quickly set the shrine to rights and looked around the little refuge for somewhere to put it. Finally he climbed up to a kind of shallow niche, high above what he hoped would be the high-water mark in the rainy season. He set the shrine on that ledge, after chasing out sand, a few dead leaves, and the shell of a beetle or two.

He scrambled down from his perch, and returned to unpacking the bag. Under the bedding were the woolen cape he'd been given for cold weather, and the canvas rain cape, both of which he had kept with his bedding. Tied up in a square of cloth were the little treasures he had accumulated while he was at the compound. There weren't many of them, some faience amulets, a carved knife-handle that someone had discarded, a horn spoon he'd made himself, a very small oil lamp he had modeled from clay. A little box proved to be a tinder-box with a firestriker; then came a couple of small knives—a sling and a pouch of stones—a wineskin that sloshed when he shook it. And on the bottom, barley bread and honey cakes, a bit squashed, but he wasn't going to complain.

Ari reappeared with that second bag. "I have no idea what's in this one," he said, bringing it over to where Vetch had spread out his loot. "1 packed the first one; the gods only know what the others thought was suitable as your grave goods." He chuckled. "I'm afraid that your fellow dragon boys recalled that rumor about you being the focus for Altan sea witch magic, and stuffed anything they could think of in there to placate your spirit, because it's cursed heavy!"

The first thing out of the top was a gameboard and counters. "Well, that's useful," Ari said sarcastically. "But I'm sure your father's spirit will appreciate it. "Now what—ah, that's more like it! Someone was feeling very guilty, indeed!"

He pulled out two more wineskins, both full. "Pour those out, rinse them, and fill them with water," Ari directed. "Avatre can't drink wine, and in the desert, water is more precious than the Great King's own vintages." After a moment of thought, Vetch emptied and refilled all three. He had never much liked wine, anyway, and the water here was very clear and good.

A net bag full of more bread. A flute—a pair of sandals far too big for Vetch—a set of jackstones, a set of dice—

—evidently they hope you will occupy your spectral time with drinking and gaming rather than haunting—

—a cone of perfume and a bundle of incense—a set of twelve abshati slaves, meant to serve tirelessly in the afterlife—

—and apparently, with a dozen slaves to work for you, you'll have the leisure to gamble and drink—

Kilts, and loincloths, which Ari shook his head over. "Not that Haraket would grudge them, but he's going to have the head of whoever had the audacity to take these from stores without asking. Still, at least you'll have some spare clothing. And speaking of heads, here's some headcloths. Good; you'll need them to keep the sun off you in the desert."

Yet another net bag of bread, a jar of oil, a clay lamp and some wicks, a bow and a quiver of hunting arrows.

"Can you shoot?" Ari asked, and when Vetch shook his head, he laid the bow aside with the objects deemed useless. "Don't bother taking this. Not only can you master the sling a great deal more quickly, but the ammunition is just stones, or clay pellets you can bake in your evening fire. You won't have to worry about losing or breaking arrows or arrowheads, and any fool can roll clay pellets. It takes a master hand to knap arrowheads and fletch the shafts."

Fishing line and hooks, a fishing net. "Not much use in the desert—but they're small and light, so you might as well take them."

Another knife, this one rather longer, a small ax. And last of all, in the very bottom of the back, a small sack that—jingled.

"What's this?" Ari said in surprise as he poured out the contents.

Coins and a little jewelry. Copper coins, copper rings, a copper bracelet, two very small silver pieces, several amulets of different gods made of enameled copper or soapstone or some other stone. Vetch expected Ari to deem that useless as well, but after pouring it all back in the pouch, he put it with the rest of the gear. "You might need that when you're across the border, to buy provisions," the Jouster said. "Now, let's get you packed, because I'll have to bring the bags back with me, if I'm going to maintain the story about laying all this out as grave offerings."

In the end, the clothing went rolled into the bedding, all but the two capes, which Ari fashioned into crude bags to hold the rest of the goods. One knife went on Vetch's belt, the others into the bags. When they tried the bags experimentally on Avatre, she didn't like them, but it appeared she would tolerate them. She craned her neck around to stare at the offending objects, quite affronted by their presence, sniffed them, then decided to ignore them. Vetch climbed back up to the niche, and Ari handed up the things they had decided to leave. When Vetch climbed back down again, the niche was tightly packed, and Vetch was satisfied that his father's spirit was going to be rather pleased, for though the leavings might be impractical stuff for his journey, they were fine funerary goods.

"Time to go," Ari decreed. "We need to go east, far and fast, to get out of patrol range before the next scouting wave goes out today."

"East?" Vetch asked, now supremely puzzled. Of course, Avatre had gone east, into these hills, but he'd had no choice about where she went. Alta was in the north, not the east. "But—

"Whether you make up your mind to go to Alta, or elect to live in the wilderness after all of my warnings, you need to get out of where we're patrolling, or you'll only be caught," Ari said firmly. He nodded, as Vetch bit his lip. "So you'll have to go east before you can go north. Besides— Well, never mind. You'll see when we get there."

"We?" he asked.

"I'm going to take you somewhere," he said, again surprising Vetch, who thought he had come to the end of surprises. "Just follow me and Kashet, and don't drop back; it's going to be cursed hot, and you're going to want to get out of the sky, but that's the last thing we can afford to do. Up, Kashet."

The great dragon rose; Ari led him into the crevice. Vetch called to Avatre, and followed.

Instead of taking immediately into the hard, blue sky as Vetch had expected, Ari took hold of Kashet's harness and led them on foot. Outside that crevice, the sun beat down on Vetch's head with unrelenting heat; under his bare feet, that he had thought were callused and toughened, the hard, baked soil, full of stones and hotter than the sands of the wallows, was very difficult to climb. But he didn't complain—how could he? He owed Ari much, much more than simple obedience without complaint, and it appeared that before this day was over, he was going to owe him a great deal more.

Both of them laboring in the heat, sweating like lathered horses, they led their dragons over the top of next ridge. Only there, just below the crest, did Ari mount up. Sweat poured down his face, but he ignored it.

"Remember what I said. Don't lag," he cautioned, as Vetch clambered into Avatre's saddle. "Now, let's get going. We have a long way to go."

At his signal, Kashet spread his wings, and leaped—forward, not up. Avatre, purely by instinct, followed, both of them coasting down the slope of the hill like a pair of ducks skimming over the surface of the Great Mother River.

Up the following slope and down the next, Kashet skimmed along the surface of the hills, staying low, and after some confusion, Vetch thought he knew the reason. If they went up, there was the chance that someone might spot them in the distance, even if all they could see were two dots, and wonder why there were two dragons in the place where there should be only one.

Despite the concerns that Ari had voiced, he wasn't pressing Kashet to any great speed. Avatre fell in behind him, just off his right wing, and it seemed as if it was easier for her to fly there, in his wake. It occurred to Vetch that flocks of geese and ducks flew that way, in formation. Did dragons? Well, why not?

It was, as Ari said, "cursed hot." Avatre seemed to revel in the heat, taking new strength from it, but it wasn't long before Vetch was thinking longingly of the bathing pools of the compound.

Ari and Kashet set up a kind of pattern in their flying that Avatre imitated—heavy, jouncing wing beats on the upslopes, and a long glide down the other side. Whenever the kamiseen came roaring down a draw or around a hill, and caught them unexpectedly, they side-slipped in a way that sent Vetch's stomach into a tumble. None of these modes of flying was especially comfortable for the rider, and Vetch found a new respect for the Jousters, who did this day after day, twice a day, for most of the year. No wonder they were as muscular as the best warriors!

They went on—forever, it seemed—up one slope, down another, on and on, as the sun god's boat slowly crawled across the heavens, and Vetch began to wonder just how far was far enough.

Then they topped another rise, and this time there was nothing more in front of them but the long slope, down into arid, rock-strewn wilderness and more desert—

Except that off in the distance, there did seem to be a little green—

Now Kashet took a bit more height, and Avatre followed him, Vetch clutching the saddle, his stomach lurching all the way. Once aloft, Kashet began a long, stately glide, spiraled up a thermal, then took a glide down until he reached the next thermal to spiral up it, all of it taking them indirectly toward that speck of green.

It was farther away than Vetch had thought; distances were deceptive in the clear desert air. Which was probably why Kashet had gotten the height to enable him to glide in; laboring that far, wing beat by wing beat, was a lot harder than getting up to where he could maneuver from one thermal to another, even if it was the longer route, measured in distance.

That speck of green eventually resolved itself into trees. Not just any trees; Vetch soon recognized them for what they were. Date palms.

It was an orchard around an oasis.

And there were people there, and tents—people garbed head to toe in long, indigo-blue robes—

The Veiled Ones! he realized, as they began a final spiral down.

He didn't know much about the Bedu, but he knew that much— their customary garb, and the fact that they made their home out here, where there was nothing that a Tian would recognize as civilization. He was able to make out their flocks, now, sheep and goats, a few donkeys.

So here was his first glimpse of the mysterious desert nomads of which he had only heard, who had no king and no land of their own. He wished he wasn't so preoccupied with flying; he would have liked to pay more attention to the exotic encampment.

They didn't seem particularly surprised to see two dragons coming to land at their camping place, although there was some pointing going on down there. Vetch was just glad to see the well that irrigated the date palms. At the moment, his mouth was as dry as the desert sands they were about to land in.

Definitely, "about to land"—the ground was coming up a lot faster than he had realized. And just about the time, as Kashet backwinged to a graceful stop, he also remembered that Avatre had never landed with him on her back—had, in fact only actually landed once in her whole life—and he hadn't been on her back at the time either.

Which was just about the time when she blundered right down onto the ground, stumbling in a tangle of legs and wings, and he went somersaulting over her shoulder again, this time entirely by accident, and this time hitting the ground instead of Kashet's neck.

Hard.

Very hard.

So it was true that when you hit your head, you saw stars…

Fortunately for the shredded remains of his dignity, if any of the Bedu were laughing, they were doing so silently, behind their veils. He didn't actually break anything, although he did indeed see stars for a moment. By the time he picked himself up off the ground and dusted himself off, one of the Bedu had approached Ari, apparently to act as spokesperson for the group. Male or female, there was no telling; they all dressed alike in those robes, and all wore headcloths and veils that showed only their eyes.

"I see you, Jouster of Tia," said a voice from behind the veil— either a high male voice, or a low female; Vetch couldn't tell which.

"I see you, Mouth of the People," Ari replied respectfully, briefly touching first his chest, then lips, then forehead with his first two fingers. "I come in peace."

"I greet you in peace," the Bedu answered, returning his salutation. "Do you seek aught here, from us, besides peace?"

"Water, and a bargain, in service, not goods." Ari sketched another little bow, this time in Vetch's direction. Awkwardly, Vetch copied his salute of respect. "My apprentice is of Alta."

There were murmurs from behind the veils of the other Bedu gathering around them, but no one spoke aloud but the one designated as the "Mouth."

"Of Alta." The Mouth feigned no surprise. "He has the look of it. Well, Jouster of Tia, Apprentice of Alta, what is it that you bargain for?"

Ari took a deep breath; Vetch held his. Ari looked squarely into the eyes behind the veil.

"My apprentice would go home."

Vetch had the feeling that no matter what Ari had told the Mouth of the Bedu, that personage would have at least appeared as if it was all perfectly expected and ordinary. Then again, perhaps it was. There were Seers enough in the Temples, so perhaps this person was a Seer as well as spokesperson. Perhaps he—or she— had known for some time that they were coming, and what they would ask.

Whether a Seer or not, the Mouth, however, was a shrewd bargainer, and proceeded to make it very plain that the services of the Bedu were not to be had cheaply.

Ari, for his part, made it equally clear that he expected a great deal out of the Bedu for their payment, and that he was no green goose fresh from the farmyard to be plucked.

He drank from his own waterskin, though the well was in plain sight, and stood under the broiling sun as if it were the coolest of days in the winter rains. "Passage-right, for this mere child and his beast, two debeks," Ari began.

The Mouth chuckled richly. "You take us for unsophisticated rustics, perhaps. A fugitive, with a dragon, going to your enemies? Twenty."

"Five," Ari countered. "It is no dragon, but a dragonet, and not even one that was on the roster."

"Eighteen. He will need hiding. How does one hide a dragon?"

So the bargaining went; first passage-right, then hunting-right, shelter-right, water-right, then something called lead-on, forage-and-feed, cover-right… every one of these things was considered, bargained over, hotly contested, then agreed to. And Vetch had no idea whatsoever what these things meant, how much they were going to cost, or—most importantly, how they were going to be paid for. There surely wasn't enough in that little pouch of jewelry and coin to cover even one of these "rights"! Was he expected to go into another kind of servitude to pay for his passage? But how could anything he knew be reckoned of enough worth to pay it in any reasonable length of time?

He, at least, could use Avatre as a shade, and followed Ari's example in drinking from one of the three waterskins he'd filled. He offered some to Avatre, but she wasn't interested, so he scooped up handfuls of sand and gave her a buffing as they waited and listened. The rest of the Bedu remained encircling them, watching and listening just as avidly.

Finally, after an endless amount of bargaining, while the barge of the sun god crept toward the west, Ari and the Mouth finished their negotiations.

"All rights, all guides," the Mouth said, as Ari wiped his sweating forehead with the back of his hand. "One lek, twenty alleks, seven debeks."

"Done." Ari seemed satisfied, but Vetch's head reeled. That was enough to provision an entire village for six moons! Where was he supposed to find that much money?

But Ari was rummaging in a leather pouch hanging off the front of Kashet's saddle. "I believe that you will find these are easily the equivalent of that sum," he said, stepping forward, and placing a necklet and two heavy armlets in the Mouth's outstretched hands. Vetch recognized, first the yellow glitter of gold—then, with a sense of shock, the Gold of Honor. Engraved with the Haras-hawk, and the royal vulture, how could it be anything else?

"The Gold of Honor, Jouster?" the Mouth said at the same moment. "Will the Great King not be incensed that it comes into profane hands? Will we not be courting his anger?"

"Do not seek to gull me into thinking you less than shrewd, Veiled One," Are retorted. "You will melt it down or pound it out, of course. I care not, so long as it buys my apprentice those rights."

"And has the Great King not forbidden any such thing?" the Mouth countered. "The Gold of Honor is not to be defaced, according to his laws."

"Since when have the People ever bent to the laws and will of the Great King of Tia?" Ari retorted, acerbically. "What matters it to you? There is no curse on such a thing, if you are concerned. It is law, not magic, that marks what may and may not be done with Honor Gold."

Then he raised one eyebrow, and his expression went from acerbic, to sardonic. "I had never thought to hear that the Bedu feared the wrath of Tia's King."

"Then the bargain is struck, Jouster," the Mouth said smoothly, apparently not in the least stung by Ari's jab. "Be pleased to accept our hospitality."

Then, and only then, as the gold jewels disappeared into the Mouth's robes, did the circle of onlookers break. Yet another of the robed creatures beckoned to both of them, and they followed, into the oasis.

There, on a wool carpet spread in front of one of the tents, they were offered dates, stewed lamb, flatbread, and water in brass cups. Their servers did not speak to them, and once they sat down to eat, the servers vanished.

Vetch, however, could not eat. He was still reeling from the shock of seeing Ari hand over his Gold of Honor to these nomads.

Ari paused with a bite of the lamb in a scoop of flatbread halfway to his mouth, and frowned. "What's wrong, Vetch?"

"The Gold of Honor," he whispered, and gulped. "You gave up the Gold of Honor—

"Which I cannot sell, nor trade, nor melt down inside the bounds of Tia," Ari pointed out. "What good did it do me? I could wear it, if I chose to flaunt myself. I could put it in a chest and keep it. I could display it on a table. Very useful."

"But won't the Great King be angry if he asks you to wear it, and you don't have it anymore?" Vetch asked, nervously.

But Ari only smiled. "I told Haraket to fetch it for me, that I was feeling guilty about your death, and I was going to leave it as my funerary gift. That, at least, is permitted—one can leave the wretched stuff in a tomb, a shrine, or as a temple offering! Haraket seemed to think this was a sensible plan, and I have no doubt that a scroll telling some fool scribe in the Palace of what I have done is on its way to the Treasury now. And the King will probably insist on replacing the wretched baubles with ones even larger and in poorer taste." Ari sighed gustily, surprising Vetch into a laugh.

"There! Much better. Now eat—" he prodded Vetch with a piece of flatbread. "You and Avatre will need strength; you'll be leaving this camp at the same time that I leave to return home."

"Indeed," said the Mouth, who seemed to materialize out of nowhere at just that moment. "It is too dangerous for you to remain here for very long. Hear what your master has bought you, apprentice. You will have safe passage across the face of the desert, and water at every oasis. You have the right to hunt and forage, and if you cannot find food on your own, then we will supply it, but as our resources are limited, you will be required to try hunting first. There will be a message going ahead of you, and a guide to the places where you will be spending your nights. Not human, no— ' the Mouth told him, anticipating his question. "Here is the first one."

He handed Vetch a cord with a blackened bead strung on it— but curiously, the cord did not hang straight, it slanted toward the east, as if something was pulling it. And when he took the cord from the Mouth, that was, indeed, what it felt like.

"At each stopping place, you will surrender your guide, and get another like this, that will lead you on to the next oasis," the Mouth said. "And if by some fearful accident, you are taken by your enemies, you must pledge on your soul's survival that you will release the bead to fly home without you!"

The Mouth was clearly waiting for an answer in the affirmative; Vetch quickly stammered agreement, and put the cord around his neck.

"As I told you, you have hunting-right, to hunt for whatever you see wild on the way, to feed your dragon and yourself. But you also have hearth-right, giving you both food from our stores if you cannot catch anything—though I will warn you. We are not a wealthy people, and you both may go hungry if you count upon this."

"I won't—" Vetch began, but the Mouth wasn't listening.

"Last of all, you have water-right, which of itself, is worth twice what this bandit bargained from me." The Mouth's tone gave the lie to his words, though. He didn't sound angry or even annoyed. "So—the message is sped, and so should you be. A man on a camel can reach the next point on your journey by full dark; you should have no difficulty."

With that, the Mouth stalked off again, leaving Vetch to stare after him.

"Don't look for friendship from them," Ari warned. "We made a bargain; that's all. The Bedu don't care for our little wars, nor our pretensions at holding dominion over the land."

"You sound as if you admire them," Vetch ventured.

"Say, rather, that I envy them. Their only enemies are the land and the weather, and they are the freest people in the world, though they pay a heavy price for freedom." He sighed. "And the Mouth is right; finish that meal, and we will both be on our separate ways."

So there it was—the moment he knew was coming. But he had never thought that it would be like this.

"Master—" he began.

"Ari," the Jouster corrected firmly. "I am no longer your master. Though I'll have a hell of a time replacing you."

Vetch winced, and hung his head. He felt horrible, leaving Ari in the lurch like this. But what could he do? He couldn't go back…

"I'd try to get Baken, but Haraket would fight me for him. I think I'll exercise my rank and purloin one of those youngsters that Baken is training," Ari continued. "Though I think not a serf, this time. If another dragon boy gets it into his head to emulate me, I at least want to get another Jouster out of the situation."

Vetch looked up, and caught a twinkle in Ari's eye, and felt a little better. Not much, but a little. "I wouldn't have run—except they'd have taken her away from me," he said softly. "And I knew it would break her heart. And mine—

"That's how you should be thinking, from this moment on. Whatever you decide, do it for her sake," Ari replied, firmly. "Nothing else. Nothing less."

"I won't," Vetch said, drawing himself up and looking Ari straight in the eyes.

"Good." There was a long moment of very awkward silence— awkward on Vetch's part anyway.

"Can't you come with me?" he asked finally. "We don't have to go to Alta—we could go east, to Beshylos—

"No we couldn't," Ari said, sadly, but firmly. "I took certain oaths, and I will do my duty. I must. I wish—well, it can't be otherwise."

"I'm sorry, Ari," he said, overcome with guilt. "I—

"Don't be. I'm not." For the very first time in all of the time that Vetch had known him, Ari broke into a broad and unshadowed smile. "It's the best thing in the world, to see a young thing fly free. I suppose—I suppose I should give you all sorts of advice now, but 1 can't think of very much." He sighed and shrugged his shoulders.

Finally, Vetch got the courage to ask the question that had been in his mind all along, since the first day Ari had plucked him out of Khefti's yard. "Ari—why? Why—everything?"

Ari looked at him quizzically. "I'm not sure myself." He looked up into the hard, cloudless blue bowl of the sky. "When I first saw you, so angry with me for stealing your water, I thought you were amusing, like a kitten that's ready to attack a lion for some imagined offense. Then, when that fat idiot of a master of yours came out and you turned from angry to terrified, it wasn't so amusing, and when he laid the lash on you, I knew I couldn't leave you there. And I did need a dragon boy."

"But the rest of it—" Vetch suddenly had to know, desperately. "Finding me a shrine—

"Because it was right. Because I never had a younger brother. I'm the youngest in my family. Because—" He sighed, and looked inexpressibly sad. "Because I feel guilty for all of the wretched things that are being done to Altans, and perhaps at first I thought I could assuage some of that guilt by being good to you. But after a while, Vetch, you earned your place, and everything I did for you. By the time that wretch Khefti showed up again, you'd earned it. The other boys may not have liked you, but they could never claim you hadn't earned your place. And—I don't know, but I'm a man who believes in the gods, and I've had a feeling all along that the gods have some purpose in mind for you, and I was just the means to that purpose."

Vetch sighed; that was another dark fear put to rest. In the back of his mind, he'd wondered all along if Ari had a darker purpose for him.

But no. It was all as simple, and as complicated, as guilt, faith— and just maybe, friendship.

"Now, I have a question," Ari said into the silence. "You aren't really named Vetch, are you?"

He smiled; he almost had to. "No—that's something we Altan peasant farmers do, to protect precious boy babies. We name them something awful, so that the demons think they aren't worth taking in the night."

"So, just what is your real name?" Ari asked. "No—wait, let me guess. Kiron. Like your father."

Vetch nodded, and felt a sudden sting in his eyes that he blinked away.

The bead suddenly tugged at Vetch's neck, just as the Mouth materialized again, looking significantly at the sun. Ari nodded, got to his feet, and whistled sharply for Kashet.

The dragon raised himself from where he'd been basking in the heat, beside Avatre, and moved toward his beloved Jouster. Ari swung up into his saddle without asking Kashet to drop to the sand, and from that lofty perch, looked down at Vetch.

"Whatever you do—try not to get on the opposite end of a Joust with me. I still have my duty, and I will hold to it."

He nodded. "I understand."

Ari smiled again. "I thought you would. Your gods go with you, in whatever you decide, Kiron."

And he sent Kashet up into the sky, leaving Vetch—no, Kiron— and Avatre to watch, as they disappeared into the heavens that were, at last, no less bright than his hopes, and no lighter than his heart.

WELL young Kiron," the Mouth of the Bedu said. "One more day, and you will be where you wished to be—across the border, in Alta. I hope that this proves to be truly what you desired."

Kiron—he had told the Bedu at the beginning of his journey that this was his name, and how he wished to be addressed, so as to get himself used to the shape of a name he had not used in years all over again—looked out over the desert, and saw, in the far western distance, the faint haze that marked the beginning of land where things could grow. He licked dry lips. "It has to be, doesn't it?" he replied, as straightforward as the Bedu had been. "There's no place else for me to go."

It had been a long journey, one in which he had lost track of the days, as he zigzagged from one oasis to another, following the pull of the little beads he'd been given. At each oasis, he would surrender the bead that had brought him there, to receive a new one. He and Avatre had learned, together, how to hunt, for only at an oasis—and only if they had not been at all successful in their attempts to find food on their own—would the Bedu supply them.

This was not out of greed; when an oasis held herds and flocks that numbered, not in the hundreds, but in the handfuls of animals, it was very clear that the Bedu were not a wealthy people. Honorable, yes. True to their word, without a doubt. But not wealthy.

He and Avatre honed their hunting skills quickly. He could not bear to see the big eyes of the unveiled children watching every bite he took as if it was coming out of their own portions. Which it probably was…

Sometimes he went hungry, though he never, ever let Avatre go without.

That was all right; he was used to hunger.

There had been nights spent in the open desert, the two of them huddled together against the cold, Kiron's bedding pulled over the two of them. There had been days when he'd rationed out water by the sip, as they crossed expanses of desert. But the Bedu had never misled him, nor miscalled the distances, nor failed to provide him with at least enough water to get from oasis to oasis. But the closer they drew to Alta by their circuitous route, the better he and Avatre had gotten at hunting, and the more game there had been to hunt. Until now—they never went hungry at all. He was tougher; she was tougher, stronger, and much bigger than when they had fled the Jousters' compound.

Mind, what they caught and ate might not be very palatable now, and they might be eking out their meals one scrawny hare at a time, but they never went hungry anymore. They were self-sufficient, and it felt rather good.

He had come to know as much of the Bedu as they ever allowed outsiders to see, and he came to admire what he saw. Not that he had a chance to see very much, for only the Mouths were permitted to speak with outsiders. Still, they were generous within their means, and they never once led him astray. When he slept within their encampments, they found means to give Avatre a warm wallow, by digging a pit, lining it with rocks, and letting a fire burn to ashes atop them before covering the hot rocks with sand. They gave generously of what they had, and he quickly came to the conclusion that they were not the barbarians he'd always been told that they were—not if a "barbarian" was a wild and lawless creature devoid of the understanding of honor, without religion, without wisdom, without learning. All these things, they had in plenty. It was only in material goods that they were lacking.

He mounted into Avatre's saddle, and wrapped his legs into the bracing straps. He would not need a guide bead now, with his goal within sight.

"You undertake a different sort of trial, when you cross that border, young Kiron," the Mouth persisted. "And perhaps things will not always be to your liking. We of the desert know little of the dwellers in the marshy delta of the Great Mother River, for they have little to do with us. I cannot tell you what to expect."

"But I will be free," he said softly, with one hand on Avatre's neck. "And so will she."

The Mouth bowed his head slightly. "This is so." He stared with Vetch to that distant haze of green. "Then, I can only say, may your gods go with you."

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

The free, and open sky, and the beginning of a new life for them both.