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.
