These, then, were the people that the boys had spoken of, who gave them money to carry letters to the Jousters, who bet upon the outcome of their combats, who desired their presence at their entertainments, as if the Jousters were themselves some form of entertainer. And something else occurred to Vetch at that moment, as he watched their avid faces. They did not go to war themselves, but they certainly profited from it; they did no fighting, yet when the fighting was over, it was they who had gained— more land, more goods, more money in their coffers.
He found himself suddenly filled with such hatred that he had to look away from them lest by his expression he betray himself. Not that he cared if they knew he hated them, but he might get Ari into endless trouble.
So he looked back up at the dueling Jousters being instructed by Ari. This practice session didn't look very dangerous, for even Vetch could tell that these two weren't very good at the Jousting. Their dragons would not come close enough to permit any real combat, and although they heaved at the guiding reins, the dragons stubbornly fought their riders.
When they did 'close in,' they got nowhere near enough to actually make an exchange of blows. The dragons made very clumsy passes at each other, one high, the other low, while the Jousters were flailing at the air yards away from one another.
It was partly the fault of the dragons, and partly of the riders, who (he suspected) were afraid of getting close enough to be hit themselves.
Vetch knew all the dragons by sight now, and it wasn't hard to tell which the two Jousters rode, even if he didn't know the names of the men themselves. That was a failing among the dragon boys, to know the dragon and refer to the Jouster as 'So-and-so's rider.' One of the dragons was Seftu, a handsome, if irritable crimson male, and the other was Coresan, a female of a deeper hue and notoriously whippy tail. Coresan was usually mild-mannered in nature, or at least, she didn't give any more trouble than any other dragon, excepting only that she was known to leave her dragon boy with black-and-blue calves and thighs with that unpredictable tail. But something had her on edge the last week; from what Vetch had been hearing, her dragon boy was half afraid to go in her pen of a morning, and kept her chained as short as he dared. He'd been tempted to go look in on her himself, but his own duties had kept him so busy that he hadn't had the time.
Their Jousters were the newest of the group, barely out of ground training, and certainly it was going to be a very long time before they were the masters of either their weapons or their dragons. Ari was getting very frustrated, and no wonder; the dragons were giving most of their attention to each other and very little of it to their riders now—and were circling each other in a peculiar fashion that reminded Vetch of something…
And just when he realized what it reminded him of, Seftu's rider finally got close enough to deliver a sideswipe with his lance to Coresan's Jouster. The latter was momentarily distracted from the job at hand, since Coresan chose that moment to curvet sideways in the air, toward Seftu.
Close enough to actually land a blow, for the first time since Vetch had started watching. Only this was a blow for which neither the attacker nor the defender were prepared.
The lance connected—hard—
With a terrible crack, it connected with the Jouster's skull; the lance bent in the middle, the sign that it had hit with enough impact to be ruined, all of the fibers pulped.
And that was nothing to what must have happened to the rider's head. Not even the Jousting helmet could have saved him from that blow.
Vetch caught his breath, and his heart stopped.
As if a god had waved his hand to slow time itself, everything froze for a horrible moment.
The Jouster hung in his saddle—hung there, balanced only because he hadn't yet unbalanced. Then his lance dropped from a hand gone limp; the broken lance followed it, falling down… down…
Vetch's mind hadn't caught up with what was happening, but his gut felt that crack, and knew exactly what it meant before his thoughts could form.
Then, in painfully slow motion, Coresan's Jouster bent over the saddle.
Then went over the saddle, in a slow forward somersault.
And continued to roll, tumbling right out of his saddle.
As Vetch's heart clenched, he plunged toward the net below. But he wasn't falling right, there was something horribly wrong. He was limp, limbs sagging, and Vetch felt his stomach lurch as he realized that not only was the man not conscious, but that he was going to miss the net entirely.
The Jouster was Tian; the enemy. Vetch didn't even know his name. Vetch should have been silently cheering the demise of one of the people who was responsible for all the horrible things that had happened to his land and his family.
Should have, perhaps—but couldn't. All he could see was the body dropping straight to his death; all he could hear was the cry from above where the second Jouster still flew, a cry of desperation, thin and filled with utter
