Vetch could only shrug his shoulders at that; the only things with wings that he had any experience with were geese, ducks, and chickens. He would have thought, if dragons were a species that required multiple matings, that she would be mad to get at a male as soon as she'd slept off her enormous meals—and he was perfectly prepared for that, when morning came. He'd even shorten her chains if he had to, though he hoped it wouldn't come to that.
The next day, though, when the dragons flew overhead on their way to morning practice and the first patrols of the season, she yearned after them a little, but that could have been the eagerness to fly rather than to mate again. The moment that her meat appeared, she was much more interested in it than in the dragon shadows passing over her head.
Haraket could not tell Vetch if—or how many—of her eggs were likely to be fertile after just one mating. Ari, who might have known if one mating was enough for the eggs to be good, was, well, not really available. Vetch found out that morning that Ari was now flying two patrols, his own and Reaten's, just as he had expected would happen. Vetch vowed to manage on his own, with the information he already had, and not trouble his Jouster further. He knew from experience that Ari might well start to continue to talk on his favorite subject, then stay awake far too late to do so, in the hope that what he told Vetch would help him with Coresan.
And he didn't want to ask Ari for another reason, besides sparing him; Ari was sharp-witted, and might very well guess just what Vetch was planning from the tenor of Vetch's questions.
He wanted no one, not even Ari, to guess what his real goal had been in taking on Coresan's care. But how could anyone, having been exposed to Kashet, not fall under the spell of dragons, and want one like him?
He did not know how Ari would feel about that; if he'd been freeborn, there was no doubt that the Jouster would have encouraged him, but a serf? And a serf born free, born Altan? However Ari felt about the war, personally, he still fought Altans; how could he countenance putting another dragon in the hands of someone who could only be described as an enemy?
Even if the enemy himself didn't yet know what he would make of such a situation…
But that was counting one's chickens—or in this case, dragons—long before they were laid, much less hatched. There were a great many obstacles to overcome before Vetch could find himself a-dragonback. And many more pitfalls, and a thousand ways in which the plan could go horribly wrong.
He also couldn't find anyone who could tell him how long after mating it would take a dragon to lay her eggs, which was a good thing, because it meant that no one would be expecting eggs on a given day. That was totally in his favor, for it meant that he had a measure of time in which he could act before he had to admit that there were eggs and allow the slaves to take them away to discard them.
The one thing that everyone agreed on was that Coresan would take her time about becoming a mother. Absolutely no one expected an egg the next day, or the one after that; eggs took time to form, after all, even in chickens. Especially something as big as a dragon egg.
Vetch had wondered, despite what Ari said, if he would have to compete with other Tians for the eggs, perhaps would-be Jousters who had not yet gotten a dragon, or even other boys who decided that they wanted to emulate Ari. It seemed logical, after all; maybe no one wanted to dare stealing eggs from wild clutches, but here was Coresan, about to go to nest, and the eggs were practically begging to be taken.
Surely there would be one boy (other than himself) here in the compound who would want to become a Jouster by getting himself a dragon.
But Ari had been right; no one rushed forward to claim an egg in order to repeat Ari's experiment.
Vetch couldn't understand it. Especially given what Kashet and Ari had done in saving Reaten. It should have been obvious to a blind man that Ari's way was the superior one. When you hatched and raised your own dragon, you got a beast that was so much easier to handle, and so much more cooperative! Why would anyone even think of taming a dragon any other way?
But no. And when he asked, cautiously, he got the same answer that Ari had given him. The Jousters much preferred the old ways—hunting the nests of dragonets about to fledge, trapping them, and confining them while they were tamed.
And it was clear, the more questions he asked, that they saw nothing obviously inferior in the way their dragons were trained, either. Dosing them with tola, training them until they were broken to the saddle and accepted a rider, and schooling them with increasingly heavy weights on their backs until they were grown enough to carry an adult Jouster, might be harder in the long run than Ari's way, but it meant that the Jousters themselves didn't have to do a thing until they were presented with a dragon already trained.
But this was hardly the way to tame a wild thing and turn its heart toward you. Even Vetch knew that.
What was more, besides knowing little or nothing about the taming, the Jousters weren't even involved in the primary training of their mounts. The poor things would pass through several hands before they came to a Jouster —one group of hunters to trap the fledglings, then a coterie of trainers to make them tractable, then a dragon boy to see to their needs. By the time they finished their training, it was yet another stranger who rode them and commanded them, Jousters who never saw them except when it was time to ride. Small wonder none of them loved their Jousters. Only Ari and Kashet had that bond of trust between them that made for more than a grudging service.
And not even a lowly dragon boy, much less a Jouster, seemed to understand how a bond like that enriched every moment of both of their lives.
