deserve.'
As long as he was here. He could not promise more than that.
For though he tried not to think of it, because he did not want to give himself too much hope, too many dreams, to hatch and raise a dragon meant more than just echoing Ari's achievement. Ari was Tian; by raising Kashet, he had won an automatic place within the ranks of the Jousters. If you had a dragon, you were a Jouster, it was a simple equation. Tian custom, so resistant to change, had worked for Ari in that instance.
But Vetch was Altan, a serf, and not born into captivity; he had no loyalty to any Tian, and no reason to fight for the Tians. In fact, he had many, many compelling reasons to fight against them. So no matter what happened, if anyone discovered he had a dragonet, it would be taken from him; no sane Tian would leave such a dangerous weapon in the hands of an enemy.
That was the first, and most all-encompassing difficulty he would have to face, every moment of every day from the first instant of claiming an egg for his own. But if he could raise a dragonet to fledging—and teach it to carry him, so that, like Ari, his dragon's first flight was with him on its back—
—he could escape. And no one would be able to stop him. Not even another Jouster, if he could contrive for the flight to take place when they were all out on patrol.
He tried not to think of that. One step at a time, and be primed for disappointment. After all, if he failed, he would be no worse off than he was now. And there were so many ways in which the plan could fail, so few that would lead to success.
The first step: get an egg. And not just any egg; a fertile egg.
He went to sleep at night with his mind full of prayers for success.
For the next three days, he gave Coresan double rations, which (more than the tola, he suspected) greatly improved her temper. She swiftly put on weight until she was sleek again, and her scales shone with health and good care. On the second day, she stopped looking up when the other dragons flew overhead; she began to dig in her sand, as if she was looking for some perfect spot to nest. She had plenty of opportunity to do as she pleased, since she only left the pen with Vetch to be groomed. The rest of the time she was on a long leash and left to her own devices when he wasn't feeding her or trying to gentle her. He still had Kashet to tend, after all, and that left her plenty of time on her own.
She began taking him for granted, as a part of her landscape. It was tolerance rather than acceptance, but it was enough. She suffered him to clean her pen while she was in it, which was a mercy; the scheme would swiftly have fallen apart if he'd had to ask Haraket to get someone to clean the pen while he took her out of it. No matter what happened, he couldn't actually take an egg until after nightfall, which meant that it would have to stay in the pen from the time that she laid it until sundown. If someone else had been required to help him, then farewell secrecy!
After living the good life for several days, Coresan still snapped at strangers, and that agile tail of hers was guaranteed to deliver painful blows to the unwary. But she seemed to have decided that making life difficult for him was not going to change what she was being asked to do, and would only delay the rewards of food and grooming that she wanted. In fact, there were only two or three more attempts to intimidate Him rather than strangers, and even then, the attempts were halfhearted, as if she didn't care if he didn't react. He had to wonder, then, what that fool of a Sobek had done with her, that she had gotten so ill-tempered.
Perhaps all it had taken was simple neglect, after all. Though why Sobek had neglected his charge, when Coresan had not been known for being a particularly difficult dragon, baffled Vetch. Maybe it had been fear; maybe he'd been afraid of her all along, and as a consequence, kept chaining and tying her closer and closer, so that the only time she was truly free to move was when she was under saddle. Maybe that was why she'd learned the trick of snapping her tail at everyone. Sobek hadn't ever acted as if he feared her until the last, but then, he was a blustering sort of boy, and maybe he couldn't have admitted his fear even to himself.
Well, in her position, as he'd thought and said before, he'd have acted the same way Coresan had. If Sobek Had been chaining her short, she had certainly been partly cold all the time, since there was no way she could properly wallow on a short chain. He already knew that she'd been hungry, and that she hadn't been properly cleaned in an age. So, cold, hungry, and itchy—it was a wonder she hadn't tried to take off Sobek's head, fulfilling the fears that made him ill-treat her!
Or maybe it had just been laziness on Sobek's part, rather than fear. Certainly Haraket seemed to think so. It was a lot easier to bring a barrow full of whatever the butcher happened to put there and leaving it for the dragon to clean out, rather than carefully observing the dragon to see if it was still hungry after the first barrow. And it was easier to skimp on grooming if the dragon was fractious.
Or, just possibly, Sobek had stupidly thought that by keeping Coresan hungry, he would teach her not to fight him. Now, that was a technique that could work, but only if you made up for the short rations in reward morsels, tidbitting the dragon whenever she did something right, and making sure she got her full feed over the course of the day.
If the Overseer had thought that Sobek's fear of his dragon (rather than laziness) was the real reason for what had happened, he still wouldn't have hesitated to dismiss him, but it wouldn't have been in such complete disgrace.
Haraket, so Vetch had heard, had made it known that Sobek was a shirker, a slacker, totally incompetent and the kind of boy who would find any excuse to evade doing his duty. Now the officers of the army wouldn't have him, even in the lowliest of positions. That didn't leave much for him but manual labor, or perhaps the scribes or artists, and Sobek had not enough patience for the former, or talent for the latter.
