Alta

had told Kiron was a stuffed grape-leaf into his mouth. Kiron had tried them himself; they were spicy, but good, full of chopped meat and bread crumbs. “That would be the easiest.”

“No, it wouldn’t,” Aket-ten countered. “In fact, it would be stupid and dangerous! The easiest would be to tie out one of the female fighting dragons, and let a male come to her. That’s how they trap the males already, anyway, they just don’t let them mate.”

“And just what do you know about it?” Orest asked heatedly.

“I read,” she shot back. “I’ve been reading about dragons all day, in fact! Which you could have done, if you hadn’t been spending all your time telling your friends what a great Jouster you’re going to be, and how your egg is going to hatch out the biggest dragon there ever was!”

“Oh, you read all about it, did you?” Orest, his ears getting red. “And just who let a Nestling back into the restricted scrolls?”

“The librarian of the Temple of the Twins, of course,” Aket-ten said primly. “The temple has just as many scrolls as the Great Library, and no Nestling is ever restricted from reading any of them. So there.” She folded her arms over her chest and gave him a look of triumph. “I probably know more about dragons than anyone but a Jouster. I could probably be a Jouster if I wanted to.”

“No, you couldn’t,” Orest said, with such a look of smug superiority on his face that his sister flushed. “They don’t let girls be Jousters.”

“I could go in disguise,” she retorted, and looked hurt when both Orest and Kiron laughed at her. “Well, I could!”

“The Jousters train and bathe together when they aren’t fighting,” Orest said. “They wrestle naked and bathe naked. So how are you going to disguise what you don’t have?”

“It’s a stupid rule,” she said, going from triumphant to sullen sulk all in a moment. “I could raise a dragon just as easily as you.”

“No, you couldn’t,” Orest and Kiron said together. They exchanged a look, and Orest nodded.

“Dragonets eat lots and lots of raw meat,” Kiron said. “Piles of it. And hearts and livers and lungs.” Aket-ten was looking a little green at the thought, and he drove it home. “The dragonets need bone in with all of that, so you have to break up the bone so they can swallow it. And you would have to feed the baby this stuff by hand, yourself, or she won’t bond with you. By the time I got done giving Avatre her first feedings, I was bloody up to the elbows, it was in my hair, under my nails—”

“All right!” she interrupted, looking as if she was going to be sick. But her brother hadn’t had his say yet.

“And then, the bigger the dragon gets, the more it eats. And you have to clean up her messes, too, because you don’t want anyone else in the pen until she’s bonded to you! You don’t even like to clean out the cat’s sand pan, so how do you think you’d manage with a dragon?”

“All right!” she said forcefully, hot anger making her flush, her queasiness forgotten. “You’ve made your point! But I still know more about dragons than you,” she added, glaring at her brother.

“Girls,” Orest muttered under his breath to Kiron. Kiron just nodded slightly. “She is just not going to give it up,” Orest added, with a resentful glance at his sister.

Kiron nodded again. He remembered enough about his sisters to be on Orest’s side this time. Girls just got onto a fellow and wouldn’t let him alone if they got an advantage over him. He needed to distract Aket-ten, or she was just going to keep on baiting Orest.

“All right, then, since you’ve been reading all morning,” Kiron said, deciding to pacify her and learn something at the same time. “I know about the Tian dragons, tell me about the Altan ones. Where are they trapped?”

“Well.” Aket-ten bounced a little in her seat, once again looking very well pleased with herself. “You know that dragons need heat to hatch their eggs. We have two kinds of dragons, actually; we have some that use the hot sand in the desert, like yours do, and we have a smaller kind that makes a big mound of rotting plants the way the crocodiles do to bury their eggs in. Those are the swamp dragons. They’re easier to trap, so they’re the ones we have the most of, but we have some desert dragons too. In fact, we have a couple of Tian dragons that lost their riders and that we managed to catch. Both of those are female, and when the Jousters want a wild desert dragon, they take one of those two females and stake her out at the edge of the desert and wait for another one to find her. A female will come to fight her, a male will come to mate with her.”

“So the smart thing would be to take both of those females out and let them mate,” Kiron mused. “You wouldn’t have the risk of losing a mating pair, and you might even be able to trap the male after the mating is over. What about taking swamp dragon eggs, though, from wild nests?”

“You’d have to drive off the mother somehow, and instead of sand, you’d have to come up with a place that was hot and damp to incubate the eggs,” Orest said. “That wouldn’t be hard, though; there are a lots and lots of hot springs around here, or you could use rotting reeds like the dragons do themselves. It’s taking the eggs that would be difficult. Even if you took a lot of people, trying to drive a mother dragon off her eggs could get them killed. A trapped dragon is bad; a mother protecting a nest is ten times worse.

The swamp dragons may be smaller, but they aren’t that much smaller.” He scratched his head in perplexity. “I don’t know; maybe at night, when they’re torpid?”

“Trying to do it at night would be worse,” put in Aket-ten. “At night, both parents come and lay on the nest. They might be torpid, but there would be two of them. And it would be in the dark, too, when the river horses come out to feed, and the crocodiles, too. If the dragons didn’t get you—” She shivered.

Kiron was just grateful that it wasn’t his problem. “If I was going to choose, I’d stake out those females,” he said. “The one mating I saw was in the sky, but I bet they don’t always mate that way.”

“Was that Avatre’s parents?” Orest asked. “I know you told us that you’d taken an egg from one of the Jousting dragons. What happened?”

“Partly it was not enough tala in their food, and partly it was stupidity from the dragon boys and the Jousters both,” he said with scorn. “Nobody bothered to notice that they were—” he glanced at Aket-ten and modified the rather coarse language he had been going to use. “—getting interested. Finally during a practice, everything just went bad at once. The Jousters were new and kept missing strokes, and finally when one connected, because the female chose that moment to turn the practice into a mating flight, the male’s rider hit wrong. He knocked the female’s rider out of his saddle, and another Jouster, Kashet’s rider, caught him before he hit the ground and got killed. Meanwhile the female was flying free now, and the male’s rider lost control and they went into a full mating flight. He couldn’t get control of his dragon until the mating was over, and when the female tried to fly off to the hills, Kashet and his rider managed to herd her back.”

That was a very dry version of the whole incident, that had been both tremendously exciting and terrifying at the same time. If he closed his eyes, he could still see the horrifying plunge of the injured Jouster out of his saddle, and the incredible dive that Kashet made to catch him, saving him from a certain death.

“I wouldn’t have wanted to be the male’s rider,” Orest muttered, his eyes round.

“You wouldn’t have wanted to be either of them,” Kiron corrected. “The female’s rider almost died anyway; would have, if there hadn’t been a Healer there quick. And by the time it was over, both of them had their dragons taken away and given to other Jousters. They were sent back down to train all over again. The Overseer was very angry, and so was the General in charge of the Jousters.”

“Glory!” Orest exclaimed, seriously impressed now. “But how did you get the egg?”

“Because after she was mated, she got aggressive and her dragon boy actually walked out rather than tend her.” Once again, Kiron allowed his voice to drip with scorn. “I’ll tell you the truth, he was an idiot. He was at fault and in trouble in the first place for letting her go without a full tala ration and for not noticing she’d come into season. Then he decided she was trying to kill him when all that was really wrong was that she was hungry. He got so hysterical over it that he had every other dragon boy in the compound standing around him by the time he walked out. The Overseer was so angry he swore he’d see to it that the boy never got an apprenticeship with anyone, but he’d made the others so frightened before he was done that nobody wanted to take her. So I said I would, as long as they took all my other duties off my hands, and it turned out that the fool had been short-feeding her all along; if he didn’t feel like carrying as much food as she wanted, he just didn’t, and let her go hungry. So she wasn’t getting enough food or enough tala. As soon as she realized that I was going to