Alta

Se-atmen, who repaid his impeccable care with an outpouring of single-hearted love—which you just did not get from a bird of prey. So even Kalen, who Kiron had thought was probably the perfect candidate for taking care of a tame dragon without having to be taught anything, was learning something. . . .

And I am learning something from all of them, he thought, as he stood in the doorway of Avatre’s pen, and listened to the little sounds coming from all of the pens. Indeed I am. Now as long as I can keep a little ahead of all of them, we’ll be all right!

ELEVEN

THREE days later, Aket-ten made her first appearance in the Jousters’ Compound. She was accompanied by Lord Khumun, who told Kiron’s wing that he wished to see how she would fare in communicating with the dragons for himself.

The boys had been singularly uninterested in “Orest’s little sister” and had not been enthusiastic about leaving their precious charges to greet her. That all changed the moment they set eyes on her.

“By the gods!” Gan whispered to Kiron, as all of the boys of Kiron’s wing gathered to greet her. “What happened to Orest’s ‘little’ sister?”

“She grew up,” Kiron replied shortly, a little dismayed at Gan’s words, and surprised to feel a surge of jealousy. Aket-ten looked—well, wonderful. She had somehow achieved a compromise between the hoyden she had been and that elegant, slightly over-painted “lady” he had first seen in the Temple of All Gods. She looked quite comfortable in her skin, and yet there was no doubt whatsoever that she had, in very fact, grown up. Even Toreth was giving her an interested and intrigued look.

Yes, every one of the boys was eyeing her with varying degrees of speculation and interest except Orest himself. Orest was apparently oblivious to the change. He still looked bored, and clearly wished himself elsewhere.

“I have work to do,” he whispered irritably to Kiron. “You’d think they’d leave me out of this welcoming- party!” He shook his head. “She’s bad enough now as a know-it-all; this is just going to swell her pride like a toad in the rain!”

That his wingmates did not share his impatience didn’t seem to register with him at all.

Aket-ten didn’t look like someone whose pride was going to swell over all the attention. She looked like someone who knew she had a job to do and was determined to do it well. The encounter with the Magi had changed her profoundly, Kiron decided at last. It had dispelled some cherished illusions, and had forced her to look at the world around her with a high degree of skepticism. He felt sorry for her; the confident child he had rescued back in the swamp was gone.

On the other hand, the cautious girl who had taken the child’s place would be a bit easier to live with.

“Do you think you are prepared to attempt a wild-caught dragon?” Lord Khumun asked Aket-ten. “You need not fear them now—I am sure that your brother must have told you that we have been working intensely with them, and that though one must be cautious around them, you need not fear them.”

Where did that come from? I must have been wool-gathering. Kiron shook his head; he had been so busy staring that he had completely lost track of the conversation.

Aket-ten hesitated, then answered carefully. “My Lord, the problem is not that I am afraid of the wild-caught dragons, it is the tala. It makes their thoughts so sluggish that I cannot effectively reach them. So while I can easily tell Avatre what it is that Kiron would like her to do, with a wild-caught dragon, I do not believe that I could get past the tala and its own natural resistance to captivity. I fear that the best I could manage would be to read it, to tell you how it is feeling at that moment.”

“Annoying,” the Lord of the Jousters sighed. “Ah, well, that is better than nothing. You can tell us when they are over-drugged, or under-drugged, and if they are injured, ill, or in season. That is something, at least.”

She shrugged. “There are many things I can tell you that may help. Animals can suddenly conceive of a dislike for a person or an object, and I can tell you if that happens. I can exert some calming influence on them, provided they have not been provoked into rage. And I can certainly help with the training of the tame ones,” she said firmly. “It will be of no difficulty whatsoever to explain to them what is wanted. If they all grow up like Avatre, they will be eager to please, and need only to be told what to do in order to make a try at it.”

“Well then, there is a swamp dragon that has been looking a bit seedy of late,” Lord Khumun said briskly. “That would be Pa-alet, ridden by Hotef-ba. Let us see what you can make of him.”

With Aket-ten at Lord Khumun’s side, and the dragon boys trailing along behind, they all paraded over to the part of the compound where Kiron seldom ventured—the pens of the swamp dragons. He had not had much to do with the swamp dragons since advising Lord Khumun on ways to retrain them—though Menet-ka’s Bethlan had wandered in twice more, looking for her “mother.” As they all moved along the corridor, heads rose on long necks, craning over the walls to peer at the interlopers—slightly smaller heads on slimmer necks than Kiron was used to in an adult dragon. The forehead was broader than that of a desert dragon, though, and the nasal area smaller, and he wondered if they had all been a bit hasty in thinking of the swamp dragons as less intelligent than their desert cousins.

Their colors were more muted and less metallic than those of the desert dragons, and instead of having colors that shaded on all the extremities to a different color, or something lighter or darker, only the bellies shaded to a lighter version of their base color. But what they lacked in brightness of color, they made up for in subtle patterning; with few exceptions, virtually all of them sported diamond-in-diamond patterns down their backs in subtle variations of their base colors. He could see how this would be valuable in the swamp; if they were lying in a hot mud pool, they would look much like the surface of the pool. And if they chose to swim in clearer water, that lighter belly would disguise them from below both from the enormous carp that formed part of their diet and from the crocodiles that lurked on the bottom. Even a dragon had reason to fear a really big crocodile.

They came to the pen of the ailing dragon, who looked up and grunted at their entrance. He was a brown, and he lolled in his pool of hot water with more lethargy than Kiron was used to seeing in a dragon that wasn’t trying to sleep through the rains.

“Do you need to touch him?” Lord Khumun asked. “If so, I will send for his dragon boy—”

“No, that will not be necessary, my Lord,” Aket-ten replied, with a faint frown of concentration. She stretched out her right hand as if she meant to touch the dragon, but she remained in the doorway, well out of reach. “Ah. Too much tala, not enough food, my Lord,” she said after a moment, her voice sounding distant and preoccupied. Her eyes stared off into space somewhere, looking distinctly unfocussed. “Something put him off his food at some point recently, a stomach ailment perhaps, but his dragon boy was trying to make sure still he got his full dose. Except that as he lost weight, it was a larger dose than he needed, and the overdose of tala has made him lethargic and put him further off his food. Which of course, will make him lose more weight.”

She dropped her hand, blinked, and looked up at the Lord of the Jousters, who himself looked impressed. “Can you afford to take him off the fighting roster and put him on a half ration of tala until he returns to fighting weight?” she asked. “That would be the surest way to get him to recover, and the fastest.”

Lord Khumun visibly weighed the options. “I believe I will have to,” he said at last. “He’s really not effective now. How long do you think it will take?”

She shrugged. “Half a moon?” she guessed. “For all that I have been studying them, this is the first dragon I have had any contact with besides Avatre.”

“Half a moon on half rations of tala and all he can eat,” said Lord Khumun to the dragon boy in question, who looked very nervous indeed. Half rations of tala for a dragon meant a great deal less control over him.

“I think, my Lord,” said Kiron, as an idea occurred to him, “that during this period, if it can be managed, you should let his food walk to him on its own four legs. Or perhaps two—it might be easier to send in chickens, or ducks and geese.”

“Eh?” Khumun turned to stare at him.

“I mean, we should force-feed the tala ration to a sheep or several live fowl and then drive them into the pen,” Kiron elaborated. “He’s wild-caught; he’s used to catching and killing his own food. Let him have live food while he’s recovering his strength. It will taste better to him, which will perk his appetite, and having something to kill might help him with aggression.”