Alta

her a slavish bow that made her laugh. He offered a hand to Kiron, who took it to pull himself to his feet. “Until tomorrow, Aket-ten! I look forward to our match!”

“Until tomorrow,” she replied, her voice a little muffled as she bent to blow out a lamp.

“Well fought,” Toreth repeated, slapping Kiron on the back as they left.

But he said it in a tone that left Kiron wondering. Was he talking about their game of Hounds and Jackals or some other contest altogether?

Kiron had thought that beautiful Tathulan, Huras’ enormous female dragonet, would probably lose some of her relative size as the others caught up with her. But as the days passed, that didn’t happen. She continued to grow at the same rate as all the others—which meant she was still half again as large as the nearest in size.

“She’ll be fledging long before Bethlan,” Kiron observed, watching as she tossed her current favorite plaything, a bag loosely stuffed with straw, into the air with a flip of her head. It was a singularly beautiful head; dark blue along the neck ridge and in a blaze down her forehead, fading to a glorious purple, which in turn faded to scarlet on the underside of her jaw and on her muzzle.

“You think?” Huras asked doubtfully. “She doesn’t act any differently from the others. She’s just bigger. I thought that you told us that the biggest and the strongest were the firstborn.”

“That’s what Ari told me, but now I wonder. He couldn’t see the wild ones’ nests all that well when he spied on them, and the only dragon he really ever had any experience with was Kashet.” Kiron rubbed the side of his face with the back of his hand. “When it comes right down to it, at this point, we all have eight times the experience with dragonets that he did.”

“Well, in that case, I think she’ll fledge right in order,” Huras said firmly. “I think it’s more to do with when they’re ready, not how big they are.”

He might have said more, but a steady bleating had just started from their right and was approaching. They exchanged a look.

“That doesn’t sound like Bethlan,” said Huras.

“No, it doesn’t,” Kiron replied, already on his way to the doorway.

He was just in time to intercept, not Bethlan, but Gan’s Khaleph. “Oh, no, baby!” he said, laughing, barring the way with his arms outstretched. “Not two wanderers! Back you go—”

But Khaleph wasn’t going to be turned back quite so easily. Instead, he ducked past Kiron and— unexpectedly—into Tathulan’s pen.

Both dragonets stopped what they were doing with snorts, and stared at one another.

“Do you think we should chase him out?” Huras asked, in a worried whisper, as Khaleph edged forward a little, neck stretched out so far toward Tathulan that he seemed twice his usual length.

“No—no, let’s see how they react to each other, first,” Kiron said cautiously. “They’ve never seen another dragon—and Bethlan gets along fine with that swamp dragon she keeps visiting.”

Now Tathulan had her neck stretched out nearly as far. The two touched noses, snorting in surprise, and jumped back.

Kiron stifled his laughter. Huras still looked worried—though why he should be worried, when Tathulan was far more likely to injure Khaleph than the other way around, made no sense to Kiron.

The little emerald-green male stretched out his head again, and this time, when he touched noses with the bigger female, he didn’t snort and jump back. Instead, he carefully eased himself down into the sand pit with Tathulan.

Now the two of them began a careful circling of each other, rather like two strange dogs—though unlike dogs, neither made any attempt to nip. Then they stopped, and both of them looked at Huras and Kiron.

“What do they want?” Huras asked urgently.

“It’s all right,” Kiron told the two dragonets—he was, after all, the one they both knew. “It’s fine, little ones.”

They looked at each other. And then Khaleph stretched out his neck and head again, one eye on Tathulan, only this time it was toward Tathulan’s stuffed sack.

She immediately figured out what he was after, and snatched it away from under his nose.

Clumsily, he gave chase. They romped all over the pen, while Kiron and Huras scrambled out of their way, and the moment he seemed to lose interest in the chase, she stopped, and dropped the sack, pretending to ignore it until he snatched it up and she bumbled joyfully after him.

“Kiron! They’re playing!” Huras said in astonishment. “I never heard of anything like that!”

“Nobody’s ever had tame dragons growing up in front of their eyes either,” Kiron pointed out, as Khaleph lost the sack and Tathulan snatched it away again. “For all we know, they play like this in the nest.”

Just then, Gan came bursting in, hearing their voices and in a panic because Khaleph was not in his pen. He stopped dead at the sight of the two dragonets romping together.

“Kiron!” he burst out, when he could finally make his mouth work. “They’re playing!”

“And I think we ought to let them all play together,” Kiron replied. “They’ll have to work together, let’s let them get used to each other early.”

So the next time little Bethlan went looking for Menet-ka, Kalen steered her into the pen of his female Se- atmen, and soon there was a whirling ball of indigo-blue and brown-gold play-wrestling in Se-atmen’s pen. Toreth deliberately led his Re-eth-katen into Apetma’s pen; clever little Re-eth-katen was soon poking her nose into every pen to find a playmate, much to Avatre’s disgust. Orest’s Wastet and Pe-atep’s Deoth met in the corridor, and in the surprise of the moment, went tumbling into the tenth, empty pen, where they made a fine mess of the oddments that had been stored there. At Kiron’s request, a gate was built across the end of their corridor so that the babies did not get themselves into trouble by assuming that the adult dragons would be as ready to play as their fellow dragonets, and then they were permitted full freedom of the entire set of pens. This had the happy side effect of freeing half the boys while the other half took it in turn to watch over all the babies, and all the babies got used to obeying someone besides “mother.” It had another happy side effect; they grew stronger and much more coordinated with every day spent in play, and as for nights, they were so tired by the time darkness fell that you could not have awakened them with a trumpet.

However, all the boys soon learned that you either found a way to secure your belongings or you found them being used as playthings. Curtains across the doors stopped some of the dragonets, but not all. Finally, the carpenters were brought in to build actual doors after Lord Khumun tired of replacing bed coverings.

“What’s next, the furniture?” he grumbled to Kiron. “No, don’t answer that. I can see how fast they’re growing.” And he gave the orders for doors.

The dragonets found the carpenters to be even more fascinating than the furniture, and followed the poor men from pen to pen, crowding around to watch, tasting the wooden planks, trying to steal the tools. It made for an interesting day for everyone, as the boys tried to keep the dragonets away from the carpenters, and the dragonets tried to get at the carpenters, and the carpenters worked probably a great deal faster than they ever had in their lives, sure that the dragonets would go from tasting the wood to tasting them.

Avatre had never acted like this—but then, Avatre had been raised in isolation from every other dragon but Kashet. Kashet had been an adult, not at all interested in playing; it gave Kiron a pang to think of how lonely she must have been.

And yet, he had spent every free moment of time with her. And he had played with her. So perhaps she had been all right.

The one thing he found himself wishing, though, was impossible.

He could not help but think how entranced Ari would have been to see all of this, and wish that his mentor could have been there.

It might even have made him laugh again. And that would have been worth more to Kiron than all the Gold of Honor in Alta.

TWELVE

KIRON stood before the single most important man in the compound, and asked for the moon, the sun, and the stars.

“I want to teach the boys how to fly a dragon now,” said Kiron to Lord Khumun. “I