Alta

sweat tricking down the back of his neck and making his scalp prickle, and wished he was up there. The layer of humid air stopped about halfway to where the dragons were playing now and that was where the dry kamiseen wind began. He listened to the spectators with half of his attention; they found the ribbon chasing to be absolutely enthralling. He couldn’t blame them; the game was fun to watch, and even more fun to participate in.

On the other hand, one of the near-ground tactics was a combat-trick, and was going to be extremely useful. One of the things that Tian dragons did was to dive down on an Altan army and snatch a commander right out of the midst of his men, rising in the air to drop him to his death. The swamp dragons weren’t big enough to pull that off.

Neither were the fledglings, nor would they be for at least another year. But they would try to do anything that their riders asked them to, once Aket-ten put it into their heads. And one of those things was a new, and potentially deadlier equivalent to what the Tians did. It, too, was intended to serve the purpose of eliminating important enemy commanders.

The fledglings took to it immediately, for it fit in so well with their natural hunting skills that they hardly had anything to learn.

They would rise to the top of a thermal, and their rider would pick a target and signal the general area where it was. Since Tian commanders wore blue war helmets, the fledglings themselves were able to tell exactly who the target was now. They would fix their eyes on the target, then fold their wings and dive. At the last possible moment, they would snap their wings open and turn the dive into a blindingly fast aerial dash at just out of spear reach from the ground. If they had been hunting, that would have ended in them smashing into their prey, knocking it over, and soaring up again to come down a second time on the now-unconscious prey to kill it.

Since this was a combat maneuver, they would aim straight for the target, and at the last possible moment, the rider would launch a javelin at it. What with being thrown from the back of a speeding dragon, when the javelins hit, they usually went all the way through the straw targets, out the other side, and buried themselves a good hand-length into the dirt. How often they did hit depended on the skill of the rider. Orest was the most accurate of the boys, hitting his targets well over three quarters of the time, Huras the least, a little better than three out of ten. Kiron himself was somewhere in the middle, and as a consequence, preferred to use the weapon he was most familiar with, the sling. Using a lead pellet instead of a clay one, he was usually able to knock the target’s “head” clean off with an accuracy comparable to Orest with a javelin.

This was very popular with the spectators on the ground, who actually got to see something besides pretty patterns in the sky. It was heartening for them, too; it was one thing to hear about distant victories, it was quite another to see your fighters actually doing something that looked effective and aggressive.

Even the older Jousters had gotten inspired by the successes of the youngsters to try as much of what was being done in fledgling practice as they could command their own dragons to cooperate with. And there, unfortunately, Aket-ten could do only so much. While she could dominate every fighting dragon in the compound now, that only meant that they would obey her, not their own riders. And in order to be alert enough to respond the complicated commands, they would have to be on half rations of tala, which made them arguably dangerous. Still there were a handful of the older Jousters experimenting with slings, though not one of them had managed to get his mount to tolerate a javelin whizzing past its head. They usually turned and snapped it out of the air, and no one wanted to discourage that behavior, since it meant that the dragons were also catching arrows that had been sent in the Jouster’s direction.

The older Jousters had swiftly worked out for themselves that they needed to learn such things, and quickly, too. Now that the Magi-sent storms had ended with the onset of the Dry season, and the kamiseen winds had begun to blow, the Jousters of Tia were back in the air and in support of troops who were angry that they had been lately driven back.

Still, on the ground, the Altans could match them man for man, and for now they were holding the land that they had regained.

And with the help of the new tactics that Kiron was working out, the Altan Jousters were succeeding in avoiding the Tians, forcing them to work much harder to go after them, and keeping them from attacking Altan commanders.

Kiron could well imagine the level of frustration that must have been building in the Tian Jousters. Always, always, the Altans had stayed and fought, man to man, dragon to dragon—and of course, since the desert dragons outweighed the swamp dragons, most of the time the victory in a conventional Joust went to the Tian and he was then free to wreak whatever havoc he cared to on the troops below. If the Altan was lucky, he was just driven off. If he wasn’t, someone would be building a funerary shrine for him by nightfall, as his dragon flew off without him, freeing itself of harness and saddle, and reverting to the wild.

Now, though, the Altans weren’t staying and fighting; in fact, there was precious little Jousting going on at all. The Tians found their dragons—and themselves—stung with clay pellets. Or they found their opponents luring them into tail chases that they could not possibly win, which left them far from the scene of battle and too exhausted to accomplish anything when they got back. And when the slingers switched from clay pellets to lead, their hits on either Tian Jousters or Tian commanders on the ground could be devastating.

Now, Kiron knew the Tians, and knew what their ultimate answer would be to the change in situation: put more Jousters in the air so that one could pursue and one attack ground troops. Because they still outnumbered their Altan counterparts, and once every Altan Jouster was fully engaged, whether in combat or in a tail chase, there would still be Tian Jousters to conduct their devastating campaigns on the troops below.

But they hadn’t yet done that and, for now, the lines were holding steady at the regained border.

As a consequence, Lord Khumun’s star was rising. According to Kaleth, he was getting more of a hearing in Council meetings with the Great Ones, although he was being very cautious about what he said. This was enormously satisfying for Kaleth and Toreth, who could have discussed every little nuance and rumor and political implication for hours if the others hadn’t been patently bored with all the political dancing.

But there was one thing that was important; the more power that Lord Khumun had, the safer Aket-ten would be. He had made it very clear that Aket-ten’s presence was very important to the Jousters’ Compound, and even if the Magi took every Fledgling of even mediocre ability and drained them all to the point where their power was not returning, at the moment, they could not touch Aket-ten.

Two of the ribbon chases ended simultaneously; the other two looked as if they would go on until all four dragonets were tired. Kiron put his fingers into the corners of his mouth and whistled shrilly.

In answer, the “combatants” broke off and returned to the ground, leaving the sky free for the older Jousters.

“Kiron!” called Toreth, as they all led their dragonets toward the compound. Kiron left the crowd of spectators and joined them.

“Good matches,” he said, approvingly. Toreth nodded his head.

“They’re getting stronger. I think we need more practice time,” the prince said. “And I know how you feel about practicing over a net—but what about practicing over water?”

“Not the canals, surely,” Kiron replied with skepticism. He couldn’t imagine using the canals instead of a net. Their movements would be even more restricted than over the net.

“No—I thought the ocean,” the prince replied, looking eager to try the experiment.

But Kiron shook his head. He hadn’t yet actually seen the ocean and the port of Alta City, but he was not exactly eager to do so either. Water, stretching as far as the eye could see? All right, he knew how to swim—but not that well. And neither did the others, he suspected. “If someone goes off, there’s no easy rescue,” he pointed out. “It’s one thing to go off the back of your dragon to rescue someone when you know the water’s no deeper than your neck, but it’s quite another to go plunging into water deeper than you can even imagine. And what about waves? I’ve heard there are waves big enough to swamp huge boats! What would happen if one of those hit you?”

The prince’s face fell.

“I’ll tell you what, though,” Kiron continued, making up his mind about something else. “I think we can find some empty property somewhere, and set up a place with straw men for more targeting practice.”

Toreth’s face brightened again. “As far away from here as possible,” he suggested.

“Oh?” asked Gan, coming up to join them, his dragonet whuffling at his hair. “Why? Not that I mind; I have