him.
It seemed a harmless enough daydream. Letis had few such dreams to sustain her, and Peri was disinclined to shatter this one.
But then, without warning, at the moment in which victory was confidently expected by their captors—the war ended. The Great King was dead. His advisers were dead. Most of the Tian army was dead. And suddenly, there was a new Great King and a Great Queen, too—and she was Altan. And he ordered the serfs freed, and their lives to be sorted out, with recompense given to them.
Of course, there were thousands upon thousands of them. And it was taking a very long time to sort through records and claims and counterclaims. So while she was waiting for
She heard the tapping suddenly take on a new urgency, and she heard, felt, exactly the place where the dragon was trying to break through. Now she moved, the hammer in her hand tapping firmly, but carefully, against the shell. Hairline cracks started from her point of impact.
Soon, but not soon enough for her rising panic that she wasn’t doing this right, a piece of shell popped off, and a fist-sized golden snout with two flaring nostrils poked out of the hole.
She sat down hard in the sand with a sigh of relief. Now, according to Aket-ten, the baby would just breathe for a while, resting, before going back to hammering its way out of the shell. If she were a mother dragon, she would be licking the shell to weaken it. She couldn’t do that, so she had to weaken it with the hammer.
And before too long, that was what she was doing. Periodically, the baby would stop to rest, and so would she. The baby had begun her attempts—Peri was sure it was a “she”—to emerge in midmorning. It wasn’t until midafternoon that a big piece of shell finally fell away and the gold-green bundle of wet skin tumbled out of the larger half of the egg to land at her feet.
The baby raised her—it lacked the horns, so it
Aket-ten watched her protegee do everything exactly right, watched the moment when Peri fell into entirely besotted adoration, and smiled.
Everything was going according to plan.
Once other young women saw Peri—who was
In fact . . . she just might proceed with this plan
But she ought to get Nofret’s permission, formally, for a girl group. It was one thing to experiment with one girl and one dragon; quite another to invent a whole new kind of Jouster.
“You’ll need food for her shortly,” she called down to the young woman, who had the baby’s head cradled in her lap, with the wings spread out over the hot sand to dry. Peri looked up, startled, at the sound of her voice, as if she had forgotten that Aket-ten was there.
She probably had, actually,
“I’ll make sure someone brings you the sort of thing she’ll need for her first meal,” Aket-ten continued, jumping down off the wall. Re-eth-ke lost interest in the proceedings as soon as Aket-ten stopped scratching her, and stretched out to bask on her own sands.
Aket-ten hurried off, feeling uncommonly cheerful.
FOUR
THE trade routes for half a day’s flight in all directions from Aerie had been carefully surveyed. Places where ambushes were likely had been found. In fact, in the very act of making those surveys, two separate groups of bandits had been flushed and defeated, a fact which both elated and dismayed Kiron.
This meant that his plan was a good one. It also meant that the help he and the other Jousters were about to supply was more desperately needed than he had thought.
On the other hand, this development electrified even the older Jousters; he hadn’t quite realized how badly they had missed having duties to fulfill. But now that they knew there really was a need, they were on fire to begin patrolling, and had begun practicing on their own, adapting the tactics of war to a different sort of combat.
Right now, the tactics were simple: dive out of the sky and spook the animals. The riders would either be carried off with the panicking mounts, or dismount—or be thrown. Once on the ground, they were easier prey. And that was where the first difficulty came in.
No one had any compunctions about killing these brigands. The question was what to do with them if they surrendered.
If there was a caravan about, the law was clear, and Great King Ari had repeated it. Bandits were war captives, and as such, became serfs. The caravans could take them and sell them to the highest bidder, or use them as labor. With all of the Altan serfs freed, there was a bit of a shortage of that sort of labor now. More strong captives would be welcome.
The problem came if there were no caravans about. What to do then? There was no good way to transport them back to the nearest settlement. They certainly couldn’t be brought back by the Jousters; there was no way to do so safely. They couldn’t be released. That was utterly out of the question. So what to do with them? Killing them out of hand was utterly repugnant to Kiron. So was leaving them trussed up in the sunlight to die.
He still hadn’t solved that problem on the day that the first official patrols began.
But it was still a relief to lift into the sky on Avatre’s back, in charge of a flight of the “greenies,” Jousters who had never actually seen combat. He wasn’t worried about them; they were merely flying support for Orest’s wing, which was composed of very experienced Altan Jousters, survivors of those terrible days when the Magi had sent them into combat with the ruthless intention of getting rid of them through battlefield attrition. Anyone who had come through that was not going to find a few bandits at all intimidating.
Kiron’s greenies, all sporting ribbons of his signature color of scarlet, striped in colors picked randomly, were acting as scouts. They ranged ahead and to either side of the trade road in pairs, taking it in turn to fly back to Kiron and the fighting wing to report. He really, truly, did not expect any fighting this day, something he had even warned the others about. It wouldn’t do for them to become disappointed and disillusioned the very first day.
For the first half of the morning, the most exciting thing that happened was that one of the green youngsters spooked up a lone camel and decided it looked tasty. Green dragon, green rider, and a prey much bigger and tougher than even some experienced hunters would try; it was a good thing that they
There was a sudden cloud of dust on the ground where no dust should be rising, and most of the dragons in both wings suddenly turned their heads in that direction, as if they sensed something wrong.
Avatre did a wingover and headed in that direction on her own, but by the time they arrived, the situation was already well in hand. The camel was down, with Orest’s blue atop it, tearing at the prey, while the youngsters stood off, the dragon’s posture one of chagrin and envy. It wanted the meat. It also knew it was only going to get what Wastet left behind.
A pointed lesson for both dragon and rider.
But Wastet had eaten, and eaten well, before he flew. And Orest had no real difficulty pulling him off after he’d had the choicest bits. Not that—in Kiron’s opinion, at least—there was anything particularly choice about a camel.
This meant a delay as the rider of the offending dragon was dealt with. Finally Kiron decided that the best possible punishment would be to leave him behind.
The dragon, oblivious and greedy, gorged himself, while the rider stood unhappily by and nodded at Kiron’s orders. “Clearly, either you are not gauging how much to feed him, shirking your hunting duties, or not paying enough attention to his behavior,” Kiron said severely. “You are the human, and you have to think for two. He is a dragon and only knows what he wants to do in the next few moments. So when he is finished eating, you will butcher up what is left and fly back to Aerie. Tell Kalen that I am assigning you to his wing for more training in understanding your dragon.”
The older riders in Orest’s wing looked pleased at this. Even in the old days, when the dragons were drugged,