Aerie

Frustrated, she finally answered, “Nothing.”

Nofret sighed, and looked down at her. “And you will incur much displeasure,” she pointed out. “Not that women should not be Jousters, though there will be some grumbling of that nature, but there will be many more complaints that you are taking dragons that should have gone to those waiting for them. And adding more hungry draconic mouths to fill.”

Aket-ten set her jaw mulishly and squinted up at her, purple and scarlet and glorious against the hot blue bowl of the sky. “I know all this. And we will not be taking dragons that should have gone to those waiting for them. We will find our own eggs, our own baby dragons. We will not be pretty priestesses flying about for no good reason except to be ornamental. We will work. We will find work.”

Nofret shook her head, then laughed. “I am the Great Queen. If I want a wing of dragons, rather than, say, a temple, I may have it,” she said at last. “All right, Aket-ten. Find your eggs and your girls. Find your work. Make me a wing of female Jousters. If nothing else, I can claim I need you to escort me on temple duties, or,” she made a face, “to escort me when I am flying at any time. You may have to play the part of pretty priestess flying about to be ornamental, at least for a while, but if you can find real work for your wing, then . . . I will release you to do it.”

Since Aket-ten had been steeling herself for more reasons why this was a bad idea, she beamed with happiness. But the next thing that Nofret said was sobering.

“I shall require you to give up courier duty, of course,” she said. “Not even the most accommodating of the old Jousters will be willing to act as the leader and administrator of this group. I can give you the full use of the old Dragon Courts, and I can lend you an overseer, but only you have the knowledge of what the dragons will need and how to train them. I doubt very much that any of the current trainers will help you. You will have to do this all yourself. And the only place besides Aerie that has the right resources for dragons is here. Mefis. You will have to remain here for the foreseeable future.”

Give up courier duty— That would mean giving up seeing Kiron. . . .

Remain in Mefis. That would mean little chance to get away. Especially with baby dragons to tend, and new Jousters and dragons to train . . . all on her own. If Kiron wanted to see her, he would have to come to her. Would his own duties allow that? Nofret eyed her with speculation as she searched within herself. What was she willing to sacrifice for this? Did she have good reasons? Enough of them?

Merely believing that it was the right thing to do was not going to be enough.

But Kiron did all this, all by himself.

Well, that was one reason. She wanted to prove to herself, and to him, that she was as capable as he was, that she could do what he had done, on her own. And maybe she wanted to prove it to other people as well; she had a sense that to her mother and father she was still the little priestess, with minor powers, who really ought to make a good marriage and settle down and raise a big family. . . .

The mere thought of that made her grit her teeth. Not that she didn’t want a family, but . . .

I’m more than that.

And before she did any settling with anyone, especially Kiron, she wanted him to know that, too.

But as the wind stirred her hair and cooled her forehead, and she looked up at Nofret and her increasingly restless dragon, she knew that this couldn’t only be done because she wanted it, nor only for her reasons. The-on lifted wings of deep purple shading to scarlet at the tips, and folded them again, and looked down at her. And her instincts told her there were good reasons for other girls and young women to do this—even if she didn’t know what they were yet.

But maybe those reasons will be as different as every girl who raises a dragon.

She felt it then, the certainty. “I’ll need that overseer,” she said then. “And the priests to make sure the sands are kept hot. And some of the old dragon hunters to help me. And a cold room and some butchers and a few servants to tend the rooms, and—”

Nofret laughed. “And, and, and!” she said. “The records for dragon keeping are extensive and exact, I believe my vizier can puzzle out what you will need. For how many?”

“Nine, including me and Peri,” she replied. Her mind was already racing. It was not too late in the season to find eggs yet to hatch, and not too late to find nests of young dragons whose parents did not know how to tend them. She would, in fact, look for those first. Nofret had shown the way there with The-on and her siblings; accustom a baby to a human as its parent young enough and it had no trouble in accepting that human, indeed, all humans.

“And I will request to Kiron that he send me one of his young and inexperienced Jousters to be our courier . . . hmm . . .” Nofret’s eyes grew distant for a moment. “If we are to have more than just four dragons here, it would be no bad thing to have more than one courier. Two, at least. No, four. Two for between here and Aerie and two for between here and Sanctuary, one at each end. If Kiron is going to start guarding the trade routes, we will need to speak with him very much more often.”

“That is something we can do!” Aket-ten said instantly, glad of the opening for one of her ideas. “We females can fly courier, and since we are lighter than the men, we can probably fly faster.”

Nofret looked down at her, and at that moment, Aket-ten saw the Great Queen, and not her friend. “That will be for the future, then. Keep thinking, Aket-ten,” the Great Queen said. “The more reasons you can make, the easier it will be for me to defend your existence. Now, my dragon is getting restless, and so am I. Go and consult with my vizier and make your lists. And think of how you are going to tell Kiron that if he wishes to see you, it will be he who must come to you from now on. Because no matter how you tell him . . . he is not going to like being told.”

Aket-ten sighed, and shielded her eyes as The-on took to the skies. Nofret was right.

That was going to be one of the hardest things she was going to have to do.

The easiest thing turned out to be finding the dragons themselves.

Two seasons on, and the freed dragons of Tia often still could not manage to grasp how to properly tend a nest full of babies. This was not so bad for the young ones when one of the parents was a fully wild dragon, but when both were former Jousting dragons . . .

Over the course of the next few days, Aket-ten went back to all those places where she had found dragon nests and marked them, hoping to find eggs that had been abandoned.

Now she looked for baby dragons that were not prospering.

It turned out that it was not at all difficult to find them. Baby dragons that were not being fed were hungry, and hungry baby dragons cried.

Now, occasionally a dragon who had laid infertile eggs would adopt the younglings; not wishing to find herself and her crew of carters staring into the face of an angry mother, Aket-ten spent time at each nest, waiting to see if the mother returned with adequate prey, or if she would fail to return at all. Once, where there had been two nests relatively close together, the gold dragon that Aket-ten remembered at the second abandoned the eggs that were clearly not going to hatch and took over the babies in the first nest. But all too often it appeared that not all of the baby dragons were going to survive being raised by indifferent or inexperienced mothers.

This was not unlike the experience that falconers had, when stealing young hawks. A good falconer would find a nest where one or two of the chicks was not thriving and take the strongest, leaving the other one or two that were left to enjoy the good feeding that the largest and greediest had been getting all for himself.

However, given the size and strength of even the smallest of young dragons, Aket-ten took the opposite approach. She and her wild-animal hunters took the weakest.

They waited until the mother and father flew off for the first of the morning hunts, then moved in. And the first thing that they did was to stuff all the babies in the nest with meat that they had brought with them. The babies were still too young to recognize a human as anything other than another moving object in their world, and when that moving object slid meat down their throats . . .

When the babies were full, they stopped whining and went almost immediately to sleep. That made extracting one from the nest trivially easy. Two strong men could carry one in a sling, and the rocking motion seemed to be soothing for them. Putting the sling between two camels for the trip back to Mefis proved to be just as soothing. Unlike captured fledglings, these babies were perfectly content to sleep in their swinging cradle and be fed when they woke and whined. Within seven days, Aket-ten had as many young dragons, and she took care to point out to her animal hunters how she had located these babies. There had to be other nests out there, with ill-