Aerie

Never mind. Now they must try and make up for that neglect. And the sooner he got his riders in the air, the better.

Breakfast was . . . very interesting that morning in the Dragon Courts of Mefis. Peri- en-westet said nothing about Lord Kiron to Wingleader Aket-ten. She didn’t have to. The other young ladies were saying quite enough as it was, rather too much in fact, and Aket-ten was clearly getting very irritated about it. The more nice things they had to say about Lord Kiron, the deeper a frown line grew between Aket-ten’s brows. They seemed oblivious to the effect they were having.

Or perhaps they were enjoying it. Some of them had rather mischievous natures.

For Peri’s part there was something more going on, something she was afraid to tell anyone just yet.

She had spoken for quite some time to Lord Kiron last night. And until that conversation it would never have occurred to her that Lord Kiron, the leader of all of the new Jousters of the Two Lands, the friend of the Great King and Queen, could possibly be the same person as the missing son Kiron of her friend Letis-hanet.

Even now the speculation seemed unlikely.

A logical person would say that there was not the least little chance in the world that something so impossible could be.

But—

Lord Kiron was a farmer’s son, from the borderlands between Tia and Alta, from lands taken by Tian troops.

The missing Kiron was from those same lands, and was about the same age as Lord Kiron.

Lord Kiron had been separated from his family as the lands were divided. Letis had lost her son almost immediately in one such division.

Lord Kiron had had at least one sister but was the only son. Letis, of course, still had one of her daughters with her, had lost others, and had had only one son.

Now, Kiron was a common Altan name. Kiron, son of Kiron, was not at all uncommon. Every village had at least one Kiron. But . . .

The more she looked at it, the more it seemed that there were too many points of similarity between the two. Kiron even looked rather like Letis; there was a great similarity in the eyes.

The complication was this: Letis had made it very, very clear that once her son was found, she was going to do everything in her power to make a match between her boy and Peri. And up until last night, Peri had always considered that idea to be the wildest of fantasies, somewhere between laughable and suitable only for the sort of thing one would amuse a child with.

Now . . .

If this was Letis’ son—

She left the rest of them teasing Aket-ten and went back to her baby dragon. No reason why she couldn’t continue to consider all this while she took care of the little one. Her hands could work undirected while she thought things through.

As she tended Sutema, tenderly oiling the baby’s delicate wing webs, feeding the little one until her stomach was round and full, then leading her to flop down on the hot sands in the sun to doze contentedly with the rest of the wing’s babies, she thought about Lord Kiron, and what it would mean, could mean, if he was her friend’s lost son.

He was a Jouster. He was Lord of the Jousters. And what better mate could there be for a Jouster than another Jouster?

Letis would heap scorn on her for having airs and presuming above her station for being part of this creation of Aket-ten’s under any other circumstances but this. If her own son was not only a Jouster, but Lord of all the Jousters of the Two Lands—to scorn that would be to scorn her own long-lost, longed-for son. She could say nothing to Peri, who would be the fittest bride there ever could be for such a man.

As for Kiron the man—

He was handsome, fit, young, but most of all, he was kind. If someone had come to Peri and said, “What are all of the things you could desire in a mate? Only say, and the gods will create such a man for you,” then Lord Kiron would have come very close to that ideal. She’d had moments, and many of them, when she had thought it likely she would never marry. And back when she was a serf, she had wondered if a mate would be forced on her, an old man, or someone cruel. Lord Kiron . . . Lord Kiron was like something out of the sort of story that a market storyteller would recite to charm the coins from pretty unmarried girls.

Well, it was worth thinking about this as at least a decent possibility. Why not? Even if Lord Kiron was not Letis’ son . . . now that Peri was herself a Jouster, was there any reason why she should not look on Lord Kiron as someone she might attract?

Not really. He was not of aristocratic blood. He was, in fact, as common as herself.

The only other possible rival—

Aket-ten.

As for the other young ladies—Peri thought she was on fairly safe ground there. Judging by the way that Kiron had spoken of the Tians in general last night, she thought he would never consider anything but another Altan. So her fellows of the new Queen’s Wing were easily dismissed. And they were priestesses, people with whom he had very little in common. It was one thing to pursue a pretty priestess or noble for light love, but Letis was right about one thing. When a man chose a woman for something permanent, he liked to have someone about who wouldn’t make him feel inferior, nor make him feel as if she was doing him a great favor by being with him.

Now, Aket-ten was, of course, the very first female Jouster. She and Kiron must have shared many adventures together, and Peri thought she might have heard some vague tale of how Kiron had rescued her from the earthshake that destroyed the capital city. Or maybe the story was that he had rescued her from the Magi. She, too, was Altan, and what with all that previous acquaintance, she was ahead of the game. But Peri had two advantages that Aket-ten did not have. She was of the same background, and the same rank, as Kiron. Aket-ten was nobly born, with all the unconscious arrogance of someone who never needed to think about whether or not her orders would be obeyed. This didn’t matter to someone who was already an underling, but at some point, that had to grate on a man.

And there was a third advantage, if Kiron really was who Peri thought he was. Peri already had Letis’ approval. Approval? Letis had essentially handpicked her as the mate for her son.

Aket-ten could never get that, try as she might. Letis did not at all approve of looking above one’s self for a mate; she did not at all approve of what she called the “presumption” of the “jumped up.” She had many things to say, none of them complimentary, about such liaisons. She would say them to her son’s face if he went, as she would put it, “chasing the hem of the skirts of a noble.” When Letis chose to use the weapon, she had a very, very sharp tongue. Mind, with the excitement of being reunited, it was likely that Kiron would be willing to agree to just about anything his mother asked of him, and Letis would never have to use that particular weapon.

But from the way that Aket-ten herself was acting, well . . . it did not look as if there was any interest there at all. Look at how she had portrayed Kiron to the others! And when he had been among them, she had given him very short shrift indeed. It was more as if Aket-ten considered Kiron a rival, and not a potential mate.

Perhaps that was precisely the case. She had been a priestess herself, after all. Priestesses were accustomed to power, and being merely one Jouster among an increasingly large number, with no chance that she would ever be given any leadership role, must have grated on her. But now she had the chance to make, not only a single wing of lady Jousters, but perhaps a force to equal or rival the males, if enough work could be found for them. But Kiron’s Jousters were essentially competition for her; at any point they could demand to be brought back here to the Dragon Courts, and there was no reason not to accede to that demand. Once they were here, what could the Queen’s Wing do that the male Jousters could not do as well or better? That, at least, would be what the naysayers would claim.

Surely that was the only explanation for the way that Aket-ten had made Lord Kiron out to be the worst possible sort of authoritarian and some sort of monster to boot, why she had insisted that he would immediately disapprove of each of them individually and the Queen’s Wing as a whole. Peri had expected someone large, rude, and angry, someone determined to put “the women” in their place, someone who would see nothing good and much evil in the very existence of the Queen’s Wing. And possibly someone old enough to be her grandsire.

She had certainly not expected the young, polite, affable and self-effacing young man who turned up at dinner. He had been good company, he had gone out of his way to make them all comfortable in his presence, and