Aerie

clothes chest, a desk, a brazier, and some lamps. Avatre had her wallow, properly heated now by magic. It looked bare, in the big, empty room, but then, he didn’t actually spend a lot of time here. There was just too much work to be done.

He punched his pillow a few times and settled back onto his side. But something in him kept listening for that pesky cat.

He was not sure how he had acquired the little beast. It seemed to have decided that he was the one privileged to play host to it. Which wouldn’t have been bad, since it definitely kept down the vermin, except for the way it kept trying to suck his earlobe when he slept and use him as a ramp to get itself into the air.

Some priests had followed the Jousters out here to Aerie, prompting a couple of snickering remarks about priests looking for captive worshippers. But it was not to be denied that there were temples here, too, and no real need for any Jousters to claim them. The priests of the cat goddess Pashet had found what seemed to be an ancient temple to their deity and had claimed it, bringing with them a veritable horde of four-legged avatars. Cats being cats, the maucats brought to Sanctuary had thrived and bred . . . cats being cats, the ones brought here did the same. Not that they weren’t useful, because the half-ruined city swarmed with all manner of things that the cats simply gobbled up, but cats did have minds of their own, and some of them were minded to find places to live other than the temple. This despite the fact that they were literally worshipped and adored at the temple, and had their pick of the daintiest portions of the kills and sacrifices that went to feed the dragons.

So they were likely to be found not only in the temple, but outside of it. Some of them didn’t seem to realize they were supposed to be in the temple at all—One of them being the mau-cat that kept trying to derive nourishment from Kiron’s earlobes.

He sighed, now wide awake despite the fact that it was so pitch-dark he wouldn’t be able to see the cat, or know where it was until it—

He refrained from leaping to his feet and screaming when it dashed across the length of his body and used his shoulder for a launch point into a tremendous jump.

He heard it land, heard a brief scuffle and a squeak, and then heard the wet sound of a cat dining on a fat desert rat.

Neither Avatre nor any of the other dragons bothered the cats, or bothered about them either, much to Kiron’s relief. He wasn’t sure how he would explain to the priests that one of their avatars had gone down the gullet of a dragon. Fortunately, dragons were too slippery for cats to want to sleep on, and most of them preferred warm human and blankets to warm sand of the wallows.

The wet sounds in the darkness ceased. And a moment later, the nameless cat strolled up Kiron’s legs to his hip, and stood there, attempting to knead it into a soft bed. Its claws were very sharp and long, and he gritted his teeth as they stung him even through the thick wool of his blanket, reminding himself over and over that one must not strike the avatar of the Goddess Pashet. . . .

He knew better than to roll over to try to dislodge it. Doing that in the past had resulted in the cat sinking its claws into his hip in an effort to keep its balance.

Finally, the cat gave up hip kneading as a lost cause and strolled down his legs again. Presumably, now that it was full, and he had, once again, proved to be a less-than-satisfactory sleeping partner, it would pad down the stairs to Avatre’s magic-warmed sands and curl up on a ledge at a respectful distance from the dragon. After all, she might not intentionally harm it, but dragons did occasionally heave themselves up out of their sands and roll over. They also were known to lash their tails in their sleep, or flail their wings. Kiron, on the other hand, was not a satisfactory place to sleep. He was too bony, and he moved too much, and he would not allow the cat the two thirds of his pallet that it wanted. Clearly, he was being ungenerous to the avatar of the goddess.

Maybe that was why he couldn’t get Aket-ten to stay here. Pashet was the goddess of love as well as cats, cats being well known for their amorous nature. Maybe he had offended Pashet herself.

That . . . could be bad. He made a mental note to find something to make the cat a warm bed with down on that ledge. And find another way to keep it from sucking his earlobe. And make an appropriate sacrifice at Pashet’s Temple in the morning.

Aket-ten was one of a handful of Jousters who were staying in Sanctuary to run courier to the new city the Great King and Queen were building on Great Mother River between Tia and Alta. He could hardly blame her for wanting to stay there instead of here. Her family was there, or at least, her mother and father were; most of her brothers had gone back to Alta to take care of the family estates and help resettle the refugees of the city. The only one of her brothers who had stayed was Orest, who was one of the first of Kiron’s wing in Alta. He was here in Aerie, though.

Maybe she’s living in Sanctuary to get away from Orest, he thought with amusement. The two had something of the usual sibling quarrels, exacerbated by Orest having decided quite on his own that, since all of his brothers were off and their father was immensely busy helping Great King Ari reconcile Altans and Tians, it was his duty to “keep an eye on” Aket-ten.

Maybe he ought to give Orest more to do.

Maybe I ought to give all of us more to do.

Maybe. But there was already too much work. That was the problem, really. It was all work they weren’t particularly good at. There were just not enough hands to make Aerie livable, to free up the Jousters to do—

To do what? Yet another problem. What was it that the Jousters should be doing? Not fighting each other. Not fighting each others’ nations. What could a man and a dragon do that half a dozen fighters couldn’t?

Honest answer: not much.

Still turning this question over and over in his mind, he finally fell asleep.

Avatre greeted him as he came down the stone stairs with a croon of pleasure. He couldn’t help but smile. Since she wasn’t bothered by the cat, he never put the shutters over her window unless there was going to be a kamiseen storm, so the light of midmorning reflected off the sands of the canyon and into the room.

It was a bit more rough-hewn than the one above it, leading him to wonder once again what the original purpose for it had been. There was no sign that dragons—domesticated ones, anyway—had ever lived here. And yet—There were the sunken, rough-cut lower rooms. What would you put in such a room if not a dragon?

Could they have been stables? Pens for livestock? Not stables; no, probably not. The first time Tians or Altans had ever seen horses, they had been in the hands of the Nameless Ones.

But pens for livestock. Goats. Maybe camels. Donkeys. That made sense. And it explained the huge doorways even a dragon could pass through. You had to have a doorway that wide or you’d have a devil of a time getting livestock to pass through it.

Now that there were no patrols to be flown, the dragons could awaken at their own time and pace. Now that they were each flying out to hunt alone, it didn’t matter that the wing never flew together anymore except during rare practices. Avatre, given the choice, was a late riser.

“Ready to hunt?” he asked her. He was never entirely sure how much she understood, but she certainly knew what that meant. She snorted eagerly, and positioned herself to best advantage for getting harnessed up.

He paused for a moment to reach his arms up toward her. She bent her head down on her long, long neck and rested it over his back while he embraced her neck. In so many ways she was his first love, and for so long she had been the best thing in his life. Truth to tell, she and Aket-ten were tied for first position now. If he lost either of them—well, he just didn’t want to think about that.

She was beautiful, and not just in his eyes. Her colors of scarlet shading to gold and topaz on the extremities only grew deeper and more intense as she grew older. When she was in the air, those colors shimmered against the hot turquoise bowl of the sky. She might not have been the most beautiful of the dragons, but everyone who saw her was struck by her combination of color and regal bearing.

He scratched the soft skin under her jaw for a bit, then patted her neck. “Come, my Sunrise. Let’s get you fed.”

He intended to go a great deal farther afield today, to give the regular hunting grounds the opportunity to replenish. And while he was at it, he was going to look for more dragon nesting sites. Though he was going to make it a condition of egg ownership that the potential Jouster have his own dwelling and pen with hot sands ready and waiting before any egg was bestowed.