Now here, Aket-ten wiped down the purple flank of Nofret’s dragon with a feeling of uncertainty. Marit had quite been in love with her destined mate. But Nofret?
Nofret was hard to read and always had been. Much more phlegmatic than her twin, much more practical, Nofret had clearly enjoyed Prince Toreth’s company and had not shown any sign of discontent with her prospective life. But . . . when Toreth was murdered by the Magi of Alta in the next stage of their bid to take over governance of the entire Kingdom, Nofret’s distress had not been . . . as intense as Aket-ten would have thought it would be, had Nofret loved him as anything other than a friend.
Now, coercion into a marriage with a pair of faux-Royal twins the Magi had cobbled up in order to take those thrones—that had gotten an intense reaction.
And still Nofret had been Royal, and not able to escape the ever-increasing restrictions. Until she and Marit had escaped Alta into the desert, and the lost city they called Sanctuary. And there, for a brief moment of escape, she had been something other than Nofret, heir to the throne, Royal twin.
After all, they were all too busy scraping out life in Sanctuary to think about relative trivialities like royal birth.
But with only that brief time, things returned to what was “normal” for Nofret; she was a Royal again, this time selected to marry the only other Royal—if illegitimate Royal—left of the Tian bloodline. And that had been Ari-en-anethet, who had until that moment been perfectly content to live his life as plain Jouster Ari. It was just a good thing for both of them that they were very fond of each other, very fond indeed, and fond quite quickly became loving. But it still meant that Nofret had had only brief moments of being herself, and not a title and responsibilities.
Aket-ten sighed in sympathy; Nofret had gotten a short taste of freedom, and without a doubt she treasured the few moments of freedom she still was able to garner.
No one troubled her when she was with her dragon, even though, aside from exercise, the only flying she ever got to do anymore was when she and Ari made a Royal Appearance on dragonback.
Perhaps that was why she looked askance at Aket-ten, and repeated, “A female Jouster group? What would they do? We have not got work for the wings we have—”
“Yet,” Aket-ten replied, and tried not to smirk. “Kiron is testing his idea of sending out every dragon he has to guard the trails soon, if he has not already begun. Every wing in Aerie will be flying guard on a trade road. I suspect that it will not be long before the traders and the merchants who depend on them for goods will be petitioning Your Highnesses to find more Jousters for the same duty.”
“Knee,” Nofret said absently, and her dragon obediently lifted a purple-to-scarlet leg for her to use as a stepping place to mount up to the saddle over her shoulders. Once securely in the saddle, Nofret looked down at Aket-ten. “But why a group of female Jousters? Not that I object,” the Great Queen added quickly, “but what can they do that the Jousters we have cannot?”
Aket-ten opened her mouth to answer hotly, shut it without saying anything, then opened it again. 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-tended babies. Kiron had complained that he had more would-be Jousters waiting than he had eggs or babies to give them. The Great Queen had observed that Aket-ten would incur resentment for “taking” dragons that “should” have gone to men.
Well, no one would now be able to say she had not done her best to help her “rivals.”
Besides . . . she couldn’t bear the thought of those beautiful little creatures slowly starving to death. . . .
When Nofret had approved the notion of the “Queen’s Jousters,” Aket-ten had hoped that young women would be as eager to volunteer for such a thing as the young men were. There never seemed to be any shortage of young women wishing to be priestesses, for instance, and that was equally demanding work. . . .
Not that she was going to take just anyone, but—
“I don’t understand this,” she said forlornly, as Peri helped her to feed the babies, which she had housed all together in one pen for ease in care. “Why aren’t there more people who want to train as Jousters?”
“More girls, you mean,” Peri said shrewdly. “Well that’s easy enough. How is a girl going to find a good husband if she’s riding around on a dragon?”
Aket-ten stared at her, dumbfounded. “You jest, yes?”
But Peri shook her head. “You have not spent enough time around ordinary people, Aket-ten,” she said frankly. “Ordinary girls anyway. It seems . . . even among us when we were serfs, that was what we talked about. It was what our mothers and grandmothers talked about. It was all anyone ever talked about—”
“Not among the Winged Ones!” Aket-ten protested.
“Then perhaps you are looking in the wrong place,” the girl said shrewdly. “Perhaps if you looked among the priestesses—”
Aket-ten blinked. That simply had not occurred to her. But—
But among the priestesses, her power was considered minor, uninteresting, and . . . to be honest . . . not at all useful. To be able to speak into the mind of an animal? To what purpose? Far more useful and cherished were those who could speak to another priestess at a distance, to see at a distance or the future or the past. To speak with spirits—that was another sought-for power. Most of all, to be a Mouth of the Gods . . .
All these things could serve the people. What would you learn if you spoke into the mind of an animal? Not a great deal that was useful.
Unless, of course, that animal was a dragon.
Aket-ten had been able to calm even the Jousting dragons that had gone to the wild. She could coordinate an entire wing. She could soothe fears and tell what was hurting.
What if every wing had someone like her?
“Peri,” she said breathlessly, “you are a genius.”
“I am a genius covered in bits of meat,” Peri said ruefully, looking at her bloody, sticky hands. “Let us finish feeding these little ones so we can bathe before we become covered in biting flies.”
Aket-ten laughed.
She hurried through her bath, though, a daily luxury she usually lingered over, especially in the hot days like this one. Not that she didn’t take care with it; she certainly did that. After all, when one is going to visit a temple, one does well to look one’s best.
But she also did not want to look as if she was one of those silly women who dressed to impress a man with how important and wealthy she was. Baket-ke-aput, the High Priest of Haras in Mefis, was not the sort to be impressed by what was on the surface of things.
She did pause at the Palace long enough to ask Nofret’s vizier for a note of introduction to the priest, and waited while a servant went to take her request to the overseer. The Palace was pleasantly cool, the effect of the same magic that kept the sands of the dragon pens warm. Heat was removed from the Palace, where it certainly was not wanted, and sent to the pens, where it certainly was, something that at the moment, the dwellers in Sanctuary and Aerie would probably be very glad of. Aket-ten amused herself by examining the murals here, which were many-times-life-sized paintings of one of the Kings of Tia out hunting in the marshes for ducks.
Which was certainly a subject preferable to one of the many Kings of Tia out hunting for Altans in his war chariot . . . .
A not
e of introduction was going to be necessary to get past all the underpriests and scribes and functionaries of the temple, who were there in no small part to keep the High Priest from being bothered. The High Priest of Haras was not the sort of person one simply walked up to—well, not unless one was the Great King—
“Aket-ten!”
She looked up, startled, to see Ari himself striding toward her, hands outstretched, his bodyguards looking very unhappy to be forced to trot to keep up with him.
“Nofret’s vizier knew that I am to have an audience with Baket-ke-aput shortly, or rather,” Ari grinned, “he is to have an audience with me. I see no reason why your business with him, whatever it is, cannot be broached at the same time.”
Aket-ten felt almost faint with gratitude. She had been anticipating, despite a note, having to spend most of the rest of the day, and possibly tomorrow, being sent from one underling and scribe to another.
This would cut all of that short.
Belatedly she remembered that this was not just Ari. This was the Great King—
And she quickly got to her feet and flung herself down on her face again.
“Oh—” she heard him say in exasperation. “Don’t do that. Or at least, don’t do it when we are private together. It isn’t necessary.”
Slowly she got back up to her feet and smoothed out her linen sheath with both hands. “If that is your will, Great K—”
“Not when we are private together,” Ari said firmly. “And, to you, in private, I am nothing more than Ari. Now come to the Lesser Audience Chamber with me. Baket-ke-aput is a good man. If what you need is simple enough, he may be able to help you this very day.”
Aket-ten had not really had very much to do with Ari back when they were all just the refugee Jousters trying to survive at Sanctuary. She was Altan, he was Tian, he was so much older than the rest of the young wing of Jousters created by Kiron, and at any rate, it had not been long before the plan of making him Great King and Nofret Great Queen had resulted in both of them being so embroiled in plans and strategies and negotiations that she had seldom seen him or Nofret. He had been Kiron’s great friend and mentor, not hers. She hadn’t really thought he had paid all that much attention to her, but—
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