Alta

by Mercedes Lackey

  “I see your point, and although I would like to consult with the senior Jousters on that idea, even this last phase of your plan has its merits,” Lord Khumun acknowledged. “Very well. You can put the first stage of your plan into action, and the second as well. We will then see if we actually need to proceed to the third stage when the time comes.”

  Kiron bowed deeply out of overwhelming gratitude. “Thank you, my Lord. I do not believe you will be less than happy with the results.”

  When he rose again, Lord Khumun was smiling. “I can see why you made a poor serf,” he said softly. “It was the same reason why you make an excellent leader. Go on with you. I’m sure your wing is waiting to hear the results of your request to me.”

  Kiron bowed again, and—well, he didn’t run, but he wanted to. He satisfied dignity with a very brisk walk to the area the senior Jousters had begun to call “the Nursery.” Not that anyone really minded the name—the place was full of baby dragons, after all, and though the senior Jousters might have looked on Kiron’s wing with a certain level of patronization, it was paternal patronization. And all they had to do was to look at Avatre and the things she could do to know what the future held for the rest of the babies in the Nursery.

  The others all knew what he was going to ask, of course. They’d all been talking about the idea for the last several days. They were too wise to wait for him anywhere near Lord Khumun’s quarters, but they pounced on him as a group the moment he entered the corridor nearest the Nursery.

  Before they could start chattering at him, he held up his hands in the victory sign, and the corridor echoed with their cheers. He had to smile at that. Oh, they were so eager to get into the sky, even the ones who’d been sick on the mock dragon. How easily they forgot!

  “Oh, don’t start cheering until after you’ve had a taste of what those two beasts I’m going to start you on can think up in the way of torment for a new flyer!” he warned them, laughing. “Don’t forget for a moment that these are mean old cows who would much rather be in their sand wallows being treated like princesses than have to work for their meat. It’s going to be especially bad for the first two to ride them, in the morning. They hate getting up, and they’ll take it out on you!”

  “But you and Avatre will be there to teach them better manners,” said Gan gaily. “There’s nothing to worry about, is there, lads?”

  Kiron sighed. Enough enthusiasm to build a palace and not a brick of common sense among them. Well, they would see soon enough for themselves that he hadn’t been joking. The first few days were going to be—interesting.

  No wonder Haraket was bald. He must have torn his own hair out long before I ever came to the compound.

  He had to wonder, though. Were all young riders such overconfident idiots?

  Sut-ke-re, rider of Jatel, laughed when he asked that question aloud. “Ah, Kiron,” he said, with a twinkle in his eye, “Are not most young men in general overconfident idiots? I think that is the essence of a young man.”

  “Well—” he said, and flushed when he thought of what he had done to win Avatre for himself. It had been insane. He should never have been able to pull it off. At least he hadn’t been overconfident—he’d been terrified every moment of every day that he would be caught—but he’d been a fool to even try it in the first place. “I suppose so. If not overconfident, then—at least, we are all foolhardy. And as for idiots—well, I suppose we are that, too.”

  “I think it is in the nature of young men,” Sut-ke-re said, pulling off his short wig and rubbing his shaved head as he squinted up at the sun. “Young men are willing to take risks that older men would not even think of trying. Young men believe they are immortal, I do think. I know that they are impatient with tradition. If they were not, they would never attempt the half of what they do, and no new thing would ever be tried.”

  “Such as growing dragons from the egg?” Kiron hazarded.

  “Such as growing dragons from the egg,” Sut-ke-re confirmed. “Now, here is my dilemma. On the one hand, I would rather that your wing did traditional training. On the other hand, there are no dragons to spare for traditional training, and even if there were, there are young men two or three years older than your boys are, who have had other sorts of military training, who are waiting for a dragon. There are always more trained warriors wanting to be Jousters than there are dragons. And I agree with you that putting two fledgling flyers into the air at the same time is foolhardy. So I agreed, and so did Ke-shuth.”

  “Jouster,” said Kiron, trying to put as much gratitude as he could muster into his voice, “Thank you.”

  Sut-ke-re shrugged. “I can see no reason to object to your borrowing Jatel before I am ready to ride out, for she is a lazy cow and could surely stand to be ridden far more in a day than I ride her. And Keshuth will be pleased to have his slug Orthele warmed up and more inclined to move when he comes to take her out as well.”

  So, he had gotten past the second hurdle with not so much as a single objection! “Thank you, Jouster Sut-ke-re,” Kiron said again, with relief as well as gratitude. He bowed slightly, and turned to go give the boys the good news.

  “Just you keep them out of trouble!” Sut-ke-re called after him, though there was amusement in his voice. “If ever I turn up and there’s a sprained foot or a strained wing, a broken strap or an exhausted dragon, there will be a reckoning!”

  This made for a change in the babies’ routine. The dragonets were no longer clamoring for food constantly; they were content with several large meals every day now, which made it possible for the boys to get away long enough to train in between feedings. But for the two on the morning flights of the new stage of training, the dragonets had to be fed by someone else, otherwise the two boys in question would not have time to fly before the wings went up.

  That “someone” was Aket-ten.

  She had, in fact, volunteered for the duty, and Kiron had been concerned that she would not be up to it. Feeding the babies was still a messy, bloody job, and he would not have blamed her for taking one look and deciding it was not for her.

  In fact, she took to it without a flinch or a word of complaint, and by the time Toreth and Huras were ready for their first real flights, she had fed every one of the babies, under the supervision of its “mother,” at least twice.

  As for the babies, once they got over the surprise of seeing someone different from their “mother” with food in hand, they accepted her without question or pause. In fact, they began to obey her nearly as well as they obeyed their “mothers,” which meant that she could take a turn at the baby minding when they played together.

  “If I’m going to be Speaking with them, and possibly helping them when they’re sick or hurt, I’d better be prepared to feed them, now, hadn’t I?” she replied, when Kiron had suggested that she might find it unpleasant. “If I have to help hand feed a very sick or injured dragon, it’s not going to be much different from what I’m doing now except in terms of scale.” Since she was exactly right, there hadn’t been anything he could do except to thank her and turn her over to the boys to be shown what to do.

  By this point, the dragonets were bonded strongly enough with their riders that having someone else feed them once every couple of days wasn’t going to make a difference. And Aket-ten was right; better to have them associate her with a very pleasant experience now, so that when she had to help them under unpleasant conditions, they would trust her.

  On the first morning of the new training, Kiron had the dragon boys bring Jatel and Orthele to the landing courtyard after they had been saddled. There was no other way to get both boys up into the air under supervision at the same time. Both dragons were heartily displeased with this change in routine, and hissed and whined at each other when they were led into the courtyard. But Kiron had strong slaves standing by to help the dragon boys if needed, and though the two dragons grumbled, they didn’t actually do anything, thus being true to their essentially lazy natures.

  Kir
on and Avatre took off as soon as Toreth and Huras were in their saddles. Avatre watched the two dragons below her with great interest as he put her into a little circle above the court. As soon as he thought their position was good, he waved to the dragon boys below; they unhitched the chains, and the two riders gave their dragons the signal to fly.

  And nothing happened.

  Now this was not entirely unexpected. Their regular riders knew what to do, but both of the desert dragons had probably assessed these inexperienced boys within moments as being riders that they could afford to ignore, and they were not going to move unless they were forced. It was hard to force a dragon to do something it didn’t want to do—and they held grudges when you did.

  So Kiron did the forcing.

  He had considered stinging them with clay pellets from his sling and had thought better of the idea. He didn’t want these dragons to associate his boys with being “bitten” by a clay pellet. So instead, he had laid another plan to get the dragons to fly.

  He gave a second signal—and on the other side of the wall, one of the local pigeon keepers flung open his portable coop, and several dozen rock doves burst into the air with a whirring explosion of wings.

  As Kiron very well knew, when one winged thing suddenly explodes into the sky, virtually every other winged thing nearby will do the same. The instinct to flee the unexpected is a powerful one, and in general, winged creatures are uniquely vulnerable when grounded, so when the eyes and ears took in the signal Fly!, it was likely that they would do so without hesitation.

  The dragons were no exception.

  Even Avatre started at the explosion of wings; Jatel and Orthele leaped for the sky, their muscles and wings moving before their heads had a chance to interfere. Toreth and Huras hung on for dear life as the dragons climbed, each surging wingbeat throwing them back, then forward, in their saddles.

  Avatre got a little more height; Aket-ten had done her best to convey what the dragon’s duties were going to be this morning, and apparently Avatre had understood. As Toreth and Huras gradually, and successfully, exerted more and more control over their mounts, Avatre kept watchful vigil just above them. Whenever either of the two looked as if she was going to take command of the situation to do what she wanted, Avatre followed Kiron’s directions and made a feint at her. Avatre might not be fully grown yet, but she had the superior position, and the other two hated physical confrontation with another dragon. Historically, they closed for combat with great reluctance, and never tried to lay into an enemy dragon with tooth or claw the way the swamp dragons sometimes did.

  Finally they were answering the simple commands that the boys gave them with a minimum of objection, and Kiron got a little more height to let the boys put the two dragons through their paces. Up here, with the sun beating down on them, it was hot already, though the first hints that the kamiseen would start soon were definitely in the wind. All three dragons were soon moving easily and freely, and the little grunts and hisses of complaint from below stopped coming. Kiron was enjoying himself completely, and so was Avatre, when he looked down to the landing courtyard and saw someone waving a bit of white linen in the signal that the proper riders were ready to go out.

  There was a moment of confusion for the two adult dragons, who were not used to landing so soon after taking off; Avatre had to come down very near to them in order to persuade them to land. And they hissed a bit in complaint when they saw their proper riders and realized that the first flight had been nothing more then a warm-up.

  But though they hissed, they took to the sky again with no sign of reluctance, and joined up with the rest of the wing. Only when he was sure that they were not going to give their riders any trouble—and thus a reason to object to this training scheme—did Kiron turn toward the boys of his own wing.

  Huras looked a little pale. Toreth, however, was gazing after the departed dragons with a look of longing.

  “It will be too long until the day after tomorrow,” said Toreth.

  Huras snorted. “For you, maybe,” was all he said.

  Kiron recalled his own first experience with real flight, and sympathized. But he didn’t offer that sympathy to Huras, who would only learn that one got used to flying by actually getting used to it. And he wanted to be a Jouster—Jousters didn’t ride their dragons on the ground.

  By the end of the fourth day, Jatel and Orthele were resigned to the new schedule, and if they were not happy about it, they had at least stopped being so uncooperative. There had been two instances of trying to dump their riders, neither of which had been anything like as violent as some of the convulsions the mock dragon could produce. There were three attempts to refuse to take off, all three of which had been overcome by a release of pigeons. And once, Jatel had tried to snap at Huras, who had shocked her by punching her on the nose. He hadn’t hurt her, but he certainly got her attention, and her respect, for after that, she was as good with him as she was with her regular rider.

  As for Aket-ten—

  Kiron soon learned that she had a scheme of her own in mind to help them all.

  The air was hot, humid, and far too still. Virtually everyone was taking a rest from the heat. Kiron, however, could not find Aket-ten anywhere. She was not in her quarters, not with the wing’s dragonets, and she had not left word with her servants that she was leaving the compound. She never left the compound without telling them where she was going, for she still did not trust the Magi, and feared that if any of them even suspected she still had her powers, they would try to carry her off.

  She was probably right to fear that. Though Kiron no longer spied on the Magi when they came to take the Fledglings in the evening, he had heard from Kaleth that the young Fledglings were not looking good. Whatever the Magi were taking from them was beginning to run out. If they thought Aket-ten—fresh, rested, and full of energy—was still able to be drained, they would be on her like a falcon on a dove.

  Finally, after questioning every person whose path he crossed, he found someone who had seen her, and the direction surprised him.

  What can she possibly want in the swamp dragon pens? he wondered, as he crossed over into the section where the pens held water instead of sand. He followed the directions he had been given until he found her—at the pen of the same swamp dragon that had been placed on half-rations of tala.

  She was sitting well out of reach of the chained dragon, staring at him. He was immersed in his hot water with only his head and neck sticking out of the water, his chain slack enough that it was lying on the bottom of the pool, staring back at her.

  The place smelled like a bath; odd, he would have thought there might be an unpleasant tang to it. Evidently the swamp dragons were as clean and fastidious as their larger cousins. This dragon was a very dark reddish brown, his patterning laid out in a slightly paler and more golden brown. He looked like a weather-aged statue, he lay so still, his golden-brown eyes staring intently at Aket-ten. There was a tension in the air, however, that told him that their relaxed poses were entirely a deception.

  “They are smarter than we thought they were,” she said quietly, without looking around at Kiron. “Mind, they aren’t as intelligent as an ape, and I am not certain I would even put them at the same level as a truly smart dog, but this fellow is definitely as smart as any of the desert dragons. Whoever decided that they were not as bright because they weren’t as big or as pretty made a fundamental error.”

  “Huh.” He squatted down where he was, resting on his heels, and stared at the dragon himself. He wondered what she was getting from the beast’s thoughts. This was as close as she was ever going to get to a wild dragon’s mind.

  “Partly it’s the tala,” she continued absently, rubbing the palms of her hands up and down her bare upper arms in a completely unconscious gesture. “I think they’re a little more sensitive to it than the desert dragons.”

  “Well, it’s a desert plant,” he reminded her. “And if we don’t find the wild tala and harvest it, there
are a lot of animals that eat it. Desert dragons are probably used to getting some of it in their prey, so they’ve gotten used to the effect of it.”

  “That could be,” she agreed. She and the dragon continued to match unblinking stares. “You know, falcons hate this. Being stared at, I mean. It’s a challenge; that’s one way they challenge each other. Cats, too. In cats, the first one that looks away loses, and is going to get attacked. He sees my staring at him as something else. Some kind of contact. I wonder if they have a very primitive kind of Speaking? Something that requires eye contact?” She never once dropped her gaze. “It doesn’t seem to bother him at all that I can put thoughts into his head—and what’s more, he knows that they’re mine and not his own.” She tilted her head to the side. “I thought I might have been sensing something like that from the dragonets, too.”

  “Haven’t you ever felt that from any of the other adult dragons?” he asked curiously.

  She shrugged. “If they do have some form of Speaking, the tala blocks it. I can’t look away right now, by the way. If I do, I’ll be saying he’s the stronger of the two of us.”

  “I’d gotten that idea,” said Kiron. “Did you have something in mind by coming here?”

  “I did.” She continued to stare; was the dragon beginning to look a little uneasy beneath that unrelenting gaze? “I wanted to see if these swamp fellows were just as smart as their desert cousins. I wanted to have a look into the head of one that wasn’t completely foggy with tala. I never intended to get into a staring contest, but I don’t dare back down now. It’s either predator or prey, and I must prove which one I am, for he only respects the former.”

  At just that moment, the dragon gave up, dropping his eyes and his head in a gesture of submission.