—and held him while he wept.
He wanted to fight, but all the fight was out of him. There was nothing, literally nothing left but grief and hopelessness. He was all alone, and there was nothing left to him but a bleak future of pain and emptiness.
Or so he thought—until Ari took his shoulders and gave him a good hard shake, stopping his hysterical sobs for just an instant.
And that moment was all that Ari needed. "Stop it!" the Jouster commanded into the hot silence. "You don't really think I'm going to take you back, do you?"
For a moment, the words made no sense. Then when he did get the sense of them, he was so shocked that all he could do was stare, eyes still streaming, throat still choked on a sob.
"I have no intention of bringing you back," Ari repeated, wearily. "Especially not after seeing you try and kill yourself to keep from being caught. I may be a monster, but at least I'm not that sort of monster."
He might have said more, but just then Avatre came charging toward them, knocking Ari aside with her head, and clumsily putting herself between the Jouster and Vetch, hissing defiance. Ari put up both his hands, placatingly, but laughing all the same, as Vetch instinctively threw his arms around her neck.
"There. How can I possibly take you back? She'd only come and carry you off again, and probably tear the rest of us to shreds doing it!" he chuckled.
Vetch held his arms tight around her neck, to steady himself as well as to keep her from some clumsy attempt to attack Ari. He still couldn't believe what he'd just heard.
He's not taking us back? How can he not take us back? Isn't it his duty?
But it was Ari, who had never told Vetch a lie—
Then Kashet, full of dignity and twice the size of Avatre, interposed himself between the dragonet and his Jouster, looking down at her with an expression of weary condescension. Avatre, who had never seen another dragon but Kashet except as a head over a wall, or a shape in the sky overhead, just hissed at the bigger dragon, defying him along with his Jouster.
"Very brave," Ari chuckled. "I hardly think I need to worry about you encountering trouble. She'll certainly protect you from anything and everything, or die trying. And at the moment, there isn't much that will be able to take her on except humans."
Vetch swallowed. Hard. "You're—" he began.
"I am not taking you back. I never intended to," Ari replied. That was when Vetch's legs failed him, and he sat down hard on the ground.
Avatre stood over him, making it very clear that she was not going to allow anyone or anything near him.
The Jouster looked at both of them for a long moment, then sighed, shaking his head. "Look," he said. "We're in the middle of the Dry, practically midday, and it's damned hot out here in the sun." He beckoned. "If you can get up, follow us."
Vetch struggled to his feet. Ari and Kashet were already halfway down the slope, heading for the dry streambed that cut down the wadi. Evidently, he knew where he was going, and Vetch took hold of Avatre's harness and followed behind. Avatre resisted at first, not wanting to follow the creature that had threatened Vetch, but at his insistence, she reluctantly and suspiciously plodded after Kashet.
Ari turned down a crack in the earth so narrow that Kashet's folded wings brushed both sides of the wind- and water-sculpted passage. The sun might be right overhead, but here, everything was still in shadow, and it was a lot cooler. It was deep, too; they might have been going down one of the corridors between the pens, except that the farther they went, the taller the "walls" became.
The sandstone was carved in weird, smooth, many-layered curves that twisted and turned without any rhyme or reason. This tormented, contorted passage was far wider at the bottom than it was at the top; above them, the crack couldn't be wider than a two feet or so, while down below Kashet was able to squeeze along without too much difficulty. The floor was a thin layer of sand over a harder rock; Vetch felt it under the hard soles of his bare feet. It was strangely beautiful here, and completely without the mark of man on it.
Then, with no warning, the walls opened up into a sort of pocket about the size of a dragon pen, again, with only a small opening to the sky overhead. The rock of the ceiling framed the irregular oblong of turquoise sky like a gold mounting surrounding a gem. At the far end of the pocket was a patch of green where sun must fall during some part of the day—a twisted, ancient tree, a few flourishing bushes, some grasses—all surrounding a tiny pool of water fed by a mere drip of a spring that trickled down the side of the rock through that hole above.
Ari bent and drank a palmful; he gestured to Vetch to come up beside him. With his tongue cleaving to the roof of his mouth and his eyes as dry as sand, and sore with weeping, Vetch didn't have to be asked twice.
But first, he let Avatre drink her fill.
She drank down the basin to about half its depth, and only when she was satisfied did he drink, and take a handful of water to carefully wash his eyes.
Ari watched him with tired satisfaction; Kashet with benevolence.
When he had drunk and cleared his eyes, Vetch looked up at the Jouster with one question in his mind. He felt such a whirlwind of contradictory emotions that he literally shook with them—relief, anger, gratitude, defiance, hope, disbelief-He distilled it all down to one word.
"Why?" he demanded.
Ari sighed, and looked around for a place to sit, choosing eventually a smooth outcropping wind-sculpted into a shape vaguely like a toad. He sat down on its flat top, and Kashet folded his own legs underneath him.
"That's two questions, I think. Or, perhaps three. Why did I save you, why did I follow you, and why did I do so, intending to help you make your escape?"
Vetch nodded; his legs were still shaking, his knees still weak, so he followed Ari's example, except that since there was no outcropping to sit on, he sat down on the ground.
"I was just coming in as you took off," the Jouster said meditatively. "I'd had my suspicions about that little scarlet dragonet ever since you asked to sleep in her pen, by the way. How did you manage to purloin her away from Baken?"
Vetch managed a shaky smile of triumph. "I didn't," he said proudly. "I hatched her from Coresan's first egg, just like you did with Kashet."
"Great Haras!" Ari exploded, looking astonished and delighted at the same time. "No wonder she follows you like a puppy! Is that why you volunteered to take Coresan in the first place? And she's been in the pen next to Kashet all this time?"
He nodded, and smiled. At least he had managed to deceive Ari in that much! That was no mean feat.
"By Sheshet's belly! I can scarcely believe it! And you tended and hatched the egg and tended Kashet and Coresan? When did you sleep?" the Jouster asked incredulously, then waved off the answer, while Avatre gave a huge sigh and flopped down beside Vetch. "What do you call her?"
"Avatre," he said proudly, and she raised her head at the sound of her name.
"Fire of the dawn—" Ari smiled at the dragonet. "Well… to continue, we were coming in to land after our patrol; Haraket waved us off, after another couple of Jousters, and pretty soon it was clear enough why we were in pursuit. I recognized you, of course, and the little scarlet, and at first I thought this was some sort of accident, that you'd been exercising her for Baken and she'd broken the tether or something. But by the time we were halfway across the desert, it was clear enough to me that it was no accident, and that you were trying to escape with her." He took a deep breath, and shook his head. "What was going to happen when you were caught—well, it was pretty obvious, too. So when the second rider dropped out of the chase, I kept it up; I'd already decided to help you, but I wasn't sure yet what I was going to do. I figured I'd force you two to ground and work that out once I got you down. I didn't expect you to do what you did."
He leveled an accusatory look at Vetch. Vetch matched him with defiance. "I would rather die than lose her," he said, quietly. "She's all that I have."
"You made that abundantly clear," Ari said dryly.
"And you nearly turned my hair white when you rolled over her shoulder like that. I wasn't sure we could catch you."
Vetch remained silent. Ari examined him closely; Vetch put his arm over Avatre's shoulder, and wondered what, if anything, Ari saw in his expression.
"Well, no one is going to find us down here," Ari said at last. "You can overfly this place as much as you like and you'll never spot it. I only found it by accident because I was following a dragonet one day and I couldn't work out why he had dived into a crack in the hill. So, we have time enough to work out what we're going to do."
"We?" Vetch repeated, incredulously.
"Yes," Ari replied, settling back against the rock. "We. Let's start with where you think you're going to go from here."
Chapter Seventeen
WITH those words, Vetch wondered wildly if Ari was going to come with him, and a strange, wild hope rose within him. It was not just that it would be so much easier to make his way northward with Ari—no, it was that he would not lose his friend—
But Ari's next question dashed that thought, and that hope, to the ground and broke them.
"First of all, where are you going?" Ari asked. "To the—ah— 'Great Devil, Alta,' I presume?"
Ah. Of course. He can't go with us to Alta; he wouldn't be welcomed, he'd be killed. So unless Ari had a different destination in mind for both of them, though what that could be, Vetch had no clue, Ari would not be making an escape along with Vetch.
And Vetch felt horribly trapped by the question. Once Ari knew that Alta was his final destination, surely now Ari would stop him—
But Ari only shrugged, and answered his own question, as if it had been entirely rhetorical. "Of course you are; what else is there for you? They'll welcome you, certainly—an escaped serf with a dragonet bonded to him—I can guarantee that they'll welcome you. Now, you'll probably have to prove that Avatre won't fly for anyone else, because they'll assume she's like every other dragonet and try to take her from you, but I don't believe you'll have any trouble convincing them that the two of you come only as a pairing."
Vetch shrugged, helplessly, but underneath it, he was dismayed, because he hadn't considered that possibility!
"Don't worry too much about that, Vetch," Ari said, in a kindly tone. "You're both still youngsters. Now, if she was Kashet's size, they'd make more of an effort to take her, but as it stands, they'll know very well she won't be useful to them as a fighting dragon for another couple of years, and by then—well, so will you."
Unless I can be useful to them in another way altogether, Vetch thought somberly. Still, Ari was right; they probably wouldn't fight too hard over a dragonet. And if the Altan Jousters were as reactionary as the Tian ones were, well, it would probably take years to convince them that hatching dragons made more sense than catching dragons, anyway…
"So, it's Alta. Unless you plan to wander with your dragon in the wilderness—" Ari shook his head. "Take it as read, don't even consider that option. I do not advise that course at all, because sooner or later one of us will run across you, and you can't expect to outrun us twice."
Vetch nodded, knowing that Ari probably was a better judge of that than he was, given his years of experience.
But I'd try it anyway, if he'd come with us…
"First things first," Ari continued briskly. "Do you even know how to get across the Border from here without following the Great Mother River?"
Vetch could only shake his head.
"Have you provisions? Clothing? Tools?" Ari persisted. "What were you going to eat? What were you going to feed her?"
"I thought we'd hunt," Vetch said weakly. Ari shook his head ruefully.
"Mind, since I know you must have had a lot of experience in foraging for yourself, you aren't as ill-prepared to fend for yourselves as some of those idiot boys back at the compound," he said graciously. "And I know you weren't exactly thinking that this would be First Flight when you got on her back this morning, so how could you be prepared? Still—no, this is no way to send you off. You need a great deal more than you've got." He stood up. "You two stay here, and don't move from this place. I need to make some arrangements, and neither of you are going to be able to help in the least."
"Arrangements?" he asked weakly.
"Arrangements… and one is going to have to be immediate." Ari glanced over at Vetch's exhausted dragonet. "First thing of all, we need to do something about little Avatre—she's expended a lot of energy, and when she gets over being too tired to move, she'll be hungry."
He stood up; Kashet took that as a signal, and got to his feet. "Don't move," Ari repeated, as he led Kashet out down that twisting passage.
Vetch had known the first time that Ari said "stay here" that his knees were too shaky to hold him. As if I could move. … he thought ruefully.
Then Vetch and Avatre were alone. He looked down at her, and saw that she was asleep in the pool of sunlight that came down through the hole in the ceiling. He slid to the ground and lay down beside her, feeling absolutely drained to the point of numbness. He couldn't even think properly, and the silence down here was so profound that it seemed to echo in his head. The hills broke up the kamiseen winds, so that there was nothing down in this crevice, not even that omnipresent whine. Even that trickle of water slid over the rock without making a sound.
It was never silent in the compound; it had never been silent on the farm. He found it a novel experience, and closed his eyes, trying to pick out anything besides his own breathing and Avatre's. And in listening to the silence—silence of a quality that he had never before experienced—he fell asleep without having any intention of doing anything of the kind.
He woke to a strange, grating, dragging noise; he shoved himself upright in alarm, as Avatre beside him shot her head up, eyes pinning.
But it was Ari who emerged into the pocket, followed by Kashet—who was wearing only the collar of his harness as a harness, as the rest of the straps had been unbuckled and reassembled into a peculiar sort of drag arrangement. That was the scraping sound—Kashet dragging three very dead goats underneath him.
"It's not Jousting fare, but if she's hungry—" Ari began, as he unbuckled the first and dragged it into the pocket, leaving it on the ground while he went to get the next.
He didn't get a chance to finish that statement, for Avatre pounced on the carcass and began tearing into it as if she ate whole wild game every day.
"Evidently," he chuckled, "she's hungry."
Vetch blinked, for there wasn't a mark on any of the three bodies. "How did you—
Ari laughed, and took off his belt—which wasn't a belt at all, but a sling.
"Maybe other people have trouble using missile weapons on dragonback," he said, with something as close to a smug look as Ari ever got, "but 1 don't. Then again, our Noble Warriors do think that a sling is beneath them to use…"
"The more fools, they," Vetch replied, with scorn.
Ari smiled. "And I strongly suggest that if you haven't already got skill with a sling, you acquire it. Well, that takes care of your little girl. Are you starving?"
He shook his head; curiously, he wasn't even hungry. Then again, his stomach was still roiling from all he'd been through and the gamut of emotional states he'd run.
"That's just as well; wild goat broiled on a knifetip over a scrap of fire bears a close family resemblance to burned sandal, and that's all I have to offer you," Ari told him, with a raised eyebrow, inviting his reaction.
Vetch blinked at him for a moment, then managed a smile.
"You just let her eat and doze in the sun; you drink plenty of water, and wait for us to get back," Ari ordered. "Rest, if you can, because it will be the last uninterrupted rest you'll get for a long while. Your journey is going to be long and hard, even with my help."
Vetch couldn't imagine what Ari was going to do, but he nodded, and helped Ari drag the corpses of the other two goats over to Avatre, who was nearly finished with the first.
Once
again, Ari and Kashet vanished down that tall crack in the earth. Avatre was busy with her meal—the first she'd ever eaten that hadn't been cut up neatly for her, but she was doing perfectly well, and didn't need his help. Evidently there would be no need for a "how to eat whole wild goat" lesson.
Vetch lay back down on the ground to watch her with his back against the crevice wall, and pillowed his head on his arms for just a moment. He really didn't intend to sleep, but his eyes were still sore, and he still felt as drained as a wineskin of the first vintage at the end of a festival. No, he really didn't intend to sleep…
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