Then Vetch found himself dodging boys who were suddenly as quick as he to get their feeding and cleaning chores done. Never had the corridors been so congested, so early. And worse was to come—so far as he was concerned, who had no reason to love this festival. The kitchen court was closed, all the servants, serfs, and slaves getting their own holiday, with everyone expected to go to the festival site to get their meals. Once he was out of the area of the pens—which swiftly emptied, as the dragon boys finished their duties and fled to the delights in the landing court—the place was full of strangers.
Once he sent Ari and Kashet off, he slouched off in a sour mood to get himself breakfast. He didn’t even trouble to get a bath—he wasn’t going to compete with the little popinjays who were using up all the water in order to try and impress some girl or other! No, he would wait until the afternoon, when there was no one to compete with, and he could get a bath without some stranger poking his nose in the door and staring at him.
For his privacy was gone along with the quiet; nobles practically swarmed the place, especially the Jousters’ quarters. It was a repetition of the usual scene at the training field, only within the compound itself. The glitter of gold, the gleam of jewels, and the sheen of expensive fabrics made him glower with disgust at the amount of show. There were so many women, young and old, draped in flowers, with perfume cones atop their elaborate wigs, that the air was sometimes chokingly sweet with their scent. He was glad that all visitors had been barred from the pens on account of the dragonets, who were easily startled. The fluttering ribbons, the high, shrill voices, and the idiotic babbling would have left the place in an uproar that would take a week to undo.
The only place where Vetch could get away from the press of the curious and the fawning was in the pens themselves. Not feeling in the least like celebrating when he knew very well that what was being celebrated was the start of more aggression on his own people, he found the pens far more congenial.
So that was where he took himself, after a brief visit to the landing court where he got fried fish—a delicacy that seldom graced the tables of the dragon boys—and some date-stuffed honey pastries for breakfast. The corridors were, by then, thankfully, echoingly, empty.
He wasn’t surprised to find Kashet still gone. Ari was a senior Jouster, and at this point his skill and Kashet’s were near-legendary. He would, no doubt, be competing in the games for most of the day—or perhaps demonstrating that falling-man-catch trick for an admiring audience, but done with a dummy instead of a man. But as Avatre was finally having a nap, worn out from fretting at the unaccustomed noises, and he didn’t want to disturb her, he settled down in Kashet’s pen for his meal.
He had just about finished it and was licking the last of the honey from his fingers, when, much to his surprise, a shadow darkened the sun above the pen, and when he looked up, he saw that Ari and Kashet were returning.
He leaped to his feet—very glad now that Ari had found him here, and not in the other pen. He sent a brief thanks to the gods for sending Avatre that bout of sleepiness as he waited for Kashet to settle, then trotted over to the great dragon’s side.
“Unharness him,” Ari said, with shocking brusqueness, as he threw his leg over the saddle and slid down to the ground. “We won’t be going back out. The cursed games can go on without us. And I hope they all choke on fish bones.”
Vetch stared at him with an open mouth; Ari’s face was white, his mouth pinched, and that last had been said with such savagery that Vetch was sure Ari meant every word. “Why?” he blurted.
“You don’t want to know,” Ari replied, and started to stalk off.
But something inside Vetch made him act without thinking; he grabbed the Jouster by the elbow and wouldn’t let him go. “Yes, I do,” he said firmly, shocking himself with this insane act of audacity, but unable to stop himself. “Or maybe I don’t—but if you don’t tell someone, you’re going to snap, and then where will Kashet be?”
Perhaps nothing other than the stark truth that if Ari failed, his dragon would suffer, got through to him. He resisted for just a moment, then his shoulders sagged, and he turned back to Vetch. His eyes were bleak, his mouth twisted, and his skin so pale beneath his tan that it looked as if every bit of blood had been drained from him.
“You don’t want to know. And I want you to know that I didn’t have anything to do with what happened. If I’d been ordered to do it, I swear, either I would have stopped it, or I would have flown Kashet into the wilderness instead and never come back—”
That shocked Vetch even more. Ari? Threatening to desert? “Tell me—” he just barely managed.
Ari took a deep breath. “There’s a date orchard, just over the border. The Altans haven’t bothered to even try to protect it for seasons and seasons, I don’t know why, I suppose it isn’t profitable enough. There’s a Tian village of settlers right on the edge of the orchard right across the border; when the dates ripen, they harass the Altans and grab the dates for themselves. It’s happened every year, like the Flood. But this year—maybe because of the sea-witch-sent storms, the rightful owners got up some courage, they fought back. I mean, really fought; they chased off or wounded most of the Tian settlers who tried to steal their fruit, and even killed two. So yesterday, instead of going out on patrol, one of the senior Jousters decided to teach them a lesson. He led an entire wing of Jousters to the village, where they stooped down on the villagers in their fields, grabbed whoever they could get, carried them up—and dropped them.”
Just like on the battlefield, Vetch thought, his heart growing cold inside him. Only—these weren’t enemy commanders being smashed on the rocks. These were simple farmers, who’d done nothing except defend what belonged to them, who had only tried to protect what had been stolen year after year, in defiance of laws and treaties.
“They didn’t stop until there wasn’t anyone left in the open. They—weren’t even all men—” Ari got out between clenched teeth. “There were women. And some children.”
Dropped, to plummet to the earth and die, smashed like eggs. They hadn’t had a chance. Vetch wanted to scream, weep—he couldn’t even breathe.
“I didn’t find out about it until today. When the target game started.” Ari grated, each word wrung from him, each phrase drenched in pain and anguish. “When they started boasting about it—and saying that the next time they went out—they should stop long enough to paint a target on the ground for more sport!”
Vetch’s anger, so long dormant, erupted within him like a volcano, and filled him with such rage, that if Ari’s voice hadn’t been flooded with outrage and pain that nearly matched his, he’d have gone for the Jouster’s throat, just because he was Tian. As it was, he swayed where he stood, going cold and hot by turns, red mists passing between him and the rest of the world as he tried to hold the anger in check.
“I will not make war on children!” Ari shrieked—and broke away from Vetch, and ran.
Vetch felt his knees giving, and he dropped to the ground like a stunned bird, his pain finding vent in a howl of his own, and a flood of tears that he could not stop, and did not want to.
He came to his senses only when his eyes were swollen and gummy, his cheeks raw, and he was so dehydrated from weeping and the kamiseen that his lips were cracked and his tongue cleaving to the roof of his mouth. Something snuffled his head—and the back of his neck.
He looked up through blurring eyes, to see that not only was Kashet whuffing at his hair in concern, but Avatre had managed to make her way out of her own pen and into this one. She whimpered in sympathy and no little fear, though not of Kashet, apparently, who was dividing his attention between Vetch and her.
“It’s—all right—little one,” he said thickly, even though it wasn’t, but she couldn’t know, couldn’t understand what had happened, and neither could poor Kashet, who only understood that the center of his universe had screamed and run away, and the other source of his comfort was suffering, too.
&nb
sp; He got unsteadily to his feet, and went over to Kashet’s trough, and plunged his entire head under the water, keeping it there for as long as his breath held out. He came up with a gasp, and wiped his eyes.
He couldn’t help Ari; Ari would have to find his own solution to his conflict. But certainly his absence from the games would not go unnoticed.
What Ari does about it is Ari’s business.
He finished unharnessing Kashet with fingers that shook; he tried to comfort the unsettled creature as best he could. Avatre kept butting her head against him, anxiously, and he had to pause frequently to try and give her comfort, too.
What comfort he had to offer, anyway.
Snatches of raucous music came wafting incongruously from the landing court; muffled shouts from the training field where the games were still going on. His stomach turned over. He was glad that he didn’t know the names of the Jousters who had participated in the atrocity; he didn’t think he’d be able to restrain himself from trying to take some sort of revenge if he knew. Which would gain him nothing, of course; he’d be caught and probably executed, and then what would happen to Avatre?
Poison? Where could he get hold of poison? Or at least, where could he get hold of poison that he could actually use? Nowhere, of course; there were plenty of things in the compound that were poisonous, but they tasted or smelled foul, or were only poisonous in such large quantities as to make their administration impractical. Knives in the dark? He snorted at that. As small as He was, even an ambush was out of the question, and he was no trained assassin, to sneak into the Jousters’ quarters undetected to slit the throats of sleepers—
—though the vision conjured up by that thought was vastly satisfying.
No—he could do nothing for revenge.
And he could do nothing for his own people either, not as he was now.
But if he and Avatre could get away—
I hold the knowledge of how to raise and train the most superior Jousters and dragons in the world in my head. What would happen to the Tians if every Altan Jouster was as good as Ari and Kashet?
Until this moment, he’d had no real idea of what he was going to do with Avatre besides escape. Now he had a goal, a mission. He would go north, to Alta, to Bato, the heart of the ringed capital of the kingdom. He would present himself to the Altan Commander of Dragons. They surely knew about Ari already; tales of such a legendary Jouster would have come not only from their spies, and their Seers, but from their own Jousters who encountered him. Vetch would have the proof, in the form of Avatre, not only of how Ari had trained such a perfect dragon, but that the training could be duplicated.
“It’s all right,” he reassured the anxious dragon and dragonet, taking a deep, unsteady breath. “Or, at least it will be.”
SIXTEEN
IF Vetch had little stomach for the festival before, he had even less now. He could not bear to look at those cheerful faces and wonder which one of them knew what Ari had just revealed. Or worse—which ones had participated in some way.
Or worse still, which ones approved.
He led Avatre back to her pen, and as she settled anxiously back into her wallow, he wondered briefly if he was going to have to begin tethering her there to keep her from following him. But he soon realized, when she displayed no further interest in the entrance, that she had only come looking for him because she had heard his deep distress and had followed the sound of his voice; she had wanted to comfort him as he had so often comforted her.
The very echoes of the celebrations made him feel ill. How could there be a festival going on, how could people be having a good time, when a massacre of innocents had just taken place? How could the people who had participated in it be joking about it and planning to make a game of killing the next time? How could they even bear to imagine a “next time?” And the part of him that longed for revenge writhed inside, urging him to go do something, now, while his enemies were all unwary.
Was it weakness, or was it wisdom, that offered the counter to that anger in his soul? If I do that, I am no better than they are . . . .
He hoped it was the latter, for the thought held him for a moment.
Suppose he should go and do something horrible, not to the Jousters who had been the murderers, but to ordinary folk? That would be exact revenge—but that wouldn’t be right either. And if he did something horrible, just how much worse would the next Tian atrocity be to “make the Altans pay?”
He saw poor Kashet peering anxiously over the wall, and resolutely turned his heart away from vengeance. Ari’s dragon was just as distressed as little Avatre; his rider had acted quite out-of-keeping with anything Kashet had come to expect, had run off from the games, been in deep anguish, had not paid any attention to Kashet, and had run off after shouting at Kashet’s dragon boy. The bottom was out of Kashet’s universe.
Fortunately, Vetch knew what would make things at least partially right again, at least for the dragon and the dragonet.
Because the butchers were going to have a holiday along with everyone else, priest-magicians had come yesterday to create the reverse of the magic that they worked on the dragon sands, taking the heat away from a huge room at the back of the butchery, presumably sending that heat into one of the pens. Or—perhaps putting it into one of the cook tents, to keep the hot food there warm without the use of charcoal or other fire. The butchers had worked at a frenzied pace to fill that room, and the result was that two days’ worth of dragon fodder was stockpiled in the ensorcelled storage area, a curious place in which it was so cold that one could see one’s breath, hanging in the air! This was no new thing, or so Vetch had been told; the Palace kitchens had such a place. But the magic was seldom used outside of the Palace, except for occasions such as this; it was much simpler just to have butchers to deal with the steady stream of carcasses that always came from Temple Row.
The way to soothe a dragon’s heart ran through his belly. Vetch went to get Kashet’s favorite treats.
He brought some for Avatre, too, the hearts of smaller beasts than cattle. Although it was not feeding time, Kashet always had room for beef hearts, and his favorite food relaxed and comforted him. When he finished his snack, he looked up at the sun speculatively, and yawned—then waded out into his wallow, and instead of burying himself as he did during the winter rains, he spread himself out to bask in the hot sun, with his wings stretched to their fullest extent.
This was a contented dragon, and Vetch knew it was safe to leave him.
He returned to Avatre, and introduced her to the delights of Kashet’s favorite. She was dubious at first, but one taste convinced her. Rather than relaxing her, though, the snack energized her, and she began exercising her wings, flapping hard and making little jumps into the air.
Unlike birds, who had to grow feathers and skin and bone before they could fly, dragons only had to grow enough skin and bone—the bone forming the support, the skin forming the wing surface. And unlike birds, whose feathers were fragile while they were growing, dragonets began hopping and flapping fairly early in their development. But they hovered far better than most birds could, and Vetch knew, from watching the older dragonets, that at some point Avatre would be able to hover for a few moments in place, even with extra weight on her back. When that happened, he would know that the moment for first flight was close.
He watched her closely, and realized that the day was not far off. It was time to keep the harness on her during daylight hours, except when he was giving her a bath. And it was time to start edging the weight she was carrying upward, until it was heavier than he was.
That way, when she actually made that first flight, she would have built up her strength to carry more than Vetch, and as a consequence, she should be able to go higher and farther than a dragonet of similar age. He had to plan on pursuit; he hoped it would not come until he and Avatre were out of sight, and those who came looking for him would cast their nets far short of where he and she eventually had to come to ground. With lu
ck, pursuers would assume they had no more strength and endurance than the average dragonet at first flight, and as a consequence, would never guess how far they could go.
The best way to strengthen her was through play, so until she grew tired and wanted another nap, he resolutely closed his ears to the unwelcome noise of celebration and chased her around the pen until she tired of that, then let her chase him. The play was good for him, too—though he felt guilty at playing when he knew what he knew. . . .
But Avatre didn’t know, and wouldn’t understand if she knew. There was no reason to deprive her of the fun and exercise she needed.
Like a puppy or a kitten, her energy seemed boundless right up until the point where she suddenly tired, flopped down where she stood, and was instantly asleep. At that point, he left the pens for what (he had already decided) would be his last foray out to the landing court until the festival was over.
He brought a clean barrow with him, and wandered among the food tents, picking out items that would not need to be eaten warm. No one questioned him, oddly enough. Perhaps they assumed he had been sent to get provisions for several of the other boys over at the games. When he had enough to hold him for two days, he returned to the pens, and went straight to the butchery, stashing his provisions in that cold room. There he would not need to worry about them spoiling—and he would not have to venture among the celebrants in order to eat.
Which was just as well, because to do so would have put the temptation to wreak anonymous harm too near to resist. It had come very, very close, as he had made his way around all of that unguarded food. . . .
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