Joust

by Mercedes Lackey

  He would never let them take her. He would rather die and set her free.

  Sobs welled up in his throat, he choked them down. His heart felt as tight as if there were copper bands around it, and he prayed wordlessly. Surely the gods had not brought him this far only to snatch everything away from him!

  He looked back again; there were three dragons in pursuit of him now, for all the rest had dropped out of the race. But these three were obeying their Jousters, and he thought they looked a little nearer, though not near enough to tell who they were. Just the colors; a scarlet, a green, and a blue.

  He looked down; they were over the desert, which undulated beneath them in waves of pale sand, broken by rocky outcrops. The breath of the desert, hot, dusty, and so arid it parched his lips, wafted up to them. He bent over Avatre’s neck, and shouted encouragement to her.

  He’d had no idea where to go, but she, guided by instinct alone, was heading for the same hills that her mother had sought at the end of the mating flight. Those hills were riddled with caves and rich with game—and they marked the boundary of the lands that could truly be called “Tian.” Out there, although Tia claimed the earth, it really belonged to the dragons and the wild, wandering tribesmen of the Bedu, the Blue People, the Veiled Ones who called no man “king.” If they could reach the hills, they could hide there. They could stay under cover until the hunters had given up.

  But the hills were a long way away, and there were three trained dragons in pursuit. He crouched lower over Avatre’s neck, and willed his own strength into her. His long hair whipped into his face; he ignored it, and tried to wish himself lighter than he already was.

  When they were halfway between the hills and the Great Mother River, he looked back again. Avatre was still flying strongly, showing no signs of tiring. And now there were only two dragons following. One, the scarlet, had dropped down and was gliding behind the other two, making a long, slow turn to return to the compound.

  His heart leaped. One gone—could they outdistance the other two?

  “Go, my love, my beauty!” he shouted at Avatre’s head. “Go! We are small and light as down; ride the wind, my heart! Take us to freedom!”

  He thought she responded to his encouragement with a little more power.

  One gone—two to go.

  But they were two Jousters, and he was only a dragon boy on First Flight. They had strength and experience on their side; all he had was hope and heart, and the valor of a very young dragonet.

  He looked down again; the sand was interrupted by more and larger outcroppings of rock. They were getting closer to the hills. He redoubled his prayers.

  With every wing beat, they drew nearer to escape. When they reached the hills, he looked back again.

  One of the two remaining dragons had turned back!

  But the third was still in hot pursuit, and was closing the gap between them.

  And now he could see, with pitiless clarity, that the third was Kashet.

  His heart felt as if it was being squeezed, and for a moment, he was blinded by tears. But he leaned over her neck again and begged Avatre to fly faster, harder—

  She heard him, and he felt her trying to do as he asked. They topped the first set of hills—

  But below them he saw the ground of the second rising to meet them, closer than it should have been—

  She was losing relative height and real height as well. He felt her muscles beginning to tremble, and knew then that she was running out of strength and endurance.

  And a shadow passed over them, between them and the sun, the superior position for a Jouster to force another dragon to earth.

  He knew without looking up that it was Kashet.

  It was over.

  Ari had caught them, and he would force them down, take them both captive. The teams of trainers and soldiers that Haraket had surely sent after them would come and take them back, bound and chained.

  They would take Avatre away from him, if he allowed that to happen. Avatre was at the end of her strength, and there was nothing more that she could give him.

  It was time to give her a gift—her freedom.

  And with a sob, he pulled his legs free of the harness, he leaned down over her neck.

  “Good-bye, beloved, my light, my love,” he murmured to her. He squeezed his eyes tight; he couldn’t look at the ground. But this was the only way. Better this, better lose life, than lose everything that made life worth having.

  Let me wander as a hungry ghost. Better that, than a slave without her.

  He took a long, last, deep breath.

  Then he deliberately overbalanced, and let go.

  It was horrible.

  He screamed in utter terror as he fell, tumbling over and over in a macabre parody of an acrobat. The screaming just burst out of his mouth without any thought. He waited for the scream and the horror to end in a terrible blow, and blackness.

  Something hard struck him in the stomach instead, knocking what was left of his breath out of him and ending his scream in a gasp. He slid face-down along something hard and smooth and hot—then impacted a second time, and felt a strong arm grab him around his waist.

  And he screamed again, this time in thwarted rage and heartbreak, as he realized that Ari and Kashet had plucked him out of the sky, as they had saved Reaten. Only he didn’t want to be saved, and they had rescued him only to haul him back to a wretched existence not worth the living!

  He screamed and tried to fight, but he was lying in a difficult position, he could only strike at Kashet. Ari was three times his size and double his strength, and was not about to let him land a blow. He cursed the Jouster in every way he could think of, tears blinding him, as he changed his tactics and tried to squirm out of Ari’s grip to resume the plunge to death that they had interrupted.

  That was just about as successful as trying to fight them.

  He felt Kashet sideslipping and losing height quickly; his stomach lurched with the renewed sense of falling, but he knew that this “fall” would not end in blessed blackness, but in captivity, and he howled his anguish.

  Avatre cried out above him—he’d never heard her cry before, it sounded like a hawk—and she followed them down, floundering wearily through the air, as Ari and Kashet brought him down to the earth. As they spiraled down into a little valley, he just gave up and went limp. He was crying, uncontrollably, sobbing with rage and thwarted hope, and the death of everything he had hoped for. He couldn’t see, blinded by the tears as they landed, as Ari slid off first, then pulled him down to the ground—

  —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 aroun
d 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.”

  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?�
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  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.”