Alta

ELEVEN

THREE days later, Aket-ten made her first appearance in the Jousters’ Compound. She was accompanied by Lord Khumun, who told Kiron’s wing that he wished to see how she would fare in communicating with the dragons for himself.
The boys had been singularly uninterested in “Orest’s little sister” and had not been enthusiastic about leaving their precious charges to greet her. That all changed the moment they set eyes on her.
“By the gods!” Gan whispered to Kiron, as all of the boys of Kiron’s wing gathered to greet her. “What happened to Orest’s ‘little’ sister?”
“She grew up,” Kiron replied shortly, a little dismayed at Gan’s words, and surprised to feel a surge of jealousy. Aket-ten looked—well, wonderful. She had somehow achieved a compromise between the hoyden she had been and that elegant, slightly over-painted “lady” he had first seen in the Temple of All Gods. She looked quite comfortable in her skin, and yet there was no doubt whatsoever that she had, in very fact, grown up. Even Toreth was giving her an interested and intrigued look.
Yes, every one of the boys was eyeing her with varying degrees of speculation and interest except Orest himself. Orest was apparently oblivious to the change. He still looked bored, and clearly wished himself elsewhere.
“I have work to do,” he whispered irritably to Kiron. “You’d think they’d leave me out of this welcoming-party!” He shook his head. “She’s bad enough now as a know-it-all; this is just going to swell her pride like a toad in the rain!”
That his wingmates did not share his impatience didn’t seem to register with him at all.
Aket-ten didn’t look like someone whose pride was going to swell over all the attention. She looked like someone who knew she had a job to do and was determined to do it well. The encounter with the Magi had changed her profoundly, Kiron decided at last. It had dispelled some cherished illusions, and had forced her to look at the world around her with a high degree of skepticism. He felt sorry for her; the confident child he had rescued back in the swamp was gone.
On the other hand, the cautious girl who had taken the child’s place would be a bit easier to live with.
“Do you think you are prepared to attempt a wild-caught dragon?” Lord Khumun asked Aket-ten. “You need not fear them now—I am sure that your brother must have told you that we have been working intensely with them, and that though one must be cautious around them, you need not fear them.”
Where did that come from? I must have been wool-gathering. Kiron shook his head; he had been so busy staring that he had completely lost track of the conversation.
Aket-ten hesitated, then answered carefully. “My Lord, the problem is not that I am afraid of the wild-caught dragons, it is the tala. It makes their thoughts so sluggish that I cannot effectively reach them. So while I can easily tell Avatre what it is that Kiron would like her to do, with a wild-caught dragon, I do not believe that I could get past the tala and its own natural resistance to captivity. I fear that the best I could manage would be to read it, to tell you how it is feeling at that moment.”
“Annoying,” the Lord of the Jousters sighed. “Ah, well, that is better than nothing. You can tell us when they are over-drugged, or under-drugged, and if they are injured, ill, or in season. That is something, at least.”
She shrugged. “There are many things I can tell you that may help. Animals can suddenly conceive of a dislike for a person or an object, and I can tell you if that happens. I can exert some calming influence on them, provided they have not been provoked into rage. And I can certainly help with the training of the tame ones,” she said firmly. “It will be of no difficulty whatsoever to explain to them what is wanted. If they all grow up like Avatre, they will be eager to please, and need only to be told what to do in order to make a try at it.”
“Well then, there is a swamp dragon that has been looking a bit seedy of late,” Lord Khumun said briskly. “That would be Pa-alet, ridden by Hotef-ba. Let us see what you can make of him.”
With Aket-ten at Lord Khumun’s side, and the dragon boys trailing along behind, they all paraded over to the part of the compound where Kiron seldom ventured—the pens of the swamp dragons. He had not had much to do with the swamp dragons since advising Lord Khumun on ways to retrain them—though Menet-ka’s Bethlan had wandered in twice more, looking for her “mother.” As they all moved along the corridor, heads rose on long necks, craning over the walls to peer at the interlopers—slightly smaller heads on slimmer necks than Kiron was used to in an adult dragon. The forehead was broader than that of a desert dragon, though, and the nasal area smaller, and he wondered if they had all been a bit hasty in thinking of the swamp dragons as less intelligent than their desert cousins.
Their colors were more muted and less metallic than those of the desert dragons, and instead of having colors that shaded on all the extremities to a different color, or something lighter or darker, only the bellies shaded to a lighter version of their base color. But what they lacked in brightness of color, they made up for in subtle patterning; with few exceptions, virtually all of them sported diamond-in-diamond patterns down their backs in subtle variations of their base colors. He could see how this would be valuable in the swamp; if they were lying in a hot mud pool, they would look much like the surface of the pool. And if they chose to swim in clearer water, that lighter belly would disguise them from below both from the enormous carp that formed part of their diet and from the crocodiles that lurked on the bottom. Even a dragon had reason to fear a really big crocodile.
They came to the pen of the ailing dragon, who looked up and grunted at their entrance. He was a brown, and he lolled in his pool of hot water with more lethargy than Kiron was used to seeing in a dragon that wasn’t trying to sleep through the rains.
“Do you need to touch him?” Lord Khumun asked. “If so, I will send for his dragon boy—”
“No, that will not be necessary, my Lord,” Aket-ten replied, with a faint frown of concentration. She stretched out her right hand as if she meant to touch the dragon, but she remained in the doorway, well out of reach. “Ah. Too much tala, not enough food, my Lord,” she said after a moment, her voice sounding distant and preoccupied. Her eyes stared off into space somewhere, looking distinctly unfocussed. “Something put him off his food at some point recently, a stomach ailment perhaps, but his dragon boy was trying to make sure still he got his full dose. Except that as he lost weight, it was a larger dose than he needed, and the overdose of tala has made him lethargic and put him further off his food. Which of course, will make him lose more weight.”
She dropped her hand, blinked, and looked up at the Lord of the Jousters, who himself looked impressed. “Can you afford to take him off the fighting roster and put him on a half ration of tala until he returns to fighting weight?” she asked. “That would be the surest way to get him to recover, and the fastest.”
Lord Khumun visibly weighed the options. “I believe I will have to,” he said at last. “He’s really not effective now. How long do you think it will take?”
She shrugged. “Half a moon?” she guessed. “For all that I have been studying them, this is the first dragon I have had any contact with besides Avatre.”
“Half a moon on half rations of tala and all he can eat,” said Lord Khumun to the dragon boy in question, who looked very nervous indeed. Half rations of tala for a dragon meant a great deal less control over him.
“I think, my Lord,” said Kiron, as an idea occurred to him, “that during this period, if it can be managed, you should let his food walk to him on its own four legs. Or perhaps two—it might be easier to send in chickens, or ducks and geese.”
“Eh?” Khumun turned to stare at him.
“I mean, we should force-feed the tala ration to a sheep or several live fowl and then drive them into the pen,” Kiron elaborated. “He’s wild-caught; he’s used to catching and killing his own food. Let him have live food while he’s recovering his strength. It will taste better to him, which will perk his appetite, and having something to kill might help him with aggression.”
“And the boy will not have to wheel a barrowful of meat close to a testy dragon,” Lord Khumun mused. “I think that is a good compromise. Can you manage it?” he asked the dragon boy.
“My lord, if it will keep me out of range of his teeth, I can manage nearly anything,” the boy said fervently. Kiron could only reflect how fortunate it was that this was a swamp dragon; the pen was cleaned daily by flushing the pool, which was done from outside. If it had been a desert dragon on half rations—well, he was not sure even leaving it chained short would be protection enough for a boy to clean the pen.
“I will continue to watch his progress,” Aket-ten added. “And as soon as I think he is ready, we can put him on his full tala ration the same day.”
“Already you prove your worth,” Khumun said warmly, looking as if he was going to pat her on the head, but stopping before acting on the impulse. “Aket-ten, I am pleased to have your services; our gain is the Winged Ones’ loss. Now, I come to a question—will quarters among the female servants of our compound offend you? Your father specifically asked that you be housed here, but I have no better place to put you. I can arrange for a suite of several rooms with a bathing room to yourself, however. I can simply give you all four of the rooms around a courtyard. The quarters are plain and small, but they are clean and private.”
She grinned, and for a fleeting moment, Kiron saw the “old” Aket-ten. “Such an arrangement will not displease me at all, my Lord! I can send to my father for things to make such rooms more comfortable, if you could show me now.”
“So I shall.” Khumun looked at the boys of Kiron’s wing as if he had only just realized they were there. “Well—have you nothing to do?” he growled.
“Ah—yes, my Lord,” came a ragged chorus of voices, and they scattered before his glare like a covey of quail.
But not before several of them had cast Aket-ten a final appreciative glance; Kiron might have thought that she was oblivious to these attentions, but he caught her watching them under half-lowered eyelids, and saw the little smile of satisfaction she wore as she turned to follow Lord Khumun to her new quarters.
He groaned. That was hardly fair! Now he was going to have to compete with all the others—Oset-re with his handsome face, Gan with his glib tongue, Toreth with—with all of his advantages! No, that was not fair at all! How in the name of all the gods was he to compete with all of that?
Well, he could still do one thing that the others couldn’t, yet. He and Avatre could fly. And the servants’ quarters were just off the practice field. If she was in her courtyard and looked up, she would not be able to avoid seeing the two of them flying.
Avatre was only just big and heavy enough now to begin practicing that maneuver of Ari’s that had saved Kiron’s life, and of all of the tricks that he planned for his wing, that was the one he wanted them to master first. Yes, they practiced over the net—but so had the Tian Jousters, and an accident had happened anyway that would have ended in a death had Ari and Kashet not been there. If anyone from his wing fell from the back of his dragon, Kiron wanted everyone else to know how to catch him.
They were in the first stages of the trick at the moment. They were using a bag of barley half the weight of a man. One of the other Jousters carried it over his saddle, and let it slip off at a prearranged signal. Kiron had Avatre stationed at hover immediately below, so that the bag didn’t fall far or build up much momentum before she caught it, ducking her head under and sliding it along her neck to where he grabbed it. Even so, they missed about half the time, which might have been discouraging if Kiron hadn’t known how long it had taken Ari and Kashet to master the exercise. And unlike Ari, who had faced the scorn and amusement of his fellow Jousters right up until the moment when he actually saved someone, the Altan Jousters, who were knocked from their saddles far too often by the Tians with their bigger dragons, were well aware of the value of this “trick.” They only wished that their dragons would be willing to learn it. The fact that eventually there would be at least nine fighting Altan dragons who knew how to pluck a falling man out of the air provided a great deal of comfort to them.
So Kiron had full cooperation and help from the rest of the Jousters in the compound. It didn’t matter what they were doing at the time; when the one that was currently practicing with him had trouble with his swamp dragon growing restive over the unwelcome proximity of a desert dragon, another rider was willing to take the place of the first.
He and Avatre also practiced Jousting, of course, but he had more of a mind to take to the sky with a sling rather than a lance. Avatre would have to be full-sized before he could Joust, but he could use a sling now. The greatest limitation was that at the moment, she was not strong or fast enough to fly to the combat zones and return on the same day.
They practiced until both dragon and rider were tired; Kiron got in a little target practice while on the wing, just to keep Avatre used to the idea, then brought her in for a much-anticipated grooming and feeding.
He was not at all unhappy to see Aket-ten waiting for him in the landing courtyard when they came in. Now that Growing season had begun, and with it, warmer weather, she was wearing linen gowns instead of wool. And although it wasn’t the semi-transparent mist linen favored by the Priestess of Tia, her current gown certainly left even less to the imagination than the woolen gowns she’d been wearing during the rains. The wind kicked up by Avatre’s wings as she landed molded the front of the gown as tight to Aket-ten’s form as if it had been wet. He felt his ears grow hot.
“You two look very good,” Aket-ten said as he dismounted. She held out a hand for Avatre, who was perfectly happy to slide her head under it for a rub. “I would have expected her to be as clumsy as a puppy, trying anything that complicated.”
“It isn’t the first time,” he admitted, then added awkwardly, “You look very nice.”
The compliment sounded very flat to him, even as he spoke it, but what else was he to say? You are prettier than any of the women who chased Ari was not better! And You don’t look like a little girl anymore was even worse.
She dimpled at him. “My Akkadian friend Heklatis had some very good ideas about how I should dress and act, and made sure to help me make these things into habits, as well as rebuilding my wardrobe,” she said, with some amusement. “For a man who does not find women attractive, he has excellent taste and sound notions. I miss my tunics—but I might as well keep my child lock as stick to the things I used to wear.” She sighed. “I wish it was not the case, but he convinced me that how I will dress for the next several years will profoundly affect how people treat me. If I am to be taken seriously, and not dismissed as a hysterical child when I accuse the Magi of wrongdoing, then I must sacrifice some of my freedom and dress the part of a woman. I am quite indebted to him, actually. Even people who knew me in my cradle have been treating me as if they had just realized that I do know what I am doing, and I am not having childish tantrums.”
“They are treating you as an adult, because you look like one as well as act like one,” Kiron agreed. “Even your father was affected.” Then added, “Oh, except Orest, of course.”
“Of course.” She laughed. “When has a brother ever treated a younger sister as if she had grown up?”
Possibly when he realizes that Gan, Oset-re, and Toreth are flirting with her, Kiron thought—and the thought gave him a feeling of gloom for a moment. After all, how could he even hope to compete with the likes of them? Wealth, power, the highest breeding—
But I’m the wing leader and trainer, he reminded himself. They don’t have that. And they’re still tending babies, not flying combat training.
“Have you gone to see the dragonets yet?” he asked.
She laughed. “If I hadn’t, the others of your wing would have had seizures by now,” she said merrily. “Yes, I’ve seen all of them. And I would never, ever say this to their faces, but the poor little things look terribly unfinished compared with Avatre. However, I’ve Spoken to all of them, and I can tell you that they are all amazingly healthy and thriving. My only recommendation is to get them all toys now and get them interested in playing. They may be clumsy, and they may not be able to do more than mouth pretty colored things, but their minds need stimulation as much as their bodies do.” She pursed her lips a moment. “In fact, you had better get Bethulan and Re-eth-katen twice as many toys as the rest, and more interesting ones, because they will get bored the soonest. Perhaps systrums that they can rattle, or soft things that they can carry about and worry like puppies.”
He made a mental note to see to it. “Avatre needs a grooming,” he told her. “And I know she likes your company. Would you like to come along?”
“No, by now, the servants are back with my things,” she told him, and he bit back disappointment. “If I don’t direct them, they’ll put my bedroom where I’ll be hearing chatter and clatter all night long, and my study in the darkest room of the lot. I promise though, I will wait for you at supper.”
His spirits rose again. “I’ll hold you to that promise,” he said, and led Avatre off to the grooming pens feeling very much better.
At supper, however, despite his attempt to sit with Aket-ten in an unobtrusive corner of the enclosure, the others spotted them and settled themselves at the table, completely ignoring some fairly fierce glares on his part.
This eating area could have been the duplicate of the one in the Tian compound; there were the identical wooden tables and benches, the plain stone walls, and nearly the same cooking smells. The only real difference was that besides the movable awnings on lines overhead, the four walls supported permanent awnings as well, held up on posts, so that the area open to the sky was considerably smaller. And beneath the cooking smells, the scent of the compound was much different—with so many swamp dragons here, and with the canal so near, the air was always humid and full of water scent.
No wonder the Tians are envious of us. We have so much water we have to find ways to getting rid of it, but once you move from the Great Mother River, there is nothing worth having in Tia.
He wondered what Aket-ten would think of that observation. If they had been alone, he probably would have asked her opinion. But with the others around—well, they’d probably think he was an idiot.
He sat there, tongue-tied, while Gan kept Aket-ten laughing with his imitations and his cleverness. He couldn’t help but notice her admiring glances at Oset-re’s handsome profile—and neither could Oset-re.
Huras, however, seemed to be on Kiron’s side. He had no more advantage than Kiron did in flirting—his father the baker surely did not move in court circles!
And, in fact, he probably had a bit less of an advantage, for although he was frighteningly intelligent, he was not much inclined to speak unless he was spoken to, and his large frame and stolid expression often made people think he was stupid. While Kiron didn’t think that Aket-ten had made that mistake, Huras also seemed far more interested in what Aket-ten could tell him about Tathulan than about herself.
Since Huras was at the outer end of the table, he got the serving dishes first—and he kept spearing the choicest bits and passing them directly to Kiron with a nod toward Aket-ten and a conspiratorial wink. Kiron was good at taking hints; he passed the bounty on to Aket-ten, and at least got the reward of a nod of thanks and a smile.
And Toreth also seemed, obliquely at least, to be helping Kiron. When Gan was being a little too clever, Toreth deflated him with a barbed bit of wit of his own. And when Oset-re started moving to put that handsome face of his in the best possible light, he asked, innocent as a child, “Are you posing for a statue, Oset-re? I should wait until I had earned my first Gold of Honor if I were you.”
Aket-ten had the grace not to laugh at these stabs at the others’ vanity, but she hid a smile behind the cover of her jar of beer.
“Aket-ten,” asked Orest, suddenly, quite out of nowhere. “What was going on when you left? Did you really lose your other powers?”
The group around the table went very quiet, although the chatter from the rest of the eating-court covered the silence.
“Why do you ask?” she said, in so low a voice that they could hardly hear it. Then—“Never mind,” she continued. “I will tell you all about it, if you all will come to my courtyard later tonight.” She looked around at all of them. “Kiron and Toreth trust you with their secrets; I can do no less.”
Toreth started a bit at that, but said nothing. Kiron held his tongue as well. But the rest of the meal was eaten in a peculiar silence—not uncomfortable, but awkward. The boys were not sure what they were going to hear, but they were fairly sure it wasn’t something that went well with mild flirtation. Which, Kiron thought, was surprisingly perceptive of them. But it seemed as though when they were prevented from flirting, they—or Oset-re and Gan at least—didn’t know what else to say to her.
In a way, Kiron could sympathize. The things they normally chattered about—the dragonets, the plans for training—didn’t fit in with the usual definition of “polite conversation around a young lady.” They had no way of knowing that such things would be as interesting to Aket-ten as any of the boys around the table.
Not that Kiron had any experience with “polite conversation around a young lady.” He hadn’t the breeding or the family background, so he decided that he wasn’t even going to try coming up with witty repartee. He’d just talk to Aket-ten, like he would talk to anyone else, like the two of them had talked when she was still with the Healers.
So he and Toreth filled the void. Toreth passed on news from outside, and he reported what he had learned from the older Jousters about how the fighting was going. There actually wasn’t much Jousting going on, not with those storms continuing to keep Tian dragons out of the sky. So instead of Jousting, the Altan dragon riders were acting as scouts, and disrupting the Tian camps by means of a number of clever attacks. For instance, setting fire to the wagon-loads of fodder for the chariot horses not only frightened the horses and even ran some off the picket lines, but made it necessary to send for more fodder or try and find grazing. And dropping jars full of deadly black scorpions and poisonous adders into the camps was more than just a disruption. For the first time in years, in fact, the Tian lines had been pushed back. Several small villages had been retaken, and the Tians who had arrogantly moved in had fled in confusion. Kiron’s only complaint was that at least half the credit for the recent string of victories had to go to the Magi, who kept Tian dragons grounded. Eventually, Aket-ten—looking as if she wished to stay—excused herself, saying she had to supervise the servants setting up her things.
Between them, Toreth and Kiron probably could have kept that particular conversation going all night. But there were, of course, chores to be done, dragonets to be settled into sleep, before they could gather in Aket-ten’s new quarters. Of all of them, Kiron had perhaps the lightest duty; the babies needed a last extra feeding to sustain them in their sleep, and they were growing so fast that they all had to have their sensitive skin rubbed with oily cloths before they went to sleep, or they might scratch too hard and damage themselves. Avatre needed nothing more than a little extra grooming, and to be told what a glorious dragon she was and that Kiron would be back soon. She settled into her sand with a sigh of pure pleasure, and was fast asleep in moments as the moon rose over the walls of the compound.
So he was the first to present himself at the door to Aket-ten’s courtyard. It hardly merited the title; it couldn’t have been more than fifteen paces in length or width, and boasted a tiny, square pool with a few latas, a single fish, and a square stone box in which a small acacia tree grew, scenting the night air with its blossoms. There was only one bench; Aket-ten was setting out pillows even as he arrived, and lighting lamps and torches around the walls. Somehow he felt relieved that she was not bringing them into any of those rooms. He helped her with the latter, allowing her to go back into one of the rooms for more cushions.
There were no mosaics adorning the pool, only the plainest of white tiles; there were no paintings on the walls. It had, after all, been a courtyard shared by a dozen servants, all crammed on pallets into three of the four rooms around it—the fourth room being the bathing room, of course. But Aket-ten seemed completely pleased with her new domain.
“Are you all right here?” he asked doubtfully.
“I feel safer here than at home,” she replied, “And I wouldn’t trust living with the Fledglings now no matter what the senior Winged Ones promised me.” She sighed, and sat down on a cushion at the edge of the pool, trailing her fingers in the water. “I don’t trust them anymore; I can’t. I think they would give me over to the Magi in a heartbeat. I couldn’t stay with the Healers either; I was in the way. They were quite polite about it, but I was an inconvenience at best, and I didn’t have a great deal in common with them. Healers are—very passionate about what they do, and I just didn’t share that passion. Here I’m at least useful.”
“I believe you would find a way to be useful no matter where you were,” said Toreth, coming in on the end of the statement. “I should warn you, though, Lord Khumun will have our heads if we stay too long here, tonight or any other night.”
“I’ll chase you out before you get yourselves into trouble,” she replied, as the rest straggled in. “I have duties of my own, too—ones I might as well tell you now, because it answers my brother’s question.” She looked around at everyone but Kiron. “No, I did not lose my powers—which were Animal Speech, the Silent Speech with a fellow Winged One, and the Far-Seeing Eye. I did not have the Seer’s Eye, which imparts a view of the future; I did seem to have it at first, but it was the Far-Seeing eye, not the ability to look into the future. I disappointed my teachers in that regard. Frankly—given how things have turned out—I think I am just as glad.”
“Why?” Gan asked, choosing a flat cushion of woven reeds for himself.
“Because I think if I had possessed the Seer’s Eye—no matter how far I went, the Magi would have come looking for me.” She shivered. “I am far less of a threat to them without it—”
“A threat?” her brother gaped at her.
“I’ll get to that in a moment.” She took a deep breath, and closed her eyes for a moment. “First, you should all know that one of my agreed-upon duties here is that I will be employing the Far-Seeing Eye privately for the benefit of Lord Khumun and the Jousters, and I will do so around dawn, because the Winged Ones are occupied with the Dawn Rites then. Which is why I will be getting up just as early as all of you. They do not know that I never lost my powers. I do not wish them to know this, for they would tell the Magi. Lord Khumun knows because Kiron and my father trust him, and he has no love at all for the Magi.”
Gan rubbed the bridge of his nose; he had completely lost his usual air of languid boredom. “So Lord Khumun knows the truth about you. Who else, besides your father and Kiron?”
“The Healers at the Temple of All Gods, which is where I was hiding, rather than going to my aunt,” she said immediately, as Orest continued to gape at her. “You know about the Magi and why I fled, then?”
Toreth nodded. “I think half of us do. My brother is trying to find out exactly what they’re doing with the Fledglings—” he began. She held up her hand.
“Wait a moment, and let me explain to the rest.” Briefly she outlined what had happened to her, and what the Magi had been doing with the rest of the Fledglings. Kiron volunteered what he had witnessed—the Fledglings being taken away looking like sleepwalkers, and returning looking utterly exhausted. “But as for finding out what is going on inside the Tower of Wisdom, don’t bother—I can tell you. The Magi are stealing some form of power from us—from the Fledglings—to fuel the spell that sends the storms down on Tia.” She smiled grimly at their nods; by this time none of them was surprised, and she didn’t look as if she had expected any of them to be so. “Here is what you don’t yet know; when the last chance of sending rain is over, they do not intend to stop.”
Toreth’s head came up, like a hound on a scent. “For the purpose of—?” he asked delicately.
“That, I cannot tell you. But I learned this, not from watching with my power, because I will not dare that, but from the memories that an Akkadian Healer coaxed out of my mind.” She grimaced. “The Magi believe that the Fledglings are made blind and deaf to what goes on around them as they are being drained of their strength. They are not. But there is a spell of forgetfulness placed upon them before they are allowed to leave. The Akkadian knew it of old, and knew the counter. I remember everything that happened that single time I was taken, and everything that was said and done. This is how I know that, had I the Seer’s Eye, the Magi would have pursued me to the ends of the earth. They cannot permit someone with the Seer’s Eye in any strength to mature into his power. He might reveal the future to the Great Ones—and if he did, the Great Ones and their advisers would soon know that the Magi intend to be the ones to rule in Alta, making those who sit upon the Twin Thrones little more than figureheads.”
“I should like to speak with that Akkadian one day soon,” said Toreth as if to himself.
Aket-ten said nothing for a moment. Then she looked up. “Kiron told me that you have—a path you wish to travel, when the gods call the Great Ones?”
“But not before their time,” Toreth said swiftly.
“Yes. I believe it is time that the Magi began to practice their craft with—supervision. And with a great many conditions that they must follow. And I believe that it is time to end this foolish war, which eats blood and lives, and gives nothing in return.”
“Then I am with you,” Aket-ten said simply. “Though I fear that there is little I can offer you.”
“You can offer your testimony when the time comes,” Toreth replied, grimly. “Other things, too, maybe. Perhaps you can persuade this Akkadian friend of yours to share some of his time with me. I should like to learn how it is that the Magi do their work, and what constraints can be placed upon their excesses.”
“Perhaps you could hire more Akkadians?” Gan suggested brightly, making them all laugh.
As if that had somehow released unspoken tension, talk drifted into lighter topics. Having discovered that yes, Aket-ten was as fascinated and enthralled by the dragons as they all were—if, perhaps, not quite as obsessed—the little gathering turned into something very like an ordinary evening. Aket-ten sent a servant for food and jars of beer, brought out the Hounds and Jackals box, and responded to flirtations with clever retorts.
For a while, Kiron was afraid that she did so only because she wished to keep the way clear for Toreth, but when she delivered a set-down to the prince as well, he relaxed.
For his part, he did not even want to attempt a flirtation, and kept a sharp watch on his words. If Gan and Oset-re, who were so clever at such things, were left nursing their egos, what hope had he of getting anything other than the same response?
Aket-ten might look like an “ordinary” well-born girl, but it was clear to Kiron that she was not in the least interested in the sorts of things that the other boys believed “ordinary” girls concerned themselves with. Not that he was terribly familiar with that sort of thing; he was far more familiar with the way that the older Jousters jibed with the girls who served them their beer. But what passed for a witty innuendo with a slave or a serving girl was probably going to earn him a slap.
He wanted some of her attention all for himself. So he challenged her to a game of Hounds and Jackals, and had the satisfaction of not only holding his own against her, but of presenting her with something that she did find pleasurable.
Eventually, the others drifted off to their respective pens until only he and Toreth were left. Orest had been the first to go, wearing a puzzled, even bewildered look, as if his sister had suddenly turned into a stranger before his very eyes. Toreth was watching the game with every evidence of interest, and Kiron was determined to fight it out to the last piece. Finally, with only one Hound left, she took out both of his remaining Jackals.
“Well fought!” Toreth exclaimed, as Kiron congratulated her. “My Lady, I should like to request a match tomorrow night.”
“You can have your match, provided you always call me Aket-ten, and nothing more,” she replied, flushed with victory, and putting up the pieces. “I have taken a dislike to being called ‘my Lady.’ ”
“Gladly. And seeing you play—both of you—I note that you both use unconventional strategy.” He looked keenly from Kiron to Aket-ten and back again. “Now, the one thing that the Magi can do—at a cost that none of us wish to continue paying—is to negate the superiority of the Tian Jousters, if only temporarily.”
Kiron nodded, though he wondered fleetingly if the prince ever thought of anything other than the war. Or—wars. For there was no doubt in his mind that he considered himself to be at war now with the Magi.
Aket-ten tilted her head to the side, and regarded him thoughtfully.
“This is true,” she admitted. “But there is no other option, short of fielding equal or superior numbers ourselves. Is there?”
“That, Aket-ten and Kiron, is what I would like you to think on,” he told them. “Because you, both of you, may see something that Kaleth and I have not.”
Kiron blinked. “I suppose that is possible,” he replied, but dubiously. “Perhaps. In time—”
“And what have we but time?” the prince retorted, spreading his hands wide. “We have one solution—the tame dragons. One of them is better than four Jousters on tala-drugged beasts. We are not desperate for a solution, I merely want you to see if you can devise more than one. No archer goes into battle with a single bow string.”
Aket-ten nodded briskly. “That is only reasonable,” she said. “Now, as for my Akkadian, it may be several days before I can speak with him, and more before I can persuade him to speak with you. He is reluctant to admit his training.”
“And what have I but time?” the prince repeated. “If you can persuade him, well and good. If not, perhaps on the day when my brother and I sit on the Twin Thrones, he will be willing to come forward. Until then, anything he might tell us is nothing we can put into immediate use.”
“There is that,” Kiron agreed, and stifled a yawn. “Dawn comes early—”
“Earlier every morning until Midsummer,” Aket-ten agreed cheerfully. “So, I fear, my guests, you must consider yourselves to be invited to leave!”
“And we will take the invitation in the spirit with which it was given,” said the prince, standing up and giving her a slavish bow that made her laugh. He offered a hand to Kiron, who took it to pull himself to his feet. “Until tomorrow, Aket-ten! I look forward to our match!”
“Until tomorrow,” she replied, her voice a little muffled as she bent to blow out a lamp.
“Well fought,” Toreth repeated, slapping Kiron on the back as they left.
But he said it in a tone that left Kiron wondering. Was he talking about their game of Hounds and Jackals or some other contest altogether?

Kiron had thought that beautiful Tathulan, Huras’ enormous female dragonet, would probably lose some of her relative size as the others caught up with her. But as the days passed, that didn’t happen. She continued to grow at the same rate as all the others—which meant she was still half again as large as the nearest in size.
“She’ll be fledging long before Bethlan,” Kiron observed, watching as she tossed her current favorite plaything, a bag loosely stuffed with straw, into the air with a flip of her head. It was a singularly beautiful head; dark blue along the neck ridge and in a blaze down her forehead, fading to a glorious purple, which in turn faded to scarlet on the underside of her jaw and on her muzzle.
“You think?” Huras asked doubtfully. “She doesn’t act any differently from the others. She’s just bigger. I thought that you told us that the biggest and the strongest were the firstborn.”
“That’s what Ari told me, but now I wonder. He couldn’t see the wild ones’ nests all that well when he spied on them, and the only dragon he really ever had any experience with was Kashet.” Kiron rubbed the side of his face with the back of his hand. “When it comes right down to it, at this point, we all have eight times the experience with dragonets that he did.”
“Well, in that case, I think she’ll fledge right in order,” Huras said firmly. “I think it’s more to do with when they’re ready, not how big they are.”
He might have said more, but a steady bleating had just started from their right and was approaching. They exchanged a look.
“That doesn’t sound like Bethlan,” said Huras.
“No, it doesn’t,” Kiron replied, already on his way to the doorway.
He was just in time to intercept, not Bethlan, but Gan’s Khaleph. “Oh, no, baby!” he said, laughing, barring the way with his arms outstretched. “Not two wanderers! Back you go—”
But Khaleph wasn’t going to be turned back quite so easily. Instead, he ducked past Kiron and—unexpectedly—into Tathulan’s pen.
Both dragonets stopped what they were doing with snorts, and stared at one another.
“Do you think we should chase him out?” Huras asked, in a worried whisper, as Khaleph edged forward a little, neck stretched out so far toward Tathulan that he seemed twice his usual length.
“No—no, let’s see how they react to each other, first,” Kiron said cautiously. “They’ve never seen another dragon—and Bethlan gets along fine with that swamp dragon she keeps visiting.”
Now Tathulan had her neck stretched out nearly as far. The two touched noses, snorting in surprise, and jumped back.
Kiron stifled his laughter. Huras still looked worried—though why he should be worried, when Tathulan was far more likely to injure Khaleph than the other way around, made no sense to Kiron.
The little emerald-green male stretched out his head again, and this time, when he touched noses with the bigger female, he didn’t snort and jump back. Instead, he carefully eased himself down into the sand pit with Tathulan.
Now the two of them began a careful circling of each other, rather like two strange dogs—though unlike dogs, neither made any attempt to nip. Then they stopped, and both of them looked at Huras and Kiron.
“What do they want?” Huras asked urgently.
“It’s all right,” Kiron told the two dragonets—he was, after all, the one they both knew. “It’s fine, little ones.”
They looked at each other. And then Khaleph stretched out his neck and head again, one eye on Tathulan, only this time it was toward Tathulan’s stuffed sack.
She immediately figured out what he was after, and snatched it away from under his nose.
Clumsily, he gave chase. They romped all over the pen, while Kiron and Huras scrambled out of their way, and the moment he seemed to lose interest in the chase, she stopped, and dropped the sack, pretending to ignore it until he snatched it up and she bumbled joyfully after him.
“Kiron! They’re playing!” Huras said in astonishment. “I never heard of anything like that!”
“Nobody’s ever had tame dragons growing up in front of their eyes either,” Kiron pointed out, as Khaleph lost the sack and Tathulan snatched it away again. “For all we know, they play like this in the nest.”
Just then, Gan came bursting in, hearing their voices and in a panic because Khaleph was not in his pen. He stopped dead at the sight of the two dragonets romping together.
“Kiron!” he burst out, when he could finally make his mouth work. “They’re playing!”
“And I think we ought to let them all play together,” Kiron replied. “They’ll have to work together, let’s let them get used to each other early.”
So the next time little Bethlan went looking for Menet-ka, Kalen steered her into the pen of his female Se-atmen, and soon there was a whirling ball of indigo-blue and brown-gold play-wrestling in Se-atmen’s pen. Toreth deliberately led his Re-eth-katen into Apetma’s pen; clever little Re-eth-katen was soon poking her nose into every pen to find a playmate, much to Avatre’s disgust. Orest’s Wastet and Pe-atep’s Deoth met in the corridor, and in the surprise of the moment, went tumbling into the tenth, empty pen, where they made a fine mess of the oddments that had been stored there. At Kiron’s request, a gate was built across the end of their corridor so that the babies did not get themselves into trouble by assuming that the adult dragons would be as ready to play as their fellow dragonets, and then they were permitted full freedom of the entire set of pens. This had the happy side effect of freeing half the boys while the other half took it in turn to watch over all the babies, and all the babies got used to obeying someone besides “mother.” It had another happy side effect; they grew stronger and much more coordinated with every day spent in play, and as for nights, they were so tired by the time darkness fell that you could not have awakened them with a trumpet.
However, all the boys soon learned that you either found a way to secure your belongings or you found them being used as playthings. Curtains across the doors stopped some of the dragonets, but not all. Finally, the carpenters were brought in to build actual doors after Lord Khumun tired of replacing bed coverings.
“What’s next, the furniture?” he grumbled to Kiron. “No, don’t answer that. I can see how fast they’re growing.” And he gave the orders for doors.
The dragonets found the carpenters to be even more fascinating than the furniture, and followed the poor men from pen to pen, crowding around to watch, tasting the wooden planks, trying to steal the tools. It made for an interesting day for everyone, as the boys tried to keep the dragonets away from the carpenters, and the dragonets tried to get at the carpenters, and the carpenters worked probably a great deal faster than they ever had in their lives, sure that the dragonets would go from tasting the wood to tasting them.
Avatre had never acted like this—but then, Avatre had been raised in isolation from every other dragon but Kashet. Kashet had been an adult, not at all interested in playing; it gave Kiron a pang to think of how lonely she must have been.
And yet, he had spent every free moment of time with her. And he had played with her. So perhaps she had been all right.
The one thing he found himself wishing, though, was impossible.
He could not help but think how entranced Ari would have been to see all of this, and wish that his mentor could have been there.
It might even have made him laugh again. And that would have been worth more to Kiron than all the Gold of Honor in Alta.