“Against a small group, the old fighting style against ground fighters worked very well,” Kiron continued. “The horses were frightened into bolting, and none of them had the presence of mind to shoot at me. Of course, this, too, will not hold for long. So what I think we must do is this. We will begin by running patrols in pairs. For now, having two targets will keep the bandits confused enough. We will determine where the places of cover are along the caravan routes and keep them under watch.”
“We will be limited to flying no more than half a day from Aerie,” Kalen pointed out.
Again, Kiron nodded.
“For now,” he repeated. “This will change. Perhaps the merchants will suggest ways in which we can feed our dragons along the routes besides hunting. Perhaps the Great King will establish outposts of Aerie. But, for now, this will do. We will be giving the caravans some protection. And those who are now questioning the need for us will shortly be the ones insisting on such things. So. We have much territory to cover, and not so many of us. I would hear your words, wingleaders. Who shall we set to what patrolling, and still remain able to feed our dragons with hunting?”
Two days later, much as Kiron had expected, Aket-ten swooped down out of the sky on Re-eth-ke, just as he was harnessing Avatre to go out to hunt. Re-eth-ke backwinged smartly, throwing up an enormous cloud of sand, a piece of rudeness on Aket-ten’s part that Kiron found less than appealing. She flung her leg over the saddle and slid down Re-eth-ke’s blue-black flank as he dusted himself off, her face a study in anger and admiration mingled.
“Great King Ari and Great Queen Nofret send their greetings to Kiron, and compliment him on the successes against the bandits that have been raiding caravans,” she said, with an attempt, not very successful, at icy formality. “They command you to continue in these ventures, while their advisers study the results. And I would like to know—” she continued, her eyes flashing, “—why no one told me that there was going to be fighting!”
“Because you were with the Great King and Queen,” Kiron replied mildly. “I only just launched the first strike by accident two days ago. We are still working out what pairings are best, and what we will do when two dragons are no longer enough. And do not think to add yourself to the roster. Not until the Great King and Queen release you from messenger duty, at any rate. I cannot countermand their orders, and you will flout them at your peril.”
Aket-ten looked quite ready to bite something. “Any dragon past fledging could run messages!” she protested.
“But not just any Jouster has the full trust of the Great King and Queen,” he pointed out with inexorable logic.
He didn’t expect that to mollify her, and he was right. She actually growled.
But at least this had put all complaints about the lack of female Jousters right out of her head for now.
Aket-ten surveyed her handiwork and smiled.
So Kiron thought he was going to be clever about her plan for more female Jousters, did he? “Allow” it as long as they got their own dragons? He had clearly forgotten who he was dealing with. She loved Kiron, no doubt, but sometimes he drove her mad. He should have known by now that when Aket-ten made up her mind about something, she found a way to get it done.
It didn’t hurt in the least that she was serving duty as a courier between Mefis, Sanctuary, and Aerie. And there in Mefis were all those dragon pens, lying empty. . . .
And in the hills beyond the Great Mother River, all those former Jousting dragons, some of whom, at least, retained some good memories of their service to humans, none of whom were the least bit experienced in hatching eggs and raising youngsters.
It had all been a matter of patience, really. Patience, and having Great Queen Nofret’s ear. Nofret would immediately see the value of having female Jousters as well as male; for one thing, dragon courier service was proving extremely valuable to the Great King and Queen, and they certainly could use more than just Aket-ten to serve as messengers. For another, just because Jousters were very good at fighting, that didn’t mean that fighting was all they could do. Men were so single-minded! Kiron assumed that because she’d fought alongside the rest of them, that was what she wanted to do, too! She had never liked the fighting. Never. The acrobatics, the training, all of that, yes, but never the fighting. But girls could scout the borders of the Two Kingdoms without ever engaging an enemy, making the regular patrols that Tian and Altan Jousters always had, and that could free the fighting dragons to be ready to spring into action if a threat did appear! Girls could give Great King Ari regular reports about conditions within the Two Kingdoms, too, if that ever become necessary. In flood season, they could fly rescues as Kiron’s own wing had when the capital of Alta fell. They could ferry a single passenger, say a Healing-Priest, to places where he was needed—much, much faster than the fastest chariot could bring him. From the air, they could learn how to recognize blight in crops and map out the exact area that would have to be burned in order to save the rest of the crops.
And that was only what she could think of without working too hard. She was certain she could think of more things, and all of them would be tasks the men would—face it—scorn to perform. Or, well, at least the hotheaded young men, and the hidebound old ones. Probably Kiron and most of his wing would see the need. But they’d be glad to have girls around to do the jobs, so they wouldn’t have to.
Once she had girl Jousters, anyway. At the moment, she only had one . . . or rather, she had one girl and one egg, shortly to hatch. Still! it was a start!
The Palace still needed its food rooms cooled; that hadn’t changed, and the heat removed had to go somewhere. Sending it to the dragon pens as it had always been sent was the logical choice, even if there were only two dragons here to benefit from it. Or three, if Aket-ten was at the Court. But now there was another occupant here besides Kashet, The-on, and Re-eth-ke.
Secretly, Aket-ten had been very pleased when the only girl to present herself as a candidate for the lone egg she had retrieved had been a fellow Altan and a former serf, as Kiron had been. That had seemed a very good omen. Getting an egg hadn’t been trivial, but it hadn’t been impossible either. The problem had been that so many of the first-time mothers among the former Jousting dragons had laid infertile eggs and had abandoned them for that reason. It had taken a lot of patience and incubation to find one that was fertile and hadn’t sat so long that the egg had died. She must have had drovers haul in over three dozen that she’d had to discard. Only when she was sure she had a fertile one had she felt prepared to look for the right girl to play mother to the incipient dragonette.
But Peri-en-westet was definitely the right girl, someone after Aket-ten’s own heart. Gentle and patient, she nevertheless had a mind of her own and a stubborn streak that had kept captivity from breaking her.
Her history was rather interesting. She had attached herself to a woman with a feeble-minded daughter when the three of them had been acquired by the same master here in Mefis. She was by nature an affectionate person, and since her own family was gone, she had naturally gravitated into helping to care for the daughter until Ari had freed all the serfs and given them paid employment or restored them to their lands again. In this case, the woman Peri had adopted was quite skilled, thanks to her own cleverness in getting into the master’s kitchens. Her talent at baking had blossomed, and now she was one of the bakers for the stoneworkers quarrying limestone across the river. Her daughter was not so impaired that she couldn’t be set to grind flour and pat the loaves into shape. That had freed Peri from having to look after her.
Unfortunately, it had also left her without a job. She had no lands to restore, and no real skill other than child tending, something almost any slave could do. Then she had heard of Aket-ten’s search for someone to take on a dragonet, and she had answered it.
There was a complication, of course. There always was. The woman herself was pretty well determined that Peri would be married to her son, when and if she found him. But Aket-te
n was confident that the young man was probably dead, and even if he wasn’t, he’d probably found some other young woman to marry. Peri herself seemed attached to the idea only insofar as it made her putative mother-in-law happy to plan for it. In the meantime, though, she was keeping the nature of her new “job” a secret from her friend, because evidently this woman was one of those who had set ideas about one’s place in the world—and a peasant girl had no place in the world of the Jousters, to her way of thinking.
Peri had moved into the pen where Aket-ten had installed the egg, living as any young Jouster did, but enjoying much better living conditions than the Jousters at Aerie. Granted, she had no servants, but as a farm girl she was used to that, and tending to her egg and learning about dragons from Aket-ten was scarcely an onerous job. Re-eth-ke had no objections to taking up a strange rider if Aket-ten asked it of her, and Peri’s riding lessons had been going very well.
There had been tapping and movement in the egg over the last couple of days, and Re-eth-ke was showing mild interest in it. If Aket-ten was any judge of things, today would be the day that the egg hatched. Aket-ten perched on the wall of Peri’s pen, looking down at girl and egg with Re-eth-ke craning her neck and head up beside her—though Re-eth-ke was far more interested in Aket-ten’s idle brow and chin scratches than in what was happening down on the sand. The egg was moving visibly.
It would not be long now, and Aket-ten waited to see if the girl was going to live up to her hopes.
Peri-en-westet waited beside her egg—her egg!—with a hammer in one hand, watching and listening as Aket-ten had taught her. Though she looked calm, inside she was anything but. As she listened to the tapping and waited for the baby dragon inside to pick the one spot it would try to break through, it seemed to her as if her entire life had been working toward this moment.
Not that such a thing had ever entered her mind before she embarked on this venture. Far from it. She had always thought that she would follow the path every woman in her family had ever followed, that of a simple farmer’s wife. Or, well, “always” as well as any small child understood the word. She had never really considered any other life, and truly, even now she would have been content with that path. But the war, which had changed so much for so many people, had destroyed any hope of pursuing the same life as her forebears.
In fact, it had destroyed her family altogether.
But not in the usual manner . . .
No, unlike Letis-hanet, soldiers had not overrun Peri’s village. Her family had not been slaughtered, nor taken away as serfs for some trumped-up charge. In fact, in a way, the invaders had been a blessing, for they had, at least, fed her and cared for her when they found her.
No, Peri’s family had fallen to the floods that had followed those terrible Magi-wrought rains. Upstream of their village, the waters of Great Mother River had risen, and kept rising, and kept rising, all in a single night while the villagers slept unaware until, just before dawn, disaster struck.
The wall of water that engulfed the village had melted the mud houses as if they had been children’s dirt forts. The unlucky had perished there, smothered by their own walls. And had Peri not been sleeping on the roof of the family home to escape the bickering of her siblings, who insisted on ending every day with a quarrel, she would have been one of them.
As it was, she woke in a panic, fighting her way out of sleep and up to the surface at the same time, by sheer good fortune catching hold of what had been someone’s roof timber. She clutched at that piece of wood with all her strength as she was whirled away under storm-racked skies, until she was fished out, nearly insensible, along with five or six others from her village. The fact that it was soldiers of Tia, the enemy, that fished her out made no real impression on her, not even when they turned her over to the Royal Slave-master to begin her life as a serf.
And even then, that life was nothing near so onerous as that of others. She had been numb and sunk in grieving for some time, so she hadn’t really paid much attention to her surroundings, but her master had not been unkind. In fact, her master was scarcely seen at all, and his cook, to whom she had been assigned, was taciturn but fair.
Perhaps all that had been due to the fact that there were no lands attached to her. She was too young to tell those who had picked her up where her family farm was, and there was no use hunting for records after the flood had swept through the place. The only other records would have been in the Altan capital, and Tians would hardly be welcome there. So there was no reason for anyone to try to be rid of her to free the property of encumbrances, and every reason to keep her alive and healthy to continue to serve. As others had noted before this, there were laws in place regarding the treatment of slaves, but serfs were war captives, and subject to much less oversight. As a consequence, for the same amount of work that could be got from them, they were much cheaper to keep.
It was in the kitchen that she had encountered Letis-hanet and her daughter Iris, and if ever there was a story of the woe of an Altan family in the hands of the Tians, it was theirs. Though Letis’ husband had never fought against the Altans, he had the misfortune of possessing fine property. A Tian wanted it. And so, spurious accusations were made, soldiers sent—
Letis was understandably less than coherent about what had happened then. All Peri really gathered was that her husband was killed on the spot, Iris was hurt, and the family broken apart, their son going with the house and the rest attached to the farmlands. Then as those lands in turn were parceled out, the remaining members of the family were further separated, leaving only Letis and her feeble-minded daughter together.
Their masters had ranged from careless to cruel until they and the remaining parcel of land they were tied to was bought by Peri’s master. “Absent” was better than “cruel,” at least. The trouble was, what to do with Iris while Letis was at work in the master’s bakery?
That was quickly solved when Iris proved moderately useful in the kitchen and the kitchen garden. Ordered to keep the girl in her charge, Peri had been perfectly happy to do just that, seeing to it that no one teased or tormented her, making sure that when she was given a task she completed it. Letis had been overwhelmingly grateful, and as time went on, the two became friends, then nearly as close as mother and daughter.
That was when Letis had started talking about her son. How he was Peri’s age. How Peri was exactly the sort of person Letis had envisioned as her son’s wife. And from that, it had drifted until the unspoken became the accepted, at least on the part of Letis—that when her son was found and the family reunited, Peri would marry him.
It seemed a harmless enough daydream. Letis had few such dreams to sustain her, and Peri was disinclined to shatter this one.
But then, without warning, at the moment in which victory was confidently expected by their captors—the war ended. The Great King was dead. His advisers were dead. Most of the Tian army was dead. And suddenly, there was a new Great King and a Great Queen, too—and she was Altan. And he ordered the serfs freed, and their lives to be sorted out, with recompense given to them.
Of course, there were thousands upon thousands of them. And it was taking a very long time to sort through records and claims and counterclaims. So while she was waiting for her claim to come up through the magistrates, Letis had been given a job that paid well, a place to live, and help for Iris. And Peri had——this!
She heard the tapping suddenly take on a new urgency, and she heard, felt, exactly the place where the dragon was trying to break through. Now she moved, the hammer in her hand tapping firmly, but carefully, against the shell. Hairline cracks started from her point of impact.
Soon, but not soon enough for her rising panic that she wasn’t doing this right, a piece of shell popped off, and a fist-sized golden snout with two flaring nostrils poked out of the hole.
She sat down hard in the sand with a sigh of relief. Now, according to Aket-ten, the baby would just breathe for a while, resting, before going back to hammering i
ts way out of the shell. If she were a mother dragon, she would be licking the shell to weaken it. She couldn’t do that, so she had to weaken it with the hammer.
And before too long, that was what she was doing. Periodically, the baby would stop to rest, and so would she. The baby had begun her attempts—Peri was sure it was a “she”—to emerge in midmorning. It wasn’t until midafternoon that a big piece of shell finally fell away and the gold-green bundle of wet skin tumbled out of the larger half of the egg to land at her feet.
The baby raised her—it lacked the horns, so it was a female—head on a neck that seemed too fragile to support it and looked up at Peri with confused golden eyes. She opened her mouth to emit a muted squeak. And Peri fell entirely in love.
Aket-ten watched her protégée do everything exactly right, watched the moment when Peri fell into entirely besotted adoration, and smiled.
Everything was going according to plan.
Once other young women saw Peri—who was not a Great Queen, not even a noble—was a Jouster, Aket-ten was certain more would step forward, eager to join her fledgling flying corps.
In fact . . . she just might proceed with this plan without telling Kiron. Just deliver it as a fait accompli. That would show him, him and everyone else, that she knew what she was doing.
But she ought to get Nofret’s permission, formally, for a girl group. It was one thing to experiment with one girl and one dragon; quite another to invent a whole new kind of Jouster.
“You’ll need food for her shortly,” she called down to the young woman, who had the baby’s head cradled in her lap, with the wings spread out over the hot sand to dry. Peri looked up, startled, at the sound of her voice, as if she had forgotten that Aket-ten was there.
She probably had, actually,
“I’ll make sure someone brings you the sort of thing she’ll need for her first meal,” Aket-ten continued, jumping down off the wall. Re-eth-ke lost interest in the proceedings as soon as Aket-ten stopped scratching her, and stretched out to bask on her own sands.
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