Joust (36 page)

Well, that wasn’t what he needed the “porridge” for, and the butchers weren’t curious enough to notice what he loaded his barrow with. They were too busy listening to the rain and thunder outside, and talking about it in nervous voices. Under any other circumstances, he’d have stayed to listen.

But not today.

He fed Kashet to satiation, while the rain drummed on the canvas awning; it didn’t take long, the dragon wanted to go back into his wallow and didn’t dawdle over his food. Kashet yawned and dug himself back into his hot sand when he was done, and was asleep in moments. Vetch quickly checked the corridor for the presence of anyone else before he whisked the barrow out of Kashet’s pen through the cold rain, and into the one next door.

And found himself looking at a limp and exhausted scarlet dragonet, sprawled on the sand, limbs and damp wings going in all directions in an awkward mirror of Kashet’s pose. The damp wings were half under the poor thing, and at his entrance, the dragonet looked up at him and
meeped
pathetically. It could barely raise its rounded, big-eyed head on its long neck; the bronzy-gold and scarlet head wavered back and forth like a heavy flower on a slender stalk, the huge old-bronze eyes barely open, as if the lids were too heavy to lift. To either side, the halves of the egg lay, red-veined on the inside, with a membrane still clinging to them.

Vetch parked the barrow under the awning and floundered out into the sand to the dragonet’s side. It was bigger than he was, and heavier—twice his size and weighing about as much as a young child, he thought, though it was hard to tell for certain. It was going to get a lot bigger before it was finished growing, though. He dug a trench in the hot sand and helped it to slide in, tucking the clumsy, weak limbs into comfortable positions, and spreading the wings out to dry on the surface.

It sighed, as it lowered its head down onto its foreclaws; already the anxiety it had shown when it realized that it was alone was ebbing. It was going to be a crimson red, like both its parents, but unlike Coresan, the extremities were going to be some shade of gold or bronze; until it got a little older, its delicate skin was going to tear and bruise easily if he wasn’t careful with it. Right now, the skin was as delicate as his own—more so, in places—and soft as the thinnest lambskin. He petted the dragonet’s head and neck for a moment, marveling at the softness of the skin. Then he left the dragonet to bask in the heat and rest from the effort of hatching, heaped a bucket with the chopped meat, and returned to its side.

It opened its eyes when he returned to it, and its nostrils twitched as it caught the scent of the meat. Its head wavered up; the poor thing looked so weak! But the mouth opened, and the thin hiss that emerged was anything but weak, and had a great deal of
demand
in it. The mouth gaped wide. It had a formidable set of teeth already, no surprise in such a carnivore. Open-mouthed, it hissed again, and whined at him, red tongue flicking out in entreaty.

He laughed. “All right, baby—don’t be impatient!” he whispered, and dropped a piece the size of his palm in the open mouth.

He’d worried about whether the dragonet would be difficult to feed—in the next several minutes, he knew that this, at least, was not going to be a problem. The little one snapped its jaws shut on the meat and swallowed; he watched the lump going down its throat with remarkable speed. Then the jaws opened up again.

They quickly fell into a rhythm. The baby gaped, he dropped meat and bone in, the jaws snapped shut and the throat worked, and the mouth gaped. It was so easy to feed the little one that literally anyone could have done it. In fact, before it was sated, it had eaten nearly its own weight in meat! It ate until its belly was round, the skin tight, and Vetch could not imagine how it could cram another morsel in.

That was when it stopped; it closed its mouth and
looked
at him, really looked at him for the first time since it had hatched. The big, dark eyes seemed all pupil—he could see that they weren’t, though, that the iris was simply so dark a color that it was nearly black, but the huge, dark eyes seemed to draw him in and hold him. He couldn’t look away, and didn’t want to, for those eyes seemed to him to be the most wonderful things he had ever gazed into. And then it sighed, laid its head in his lap with complete and utter trust, and closed its eyes and went immediately to sleep, without a care or a worry in the world.

He was here, and he was now the center of the dragonet’s world. So long as he was here, there could be nothing wrong.

He thought his heart was going to melt. A pent-up flood of emotion threatened to overwhelm him; he squeezed his eyes shut to keep from crying, and just whispered tender nonsense into the ruby and bronze shells that were the dragonet’s ears, while he stroked the soft skin of the head and neck with a hand that shook.

But he couldn’t hold the tears back for very long; finally they started, and he wept silently, anger and grief that he had held in for so very long, mingling together with joy and relief in those tears, and nothing left to hold them back.

How long he cried, he couldn’t have told. He cried until his eyes were sore, his nose clogged, his belly sore from sobbing. He cried until his throat was raw and scratchy, crying for all he’d lost, and all he could lose now, crying that his mother and father weren’t here to see him, in his first moment of triumph since the Tians came.

It couldn’t have been long, or he’d have heard Kashet hissing for his supper. Certainly it wasn’t as long as it felt.

But finally, even he ran out of tears. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand, careful not to get sand in them, and sniffed.

He felt odd. Felt as if he had cried something
out
of himself, and now there was just a hollow where it had been.

“Can you see me, Father?” he whispered into the rain, into the vast space between himself and the Summer Country. “Can you see what I’ve done? Isn’t this baby a beauty, the most wonderful thing you’ve ever seen?”

The dragonet stirred a little in sleep, and hissed softly.

Carefully, so as not to wake it, he began to stroke the head and ears, and as he petted the delicate skin of the brows, he knew that his dragonet was a female, for it did not have the bumps beneath the skin that would eventually form into a pair of skin-covered “horns” that marked the males.

“What shall I call you, baby?” he murmured to it. This wasn’t a question he took lightly. Words had power, and names were the most powerful of all words. Words where what the gods used to shape the world, and whatever he named this little dragonet would shape her.

Then it came to him; from her colors, shading from yellow on her belly, through the scarlet of her body, to a deep plum along her spine and at the end of her tail while her ears and muzzle went to that brazen-gold. Like the colors of a sunrise—

“Avatre,” he murmured. “Fire of the dawn. I name you for that.”

She stirred in her sleep and pushed her forehead against his stomach, as though in approval. Avatre it was.

“Avatre,” he sighed with content, and with rain drumming on the canvas above them, caressed the head that rested so trustingly in his lap.

Now for the next hurdles. Keeping her presence secret—and
keeping
her. . . .

But for now—now it was enough to cradle her, and listen to her breathing, softly, in the rain.

He had to feed Kashet again, eventually, of course. But the rain was still coming down, and he knew that not even Ari would come out of his quarters in this out-of-season downpour. So tonight, well, tonight he would
not
be sleeping in Kashet’s pen.

He eased the baby’s head off his lap and she woke and looked at him, then yawned, her tongue waggling comically before she shut her mouth. She stared at him for a moment, then made a small noise that he had no difficulty in interpreting as a demand.

He had to chuckle at that. Fortunately, there was enough left in his barrow to line her belly, if not fill it; enough to hold her while he went to fetch more food for her and for Kashet. Then it was the same routine again, except that already she was getting the idea that biting down on the hand that was feeding her was not going to get the meat pieces to arrive any sooner, and in fact caused a delay in delivery as the owner of the hand made funny sounds and waggled the hand in the air. This was entertaining, perhaps, but did nothing for a hungry belly. So she quickly learned to be gentle, and learned that when she sucked at the hand instead of clamping down on it, sometimes it would bring a cargo of delicious wet stuff that lubricated the throat and tongue and tasted sublime.

The “wet stuff,” of course, consisted of bits of the livers, hearts, and lungs; prime treats for every dragon because of their rich blood-content, but difficult to maneuver once they were cut up unless the dragonet was cooperating. Avatre was a fast learner, even fresh out of the egg as she was, and when he was done he hardly needed to wash his hands, for she had wrapped her tongue around them and sucked on them until every bit of blood and juice she could get had gone down that voracious little throat.

She fell asleep again immediately, and now that her wings were dry, he tucked them in against her body and heaped sand around her to keep her warm and supported. Then he took his barrow back to the butchery.

But just as he was leaving the butchery, he overheard something that made him pause for a moment.

“—witchery!” one of the butchers was saying, darkly. “Altan witchery! The Haras priest Urkat-re told me himself; he and the other Haras priests had all they could do to hold the storm back enough that the dragons could land without killing themselves and their Jousters!”

“I don’t much like the sound of that,” one of the others murmured uneasily. “The sea witches have never been able to reach so far before. . . .”

“Because they never tried to do so on the wings of a storm before.”

Vetch jumped; that was Haraket’s voice!

“Overseer, have you heard anything more than that?” asked the first butcher humbly.

“No. You seem to have gotten all the tidings there are to hear, Tho-teret. But I don’t doubt you, nor do I think what you’ve said is mere idle speculation. I have never seen a storm like that in growing season, and since the Altan sea witches’ powers are of the wind and water, it stands to reason that they called it up, all out of season.” Haraket seemed very sure of himself, and Vetch saw no reason to doubt him. “It makes every sense, too, when you think what their strategy must be. They have fewer dragons and less-experienced Jousters than we; they can no longer meet us man-to-man. So they must get us out of the sky and thin our numbers somehow. What better way than to smash our dragons to earth with an unnatural storm?”

Vetch nodded to himself; it made perfect sense. Doubtless the sea witches who had conjured the tempest were even now lying spent within the walls of their temples, and would not be able to move from their couches for days or weeks—but the damage had been done.

“And the damage has been done,” Haraket said, in an uncanny echo of Vetch’s own thoughts. “No one was killed, thanks only to the grace of Haras and the skill of
our
priests, but there are torn wing webs and sprained muscles in dragons all over the compound. A dozen will not fly without days of rest, and by then, the witches will be ready to send another storm against us.”

“They will?” gasped a butcher.

“Of course they will! It is by far the most effective weapon they have now!” Haraket said, with scorn for the man’s obtuseness. “They will hardly abandon it! And I fear
we
will now have to cease our scouting forays over their land; if a dragon is driven to earth over their territory—”

He did not need to elaborate. Even Vetch knew what would become of a Tian Jouster caught by Altan foot soldiers on the ground.

He moved off silently, using the door to the barrow storage room to make his exit. At the moment, he had rather that Haraket did not know what he had overheard.

He couldn’t but help feel some elation; among other things, if Haraket was right, Ari stood at far less risk of being hurt or killed now in the course of his duties.
Kashet
was bigger and stronger than any other dragon in the compound, now, and he had always been a better and more skilled flyer; it would take more than a witch-conjured storm to hurt him. And if the Altans were going to use storms against dragons, they must have pulled their own Jousters back so as to avoid harming them accidentally. Which meant that Ari would not be facing anyone in a Joust until the Dry came, and not even the most powerful of witches could conjure up a storm.

He trotted back to his pens with the rain drumming on his wet hair; he checked on Avatre, but saw she was sleeping as soundly as a dragon could—which was very soundly indeed. So just in case Ari turned up, he curled up on his pallet in the unseasonable gloom.