Mercedes Lackey - Alta

“And then, the bigger the dragon gets, the more it eats. And you have to clean up her messes, too, because you don’t want anyone else in the pen until she’s bonded to you! You don’t even like to clean out the cat’s sand pan, so how do you think you’d manage with a dragon?”

“All right!” she said forcefully, hot anger making her flush, her queasiness forgotten. “You’ve made your point! But I still know more about dragons than you,” she added, glaring at her brother.

“Girls,” Orest muttered under his breath to Kiron. Kiron just nodded slightly. “She is just not going to give it up,” Orest added, with a resentful glance at his sister.

Kiron nodded again. He remembered enough about his sisters to be on Orest’s side this time. Girls just got onto a fellow and wouldn’t let him alone if they got an advantage over him. He needed to distract Aket-ten, or she was just going to keep on baiting Orest.

“All right, then, since you’ve been reading all morning,” Kiron said, deciding to pacify her and learn something at the same time. “I know about the Tian dragons, tell me about the Altan ones. Where are they trapped?”

“Well.” Aket-ten bounced a little in her seat, once again looking very well pleased with herself. “You know that dragons need heat to hatch their eggs. We have two kinds of dragons, actually; we have some that use the hot sand in the desert, like yours do, and we have a smaller kind that makes a big mound of rotting plants the way the crocodiles do to bury their eggs in. Those are the swamp dragons. They’re easier to trap, so they’re the ones we have the most of, but we have some desert dragons too. In fact, we have a couple of Tian dragons that lost their riders and that we managed to catch. Both of those are female, and when the Jousters want a wild desert dragon, they take one of those two females and stake her out at the edge of the desert and wait for another one to find her. A female will come to fight her, a male will come to mate with her.”

“So the smart thing would be to take both of those females out and let them mate,” Kiron mused. “You wouldn’t have the risk of losing a mating pair, and you might even be able to trap the male after the mating is over. What about taking swamp dragon eggs, though, from wild nests?”

“You’d have to drive off the mother somehow, and instead of sand, you’d have to come up with a place that was hot and damp to incubate the eggs,” Orest said. “That wouldn’t be hard, though; there are a lots and lots of hot springs around here, or you could use rotting reeds like the dragons do themselves. It’s taking the eggs that would be difficult. Even if you took a lot of people, trying to drive a mother dragon off her eggs could get them killed. A trapped dragon is bad; a mother protecting a nest is ten times worse.

The swamp dragons may be smaller, but they aren’t that much smaller.” He scratched his head in perplexity. “I don’t know; maybe at night, when they’re torpid?”

“Trying to do it at night would be worse,” put in Aket-ten. “At night, both parents come and lay on the nest. They might be torpid, but there would be two of them. And it would be in the dark, too, when the river horses come out to feed, and the crocodiles, too. If the dragons didn’t get you—” She shivered.

Kiron was just grateful that it wasn’t his problem. “If I was going to choose, I’d stake out those females,” he said. “The one mating I saw was in the sky, but I bet they don’t always mate that way.”

“Was that Avatre’s parents?” Orest asked. “I know you told us that you’d taken an egg from one of the Jousting dragons. What happened?”

“Partly it was not enough tala in their food, and partly it was stupidity from the dragon boys and the Jousters both,” he said with scorn. “Nobody bothered to notice that they were—” he glanced at Aket-ten and modified the rather coarse language he had been going to use. “—getting interested. Finally during a practice, everything just went bad at once. The Jousters were new and kept missing strokes, and finally when one connected, because the female chose that moment to turn the practice into a mating flight, the male’s rider hit wrong. He knocked the female’s rider out of his saddle, and another Jouster, Kashet’s rider, caught him before he hit the ground and got killed. Meanwhile the female was flying free now, and the male’s rider lost control and they went into a full mating flight. He couldn’t get control of his dragon until the mating was over, and when the female tried to fly off to the hills, Kashet and his rider managed to herd her back.”

That was a very dry version of the whole incident, that had been both tremendously exciting and terrifying at the same time. If he closed his eyes, he could still see the horrifying plunge of the injured Jouster out of his saddle, and the incredible dive that Kashet made to catch him, saving him from a certain death.

“I wouldn’t have wanted to be the male’s rider,” Orest muttered, his eyes round.

“You wouldn’t have wanted to be either of them,” Kiron corrected. “The female’s rider almost died anyway; would have, if there hadn’t been a Healer there quick. And by the time it was over, both of them had their dragons taken away and given to other Jousters. They were sent back down to train all over again. The Overseer was very angry, and so was the General in charge of the Jousters.”

“Glory!” Orest exclaimed, seriously impressed now. “But how did you get the egg?”

“Because after she was mated, she got aggressive and her dragon boy actually walked out rather than tend her.” Once again, Kiron allowed his voice to drip with scorn. “I’ll tell you the truth, he was an idiot. He was at fault and in trouble in the first place for letting her go without a full tala ration and for not noticing she’d come into season. Then he decided she was trying to kill him when all that was really wrong was that she was hungry. He got so hysterical over it that he had every other dragon boy in the compound standing around him by the time he walked out. The Overseer was so angry he swore he’d see to it that the boy never got an apprenticeship with anyone, but he’d made the others so frightened before he was done that nobody wanted to take her. So I said I would, as long as they took all my other duties off my hands, and it turned out that the fool had been short-feeding her all along; if he didn’t feel like carrying as much food as she wanted, he just didn’t, and let her go hungry. So she wasn’t getting enough food or enough tala. As soon as she realized that I was going to haul enough food that she could eat until she popped if that was what she wanted, she stopped being aggressive, and the tala took care of the rest. I figured, so what if she got fat? She wasn’t going to get a rider until she’d laid those eggs, and while they were waiting for that, they weren’t going to get a new dragon boy for her either. Or, at least, not until I’d civilized her again. So I knew when she’d laid the eggs, and I stole the first one. There was an empty pen next to Kashet—they liked to keep dragons separated by empty pens before they started getting so many—so that was where I put the egg, and you know the rest.”

“That was smart,” Aket-ten said admiringly.

He shrugged. “I had a lot of time to think about what I would do if I got the chance.”

“Well, we won’t have to do all of that,” Orest said with relief.

For the first time since he came here, he had a moment of resentment. “We won’t have to do all of that” didn’t even begin to cover all of the backbreaking work he had put into caring for the breeding dragon, Ari’s Kashet, and Avatre. Orest was soft—and spoiled. A nice boy, who probably didn’t know he was spoiled, but—spoiled. He had never been beaten, never gone hungry, never been worked so hard he staggered with fatigue. You haven’t got the first idea of what I went through, he thought, as Orest and his sister argued about whether it would be better to have swamp dragons or desert dragons. He thought about the long process of getting Avatre’s mother to accept him; about watching her anxiously for the first of the eggs to appear, then agonizing over whether it would be better to take the first-laid, or the last-laid. The night he stole the egg was still vivid in his mind: slipping into the pen in the darkness, trundling the egg in a barrow down the corridor and praying that no one would happen to come along just then, and that no hungry ghosts would choose that moment to appear.