The mere thought of that made her grit her teeth. Not that she didn’t want a family, but . . .
I’m more than that.
And before she did any settling with anyone, especially Kiron, she wanted him to know that, too.
But as the wind stirred her hair and cooled her forehead, and she looked up at Nofret and her increasingly restless dragon, she knew that this couldn’t only be done because she wanted it, nor only for her reasons. The-on lifted wings of deep purple shading to scarlet at the tips, and folded them again, and looked down at her. And her instincts told her there were good reasons for other girls and young women to do this—even if she didn’t know what they were yet.
But maybe those reasons will be as different as every girl who raises a dragon.
She felt it then, the certainty. “I’ll need that overseer,” she said then. “And the priests to make sure the sands are kept hot. And some of the old dragon hunters to help me. And a cold room and some butchers and a few servants to tend the rooms, and—”
Nofret laughed. “And, and, and!” she said. “The records for dragon keeping are extensive and exact, I believe my vizier can puzzle out what you will need. For how many?”
“Nine, including me and Peri,” she replied. Her mind was already racing. It was not too late in the season to find eggs yet to hatch, and not too late to find nests of young dragons whose parents did not know how to tend them. She would, in fact, look for those first. Nofret had shown the way there with The-on and her siblings; accustom a baby to a human as its parent young enough and it had no trouble in accepting that human, indeed, all humans.
“And I will request to Kiron that he send me one of his young and inexperienced Jousters to be our courier . . . hmm . . .” Nofret’s eyes grew distant for a moment. “If we are to have more than just four dragons here, it would be no bad thing to have more than one courier. Two, at least. No, four. Two for between here and Aerie and two for between here and Sanctuary, one at each end. If Kiron is going to start guarding the trade routes, we will need to speak with him very much more often.”
“That is something we can do!” Aket-ten said instantly, glad of the opening for one of her ideas. “We females can fly courier, and since we are lighter than the men, we can probably fly faster.”
Nofret looked down at her, and at that moment, Aket-ten saw the Great Queen, and not her friend. “That will be for the future, then. Keep thinking, Aket-ten,” the Great Queen said. “The more reasons you can make, the easier it will be for me to defend your existence. Now, my dragon is getting restless, and so am I. Go and consult with my vizier and make your lists. And think of how you are going to tell Kiron that if he wishes to see you, it will be he who must come to you from now on. Because no matter how you tell him . . . he is not going to like being told.”
Aket-ten sighed, and shielded her eyes as The-on took to the skies. Nofret was right.
That was going to be one of the hardest things she was going to have to do.
The easiest thing turned out to be finding the dragons themselves.
Two seasons on, and the freed dragons of Tia often still could not manage to grasp how to properly tend a nest full of babies. This was not so bad for the young ones when one of the parents was a fully wild dragon, but when both were former Jousting dragons . . .
Over the course of the next few days, Aket-ten went back to all those places where she had found dragon nests and marked them, hoping to find eggs that had been abandoned.
Now she looked for baby dragons that were not prospering.
It turned out that it was not at all difficult to find them. Baby dragons that were not being fed were hungry, and hungry baby dragons cried.
Now, occasionally a dragon who had laid infertile eggs would adopt the younglings; not wishing to find herself and her crew of carters staring into the face of an angry mother, Aket-ten spent time at each nest, waiting to see if the mother returned with adequate prey, or if she would fail to return at all. Once, where there had been two nests relatively close together, the gold dragon that Aket-ten remembered at the second abandoned the eggs that were clearly not going to hatch and took over the babies in the first nest. But all too often it appeared that not all of the baby dragons were going to survive being raised by indifferent or inexperienced mothers.
This was not unlike the experience that falconers had, when stealing young hawks. A good falconer would find a nest where one or two of the chicks was not thriving and take the strongest, leaving the other one or two that were left to enjoy the good feeding that the largest and greediest had been getting all for himself.
However, given the size and strength of even the smallest of young dragons, Aket-ten took the opposite approach. She and her wild-animal hunters took the weakest.
They waited until the mother and father flew off for the first of the morning hunts, then moved in. And the first thing that they did was to stuff all the babies in the nest with meat that they had brought with them. The babies were still too young to recognize a human as anything other than another moving object in their world, and when that moving object slid meat down their throats . . .
When the babies were full, they stopped whining and went almost immediately to sleep. That made extracting one from the nest trivially easy. Two strong men could carry one in a sling, and the rocking motion seemed to be soothing for them. Putting the sling between two camels for the trip back to Mefis proved to be just as soothing. Unlike captured fledglings, these babies were perfectly content to sleep in their swinging cradle and be fed when they woke and whined. Within seven days, Aket-ten had as many young dragons, and she took care to point out to her animal hunters how she had located these babies. There had to be other nests out there, with ill-tended babies. Kiron had complained that he had more would-be Jousters waiting than he had eggs or babies to give them. The Great Queen had observed that Aket-ten would incur resentment for “taking” dragons that “should” have gone to men.
Well, no one would now be able to say she had not done her best to help her “rivals.”
Besides . . . she couldn’t bear the thought of those beautiful little creatures slowly starving to death. . . .
When Nofret had approved the notion of the “Queen’s Jousters,” Aket-ten had hoped that young women would be as eager to volunteer for such a thing as the young men were. There never seemed to be any shortage of young women wishing to be priestesses, for instance, and that was equally demanding work. . . .
Not that she was going to take just anyone, but—
“I don’t understand this,” she said forlornly, as Peri helped her to feed the babies, which she had housed all together in one pen for ease in care. “Why aren’t there more people who want to train as Jousters?”
“More girls, you mean,” Peri said shrewdly. “Well that’s easy enough. How is a girl going to find a good husband if she’s riding around on a dragon?”
Aket-ten stared at her, dumbfounded. “You jest, yes?”
But Peri shook her head. “You have not spent enough time around ordinary people, Aket-ten,” she said frankly. “Ordinary girls anyway. It seems . . . even among us when we were serfs, that was what we talked about. It was what our mothers and grandmothers talked about. It was all anyone ever talked about—”
“Not among the Winged Ones!” Aket-ten protested.
“Then perhaps you are looking in the wrong place,” the girl said shrewdly. “Perhaps if you looked among the priestesses—”
Aket-ten blinked. That simply had not occurred to her. But—
But among the priestesses, her power was considered minor, uninteresting, and . . . to be honest . . . not at all useful. To be able to speak into the mind of an animal? To what purpose? Far more useful and cherished were those who could speak to another priestess at a distance, to see at a distance or the future or the past. To speak with spirits—that was another sought-for power. Most of all, to be a Mouth of the Gods . . .