But these—these creatures were as clever as temple cats, as keen and beautiful as falcons, as personable as a high-bred and intelligent horse, and as eager for admiration and affection as a hand-raised cheetah. It was quite clear the moment you approached one that he (or she) liked being in your company, and would no more harm you than your favorite hound would.
Every one of the newcomers had a favorite among the dragons; that had begun from the moment the Jousters had come to Sanctuary, and those who had just arrived had simply carried it one step further—for they began wearing little tokens in the dragon’s colors to denote that partiality.
Now that the pens were complete and the priests had done their magic, they all lingered, congregating around the pens of their particular favorites, talking with great enjoyment about new ideas for improving the dragons’ living conditions, while the humans of the wing moved their belongings, at long last, into their shelters. There was a great deal more to move than Kiron would have thought. Somehow, all of them had managed to accumulate enough personal comforts to make life reasonably close to the one they had once enjoyed.
“Perhaps,” said one young priest to another as Kiron hauled in a load of flat cushions, “we ought to build a hatching pen? It would be better to have it before we need it.”
“These dragons aren’t old enough to breed yet,” objected the one he was talking to, chasing away a fly with a whisk, though not the pretty, bleachedhorsehair-and-gilded thing he would have had back in Tia, but an improvised switch made of frayed palm fiber. “I don’t think any of them except Kashet is. What would you hatch?” Still, he looked interested. And this was very new, this interest in dragons in general, as well as partiality to particular ones.
“Wild eggs,” said a third decisively—this one bearing the hawk pectoral of a Haras priest. “It’ll be nesting time soon, and if you get an egg before the mother starts incubating them, you can move it safely. Steal them the way my mother stole wild goose eggs, and bring them here to hatch. Sling it between two camels or something, so you don’t addle it while moving it.”
Ari was passing by at that moment with his bedding, and laughed. His dark eyes crinkled at the corners with amusement. “You’ve never seen a nesting she-dragon, have you? Even if she isn’t incubating, she’s guarding, and it’d be worth your—”
Then he stopped, and Haraket, who was carrying another load just behind him, nearly ran into him. He had a most peculiar look on his face, and Kiron tossed what he was carrying into his shelter hastily and went to join the discussion.
“What are you thinking?” he demanded of Ari, before Haraket could ask what was wrong. “I know that look! You’ve thought of something!”
“That we’ve got forty or fifty inexperienced she-dragons out there right now,” said Ari, staring off into the hard blue sky as if he could conjure a dragon out of it. “That instinct will tell them how to mate, but not what to do afterward. Remember how you got Avatre’s egg so easily away from her mother? I don’t know that the she-dragons out there will be much different. So I’m thinking that we’ll have dragons laying eggs in the wrong places, or in more than one nest, or just laying them and going off without knowing they have to incubate or guard. And some of those eggs will be laid near enough to Sanctuary to retrieve them. I can’t see a reason to let good, fertile eggs go to waste.”
“And we have eight or ten dragon boys right now who would give their privates for a dragon of their own,” said Haraket, nodding. “Tell ’em they’ve got to go retrieve an egg a couple days away from here? That’s nothing! They’ll bring it back on their own backs if they have to!”
“I’d go back to Mefis for a dragon egg,” said Baken, coming into the conversation, his voice raw with longing. “I’d do it barefoot and in a loincloth.”
“You shouldn’t have to go that far,” Kiron replied, and when the others looked him, he grinned. Oh, he’d seen the envious looks from the Tian dragon boys, every one of them thinking: “If I’d only had an egg, I could have an Avatre now.” They’d seen enough of Kashet, and worked enough with the young ones that were about as “tame” as a wild-caught falcon to have gotten the fever for themselves. “Look, when the tala ran out, you had all those dragons loose on the border of Alta, and I do think that most of them didn’t go back to the hills beyond Mefis. For one thing, the pickings in the swamps are better, though they would only hunt there, not den up. For another, if they tried to go back, the other dragons would drive them out. The wild ones have established groups and territories, and the Tian dragons would have been nothing more than clumsy interlopers.”
Ari nodded his approval of Kiron’s assessment. “Oh, a few of them would get accepted, but the rest would be driven out—and of course, some of them wouldn’t have bothered to try and go back since there would be good hunting here, and none of them are afraid of humans. That means they’re forming wild wings of their own, and making new territories all over this desert. In fact, I think I’ve been seeing some of them in the distance. I just didn’t think about it, because as long as they didn’t bother me, they didn’t really matter.”
“I believe I have, too,” Ari replied thoughtfully. “But I’ve been so busy hunting I hadn’t paid a lot of attention to the wild dragons in the distance.”
“I know I have,” said Menet-ka, quietly, from behind Kiron. “There’s a natural hot spring in my hunting area, and there’s a whole—flock? herd?—a group of them, anyway, that I see there most mornings. They sleep around it at night. I know they’re Jousting dragons, because they let me get pretty close before they fly off.”
Baken’s eyes lit up. “Females?” he asked eagerly.
“At least four. And they’re all breeding age.” Menet-ka chuckled. “They left us alone, I don’t know whether it’s because I’m with Bethlan, or because Bethlan is too young to be considered a rival.”
“I think I know where there’s at least one or two,” Kiron said slowly. “I think I’ll go look; I have to go there anyway to hunt tomorrow. It’s where the mountains meet the desert.”
“Then I think we should construct a hatching pen,” said the young priest firmly. “We haven’t the need to hurry, the way we did to work on these pens so we could all move to better quarters, and it won’t take all that long to do a single pen.”
“We’ll help!” replied Baken. Then he hesitated, and looked at Kiron. “That is, if—”
A memory flashed through Kiron’s mind, of how Baken had made friendly overtures to him despite being given very unfriendly treatment on Kiron’s part. How Baken had inadvertently been the one who had taught him what he needed to know to train Avatre. Without Baken, he probably would never have escaped successfully with her.