Kiron got to his feet again, and moved slowly, very slowly toward Avatre. This was not the time to startle her. She might turn around and lash out at him without knowing who she was striking at.
She glanced back at him briefly, and when the green male made no further move to attack, raised her head a little and turned it so she could watch both of them at the same time, though she was still hissing like a steam vent and kept most of her attention on the other dragon.
Kiron moved up beside her and put his hand on her shoulder. He’d never felt her so hot! She almost scorched his hand. He had the feeling that in this case he was going to be a lot safer on her back than on the ground. But he didn’t want her to crouch; that might give the other dragon a chance to attack. “Avatre,” he said quietly. “Leg.”
Without taking her eyes off the green male, Avatre slowly backed up a pace, then extended her foreleg for him to use as a step to vault up into her saddle. The moment he was in place, she straightened her neck, and still keeping her eyes on the other dragon, began to back up.
The male remained where he was, still looking thoroughly bewildered. Kiron, meanwhile, was losing no time in fishing for his restraining straps; he wanted to be buckled into place and quickly.
He hadn’t quite realized how frightened he’d been—and was!—until he tried to get the straps buckled and discovered that his hands were shaking so much he was having a hard time with that relatively simple task. He fought with the metal and leather, and it felt as if someone had glued all of his fingers together. They just wouldn’t work right—
Come on! he told himself, fiercely, feeling his heart pounding so hard he had to swallow around the pulse in his throat. If she has to fly for it—
But the straps were not cooperating, and neither were his hands. As Avatre reached the mouth of the side canyon, the green male suddenly made up his mind to charge again. And this time, instead of charging back, Avatre leaped for the sky.
And he only had one strap fastened.
With a yell, he grabbed for the front of the saddle and hung on for dear life, wedging his feet into the chest straps and clamping his legs hard against her sides. Forget the reins! She sideslipped and turned in the air with a lurch that sent his stomach where his heart had been, and put his heart in his throat. Fear ran through him like a bolt of lightning as he nearly came out of her saddle.
With tremendous wing surges, she threw herself upward. He clung like a flea on the nose of a racing camel, while she clawed for height. Height was her only hope if this green decided to challenge her after all. The only way that a smaller dragon could win against a larger was to have the height advantage.
But as he dared a glance down—in between trying to wedge himself more firmly into the saddle and trying not to be sick—he saw the green claw the ground, snort, and stare upward at them.
He wasn’t going to follow. Either he wasn’t that hungry, or he didn’t want to have to work that hard for his meal.
A couple of wingbeats later, Kiron saw him retire back into the building where he was making his den. So if he wasn’t going to pursue—time to get Avatre down before he fell out of her saddle!
And Avatre responded to his frantic directions to land on the top of the cliff. It wasn’t the best place in the world to pause, but as his heartbeat sounded in his own ears like the pounding of war drums, he managed to get the saddle straps fastened securely around him and tightened down, and gave her the signal to take to the air again.
This time she made his heart race for an entirely different reason.
Instead of leaping up and using her powerful wings to send her higher in surging jolts, she looked down into the canyon, seemed to make up her mind about something—and pushed off from the cliff.
And fell——and fell—fell almost three stories, then at the last moment before she hit the canyon floor, snapped her wings open just as it seemed as if she was going to hit the sand. If this hadn’t been exactly the kind of maneuver they had practiced to run against the Tian Jousters, he’d have probably dropped dead out of fear. As it was, he found himself yelling involuntarily and once again hanging onto the saddle for dear life just before she turned the drop into a climb.
By the time she was flying high, drifting sedately from one thermal to another on the way back to Sanctuary, he was dripping with sweat, the waistband of his kilt and the roots of his hair absolutely saturated.
If I never have to go through that again, I will be very, very grateful.
He could have been killed. Avatre could have been hurt. It could all have gone horribly, horribly wrong.
Yet as the fear wore off, the exhilaration of what he had just discovered replaced it. Not only had he found Kaleth’s mysterious hidden city, but he had found wild dragons and they had a place where they could incubate any eggs that were laid!
Avatre was still agitated, but not seriously so. She seemed more concerned about him, turning her head to look back at him from time to time as if to reassure herself that he hadn’t come to any harm.
Well, with all that yelling, she had probably thought he’d gotten hurt. He leaned over her shoulder and patted her neck, telling her what a fine, brave lady she had been, and how proud he was of her. After he’d done that for the third time, she finally heaved a great sigh, her sides inflating and deflating under his legs. Then he felt her relaxing, stretching out, lengthening as her muscles let go. She stopped looking back over her shoulder at him, concentrating on the far-off smudge on the horizon that was Sanctuary.
He half expected her to try to land, as usual, in the old communal pen, but to his pleased surprise she spiraled in on her new pen and dropped down lightly and under complete control precisely where she belonged.
He was off her in a moment; and within the space of time that it took to unsaddle her, he realized that except for her emotional agitation, which was mostly fading, she was by no means as tired by her exertions as he had thought she would be. She had just spent an overlong hunt, had faced down an older dragon, and made a fear-charged escape flight, and she wasn’t really breathing heavily. All this hunting for themselves was putting the dragons of Sanctuary into better physical shape than any of the Jousting dragons had ever been.
Which meant—could they actually face down wild dragons on a regular basis? If they could, then two or three could go out when nests were discovered, and hold off the mother if she turned up before an egg was successfully taken.
“Kiron!” Pe-atep called from the door to his pen. “Any luck?”
“The best!” he replied, “Come on, you’ll all want to hear about what we found today!”
NINE
THERE were eight fertile eggs in the hatching pen, claimed by six Altan and two Tian dragon boys, one of whom was Baken. At last, the slave who taught all of them the best way of training young dragons to be ridden had won not only his freedom but his own dragon. Kiron was both amused and bemused to see how the acquisition of his very own egg had changed him. He had gone from a young man who was all business about the beasts he was training, to one just as egg-obsessed as anyone else who had ever been granted the chance to hatch out a tame dragon of his own.
Those eggs came from four different clutches; only half of the eggs had proved to be fertile, and all four clutches had been abandoned before the female in question began incubation. To Kiron’s mind, and to Ari’s, this meant that the females must be former Jousting dragons, who were too inexperienced to know what to do, and whose mothering instincts had not yet fully awakened. Which, in turn, meant that their theories were right. At least some of the Tian Jousting dragons had not gone back to the desert and the hills near Mefis when they fought free of the last of the tala. Two Tian boys were with some curious Bedu their own age watching two more dragons to see if they’d abandon their clutches, too. There were six more would-be Jousters waiting besides those two if all of those eggs proved worth incubating.