Kiron controlled his expression with an effort. He had been trying to get Aket-ten alone ever since they all arrived here in Sanctuary, but one thing and another had always interfered with his plans. But it seemed that she had some plans of her own—
“Let me just leave word—” he said, because the one rule he had imposed on all of them, himself included, was to never fly off dragonback without first telling someone where you were going. If he or Avatre or both had been hurt by that wild green dragon back when he’d first found the new city, at least someone would have known the general direction to go looking.
That done, he hurried for the pens, to discover that Aket-ten was already in the saddle and waiting, with Re-eth-ke perched on the wall, fanning her silver-edged blue wings while Avatre watched them both with no sign of hostility. His breath caught as Aket-ten turned her head a little; she and her dragon made a wonderful pair. Re-eth-ke’s scales shone the same blue-black as Aket-ten’s hair; Aket-ten’s lithe body moved so easily with Re-eth-ke’s that the two of them might have been a single creature, like the human-horses in Akkadia that Heklatis told tales about. The linen tunic she wore was exactly the same as the boys all wore, but it certainly looked better on her than on any of them. . . .
She turned toward him at that moment, saw him, and grinned and waved. He felt his heart pound a little faster. His feet certainly started to move as if his whole body was suddenly lighter.
And his hands, when he saddled Avatre, seemed to have eyes at the ends of his fingers.
The mere thought of being far away from Sanctuary with only Aket-ten made him feel almost deliriously happy.
“Got your sling?” she called when he was in the saddle at last, and Avatre shuffled her feet impatiently, waiting for him to give her the signal to take to the air.
He nodded, and held up the sling for Aket-ten to see. He didn’t have to ask if she had her bow, it was there, with her arrows, in the quiver at her hip.
But she waited, as a good Jouster should, for him to go up first. He was the wingleader, after all, even if today the wing consisted of two.
Re-eth-ke fell in slightly behind, a position that seemed to take less effort to hold, for the dragon who wasn’t in the lead didn’t have to cut through the air. All he could figure was that air acted like thin water, and the lead dragon cut a wake that the ones behind could ride. He decided that since there were two of them, he would try for a more challenging prey today: wild ox. Ordinarily, he wouldn’t go after one. They were tough, and even Kashet found them a challenge. As a consequence, they hadn’t been hunted much in his territory, so they were plentiful and unafraid. This might be the time to take down one or more. The dragons weren’t hungry yet and could probably be persuaded to cooperate in a joint hunt—
Especially since one of them was being flown by Aket-ten.
“Wild ox!” he shouted to her, over the flapping of the dragon’s wings and the wind in his ears.
She nodded. Her main Gift as a Winged One was that she could speak to animals. She—and to tell the truth, the priests and priestesses in charge of the Fledglings—had thought that a lesser Gift. But if it had not been for her ability, she would never have been able to save Re-eth-ke from mourning to death after the murder of Toreth, whose dragon she had been.
And, thanks to Aket-ten’s abilities, the training of the entire wing had been swift and smooth; much smoother than it would have been had she not been able to explain to the dragons exactly what their riders wanted.
He had a good idea that she was “speaking” to both dragons once he told her the quarry he planned to hunt, and when Avatre looked back over her shoulder at Aket-ten several times, he was sure of it.
“Stooping runs?” she called forward, over the steady whump, whump sound of the dragons’ wings. He nodded. That meant that he would dive in first, trying to stun the quarry with a stone, but not allowing Avatre to close and bind. Aket-ten and Re-eth-ke would follow, with Aket-ten using her bow. Then he would come in again, and this time, if they’d managed to do enough damage, he’d let fly with a second stone and allow Avatre to attack and bind. Meanwhile Aket-ten would be ready to come to his rescue if the ox turned on them.
It was a maneuver they had worked out to use against chariots. They’d never actually had to use it in that manner, but they’d practiced it enough that it should work.
The burning air coming up from the baking desert smelled of dry grass, furnace-hot earth, and a faint hint of animal musk. A herd of oryx saw them and went to shelter under a grove of thorn trees. They only got a glimpse of camels from a distance, as wild goats scattered and fled away into the hills, and a herd of wild asses ducked into a canyon too narrow for dragons to get into. Not that any of those ploys would work against a dragon partnered with a human, but it showed they were used to being hunted from the air now. Which might mean more wild dragons were somewhere about.
Finally, he spotted what he was looking for—a herd of six or seven wild oxen grazing on the tough, sparse grasses in the lee of a hill.
Clamping his legs on Avatre’s saddle, he got a rock in his sling, and sent her into a long, flat dive, with the oxen at the end of it. Just before she reached them, and their heads came up to stare belligerently at him, he whirled the sling and let fly, striking the nearest right between the horns. It staggered and went to its knees, as Avatre pitched up and began working her wings, trading speed for height.
In the end, the kills were a little anticlimactic. With two dragons attacking, rather than one, even a tough wild ox didn’t have much of a chance. The hardest part was pulling Avatre off her kill to help Re-eth-ke with another, and that was the moment where it helped to be hunting while neither of them was hungry. The pull of the chase and the kill combined with Aket-ten’s persuasion overrode the need to eat.
But when both were finally down on their respective kills, Kiron deemed it wise to allow both dragons to stuff themselves. Even so, they could hardly eat more than half of the kill, and he and Aket-ten got the unpleasant but necessary chore of dividing up the remains so that neither dragon was unbalanced nor overburdened with the extra meat.
His original intention had been to leave it in the back of one of the bigger houses while he and Aket-ten got a chance to spend a little time alone together.
But that was before they reached the city.
They came in on an odd tangent that took them over a part of the city where midnight kamiseens had dumped a great deal of sand, half-burying the entrance to the houses, and filling the canyon to a depth that a dragon would find comfortable—
And, in fact, to a depth a dragon was finding comfortable.
The sprawl of scarlet on the pale sand was startling, but not nearly so startling as the four mounds uncovered when she looked up at them and moved her wing. Eggs! There was a nesting dragon here—
As if Aket-ten really did have the Gift of hearing human thought as well as animal, both dragons tilted over and soared back so they could all get a second look.
Since the female didn’t seem at all disturbed by them, Kiron sent Avatre in a little lower this time. He didn’t like what he saw. The female’s ribs were starting to show, and her movements were slower than he liked. She wasn’t in good shape, and when she crouched over her eggs and mantled her wings over them, Aket-ten called out, “She won’t leave them—and her mate’s not bringing her food!”
As the words left Aket-ten’s mouth, he was already sending Avatre back for a third pass, and sawing at the cords holding the ox quarters to Avatre’s back. Luck and timing were both with him; the first quarter landed nearly under the scarlet female’s nose, and the second within easy reach.