notice. Then again, she was being very careful around an unsedated dragon; a little thing like having a dress that was now so transparent you might as well be wearing nothing at all was not going to trouble her.
Whatever she was putting into the dragon’s mind worked. He didn’t even snap at her. When she was out of reach, Kiron wordlessly handed her a towel.
“Now is the point when I ask you what you thought you were accomplishing when you started this, rather than what you were doing,” he said, after a moment, as she dried herself off as best she could. “Since you seem to have worked out how to be the king dragon in a flight. Or queen,” he added, as an afterthought. “I think Ari said the dominant dragon can be male or female.”
She shrugged. “Finding things out. And I have; we need to drop the dose of tala that the swamp dragons get by about a double handful. Mostly though, I found out how we can get swamp dragon eggs without getting the collectors killed. So when your wing has proven itself, we can also raise swamp dragons from the egg for the next lot to fly.” She raised an eyebrow at him. “Think about a wing of dragons who are tame like Avatre who not only can fly in the rain, but like it.”
“Huh.” There was no doubt that it would be an incredible advantage. “So, how do we get eggs without someone getting killed?” he asked.
“The same way we’ve been dosing him.” She stared at him now, waiting. And he could have hit himself for not thinking of it himself.
“Ducks and geese, I suppose?” he hazarded. She nodded. “And when whichever dragon is watching the nest is drugged enough, we move in. I assume you’d be watching the dragon’s mind to make sure the nest watcher wasn’t going to wake up.”
“Don’t take more than two of the four eggs, though,” she warned. “That’s reasonable. Only one in four is going to get past its first year anyway, but you’d better give them two chances at it, or you’ll start depleting the population.”
She went off to her quarters then, to change into something drier. He went to find Lord Khumun to report on what she had learned—though he did not tell Lord Khumun that she had gotten into the pool to groom her subject. He left that part out, saying only that she had established herself as that particular dragon’s superior, using her powers. Then he described how swamp dragon nests could be raided for eggs.
The Lord of the Jousters looked at him askance. “That would be useful knowledge if we wanted swamp dragons,” he said reluctantly. “But—swamp dragons?”
“Which can be flown in the storms?” he countered. “My Lord, look at your current riders! Every day during the magic-made rains they have flown out, and every day have brought back one form of victory or another! And consider that tame swamp dragons could probably be persuaded to fly even during the whole season of Rains!” He surprised himself with his passion. Compared with Avatre, the swamp-dragons were so—
—hmm. Maybe they aren’t. He thought about the intent gaze, the feeling of challenge. Aket-ten was right. It was the tala that made them seem so dull. He said as much.
“What is more, my Lord, though the swamp dragons are smaller, a Jouster on a desert dragon is going to have some difficulty in defending against two attackers.” He saw the puzzlement in Lord Khumun’s eyes, and elaborated. “What if we got enough swamp dragons to outnumber them?”
The gleam in Lord Khumun’s eyes told him that he had won.
When they met at dinner, he told the rest of the boys what had happened, and how Aket-ten had discovered the means to get swamp dragon eggs to augment the desert dragon eggs that they could get from mating Jatel and Orthele. And initially they all had the same reaction as Lord Khumun at the suggestion. But Gan said suddenly, “You know, I believe I have seen some old wall texts in a temple somewhere, all about the first dragon Jousters. I do believe that they used swamp dragons, not desert dragons. So Aket-ten is right; they must be just as smart as the desert ones, they’re just smaller.”
“And if the odds are two-to-one in our favor, it won’t matter how small the dragons are,” Toreth put in quietly.
“No,” said Kiron into the silence. “It won’t, will it?”