“Yes, sir, Jouster Kiron, sir,” said the dragon boy, bobbing his head awkwardly, and trundled a barrow up to the butcher.
No, chores didn’t stop. Dragons were whining for their breakfast. And today there was one more than there had been yesterday.
A good omen.
Just before the rains ended, there were eight new dragonets in the pens. All of the eggs had hatched successfully. Menet-ka’s female was the indigo-purple, Orest ended up with a brilliant blue male the color of a beetle’s wings. Kalen got a brown-and-gold female, Pe-atep a scarlet-and-sand male. Gan found himself with a solid green male, Oset-re with a coppery female shading to red. Huras the baker’s son got the biggest and most striking dragonet of all, a blue-to-purple-to-scarlet female that weighed almost twice as much on hatching as the others—Jousters were still coming to have a look at her, for she was a real beauty, and no Altan had ever seen such a dragonet before. And Toreth got the quietest, another female, a blue-black shading to silver-blue, who, if she was not the largest or the most brightly colored, already showed a striking level of intelligence.
All of them were demanding. All of them were constantly hungry. Kiron was getting a good idea of how lucky he had been to get Avatre, who had been quiet and good compared to this lot. They certainly kept their “mothers” on the run.
Now the boys were finding out exactly how much work it was going to be to raise a dragonet.
There was not one complaint out of the lot of them. Not even a whisper of a complaint. Not even from Orest, who was now so busy that all of his “outside” friends never saw him anymore, unless they came to the compound—and even then, they found themselves playing a poor second to Orest’s beloved Wastet. Orest was as utterly besotted as Kiron had been, and it was his friends who were doing the complaining that Orest was “not amusing anymore” and “had no time for gossip.”
Toreth might have missed this new maturity, but his twin Kaleth—without the preoccupation of a dragonet—did not. So after the first moon, with no sign of lapsing on Orest’s part, not even when he was so tired by the time the sun went down that he was staggering, Orest became the last of Kiron’s Wing to be taken in and made privy to Toreth’s plans for the future.
For by then, the first growth spurt was over; with Avatre’s history in mind, and comparing all the dragonets, Kiron had the notion that this was the point where the first “failures” generally occurred in the wild. If parents couldn’t manage to bring enough to satisfy all of the dragonets during the point where they were the most vulnerable and needed one parent with them constantly, it would be the smallest and the youngest who failed to compete for food and died. That was perhaps why there had been so much whining and begging in the first moon—although they were not sharing the same nest, they could hear each other, and every time one started begging, it would set the rest off. It was competition to live, competition for the next mouthful, because things might thin out at any moment, and the dragonet that got the most food now was that much closer to making it to fledging.
Now, though, they all had put on enough weight that they had a small reserve, and the constant begging eased off, much to the relief of their riders and all those who had to come anywhere near the pens.
All nine human members of the wing gathered in Avatre’s pen—Avatre regarded them with a sleepy, indulgent gaze, too old now to be disturbed by voices and lamplight if she chose to sleep. They had discovered that although the rains were over, it was still necessary to keep the awnings up over the pens after dark, for every night, a great storm would sweep across the city, coming from the sea, speeding southward and growing in strength as it moved. These, Kiron had to presume, were the out-of-season storms that had so crippled the Tian Jousters; the Magi had, predictably, not troubled themselves to warn the Jousters of the little fact that the storms would be continuing after dark. It was just a good thing that everyone had felt the storms building and had rushed out to cover the pens before much rain came down. They