Unfortunately, it had also left her without a job. She had no lands to restore, and no real skill other than child tending, something almost any slave could do. Then she had heard of Aket-ten’s search for someone to take on a dragonet, and she had answered it.
There was a complication, of course. There always was. The woman herself was pretty well determined that Peri would be married to her son, when and if she found him. But Aket-ten was confident that the young man was probably dead, and even if he wasn’t, he’d probably found some other young woman to marry. Peri herself seemed attached to the idea only insofar as it made her putative mother-in-law happy to plan for it. In the meantime, though, she was keeping the nature of her new “job” a secret from her friend, because evidently this woman was one of those who had set ideas about one’s place in the world—and a peasant girl had no place in the world of the Jousters, to her way of thinking.
Peri had moved into the pen where Aket-ten had installed the egg, living as any young Jouster did, but enjoying much better living conditions than the Jousters at Aerie. Granted, she had no servants, but as a farm girl she was used to that, and tending to her egg and learning about dragons from Aket-ten was scarcely an onerous job. Re-eth-ke had no objections to taking up a strange rider if Aket-ten asked it of her, and Peri’s riding lessons had been going very well.
There had been tapping and movement in the egg over the last couple of days, and Re-eth-ke was showing mild interest in it. If Aket-ten was any judge of things, today would be the day that the egg hatched. Aket-ten perched on the wall of Peri’s pen, looking down at girl and egg with Re-eth-ke craning her neck and head up beside her—though Re-eth-ke was far more interested in Aket-ten’s idle brow and chin scratches than in what was happening down on the sand. The egg was moving visibly.
It would not be long now, and Aket-ten waited to see if the girl was going to live up to her hopes.
Peri-en-westet waited beside her egg—
her egg!
—with a hammer in one hand, watching and listening as Aket-ten had taught her. Though she looked calm, inside she was anything but. As she listened to the tapping and waited for the baby dragon inside to pick the one spot it would try to break through, it seemed to her as if her entire life had been working toward this moment.
Not that such a thing had ever entered her mind before she embarked on this venture. Far from it. She had always thought that she would follow the path every woman in her family had ever followed, that of a simple farmer’s wife. Or, well, “always” as well as any small child understood the word. She had never really considered any other life, and truly, even now she would have been content with that path. But the war, which had changed so much for so many people, had destroyed any hope of pursuing the same life as her forebears.
In fact, it had destroyed her family altogether.
But not in the usual manner . . .
No, unlike Letis-hanet, soldiers had not overrun Peri’s village. Her family had not been slaughtered, nor taken away as serfs for some trumped-up charge. In fact, in a way, the invaders had been a blessing, for they had, at least, fed her and cared for her when they found her.
No, Peri’s family had fallen to the floods that had followed those terrible Magi-wrought rains. Upstream of their village, the waters of Great Mother River had risen, and kept rising, and kept rising, all in a single night while the villagers slept unaware until, just before dawn, disaster struck.
The wall of water that engulfed the village had melted the mud houses as if they had been children’s dirt forts. The unlucky had perished there, smothered by their own walls. And had Peri not been sleeping on the roof of the family home to escape the bickering of her siblings, who insisted on ending every day with a quarrel, she would have been one of them.
As it was, she woke in a panic, fighting her way out of sleep and up to the surface at the same time, by sheer good fortune catching hold of what had been someone’s roof timber. She clutched at that piece of wood with all her strength as she was whirled away under storm-racked skies, until she was fished out, nearly insensible, along with five or six others from her village. The fact that it was soldiers of Tia, the enemy, that fished her out made no real impression on her, not even when they turned her over to the Royal Slave-master to begin her life as a serf.
And even then, that life was nothing near so onerous as that of others. She had been numb and sunk in grieving for some time, so she hadn’t really paid much attention to her surroundings, but her master had not been unkind. In fact, her master was scarcely seen at all, and his cook, to whom she had been assigned, was taciturn but fair.
Perhaps all that had been due to the fact that there were no lands attached to her. She was too young to tell those who had picked her up where her family farm was, and there was no use hunting for records after the flood had swept through the place. The only other records would have been in the Altan capital, and Tians would hardly be welcome there. So there was no reason for anyone to try to be rid of her to free the property of encumbrances, and every reason to keep her alive and healthy to continue to serve. As others had noted before this, there were laws in place regarding the treatment of slaves, but serfs were war captives, and subject to much less oversight. As a consequence, for the same amount of work that could be got from them, they were much cheaper to keep.
It was in the kitchen that she had encountered Letis-hanet and her daughter Iris, and if ever there was a story of the woe of an Altan family in the hands of the Tians, it was theirs. Though Letis’ husband had never fought against the Altans, he had the misfortune of possessing fine property. A Tian wanted it. And so, spurious accusations were made, soldiers sent—
Letis was understandably less than coherent about what had happened then. All Peri really gathered was that her husband was killed on the spot, Iris was hurt, and the family broken apart, their son going with the house and the rest attached to the farmlands. Then as those lands in turn were parceled out, the remaining members of the family were further separated, leaving only Letis and her feeble-minded daughter together.
Their masters had ranged from careless to cruel until they and the remaining parcel of land they were tied to was bought by Peri’s master. “Absent” was better than “cruel,” at least. The trouble was, what to do with Iris while Letis was at work in the master’s bakery?
That was quickly solved when Iris proved moderately useful in the kitchen and the kitchen garden. Ordered to keep the girl in her charge, Peri had been perfectly happy to do just that, seeing to it that no one teased or tormented her, making sure that when she was given a task she completed it. Letis had been overwhelmingly grateful, and as time went on, the two became friends, then nearly as close as mother and daughter.
That was when Letis had started talking about her son. How he was Peri’s age. How Peri was exactly the sort of person Letis had envisioned as her son’s wife. And from that, it had drifted until the unspoken became the accepted, at least on the part of Letis—that when her son was found and the family reunited, Peri would marry him.
It seemed a harmless enough daydream. Letis had few such dreams to sustain her, and Peri was disinclined to shatter this one.
But then, without warning, at the moment in which victory was confidently expected by their captors—the war ended. The Great King was dead. His advisers were dead. Most of the Tian army was dead. And suddenly, there was a new Great King and a Great Queen, too—and she was Altan. And he ordered the serfs freed, and their lives to be sorted out, with recompense given to them.
Of course, there were thousands upon thousands of them. And it was taking a very long time to sort through records and claims and counterclaims. So while she was waiting for
her
claim to come up through the magistrates, Letis had been given a job that paid well, a place to live, and help for Iris. And Peri had——this!
She heard the tapping suddenly take on a new urgency, and she heard, felt, exactly the place where the dragon was trying to break through. Now she moved, the hammer in her hand tapping firmly, but carefully, against the shell. Hairline cracks started from her point of impact.
Soon, but not soon enough for her rising panic that she wasn’t doing this right, a piece of shell popped off, and a fist-sized golden snout with two flaring nostrils poked out of the hole.
She sat down hard in the sand with a sigh of relief. Now, according to Aket-ten, the baby would just breathe for a while, resting, before going back to hammering its way out of the shell. If she were a mother dragon, she would be licking the shell to weaken it. She couldn’t do that, so she had to weaken it with the hammer.
And before too long, that was what she was doing. Periodically, the baby would stop to rest, and so would she. The baby had begun her attempts—Peri was sure it was a “she”—to emerge in midmorning. It wasn’t until midafternoon that a big piece of shell finally fell away and the gold-green bundle of wet skin tumbled out of the larger half of the egg to land at her feet.
The baby raised her—it lacked the horns, so it
was
a female—head on a neck that seemed too fragile to support it and looked up at Peri with confused golden eyes. She opened her mouth to emit a muted squeak. And Peri fell entirely in love.
Aket-ten watched her protégée do everything exactly right, watched the moment when Peri fell into entirely besotted adoration, and smiled.
Everything was going according to plan.
Once other young women saw Peri—who was
not
a Great Queen, not even a noble—was a Jouster, Aket-ten was certain more would step forward, eager to join her fledgling flying corps.
In fact . . . she just might proceed with this plan
without
telling Kiron. Just deliver it as a
fait accompli.
That would show him, him and everyone else, that she knew what she was doing.
But she ought to get Nofret’s permission, formally, for a girl group. It was one thing to experiment with one girl and one dragon; quite another to invent a whole new kind of Jouster.
“You’ll need food for her shortly,” she called down to the young woman, who had the baby’s head cradled in her lap, with the wings spread out over the hot sand to dry. Peri looked up, startled, at the sound of her voice, as if she had forgotten that Aket-ten was there.
She probably had, actually,
“I’ll make sure someone brings you the sort of thing she’ll need for her first meal,” Aket-ten continued, jumping down off the wall. Re-eth-ke lost interest in the proceedings as soon as Aket-ten stopped scratching her, and stretched out to bask on her own sands.
Aket-ten hurried off, feeling uncommonly cheerful.
FOUR
THE
trade routes for half a day’s flight in all directions from Aerie had been carefully surveyed. Places where ambushes were likely had been found. In fact, in the very act of making those surveys, two separate groups of bandits had been flushed and defeated, a fact which both elated and dismayed Kiron.
This meant that his plan was a good one. It also meant that the help he and the other Jousters were about to supply was more desperately needed than he had thought.
On the other hand, this development electrified even the older Jousters; he hadn’t quite realized how badly they had missed having duties to fulfill. But now that they knew there really was a need, they were on fire to begin patrolling, and had begun practicing on their own, adapting the tactics of war to a different sort of combat.
Right now, the tactics were simple: dive out of the sky and spook the animals. The riders would either be carried off with the panicking mounts, or dismount—or be thrown. Once on the ground, they were easier prey. And that was where the first difficulty came in.
No one had any compunctions about killing these brigands. The question was what to do with them if they surrendered.
If there was a caravan about, the law was clear, and Great King Ari had repeated it. Bandits were war captives, and as such, became serfs. The caravans could take them and sell them to the highest bidder, or use them as labor. With all of the Altan serfs freed, there was a bit of a shortage of that sort of labor now. More strong captives would be welcome.
The problem came if there were no caravans about. What to do then? There was no good way to transport them back to the nearest settlement. They certainly couldn’t be brought back by the Jousters; there was no way to do so safely. They couldn’t be released. That was utterly out of the question. So what to do with them? Killing them out of hand was utterly repugnant to Kiron. So was leaving them trussed up in the sunlight to die.
He still hadn’t solved that problem on the day that the first official patrols began.
But it was still a relief to lift into the sky on Avatre’s back, in charge of a flight of the “greenies,” Jousters who had never actually seen combat. He wasn’t worried about them; they were merely flying support for Orest’s wing, which was composed of very experienced Altan Jousters, survivors of those terrible days when the Magi had sent them into combat with the ruthless intention of getting rid of them through battlefield attrition. Anyone who had come through that was not going to find a few bandits at all intimidating.
Kiron’s greenies, all sporting ribbons of his signature color of scarlet, striped in colors picked randomly, were acting as scouts. They ranged ahead and to either side of the trade road in pairs, taking it in turn to fly back to Kiron and the fighting wing to report. He really, truly, did not expect any fighting this day, something he had even warned the others about. It wouldn’t do for them to become disappointed and disillusioned the very first day.
For the first half of the morning, the most exciting thing that happened was that one of the green youngsters spooked up a lone camel and decided it looked tasty. Green dragon, green rider, and a prey much bigger and tougher than even some experienced hunters would try; it was a good thing that they
were
flying support, for they were in trouble in moments, and it hadn’t taken the sight of the youngster’s partner flying back in a panic to let most of both wings know something was amiss.