Alta

“Well.” Aket-ten bounced a little in her seat, once again looking very well pleased with herself. “You know that dragons need heat to hatch their eggs. We have two kinds of dragons, actually; we have some that use the hot sand in the desert, like yours do, and we have a smaller kind that makes a big mound of rotting plants the way the crocodiles do to bury their eggs in. Those are the swamp dragons. They’re easier to trap, so they’re the ones we have the most of, but we have some desert dragons too. In fact, we have a couple of Tian dragons that lost their riders and that we managed to catch. Both of those are female, and when the Jousters want a wild desert dragon, they take one of those two females and stake her out at the edge of the desert and wait for another one to find her. A female will come to fight her, a male will come to mate with her.”

“So the smart thing would be to take both of those females out and let them mate,” Kiron mused. “You wouldn’t have the risk of losing a mating pair, and you might even be able to trap the male after the mating is over. What about taking swamp dragon eggs, though, from wild nests?”

“You’d have to drive off the mother somehow, and instead of sand, you’d have to come up with a place that was hot and damp to incubate the eggs,” Orest said. “That wouldn’t be hard, though; there are a lots and lots of hot springs around here, or you could use rotting reeds like the dragons do themselves. It’s taking the eggs that would be difficult. Even if you took a lot of people, trying to drive a mother dragon off her eggs could get them killed. A trapped dragon is bad; a mother protecting a nest is ten times worse.

The swamp dragons may be smaller, but they aren’t that much smaller.” He scratched his head in perplexity. “I don’t know; maybe at night, when they’re torpid?”

“Trying to do it at night would be worse,” put in Aket-ten. “At night, both parents come and lay on the nest. They might be torpid, but there would be two of them. And it would be in the dark, too, when the river horses come out to feed, and the crocodiles, too. If the dragons didn’t get you—” She shivered.

Kiron was just grateful that it wasn’t his problem. “If I was going to choose, I’d stake out those females,” he said. “The one mating I saw was in the sky, but I bet they don’t always mate that way.”

“Was that Avatre’s parents?” Orest asked. “I know you told us that you’d taken an egg from one of the Jousting dragons. What happened?”

“Partly it was not enough tala in their food, and partly it was stupidity from the dragon boys and the Jousters both,” he said with scorn. “Nobody bothered to notice that they were—” he glanced at Aket-ten and modified the rather coarse language he had been going to use. “—getting interested. Finally during a practice, everything just went bad at once. The Jousters were new and kept missing strokes, and finally when one connected, because the female chose that moment to turn the practice into a mating flight, the male’s rider hit wrong. He knocked the female’s rider out of his saddle, and another Jouster, Kashet’s rider, caught him before he hit the ground and got killed. Meanwhile the female was flying free now, and the male’s rider lost control and they went into a full mating flight. He couldn’t get control of his dragon until the mating was over, and when the female tried to fly off to the hills, Kashet and his rider managed to herd her back.”

That was a very dry version of the whole incident, that had been both tremendously exciting and terrifying at the same time. If he closed his eyes, he could still see the horrifying plunge of the injured Jouster out of his saddle, and the incredible dive that Kashet made to catch him, saving him from a certain death.

“I wouldn’t have wanted to be the male’s rider,” Orest muttered, his eyes round.

“You wouldn’t have wanted to be either of them,” Kiron corrected. “The female’s rider almost died anyway; would have, if there hadn’t been a Healer there quick. And by the time it was over, both of them had their dragons taken away and given to other Jousters. They were sent back down to train all over again. The Overseer was very angry, and so was the General in charge of the Jousters.”

“Glory!” Orest exclaimed, seriously impressed now. “But how did you get the egg?”