Alta

“Because after she was mated, she got aggressive and her dragon boy actually walked out rather than tend her.” Once again, Kiron allowed his voice to drip with scorn. “I’ll tell you the truth, he was an idiot. He was at fault and in trouble in the first place for letting her go without a full tala ration and for not noticing she’d come into season. Then he decided she was trying to kill him when all that was really wrong was that she was hungry. He got so hysterical over it that he had every other dragon boy in the compound standing around him by the time he walked out. The Overseer was so angry he swore he’d see to it that the boy never got an apprenticeship with anyone, but he’d made the others so frightened before he was done that nobody wanted to take her. So I said I would, as long as they took all my other duties off my hands, and it turned out that the fool had been short-feeding her all along; if he didn’t feel like carrying as much food as she wanted, he just didn’t, and let her go hungry. So she wasn’t getting enough food or enough tala. As soon as she realized that I was going to haul enough food that she could eat until she popped if that was what she wanted, she stopped being aggressive, and the tala took care of the rest. I figured, so what if she got fat? She wasn’t going to get a rider until she’d laid those eggs, and while they were waiting for that, they weren’t going to get a new dragon boy for her either. Or, at least, not until I’d civilized her again. So I knew when she’d laid the eggs, and I stole the first one. There was an empty pen next to Kashet—they liked to keep dragons separated by empty pens before they started getting so many—so that was where I put the egg, and you know the rest.”

“That was smart,” Aket-ten said admiringly.

He shrugged. “I had a lot of time to think about what I would do if I got the chance.”

“Well, we won’t have to do all of that,” Orest said with relief.

For the first time since he came here, he had a moment of resentment. “We won’t have to do all of that” didn’t even begin to cover all of the backbreaking work he had put into caring for the breeding dragon, Ari’s Kashet, and Avatre. Orest was soft—and spoiled. A nice boy, who probably didn’t know he was spoiled, but—spoiled. He had never been beaten, never gone hungry, never been worked so hard he staggered with fatigue. You haven’t got the first idea of what I went through, he thought, as Orest and his sister argued about whether it would be better to have swamp dragons or desert dragons. He thought about the long process of getting Avatre’s mother to accept him; about watching her anxiously for the first of the eggs to appear, then agonizing over whether it would be better to take the first-laid, or the last-laid. The night he stole the egg was still vivid in his mind: slipping into the pen in the darkness, trundling the egg in a barrow down the corridor and praying that no one would happen to come along just then, and that no hungry ghosts would choose that moment to appear.

And only then did the real worries begin, of hiding the egg from anyone who might glance into the pen, of keeping it safe from the strange storms that the Altan Magi had sent, of the ever-more difficult task of hiding and feeding the hatched dragonet. And, of course, of pulling double duty, tending not only to Kashet and Ari, but to Avatre on the sly. He hadn’t had a sound night of sleep, frankly, until his first night with the Bedu clan.

No, no matter how hard Orest and his friends worked for their dragons, they would never match the effort that he had put in for Avatre.

“So how sore are you still?” Orest asked, breaking into his brooding.

“Sore enough,” he admitted, though the fact was that getting around at the moment often hurt as badly as if he was being beaten by Khefti-the-Fat, and he found himself sleeping a lot. It was quite strange, actually; though he didn’t actually remember it, all he could guess was that he had hit a great many obstacles in being pulled through the water, and had probably broken several ribs in the process. And perhaps he had dislocated his arms at the shoulder as well; the joints ached enough for it. The reeds had certainly lacerated his back; he’d seen the rags left of what he had been wearing. Fortunately, the Healer had made those cuts close over; evidently dealing with broken bones took longer.

It was equally fortunate that his body had protected Aket-ten, or she would have been as injured as he was. And he was glad he had an Altan-style cot rather than a Tian bed that would have required him to sleep on his back. He could lie on his stomach to sleep on the cot, which was the least uncomfortable of all of the possible positions.

I don’t believe I will try that sort of rescue again, he thought. Or at least, not quite in that way.