Joust (47 page)

They knew what this was about; they
knew
—knew he’d “stolen” a dragonet, though they didn’t yet know it wasn’t one of the new ones. They knew that this wasn’t just the result of a wager or a boyish prank.

They understood that he was going to try to escape, that he intended to fly off on Avatre in order to do so.

And they weren’t going to let him get away. He wasn’t a dragon boy now; he was an Altan enemy, stealing a precious dragonet.

Avatre craned her neck around and looked down at the waving, yelling humans below her as she beat her wings down in a stroke more powerful than the last had been. Then she glanced back at him, her eyes pinning with alarm; she seemed to understand the fear in him, and redoubled her efforts, which were showing more skill with every passing second. For the first time, Vetch was glad,
glad
that he was such a skinny weed. He was lighter than the sandbags he’d been training her with, and she was having no trouble carrying him. He felt her deep, easy breathing under his legs; he felt powerful muscles under his hands driving her upward. The compound spun away under him; she caught sight of the hills in the east, and they must have awakened some deep instinct in her, for she drove for them.

Now she was over the city, wings pumping furiously as she continued to seek for height and the winds above. The
kamiseen
would aid her in this direction; it drove for those same eastern hills, giving her speed she could never have reached on her own. He clung on to her back more by instinct than skill, crouching down over her neck, trying to move with her. He told himself not to look down.

He couldn’t help it, though; as she leveled out and stretched her wings in a gliding stroke, he looked down and saw only the broad, flat, gray-green expanse of the Great Mother River below, a boat like a child’s toy being towed against the current, going upriver, pulled by a team of oxen seemingly as small as the ones in his father’s funerary shrine.

The shrine
—

Too late to think of that, too late to consider all the things that he’d hoped to take with him. If they escaped, he would have to survive and keep them both alive with what he had with him.

If they escaped.

They
had
to.

Then they were over the fields, once green, now brown in the dry, with here and there a small square of dusty green still being irrigated by hand to provide some special crop. Vegetables, or perhaps even
tala.

Tala
—for dragons.

The only way anyone would be able to catch him would be on a dragon.

How many Jousters had been in the compound? How many could get their dragons saddled and into the air quickly? How many were just back from a patrol, or about to leave on one? Ari wasn’t back yet, but he’d been due out of the north at any moment. There were others who had surely beaten him back in; Ari was generally the first to leave and the last to return.

That alone might save him; this was the end of a patrol, not the beginning, and dragons were coming in tired and hungry. It might be hard to get them into the air, and they’d be irritated, sluggish, and reluctant to obey.

But he had to look back over his shoulder and saw behind him what he’d feared to see—the bright eyes of color against the hard blue of the sky—dragons and Jousters in pursuit. Tiny in the distance, but there were several of them who’d managed to get their mounts airborne; experienced fliers, experienced riders.

If they caught him—they would never let him keep Avatre. They’d never let him near another dragon again, probably, even if my some miracle he convinced them that this
had
all been an accident. . . .

If he claimed that, could he make them believe him? But then, how would he explain purloining the egg and hatching her? That he was raising her for Ari, as a surprise?

Would anyone believe a tale that tall?

Even if they did, how could that make any difference? They’d still take Avatre from him!

Nothing mattered against the enormity of losing Avatre.

He would rather die than give her up. She was everything to him now; without her, it wouldn’t matter what they did to him.

He made up his mind at that moment that if they caught him, if they started to force them down, he would jump. Better dead than lose the only thing he loved, the only family he had now. The harness and saddle were not of such tough stuff that she could not eventually get them off; without tending, the leather would quickly dry out and become brittle in the sun. Within weeks, at most, the last pieces would fall off her.

He would never let them take her. He would rather die and set her free.

Sobs welled up in his throat, he choked them down. His heart felt as tight as if there were copper bands around it, and he prayed wordlessly. Surely the gods had not brought him this far only to snatch everything away from him!

He looked back again; there were three dragons in pursuit of him now, for all the rest had dropped out of the race. But these three were obeying their Jousters, and he thought they looked a little nearer, though not near enough to tell who they were. Just the colors; a scarlet, a green, and a blue.

He looked down; they were over the desert, which undulated beneath them in waves of pale sand, broken by rocky outcrops. The breath of the desert, hot, dusty, and so arid it parched his lips, wafted up to them. He bent over Avatre’s neck, and shouted encouragement to her.

He’d had no idea where to go, but she, guided by instinct alone, was heading for the same hills that her mother had sought at the end of the mating flight. Those hills were riddled with caves and rich with game—and they marked the boundary of the lands that could truly be called “Tian.” Out there, although Tia claimed the earth, it really belonged to the dragons and the wild, wandering tribesmen of the Bedu, the Blue People, the Veiled Ones who called no man “king.” If they could reach the hills, they could hide there. They could stay under cover until the hunters had given up.

But the hills were a long way away, and there were three trained dragons in pursuit. He crouched lower over Avatre’s neck, and willed his own strength into her. His long hair whipped into his face; he ignored it, and tried to wish himself lighter than he already was.

When they were halfway between the hills and the Great Mother River, he looked back again. Avatre was still flying strongly, showing no signs of tiring. And now there were only two dragons following. One, the scarlet, had dropped down and was gliding behind the other two, making a long, slow turn to return to the compound.

His heart leaped. One gone—could they outdistance the other two?

“Go, my love, my beauty!” he shouted at Avatre’s head. “Go! We are small and light as down; ride the wind, my heart! Take us to freedom!”

He thought she responded to his encouragement with a little more power.

One gone—two to go.

But they were two Jousters, and he was only a dragon boy on First Flight. They had strength and experience on their side; all he had was hope and heart, and the valor of a very young dragonet.

He looked down again; the sand was interrupted by more and larger outcroppings of rock. They were getting closer to the hills. He redoubled his prayers.

With every wing beat, they drew nearer to escape. When they reached the hills, he looked back again.

One of the two remaining dragons had turned back!

But the third was still in hot pursuit, and was closing the gap between them.

And now he could see, with pitiless clarity, that the third was Kashet.

His heart felt as if it was being squeezed, and for a moment, he was blinded by tears. But he leaned over her neck again and begged Avatre to fly faster, harder—

She heard him, and he felt her trying to do as he asked. They topped the first set of hills—

But below them he saw the ground of the second rising to meet them, closer than it should have been—

She was losing relative height and
real
height as well. He felt her muscles beginning to tremble, and knew then that she was running out of strength and endurance.

And a shadow passed over them, between them and the sun, the superior position for a Jouster to force another dragon to earth.

He knew without looking up that it was Kashet.

It was over.

Ari had caught them, and he would force them down, take them both captive. The teams of trainers and soldiers that Haraket had surely sent after them would come and take them back, bound and chained.

They would take Avatre away from him, if he allowed that to happen. Avatre was at the end of her strength, and there was nothing more that she could give him.

It was time to give her a gift—her freedom.

And with a sob, he pulled his legs free of the harness, he leaned down over her neck.

“Good-bye, beloved, my light, my love,” he murmured to her. He squeezed his eyes tight; he couldn’t look at the ground. But this was the only way. Better this, better lose life, than lose everything that made life worth having.

He took a long, last, deep breath.

Then he deliberately overbalanced, and let go.

It was horrible.

He screamed in utter terror as he fell, tumbling over and over in a macabre parody of an acrobat. The screaming just burst out of his mouth without any thought. He waited for the scream and the horror to end in a terrible blow, and blackness.

Something hard struck him in the stomach instead, knocking what was left of his breath out of him and ending his scream in a gasp. He slid face-down along something hard and smooth and hot—then impacted a second time, and felt a strong arm grab him around his waist.

And he screamed again, this time in thwarted rage and heartbreak, as he realized that Ari and Kashet had plucked him out of the sky, as they had saved Reaten. Only he didn’t want to be saved, and they had rescued him only to haul him back to a wretched existence not worth the living!

He screamed and tried to fight, but he was lying in a difficult position, he could only strike at Kashet. Ari was three times his size and double his strength, and was not about to let him land a blow. He cursed the Jouster in every way he could think of, tears blinding him, as he changed his tactics and tried to squirm out of Ari’s grip to resume the plunge to death that they had interrupted.

That was just about as successful as trying to fight them.

He felt Kashet sideslipping and losing height quickly; his stomach lurched with the renewed sense of falling, but he knew that this “fall” would not end in blessed blackness, but in captivity, and he howled his anguish.

Avatre cried out above him—he’d never heard her cry before, it sounded like a hawk—and she followed them down, floundering wearily through the air, as Ari and Kashet brought him down to the earth. As they spiraled down into a little valley, he just gave up and went limp. He was crying, uncontrollably, sobbing with rage and thwarted hope, and the death of everything he had hoped for. He couldn’t see, blinded by the tears as they landed, as Ari slid off first, then pulled him down to the ground—

—and held him while he wept.

He wanted to fight, but all the fight was out of him. There was nothing, literally nothing left but grief and hopelessness. He was all alone, and there was nothing left to him but a bleak future of pain and emptiness.

Or so he thought—until Ari took his shoulders and gave him a good hard shake, stopping his hysterical sobs for just an instant.

And that moment was all that Ari needed.
“Stop it!”
the Jouster commanded into the hot silence. “You don’t really think I’m going to take you back, do you?”

For a moment, the words made no sense. Then when he did get the sense of them, he was so shocked that all he could do was stare, eyes still streaming, throat still choked on a sob.

“I have no intention of bringing you back,” Ari repeated, wearily. “Especially not after seeing you try and kill yourself to keep from being caught. I may be a monster, but at least I’m not that sort of monster.”

He might have said more, but just then Avatre came charging toward them, knocking Ari aside with her head, and clumsily putting herself between the Jouster and Vetch, hissing defiance. Ari put up both his hands, placatingly, but laughing all the same, as Vetch instinctively threw his arms around her neck.

“There. How can I possibly take you back? She’d only come and carry you off again, and probably tear the rest of us to shreds doing it!” he chuckled.

Vetch held his arms tight around her neck, to steady himself as well as to keep her from some clumsy attempt to attack Ari. He still couldn’t believe what he’d just heard.

But it was Ari, who had never told Vetch a lie—

Then Kashet, full of dignity and twice the size of Avatre, interposed himself between the dragonet and his Jouster, looking down at her with an expression of weary condescension. Avatre, who had never seen another dragon but Kashet except as a head over a wall, or a shape in the sky overhead, just hissed at the bigger dragon, defying him along with his Jouster.

“Very brave,” Ari chuckled. “I hardly think I need to worry about you encountering trouble. She’ll certainly protect you from anything and everything, or die trying. And at the moment, there isn’t much that will be able to take her on except humans.”

Vetch swallowed. Hard. “You’re—” he began.

“I am
not
taking you back. I never intended to,” Ari replied. That was when Vetch’s legs failed him, and he sat down hard on the ground.

Avatre stood over him, making it very clear that she was not going to allow anyone or anything near him.

The Jouster looked at both of them for a long moment, then sighed, shaking his head. “Look,” he said. “We’re in the middle of the Dry, practically midday, and it’s damned hot out here in the sun.” He beckoned. “If you can get up, follow us.”