Alta

“I’ll tell you what, though,” Kiron continued, making up his mind about something else. “I think we can find some empty property somewhere, and set up a place with straw men for more targeting practice.”

Toreth’s face brightened again. “As far away from here as possible,” he suggested.

“Oh?” asked Gan, coming up to join them, his dragonet whuffling at his hair. “Why? Not that I mind; I have quite enough admirers as it is, and I weary of women flinging themselves at me.” He fanned his face with a languid hand, and got the laugh he was looking for.

“Because I want them

—” Toreth jerked his chin at the Jousters practicing in the sky above them “—to get the attention. Not us. I want them to be the heroes all the time. Let them come watch us if they want, and try some of what we do if they can, but I don’t think they should have to share the attention and the glory with a wing of boys who’ve never flown in battle. It’s not fair, and it’s not right.”

Orest tossed his head to get his hair back over his shoulders. “Rumblings of discontent?” he suggested.

“Not yet,” said Toreth. “I want to prevent them.”

Pe-atep nodded. “They’re good men, and right now, they’re grateful to you for coming up with ways to counter the Tians, but I’ve already heard some jokes about us being the ‘pretty ones’ that everyone wants to watch. Once the jokes start, there’s the possibility the joking will be covering resentment.” Pe-atep tended to spend more time around the senior Jousters than anyone other than Kalen, since his experience with training lions and cheetahs for hunting made him very useful in training the wild-caught dragons.

Kalen seconded that. “I’ve heard the same.” The falconer shrugged. “Better safe than sorry, I always say. We make it clear that we don’t care about having an audience, that we’re serious about our training, they’ll be more inclined to take us seriously, too.”

He was right. Kiron wouldn’t have thought of any of that for himself, but Toreth was right, and so were Kalen and Pe-atep. At the moment, the wing had the respect of the older Jousters, but if fighting men thought that a group of boys just coming into their beards was trying to “steal” what they had actually fought to gain, there would be resentment and anger. Kiron nodded. “Frankly, I think we ought to concentrate on targeting anyway. It makes no sense for us to even think about traditional Jousting until our dragons are bigger. I think we will be able to fight soon, but it will have to be our way.”

“One day,” Orest said, looking at him comically, “you will say something that is less than practical and sensible, something that is driven by no forethought and nothing but passion, and I will probably collapse with shock.”

The bottom dropped out of the world. The universe jolted. Kiron sat straight up in bed with a yell of fear.

His mind was blank, but his gut was a-roil, and inside he was nothing but a chaos storm of sheer terror. He was so terrified, in fact, that for one mind-numbing moment, he didn’t realize that every dragon in the compound was keening with a fear that at least equaled his.

Including Avatre.

And the ground was moving, in rolling waves.

How could that be? The ground was moving!

But it didn’t matter that the ground was shaking—and it didn’t matter that he was frightened out of his wits. Hearing Avatre cry out for him shook him back into his wits, and he fell off his cot and flung himself at the door. Avatre needed him! That was more important than anything else, including his own terror.

It was exactly like trying to move in a nightmare.

The shaking floor seemed to pitch itself out from under his feet, and he tumbled over sideways in the thick, hot darkness, bruising himself all over when the floor he’d thought was farther away hit him. The groaning of the stones around him made him sure he was going to be buried at any moment, and when he fell, he hit his elbow wrong, startling another yelp out of him. But Avatre needed him, and he crawled across the floor on hands and knees, felt his way past the door. The ground heaved again, and he was tossed into the sand of her pit. There was dust everywhere—where was it coming from? He couldn’t see it, of course, but he could feel it in his eyes, taste it in the oven-heat of the air. And the sand seemed unnaturally slick, and it kept trying to suck him down—fortunately, he knew it was no more than waist-deep, but the way it kept pulling at his limbs was as terrifying as everything else, as if it was alive and wanted to devour him. Following Avatre’s cries, he got to her side, where he got both his arms around her neck and hung on for dear life, closing his eyes and trying to soothe her when he himself was certain that the end of the world had come.

And then—it was over. Just like that. A strange silence filled the humid darkness, where a moment before there had been nothing but the cries of frightened humans and dragons, and the roaring of the earth.