And he wished one other thing—a wish that he could never have imagined himself making before he'd come here. He wished, for Ari's sake, that he was Tian. For if he had not been Altan, and a serf, he could have confided his egg theft to Ari, who would have been delighted, and would surely have helped him when the egg hatched. If he had been Tian, he could have a dragonet openly, and become a Jouster, joining the ranks of the rest.
He could become Ari's friend, and not—what he was. Whatever that was, now. Dragon boy, serf, mostly Altan, no longer able to unthinkingly hate his Tian masters—but knowing that nothing would ever induce them to accept him either, with a life that was a strange mixture of the bitter and the sweet, with nothing in between.
And it occurred to him the same night, as he lay thinking about that wish and staring up at the stars, that the one time when his anger stopped gnawing at him altogether was when Ari was around. With everyone else, except maybe Haraket, there was always that edge, the feeling that underneath it all, if a choice had to be made between him and a Tian, well, he'd come out second-best.
And even Ari and Haraket, if the choice had to be made publicly, would probably favor the Tian.
Maybe that wasn't true, but it was something he didn't want to have to put to the test.
It was an unpalatable thought.
He resolutely shoved it away. He would just have to make certain it never came to that.
Besides, he had another worry that he ought to be concentrating on. That egg would hatch within days, and that would bring the next hurdle, a successful hatching. He had to be there. He daren't take any chances. Baby chickens thought that the first thing that they saw was their mother—the same might be true of a dragonet—
And that was when, once again, it seemed as if the Altan gods had heard him and were answering him with subtle aid.
The second half of the growing season was always dry—not the Dry of the dry season, when the air sucked every bit of moisture out of everything, but usually there weren't any kind of heavy rainstorms. Instead, there was just enough rain to keep the crops from dying, and that usually in the early morning or early evening. Storms that were not hard, didn't do much, and were never very long.
In fact, they tended to be rather warm and muggy rains, bringing sticky humidity rather than refreshment to the air. And the one thing that it was possible to count on was that they would not be the violent storms that broke at the end of dry season.
There had been a feeling of a storm coming the day that Vetch was sure the egg was close, very close, to hatching. Vetch was checking it as often as he dared, and as he did, he couldn't help notice that the air felt heavy and wet. So just to be on the safe side, he pulled the canvas over the empty pens on both sides of Kashet's pen, including the one that held his egg. After all, if a storm did break, whoever was nearest would start dashing around pulling awnings, and the last thing he wanted them to do was to stumble into that pen. He even freed up the awning over Kashet's pen to be ready, just in case.
Then, in the middle of afternoon patrol time, he noticed that the sky on the horizon seemed unusually cloudy out to the north. The clouds themselves were thick and tall, or at least they looked like it from inside the walls of the compound. He congratulated himself on taking the precaution of pulling those canvas coverings early. It looked as if there was going to be a good solid rain rather than a mere sprinkle.
He thought no more about it, except to wonder if the rain would be bad enough to bring the Jousters back early, so he reckoned that he had better see to it that Kashet's pen was done as early as possible. Haraket and the other Overseers, even Te-Velethat, trusted him to get his work done in whatever order he happened to do it, and not necessarily on a set schedule anymore. He could always do his quota of leather work later, and if he really needed to clean Ari's rooms, Ari had no problem these days with having Vetch in to see to it whether or not the Jouster himself was in the suite.
So Vetch was in the middle of cleaning out Kashet's pen and he didn't think anything more about rain, until he heard something that sounded like the rumbling of a thousand chariot wheels, and looked up again sharply, into the north.
The clouds were boiling up before his very eyes, and with bottoms as black as the soil the floods laid on the fields. As if the hand of a god was shoving them along, they were speeding toward Mefis in a way that boded no good for anything caught in their path.
What was more, he could see the colorful specks that were the Jousters on their dragons, running along ahead of the storm front. For that storm was powerful enough to send the dragons back on the gust front itself, frantic to get out of the sky before the lightnings and winds caught them, winging ahead of the fury lashing the ground behind them, as fast as their muscles could send them.
He stood there with his mouth wide open for a bit, then it suddenly came home to him that this was going to be no ordinary storm.
He wasn't the only servant to have realized what was happening; a moment later Haraket ran through the compound shouting for the boys to run for the landing court, slaves to cover the pens, and cursing everyone in his path. Dragon boys and every other servant that happened to be free ran for the landing court, for there was no way that most of the dragons were going to be able to land in their pens with that wind behind them. In fact, they'd be lucky to get down without any injuries.
Vetch was right behind Haraket, and the Overseer thrust chained collars into his hands without regard for who he was or which dragon he served. Well enough; Kashet and Ari wouldn't need him, but Seftu and Coresan, and perhaps another half-dozen other dragons he'd gotten to know, and which probably would trust him, certainly would.
The first of the dragons came plunging down into the courtyard just as Haraket, Vetch, and the others got there themselves; already wind, chill as the winds of midwinter, whipped through the open space, sending dragons skewing sideways as they tried to get down to the ground. This wasn't the wind of the Dry, the kamiseen, that always blew in the same direction—no, this was a nasty wind, a demon wind, that twisted and writhed unpredictably. The landings were chaotic; with the exception of Kashet, the dragons were clearly fighting their Jousters. They wanted, more than anything, to get back to safety on the ground before the storm struck, and if they'd had a choice they would have landed anywhere they thought they could find shelter rather than take the chance on speeding for home. There were near collisions in the air above the landing court, actual collisions on the ground, as hard gusts blew dragons aside and into each others' paths. If it hadn't been that their eyes were on the coming storm and not on each other, there might have been fights among the dragons as they competed for the limited landing space; Vetch and two or three of the braver boys dashed in with chains and collars to fasten around their throats. They found themselves scrambling among the fearsome claws, to snap the collars around the first throat that presented itself, then drop the end of the chain in the hands of one of the servants or slaves. Coresan recognized him as he ducked under her nose, and actually pulled back her claws in mid-lash so that they skimmed along his back, barely stinging; he handed off the chain to Fisk, who had been behind him. He helped Seftu's boy get the leads on Seftu, but they didn't need them; Seftu was so grateful to be down that he was actually whimpering, and was crouching so low that his belly dragged the ground. The rest of the boys spread out along the walls and shouted to attract the attention of their Jousters, so that the dragons could get separated and steered over to the proper handler, and taken back to their pens.