In the old style of training, for the first two years that they were in captivity, the young dragons were given saddles and harnesses, then taken out on long leads and goaded to fly with the dead weight of sandbags in the saddle. This strengthened their flying, and got them used to harness, saddle, and weight on their backs.
Baken, of course, was going for a much more tractable dragon. He had no intention whatsoever of using goads on the new dragonets, and after a lot of convincing (and based on his success so far) the other trainers agreed to follow his lead.
Baken would follow their example, insofar as using the long leads and the sandbags went for early flying practice—but in the safety of the pens and on the four tethers, he would keep putting boys on the dragonets' backs to get them used to living weight. Furthermore, he was going to use a technique of flight training from falconry, and he planned to teach the dragonets to fly on those long leads from one end of the training field to the other on command. His plan was to teach them to fly between him and another trainer, as a dog was taught to "come" on command; this would be in return for rewards, rather than goading them into the air. This was a training technique he knew well, and the dragon trainers were mightily impressed with the ploys that Baken had used so far.
Vetch was not going to be able to do that; he could hardly take Avatre out of the pen without being discovered. He would have to strengthen her in some other way, so that her first flight would be a strong, high, and fast one. Because, by necessity, it would be with him…
This would be an all-or-nothing cast of the bones. They would either succeed, or fail horribly.
He would not think of failure, or its consequences.
So as soon as she was romping around the sands of her pen, he began getting her used to a weight on her back, improvising a harness and a small sandbag at first, then when he discovered where the dragonet harnesses were kept, purloining one and using that. He actually kept a weight on her for about half of the day when he was sure it wouldn't tire her.
She certainly was anything but quiet; in fact, he had to make her, not one, but several toys to keep her amused. He brought her bones. He made her a big ball of rawhide stuffed with grasses, which she would pursue like a kitten with a ball of thread. Taking a cue from kittens, he rigged a rope with a scrap of silk on the end to a pole he stuck in the sand of her wallow, so she could bat at it with her foreclaws as it moved in the wind. He wrestled with her, teaching her to stop attacking when he commanded her to do so, and enforcing that she must be gentle with him, because he knew that if he did not do this now, while she was small, he could never control her behavior when she was big. The closer it got to the Dry season, the faster she seemed to grow, strong and agile.
The complement of dragonets was now at the fifty that the Great King had stipulated, with as many new boys—at a cost of thirteen Jousters and several dragon hunters that were not themselves Jousters. There was talk, now, of enlarging the compound—because the Great King had gotten wind of the new training techniques, and if they worked, he wanted still more Jousters and dragons…
This did not bode well for Alta. Vetch could only pray that the Altans had spies abroad to hear such things.
At just about the time when the magic-spawned storms stopped altogether, Baken stopped needing Vetch's help, for now there were two or three of the new boys that weren't any larger than he was that he could use as "riders" to get the youngsters used to the presence of a human on their backs. Half of the dragonets had learned "up" and "down," and the blue dragonet was at the stage of learning to fly short distances on a lead. Vetch stole time to watch whenever he could get a moment, trying to make out how he could adapt all of this to training Avatre.
It was just as well that Vetch didn't need to help Baken anymore because Avatre was taking more and more of his time. He had thought he had been busy when all she did was sleep. Now that she was active, she needed attention.
Fortunately, Ari didn't know that he wasn't helping Baken now, and Vetch didn't intend to tell him. As long as Ari presumed that he was off helping the other dragon boy whenever he was missing, there would be nothing at issue.
He never saw Haraket anymore and Ari only in passing. He was worried about Ari, though; the Jouster was thinner, and looked as if he was not sleeping well. But there wasn't much that Vetch could do to help him—
—and besides, if Ari learned about Avatre—
Vetch slept entirely too well, but that was hardly surprising, considering how much work he was doing over the course of the day. He was so used to doing things at the run, that he wasn't sure now if he'd ever be able to do them at a more leisurely pace without feeling that something was wrong.
He sometimes surprised himself by how strong he had gotten, when he found that he had absentmindedly lifted some weight that would have been so far beyond his strength a few moons ago that he would not have considered trying to heft it. He hadn't gotten all that much taller, and he certainly wasn't a little barrel of muscle in the way that one or two of the other boys were. He was still wiry and lean, but it seemed that all the good food and hard work had strengthened every single muscle fiber to an amazing degree.
Avatre was also a great deal stronger than he would have guessed; when he loaded her with a sandbag that was nearly his equivalent, she hardly noticed the weight, and there was nothing to tell by looking at her that she hadn't been wild-caught like the others. He had to wonder, given how lively and big she was, if giving tala to the growing youngsters did more than simply make them easier to handle—if, perhaps, it actually slowed their growth. Certainly Kashet was the biggest male in the compound, nearly as big as any of the females, and he had never gotten tala. Avatre was going to be huge; bigger than her mother Coresan, for certain, and females were always bigger than the males.
She was not as vocal as the other youngsters either; they meeped all the time, their tone rising in shrillness the closer it got to feeding time. Avatre only gurgled happily when he appeared in the doorway, hissed if something alarmed her, and made no other sounds but a soft chuckling when she settled down for a nap with her head in his lap. So the last of Growing season was spent, with Vetch so busy that he could not have told how many days had passed from storm to weakening storm.
At last, one day, he woke to find that all of the tala bushes planted within the compound had blossomed overnight. The air was filled with their peculiar fragrance, sweet, but with a bitter undertone, like myrrh, carried through the corridors by an arid wind that must have begun in the night, coming from off the desert.
The kamiseen———the Dry just began—he recognized with a start, as he awoke with the scent in his nostrils, out of an uneasy dream of laboring at Khefti's wells, and heard the wind whining around the corners of the walls of Avatre's pen. He had been here a year!
Although these pampered bushes within the compound always blossomed a day or so before any others, this, and the wind, were the signals that the Dry had officially begun. Unless the sea witches had some new and profoundly powerful magic, there would be no more storms to keep the dragons inside the borders of Tia.
The Commander took the coming of the Dry as his sign as well, and ordered that the Jousters resume their overflights of Altan territory.
He sweetened this order with another: to signal the start of the new patrols, he decreed a two-day festival within the walls of the compound, and provisioned it himself, from his own treasure houses.