"They didn't stop until there wasn't anyone left in the open. They—weren't even all men—" Ari got out between clenched teeth. "There were women. And some children."
Dropped, to plummet to the earth and die, smashed like eggs. They hadn't had a chance. Vetch wanted to scream, weep—he couldn't even breathe.
"I didn't find out about it until today. When the target game started." Ari grated, each word wrung from him, each phrase drenched in pain and anguish. "When they started boasting about it—and saying that the next time they went out—they should stop long enough to paint a target on the ground for more sport!"
Vetch's anger, so long dormant, erupted within him like a volcano, and filled him with such rage, that if Ari's voice hadn't been flooded with outrage and pain that nearly matched his, he'd have gone for the Jouster's throat, just because he was Tian. As it was, he swayed where he stood, going cold and hot by turns, red mists passing between him and the rest of the world as he tried to hold the anger in check.
"I will not make war on children!" Ari shrieked—and broke away from Vetch, and ran.
Vetch felt his knees giving, and he dropped to the ground like a stunned bird, his pain finding vent in a howl of his own, and a flood of tears that he could not stop, and did not want to.
He came to his senses only when his eyes were swollen and gummy, his cheeks raw, and he was so dehydrated from weeping and the kamiseen that his lips were cracked and his tongue cleaving to the roof of his mouth. Something snuffled his head—and the back of his neck.
He looked up through blurring eyes, to see that not only was Kashet whuffing at his hair in concern, but Avatre had managed to make her way out of her own pen and into this one. She whimpered in sympathy and no little fear, though not of Kashet, apparently, who was dividing his attention between Vetch and her.
"It's—all right—little one," he said thickly, even though it wasn't, but she couldn't know, couldn't understand what had happened, and neither could poor Kashet, who only understood that the center of his universe had screamed and run away, and the other source of his comfort was suffering, too.
He got unsteadily to his feet, and went over to Kashet's trough, and plunged his entire head under the water, keeping it there for as long as his breath held out. He came up with a gasp, and wiped his eyes.
He couldn't help Ari; Ari would have to find his own solution to his conflict. But certainly his absence from the games would not go unnoticed.
What Ari does about it is Art's business.
He finished unharnessing Kashet with fingers that shook; he tried to comfort the unsettled creature as best he could. Avatre kept butting her head against him, anxiously, and he had to pause frequently to try and give her comfort, too.
What comfort he had to offer, anyway.
Snatches of raucous music came wafting incongruously from the landing court; muffled shouts from the training field where the games were still going on. His stomach turned over. He was glad that he didn't know the names of the Jousters who had participated in the atrocity; he didn't think he'd be able to restrain himself from trying to take some sort of revenge if he knew. Which would gain him nothing, of course; he'd be caught and probably executed, and then what would happen to Avatre?
Poison? Where could he get hold of poison? Or at least, where could he get hold of poison that he could actually use? Nowhere, of course; there were plenty of things in the compound that were poisonous, but they tasted or smelled foul, or were only poisonous in such large quantities as to make their administration impractical. Knives in the dark? He snorted at that. As small as he was, even an ambush was out of the question, and he was no trained assassin, to sneak into the Jousters' quarters undetected to slit the throats of sleepers—
—though the vision conjured up by that thought was vastly satisfying.
No—he could do nothing for revenge.
And he could do nothing for his own people either, not as he was now.
But if he and Avatre could get away—
I hold the knowledge of how to raise and train the most superior Jousters and dragons in the world in my head. What would happen to the Tians if every Altan Jouster was as good as Ari and Kashet?
Until this moment, he'd had no real idea of what he was going to do with Avatre besides escape. Now he had a goal, a mission. He would go north, to Alta, to Bato, the heart of the ringed capital of the kingdom. He would present himself to the Altan Commander of Dragons. They surely knew about Ari already; tales of such a legendary Jouster would have come not only from their spies, and their Seers, but from their own Jousters who encountered him. Vetch would have the proof, in the form of Avatre, not only of how Ari had trained such a perfect dragon, but that the training could be duplicated.
"It's all right," he reassured the anxious dragon and dragonet, taking a deep, unsteady breath. "Or, at least it will be."
IF Vetch had little stomach for the festival before, he had even less now. He could not bear to look at those cheerful faces and wonder which one of them knew what Ari had just revealed. Or worse—which ones had participated in some way.
Or worse still, which ones approved.
He led Avatre back to her pen, and as she settled anxiously back into her wallow, he wondered briefly if he was going to have to begin tethering her there to keep her from following him. But he soon realized, when she displayed no further interest in the entrance, that she had only come looking for him because she had heard his deep distress and had followed the sound of his voice; she had wanted to comfort him as he had so often comforted her.
The very echoes of the celebrations made him feel ill. How could there be a festival going on, how could people be having a good time, when a massacre of innocents had just taken place? How could the people who had participated in it be joking about it and planning to make a game of killing the next time? How could they even bear to imagine a "next time?" And the part of him that longed for revenge writhed inside, urging him to go do something, now, while his enemies were all unwary.
Was it weakness, or was it wisdom, that offered the counter to that anger in his soul? I'll do that, I am no better than they are…
He hoped it was the latter, for the thought held him for a moment.
Suppose he should go and do something horrible, not to the Jousters who had been the murderers, but to ordinary folk? That would be exact revenge—but that wouldn't be right either. And if he did something horrible, just how much worse would the next Tian atrocity be to "make the Altans pay?"
He saw poor Kashet peering anxiously over the wall, and resolutely turned his heart away from vengeance. Ari's dragon was just as distressed as little Avatre; his rider had acted quite out-of-keeping with anything Kashet had come to expect, had run off from the games, been in deep anguish, had not paid any attention to Kashet, and had run off after shouting at Kashet's dragon boy. The bottom was out of Kashet's universe.
Fortunately, Vetch knew what would make things at least partially right again, at least for the dragon and the dragonet.