He thought that she was building up to that burst that would take her truly up into the air, but he wasn't actually expecting anything other than her first hover. She was right in the middle of her pen, about to make a really big bound; he thought that this might be the moment when she really went airborne with him, rather than just jumping about with wing-assistance, and he was braced for it—
When a wild shout from the doorway of the pen startled them both.
"Hoi!" shouted one of the older dragon boys, staring at them. He knew Vetch, he knew very well that Vetch wasn't assigned to a dragonet, and he knew that Vetch should not have been sitting in the saddle on an untethered dragonet's back. He didn't know what Vetch was up to, but one thing he did know. It wasn't what Vetch was supposed to be doing.
"Haraket!" he shouted. "Haraket! Come quick!"
Vetch didn't even think what to do; he just reacted, by punching Avatre in the shoulders with his heels. She, already startled and alarmed by the shout, and even more so by a strange human in her pen, a thing she had never seen before, also just reacted—by leaping, not jumping; leaping for the sky, eyes focused up, neck outstretched, and wings working purposefully. She was frightened now, truly frightened, and she wanted away before any more people shouted at her and jammed their heels into her! One wing flap. Two.
She was off the ground, with him still on her back. Not a hover, this; no, it was the first wing beats of real flight.
"Dragonets are often startled into their first flights," he heard Ari's voice in memory. "They get very nervy about the time they're about to take that big leap. Maybe it's the gods' way of making sure they get off the ground that first time, because if nothing startled them into flying, they'd be too afraid to try. …"
She was making good, strong wing beats now, not flaps. And she wasn't just fleeing, she was climbing, with determination. She wasn't afraid to fly, not Avatre! She surged upward in that way he recalled from riding Kashet, a jerky, lunging motion, throwing him back each time she made another wing beat, until he bent over the saddle, crouching, to get himself in balance with what she was doing. He was just the rider now; Avatre was the one in control. All he could do was to hold on and try not to hamper her.
She was above the walls. Then higher than the walls—
There was more shouting down below; he clutched at the harness in sudden fear—
He heard Haraket's voice; he heard the voices of other men, loud, excited, angry, down below and behind him; he looked back and saw a crowd of men in Avatre's pen, Haraket at their center, gesturing and shouting—but not at him.
That sent a chill down his back.
They weren't calling his name.
Instead of ordering him back, demanding he return then and there, as they would have been if they thought this flight was purely accidental, they were shouting at each other, issuing confusing and probably contradictory orders. But none of those orders was shouted at him.
That was when he knew he was in deep trouble.
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 tola.
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 vees 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?