He’s talking as if he is in favor of this already. Actually, I suppose if he wasn’t he would have said no from the beginning. And he’s not going to ask me to put the others on Avatre to teach them either. Thanks be to the gods! Kiron relaxed a little at passing one hurdle—and the truth was, though he could think of other excuses why he didn’t want his friends to train on Avatre’s back, the real reason was that he didn’t want to share her. The mere thought of someone else in her saddle made him acutely unhappy. “With the training I’ve been giving them on the mock dragon, I think they’ll be comfortable in the air pretty quickly.” He waited to see what Lord Khumun would have to say about this, for Lord Khumun had been remarkably silent on the subject of Kiron’s unorthodox training methods. But what was he to do? Traditionally, the Jousters of Alta had been presented with fully-grown, trained, tala-drugged dragons, and taught to fly on them from the beginning. The dragonets were nowhere near big enough to ride.

The mock dragon had been an idea of his own. He had racked his brain for weeks to come up with a way to simulate flying, and finally, watching a new awning being put up over a pen gave him the idea. Some training was done by putting a saddle at one end of a lever with a weight at the other, but that only gave the rider up-and-down motion. And it wasn’t very far off the ground.

The training of the Tian dragons, with the dragons tethered within their pens, would be part of the training, but it wouldn’t bring the boys along nearly as fast as Kiron wanted—and what was more, both rider and dragonet would be beginners. As he had said, putting two beginning flyers into the air at once was trouble waiting to happen.

Look what had happened to him, and he had some experience at flying by then!

Then, somehow, watching that awning being re-strung, combined with the tethered fledgling, cascaded in his mind into the mock dragon.

A tightly packed bundle of reeds the size of a dragon’s chest had been put in the center of a courtyard. Ropes had been strung through enormous eye bolts driven into the stone in each corner of the yard at the top of the wall. The ropes were then brought to the center of the yard and tied to the bundle. A dragon saddle was put on it, one of the boys strapped himself into the saddle, and then eight muscular slaves pulled on the ropes to heave the whole contraption into the air until it was suspended above the court, and the boy with it. A thick pile of loose straw with straw-filled mattresses atop that was positioned beneath the bundle.

And then the games began.