Neither were the fledglings, nor would they be for at least another year. But they would try to do anything that their riders asked them to, once Aket-ten put it into their heads. And one of those things was a new, and potentially deadlier equivalent to what the Tians did. It, too, was intended to serve the purpose of eliminating important enemy commanders.

The fledglings took to it immediately, for it fit in so well with their natural hunting skills that they hardly had anything to learn.

They would rise to the top of a thermal, and their rider would pick a target and signal the general area where it was. Since Tian commanders wore blue war helmets, the fledglings themselves were able to tell exactly who the target was now. They would fix their eyes on the target, then fold their wings and dive. At the last possible moment, they would snap their wings open and turn the dive into a blindingly fast aerial dash at just out of spear reach from the ground. If they had been hunting, that would have ended in them smashing into their prey, knocking it over, and soaring up again to come down a second time on the now-unconscious prey to kill it.

Since this was a combat maneuver, they would aim straight for the target, and at the last possible moment, the rider would launch a javelin at it. What with being thrown from the back of a speeding dragon, when the javelins hit, they usually went all the way through the straw targets, out the other side, and buried themselves a good hand-length into the dirt. How often they did hit depended on the skill of the rider. Orest was the most accurate of the boys, hitting his targets well over three quarters of the time, Huras the least, a little better than three out of ten. Kiron himself was somewhere in the middle, and as a consequence, preferred to use the weapon he was most familiar with, the sling. Using a lead pellet instead of a clay one, he was usually able to knock the target’s “head” clean off with an accuracy comparable to Orest with a javelin.

This was very popular with the spectators on the ground, who actually got to see something besides pretty patterns in the sky. It was heartening for them, too; it was one thing to hear about distant victories, it was quite another to see your fighters actually doing something that looked effective and aggressive.