Even the older Jousters had gotten inspired by the successes of the youngsters to try as much of what was being done in fledgling practice as they could command their own dragons to cooperate with. And there, unfortunately, Aket-ten could do only so much. While she could dominate every fighting dragon in the compound now, that only meant that they would obey her, not their own riders. And in order to be alert enough to respond the complicated commands, they would have to be on half rations of tala, which made them arguably dangerous. Still there were a handful of the older Jousters experimenting with slings, though not one of them had managed to get his mount to tolerate a javelin whizzing past its head. They usually turned and snapped it out of the air, and no one wanted to discourage that behavior, since it meant that the dragons were also catching arrows that had been sent in the Jouster’s direction.

The older Jousters had swiftly worked out for themselves that they needed to learn such things, and quickly, too. Now that the Magi-sent storms had ended with the onset of the Dry season, and the kamiseen winds had begun to blow, the Jousters of Tia were back in the air and in support of troops who were angry that they had been lately driven back.

Still, on the ground, the Altans could match them man for man, and for now they were holding the land that they had regained.

And with the help of the new tactics that Kiron was working out, the Altan Jousters were succeeding in avoiding the Tians, forcing them to work much harder to go after them, and keeping them from attacking Altan commanders.

Kiron could well imagine the level of frustration that must have been building in the Tian Jousters. Always, always, the Altans had stayed and fought, man to man, dragon to dragon—and of course, since the desert dragons outweighed the swamp dragons, most of the time the victory in a conventional Joust went to the Tian and he was then free to wreak whatever havoc he cared to on the troops below. If the Altan was lucky, he was just driven off. If he wasn’t, someone would be building a funerary shrine for him by nightfall, as his dragon flew off without him, freeing itself of harness and saddle, and reverting to the wild.

Now, though, the Altans weren’t staying and fighting; in fact, there was precious little Jousting going on at all. The Tians found their dragons—and themselves—stung with clay pellets. Or they found their opponents luring them into tail chases that they could not possibly win, which left them far from the scene of battle and too exhausted to accomplish anything when they got back. And when the slingers switched from clay pellets to lead, their hits on either Tian Jousters or Tian commanders on the ground could be devastating.