“That was smart,” Aket-ten said admiringly.

He shrugged. “I had a lot of time to think about what I would do if I got the chance.”

“Well, we won’t have to do all of that,” Orest said with relief.

For the first time since he came here, he had a moment of resentment. “We won’t have to do all of that” didn’t even begin to cover all of the backbreaking work he had put into caring for the breeding dragon, Ari’s Kashet, and Avatre. Orest was soft—and spoiled. A nice boy, who probably didn’t know he was spoiled, but—spoiled. He had never been beaten, never gone hungry, never been worked so hard he staggered with fatigue. You haven’t got the first idea of what I went through, he thought, as Orest and his sister argued about whether it would be better to have swamp dragons or desert dragons. He thought about the long process of getting Avatre’s mother to accept him; about watching her anxiously for the first of the eggs to appear, then agonizing over whether it would be better to take the first-laid, or the last-laid. The night he stole the egg was still vivid in his mind: slipping into the pen in the darkness, trundling the egg in a barrow down the corridor and praying that no one would happen to come along just then, and that no hungry ghosts would choose that moment to appear.

And only then did the real worries begin, of hiding the egg from anyone who might glance into the pen, of keeping it safe from the strange storms that the Altan Magi had sent, of the ever-more difficult task of hiding and feeding the hatched dragonet. And, of course, of pulling double duty, tending not only to Kashet and Ari, but to Avatre on the sly. He hadn’t had a sound night of sleep, frankly, until his first night with the Bedu clan.

No, no matter how hard Orest and his friends worked for their dragons, they would never match the effort that he had put in for Avatre.

“So how sore are you still?” Orest asked, breaking into his brooding.

“Sore enough,” he admitted, though the fact was that getting around at the moment often hurt as badly as if he was being beaten by Khefti-the-Fat, and he found himself sleeping a lot. It was quite strange, actually; though he didn’t actually remember it, all he could guess was that he had hit a great many obstacles in being pulled through the water, and had probably broken several ribs in the process. And perhaps he had dislocated his arms at the shoulder as well; the joints ached enough for it. The reeds had certainly lacerated his back; he’d seen the rags left of what he had been wearing. Fortunately, the Healer had made those cuts close over; evidently dealing with broken bones took longer.

It was equally fortunate that his body had protected Aket-ten, or she would have been as injured as he was. And he was glad he had an Altan-style cot rather than a Tian bed that would have required him to sleep on his back. He could lie on his stomach to sleep on the cot, which was the least uncomfortable of all of the possible positions.