He was far from idle himself; besides keeping track of every one of the boys of his new wing, he was training Avatre, twice a day, every day. He knew at this point that there was no choice in the matter; if he was going to train the others, he had to work out how to train them himself.

He counted himself lucky that Avatre was, if anything, more sweet-tempered than Kashet. She put up with indignities from his clumsy experiments that would have left him kicking his legs as he went down the throat of a less-patient dragon.

And she was growing apace; he’d already had to have new harness and saddle made for her, and it looked as if she was going to need another set of kit before two moons had passed. Ah well, the old rig certainly wasn’t going to go to waste; the leatherworkers were using it as the pattern for eight more harnesses, and the benefit was, if the dragon fit the first harness, they’d know it was big enough to fly with a rider.

It occurred to him when he’d let out her cinches as far as he could, that he was growing, too . . . a growth spurt that had begun when he had joined the dragon boys and was still going. Lack of food had kept him stunted; plentiful food had set him growing like a weed. He doubted that he would ever be very tall, but—

And my voice just broke. Girls were beginning to look a bit more interesting to him as well.

And he wondered, in the dark of the night, just how old he really was. Older than even he had thought, he suspected, or his voice wouldn’t have broken already.

Could I be fifteen Floods old now? Fourteen, anyway? He had lost track of the Floods once he’d been made into a serf; no one ever celebrated his birthday, for what was there to celebrate in another year in captivity? One day had been like another, varying only in degrees of misery. Maybe he was fifteen Floods old now. That would make him as old as most of the others.

That would do no harm; the others would accept him as trainer and leader more readily if he was older than he’d thought.

He grew to know the boys during this time, and somewhat to his surprise, there was not a single one that he was not happy to have as a friend, and that realization, made one day as he was helping Toreth harness his charge, nearly stunned him. He, who had never had a real friend before, now had eight—nine, counting Aket-ten—

It was at that moment that he also realized that for the first time in his life, he was happy. And the revelation left him stunned for the rest of the evening.