“You shouldn’t have to go that far,” Kiron replied, and when the others looked him, he grinned. Oh, he’d seen the envious looks from the Tian dragon boys, every one of them thinking: “If I’d only had an egg, I could have an Avatre now.” They’d seen enough of Kashet, and worked enough with the young ones that were about as “tame” as a wild-caught falcon to have gotten the fever for themselves. “Look, when the tala ran out, you had all those dragons loose on the border of Alta, and I do think that most of them didn’t go back to the hills beyond Mefis. For one thing, the pickings in the swamps are better, though they would only hunt there, not den up. For another, if they tried to go back, the other dragons would drive them out. The wild ones have established groups and territories, and the Tian dragons would have been nothing more than clumsy interlopers.”

Ari nodded his approval of Kiron’s assessment. “Oh, a few of them would get accepted, but the rest would be driven out—and of course, some of them wouldn’t have bothered to try and go back since there would be good hunting here, and none of them are afraid of humans. That means they’re forming wild wings of their own, and making new territories all over this desert. In fact, I think I’ve been seeing some of them in the distance. I just didn’t think about it, because as long as they didn’t bother me, they didn’t really matter.”

“I believe I have, too,” Ari replied thoughtfully. “But I’ve been so busy hunting I hadn’t paid a lot of attention to the wild dragons in the distance.”

“I know I have,” said Menet-ka, quietly, from behind Kiron. “There’s a natural hot spring in my hunting area, and there’s a whole—flock? herd?—a group of them, anyway, that I see there most mornings. They sleep around it at night. I know they’re Jousting dragons, because they let me get pretty close before they fly off.”

Baken’s eyes lit up. “Females?” he asked eagerly.

“At least four. And they’re all breeding age.” Menet-ka chuckled. “They left us alone, I don’t know whether it’s because I’m with Bethlan, or because Bethlan is too young to be considered a rival.”

“I think I know where there’s at least one or two,” Kiron said slowly. “I think I’ll go look; I have to go there anyway to hunt tomorrow. It’s where the mountains meet the desert.”

“Then I think we should construct a hatching pen,” said the young priest firmly. “We haven’t the need to hurry, the way we did to work on these pens so we could all move to better quarters, and it won’t take all that long to do a single pen.”