He probably had the Magi to thank for that. Still, his position could be much worse. He’d once thought that she harbored a secret passion for Toreth, and that had turned out to be false. The last thing he wanted to do was to give her even the faintest of impressions that he was putting pressure on her. Aket-ten was not a desert antelope to be swooped down upon, knocked over, and devoured. Rather, she was like her own blue-black dragon Re-eth-ke, to be courted with circumspection, tact, and delicacy, so that when she made up her own mind, it was with the impression that she had been the one who’d had the idea in the first place.

She came up beside him to lean on the parapet and look down into the sand pit where the dragons were just beginning to stir. All the dragons shared a sand wallow, rather than each having their own as they had back in Alta. There hadn’t been much of a choice in that; the Jousters’ Compound had been tended by a small army of servants, builders, and slaves. There were no slaves here in Sanctuary, and precious few servants, and none to spare for building something like the complex of quarters and sand wallows the dragons were used to. Fortunately, they were all, with the exceptions of Avatre, and Ari’s huge gold-emerald-and-blue dragon Kashet, out of the same batch of eggs. All but Kashet had romped together as nestlings and fledglings, and had trained together, under the guidance of Kiron and Avatre, from the beginning of their lives. There was no serious quarreling, much less the fighting that happened among unrelated wild-caught Jousting dragons, and though there might be the occasional squabble, it was soon sorted out without much worse than a swat or a nip or two. For her part, although the lovely scarlet Avatre reacted to being forced to share her sand with the “infants” with a pained disdain that was sometimes quite funny to see, she never bullied them.

As for Kashet, who might have been expected to react poorly to the herd of youngsters, the eldest of the dragons actually took to the half-grown dragonets with great tolerance and even some show of occasional pleasure.

“I wouldn’t even try to get inside your thoughts,” Aket-ten teased. “I’d find myself listening to echoes.”

“Hah,” was all he replied. “You only think that because you’ve spent so much time around your brother, all boys have heads as empty as last-year’s latas pod.”

“Last year’s latas pod isn’t empty!” her brother Orest exclaimed, coming up the stairs to flank Kiron on his right. “It is full of the seeds of wisdom, I will have you know! Ah, they’re starting to stir.”