And fell——and fell—fell almost three stories, then at the last moment before she hit the canyon floor, snapped her wings open just as it seemed as if she was going to hit the sand. If this hadn’t been exactly the kind of maneuver they had practiced to run against the Tian Jousters, he’d have probably dropped dead out of fear. As it was, he found himself yelling involuntarily and once again hanging onto the saddle for dear life just before she turned the drop into a climb.

By the time she was flying high, drifting sedately from one thermal to another on the way back to Sanctuary, he was dripping with sweat, the waistband of his kilt and the roots of his hair absolutely saturated.

If I never have to go through that again, I will be very, very grateful.

He could have been killed. Avatre could have been hurt. It could all have gone horribly, horribly wrong.

Yet as the fear wore off, the exhilaration of what he had just discovered replaced it. Not only had he found Kaleth’s mysterious hidden city, but he had found wild dragons and they had a place where they could incubate any eggs that were laid!

Avatre was still agitated, but not seriously so. She seemed more concerned about him, turning her head to look back at him from time to time as if to reassure herself that he hadn’t come to any harm.

Well, with all that yelling, she had probably thought he’d gotten hurt. He leaned over her shoulder and patted her neck, telling her what a fine, brave lady she had been, and how proud he was of her. After he’d done that for the third time, she finally heaved a great sigh, her sides inflating and deflating under his legs. Then he felt her relaxing, stretching out, lengthening as her muscles let go. She stopped looking back over her shoulder at him, concentrating on the far-off smudge on the horizon that was Sanctuary.

He half expected her to try to land, as usual, in the old communal pen, but to his pleased surprise she spiraled in on her new pen and dropped down lightly and under complete control precisely where she belonged.

He was off her in a moment; and within the space of time that it took to unsaddle her, he realized that except for her emotional agitation, which was mostly fading, she was by no means as tired by her exertions as he had thought she would be. She had just spent an overlong hunt, had faced down an older dragon, and made a fear-charged escape flight, and she wasn’t really breathing heavily. All this hunting for themselves was putting the dragons of Sanctuary into better physical shape than any of the Jousting dragons had ever been.