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the asking!”
    “Because I’m tired of replacing free boys when they get haughty airs and decide they ought to be something better than ‘just’ a dragon boy!” Ari snapped, and unbuckled the last strap. He pulled the saddle and the pad that Vetch had clung to off the dragon’s back. He turned with it in his hands, and looped all of the straps around it into a compact bundle with a swift and practiced motion.
    He dropped the whole thing in Vetch’s arms; Vetch had been expecting this from the moment he’d heard what he was to become. A serf, after all, was for the bearing of burdens. He caught it as it dropped, though one of the strap ends hit the ground and his stripes burned again. He was used to working, and working hard, with more whip cuts on his back than two.
    The saddle was heavy, at least for him, and he staggered for a moment beneath its weight. It had an additional scent besides that of leather—a hot, metallic scent, with an overtone of spice. The scent of the dragon?
    “There, boy—” the Jouster said, in a tone of dismissal, as he bent to pick up his helmet and tuck it under his arm. “You go with Haraket; he’ll teach you your business. You’ll be living here now.”
    Jouster Ari stalked off without a backward look, and Vetch turned, the saddle in his arms, to face the person he had not yet seen.
    Haraket. Who must be an Overseer.
    The man wore a simple white linen kilt, augmented by one striped, multicolored sash around his waist and a second that ran from his right shoulder, across a chest as muscular as any warrior, to the opposite hip. His square head was shaven, though he did not wear a wig, his skin as browned and weathered as that of any farmer, and he wore a hawk-eye amulet of glazed pottery around his neck. He gazed down on Vetch with resignation from beneath a pair of heavy, black eyebrows. But at least he didn’t look angry. And he wasn’t wearing a whip at his waist either.
    “Come on, you,” he said, with a sigh. “Since I’m to teach you your business, the best time to start is now.” Vetch ducked his head obediently, silently telling himself not to look sullen, and followed as the man strode off across the beaten earth of the courtyard. But he stopped dead at the sound of something large and heavy following him.
    He turned. The dragon stared down at him, cocking its head quizzically; it had been right on his heels.
    “Come on, serf boy!” the man snarled, when he turned to discover that Vetch was not behind him anymore. “Kashet will come along without being led, much less leashed or chained. He follows me and Ari like a dog, and in time, he’ll follow you. Kashet isn’t like other dragons, and that’s something you’d better keep in mind from this moment on. Ari doesn’t need tala to control him. You’re damned lucky to be Ari’s boy; Kashet is a neferek to handle compared with the others.”
    He turned abruptly and strode off again, and Vetch hurried to catch up with him, the dragon following along like a hound. For the moment, the ever-present anger that burned in his belly had retreated before his feeling of complete dislocation and bewilderment.
    The dragon had landed in a huge courtyard with enormously high limestone walls around it, “paved” with pale beige earth pounded hard and as flat as a smooth mud brick. There were four entrances or gates to this courtyard, square arches each surmounted by a sculpted and painted symbol of a god, each one right in the middle of each wall. All were tall enough to allow a dragon to pass through them, and broad enough for three. The man marched straight through the one nearest them, which had a hawk eye painted in blue, red, and black carved into the top; Vetch followed, and the dragon followed him.
    The colors were bright enough to dazzle the eye; there was nothing like these painted walls in Khefti’s village. The painted images leaped out at Vetch, dazzling him. Even Khefti’s apprentices never worked with such