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wonderful colors!
    On the other side of the wall were—more limestone-faced walls, equally dazzling in their whiteness. They formed a sort of alley or corridor stretching in either direction; the area was also open to the sky. These walls were not as tall as the ones around the courtyard, and dragon heads peeked over the tops at intervals, peering at them with some unreadable emotion. They weren’t all the green and gold of Kashet; there were blue ones in all shades from dark to light, red ones, a purple color, and a pale gold and silver. The colors were dazzling, gorgeous, and they filled his eyes the way that a fine meal filled the appetite. Already, Vetch could tell there was a profound difference between these dragons and Kashet. Ari’s dragon had some friendly interest in his eyes when he looked at Vetch—these dragons had the eyes of feral cats, wary and wild.
    He expected noise out of them, based on the way the oxen and donkeys of his father’s farm behaved when a stranger came into their yard; to his surprise, there was very little. The dragons hissed and snorted, but there was no bellowing, no growling.
    Perhaps they didn’t make any louder sound; perhaps they couldn’t.
    They came to an intersection, and the bald man turned the corner to lead him down another corridor, then another—and just as Vetch thought he was totally lost, turned a final corner that brought them inside another courtyard. He stumbled forward on momentum and blundered into a huge pit that formed the center of the courtyard, a pit that was knee-deep in soft, hot sand. He floundered in the stuff, helplessly, and the man reached out a long arm and hauled him back onto the hard verge. Again, the whip cuts on his back reminded him they were there.
    “Stay on the walkway around the edge, boy,” the man said, but not unkindly. “That sand will burn you, else, until you’re used to it. You’ll need to toughen your skin to it.”
    He’d already found that out; the sand radiated heat upward, as hot as the sun overhead, hotter than the kamiseen . His legs stung a little, though he wouldn’t have called it a burn, exactly. His feet were too callused to feel much, even heat, from so brief an encounter.
    “Put the saddle over there,” Haraket continued, pointing to a wooden rack mounted on the wall nearest Vetch. “Untangle the straps and drape them over the rack to dry—dragons don’t sweat, but Jousters do. Kashet doesn’t need to be chained the way the others do, so you leave him free.”
    The dragon, ignoring both of them, plunged past them into the center of the room to wallow into the hot sand. Vetch heaved the saddle up onto the rack as he’d been told to do. Under Haraket’s watchful eye, he arranged the saddle straps over the bars of the rack, untangling them as he did so. Something told him that the straps shouldn’t touch the ground, so he took care that they did not do so. The kamiseen did not venture down here, for a wonder, though he could hear it whining above the walls. Not that it was cooler here; not with those hot sands contributing to the fire of the sun overhead.
    When he turned to face his instructor, he thought that the man was not displeased. He looked up into Haraket’s face, and waited for more instruction. It was not long in coming.
    “The first thing you need to get into your mind is this: Kashet and his Jouster will be your sole concern from morning to night,” Haraket told him, crossing his muscular arms over his chest, and looking down at him, examining, weighing, assessing. “A dragon boy not only tends to his dragon, he tends to the Jouster that rides him. No one can give you orders but your Jouster and me, unless Ari or I tell you otherwise.”
    Vetch bobbed his head. “Yes, Overseer,” he replied.
    Haraket grunted. “Here is the next thing; your Jouster can probably find plenty of other servants if he needs them, but you are the only one who is to tend to his dragon. If you have to choose