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in their stalls, their long, forked tongues flicking out, black as tar with venom. They rumbled, they tossed their heads, they threw their weight against the heavy iron gates that barred them within their stalls. They rasped their deadly talons against stone.
    I loved those dragons, I did.
    With my body miraculously healed and the scent of venom effervescing through my blood, I loved those dragons. Exhilaration swelled through me and I felt I could spread my arms and fly.
    The courtyard was a-clatter with motion. Pitchforks flashed in the early morning sunlight as apprentices mucked stalls, carted away manure, and wheeled in fresh bedding and fodder. In a shadowy corner, two scrawny boys worked the rusty handle of a pump; water gushed out, splashing into what appeared to be an open aqueduct running through the far side of every stall. Curses rang to and fro; bellows echoed about. Snake poles and muzzle hooks glinted from the cool shadows, the tools wielded by boys either astraddle a dragon or attempting to immobilize one for grooming.
    At the far end of the courtyard leaned two dilapidated, narrow structures: the apprentices’ latrines. A pile of lumber and a stack of bricks sat to one side of them. Ah. I understood at once. Those were the materials the dragonmaster wanted me to fashion into a latrine, and the tools I’d require to do so.
    I flared my nostrils, piqued by the flagrant challenge he’d set before me. Like any other man, he’d assumed that, as a woman, I’d have no idea how to build a latrine. Such a simple task would not confound me, hey-o! I lifted my chin. I would show him that I was no ordinary woman.
    I started across the courtyard, the red, sunbaked earth as warm as fresh blood upon the soles of my bare feet.
    At the same far end of the courtyard as the latrines and pile of lumber, an immense sandstone archway led to yet another stable courtyard, and beyond that, another. A line of apprentices was just starting to walk beneath that sandstone archway, each apprentice leading a muzzled, wing-pinioned dragon by means of a hook notched firmly in one of the dragon’s nares. They were taking them somewhere, perhaps for exercise.
    I stopped a moment, halfway across the yard, and watched the apprentices and their winged charges disappear through the archway into the courtyard beyond.
    How big were the Roshu-Lupini’s stables? There was no way I could tell, standing there, though from my fevered rambling the day previous, I knew the ochre sandstone walls enclosed the entire stable domain, however large. Those walls were twice my height and topped by ceramic shards, necessary to prevent rishi and bayen alike from pestering the dragons and holy Re, our illustrious Clutch bull, with petitions for good luck, fertile wombs, and plentiful food.
    Dragons were divine. By mere dint of their intact wings and venom sacs, the Roshu-Lupini’s dragons were regarded as especially divine and most likely to answer the prayers of the devout. There was no real logic in that supposition, but superstition and myth run strong amongst rishi.
    I continued across the courtyard, toward the building supplies stacked beside the apprentices’ latrines. The lumber was new and freshly treated with hagi, a Malacarite pitch used to protect wood from the elements, and as I approached the stack of wood, the tar-and-vinegar reek of the hagi combined pleasantly with the stables’ peppery tang of venom.
    The planks were straight, the tawny color of heart-wood, and bore few knots. Never before had I worked with such fine wood, for during my years in Convent Tieron, the lumber we’d used to mend our mill wheel had been roughly hewn and weathered, castoffs grudgingly sent our way by the Ranreeb, who, as Temple’s Overseer of the Jungle Crown, was responsible for the Tieron sanctuary.
    A wooden crate stained blue and decorated with a rendering of a dragon’s head sat atop the lumber. I crouched on my haunches and cracked the crate