"Hey, Aytin, come over here."

The young dragonette sat up. He had been planning on resting until dinner. Something about the beat of Faelon's wings kept him from sleeping during the flight. Everyone had promised him that he'd learn, but after a week of travel he didn't think that napping on dragonback would ever get any easier.

The early mornings didn't help, either. Reed insisted on getting underway an hour after sunrise whenever they weren't staying the night at a keep. Even with the warm climate, that was painfully early for the cold blooded dragonettes.

All of which was why Aytin's response was a less than thrilled, "On my way."

He found Xantha near a pile of recently unloaded baggage. Faelon hadn't moved far from his cargo. Something that sounded suspiciously like a snore came from where he was resting in the middle of the copse of trees.

"How are you with a bow?" Xantha asked as he walked up.

Aytin's ears perked at the unexpected question. "Pretty good," he admitted.

The female dragonette cocked her head. "What do you mean by pretty good? Pretty good like a gilded huntress is pretty good, or pretty good like a hatchling who can hit the side of a keep?"

"Pretty good like I made it to the semifinals of male archery in last year's keep games." He didn't mention that it had only been by a scale's breadth, and he'd been trounced handily in the next round.

"That works. Here." She handed him a bow.

Most of the caravan guards used crossbows. Those were easier to aim, and even a male could reload them with the help of a lever. But they had a few of the composite bows favored by huntresses, and more buried in the cargo for sale to keeps that lacked the ability to make their own.

Aytin wasn't exactly big, even for a male dragonette. He took the hunting bow and gave it an experimental tug. It was heavier than his bow back at the keep, and he struggled a little with the pull. He got it there, but he couldn't hold it for long.

Xantha hissed slightly at his trembling arm. "It'll have to do." She passed over a quiver with a trio of arrows. "I hope you really are as good as you say, because we're going hunting."

"Hunting?"

"Yeah. We could use some fresh meat, and there's no one on this island who will complain if we take some game. Now come on." She turned and strode purposefully towards the treeline.

Aytin stood there, waiting for the punchline to the joke but the older dragonette just kept walking. When it was clear that this wasn't some practical joke he had to run to catch up.

Only to nearly collide with an enormous red-scaled head blocking his path.

"You're going hunting?" Faelon asked. It might have been a polite question, but it was always hard to tell. The red dragon had mostly kept to himself for most of the trip. Even though he had been reasonable enough during the episode at the mine, red dragons were known for their tempers.

"Y-yes?" the young dragonette stammered.

Faelon bobbed his massive head in a nod. "I would appreciate it if you could bring enough back for me as well."

"I, well, I mean, uh, yes. Yes, we'll bring you whatever we can. Of course we will!"

The red dragon's lips curled back and Aytin's heart was already hammering before he realized it was a smile. "Thank you. I will await your return."

Taking that as a dismissal, Aytin scampered off.

He found Xantha waiting for him, tapping one taloned foot in impatience.

"Well? What took you?" she demanded.

"Faelon. He wanted us to make sure we got enough meat for him, too."

Xantha sighed. "Of course he did. The lazy wyrm can't even be bothered to hunt for himself." She looked Aytin up and down and shook her head. "I sure hope we can find something close, because I'd rather not make two trips. Now come on, we're burning daylight." She sprinted forward and leapt into the air, wings beating for altitude.

With his smaller wingspan, Aytin needed a bit more ground to get airborne. He formed up alongside the other dragonette and together they began to cross the savannah that made up the majority of this island.

"They have pronghorns back where you grew up, right?" Xantha shouted over the rushing airstream.

"Antelope? Yeah, we have those. Are... are we hunting them?"

"That's the only animal around here we'll get enough meat from to feed everyone and that big red pit. So shout out if you see a herd."

"Okay, right. I'll do that," Aytin called. He paused and then asked, "What do we do after that?"

"After what?"

"We see them!"

"What do you mean? You... shit, you've never been hunting before, have you?" His silence was answer enough. "Gods damn it, I've been away from a keep for too long." She thought for a minute. "Okay, do you think you can dive down and hit one in the back from the wing? Preferably in the neck? While it's dodging back and forth?"

He thought about that for a moment. It wasn't too much different from some of the exercises his older brother had put him through. "I can do that."

"Then you'll go in first. We'll come in high and catch them by surprise. I'll clean up."

"I'll do my best." He wasn't sure he could handle more than one draw.

"Say, you don't have any magic that might help, do you?"

It was a somewhat personal question. One he felt more than a little reluctant to talk about with a dragonette he had only known for a few days.

Xantha noticed his discomfort. "It's alright. Us crews are close. We know everything about each other. Like, I can feel the weather. Being on a moving dragon doesn't help, but I can sense if something big is coming. It's how I knew about the squall that we flew by the first day out of your keep."

Aytin remembered that. Reed had ordered them to pull to the west just after they had eaten, and an hour later they had skirted a nasty little storm. And Xantha had definitely been talking to her about the weather just before they changed course.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

"But if you don't want to share, that's fine," Xantha continued. "No one will force you."

"No, no, it's alright," Aytin replied. "I actually don't know what magic I have. If I have any."

"Don't worry about it! When I was your age I was worried that I'd be a blank. Everyone is. But I know you'll come into yours soon. In the meantime, look." She pointed into the distance where a patch of dark spots marred the green grass.

The pair altered course slightly, and started to bleed altitude. Xantha fell back a few wingbeats, letting the less experienced dragonette take the lead.

For his part, Aytin was humming with nerves. He didn't want to screw up in front of the senior crewmember, but he'd never loosed an arrow at anything alive before. Huntresses hunted. That was the way things worked in the keep. He had never considered it could be any different.

They were nearly above the herd when their gentle descent turned into a vertical dive.

A ripple went through the mass of pronghorns and they bolted as they finally noticed the pair of airborne threats.

Aytin picked out a larger buck and arrowed after it. The beast was canny, jerking back and forth to dodge the coming strike, but Aytin was patient. He drew back the bow and even though his shoulder burned he forced himself to watch the pattern.

Just as the strain was becoming too much to bear, he swung the bow to point just to the animal's left, and let it fly with a twang.

Nothing happened. The animal kept running for its life. The shot had clearly been a miss, and Aytin's heart sank.

Then the buck seemed to trip over its own legs. It tumbled end over end before sliding to a stop in the high grass. Other pronghorns bounded over the body like it was just another rise in the massive prairie that made up the bulk of the island.

"Well done!" Xantha shouted. "You land over there. I'll bring mine to you."

Aytin did as he was told. The animal was dead by the time he reached it. His arrow jutted out from just below the left shoulder, half buried in the buck's chest.

He stood there, staring at it until Xantha strode up. She had a carcass slung over her shoulder and a grin on her snout.

"That was a hell of a hit," she complimented, dumping her burden onto the ground nearby. "It looks like you got it right in the heart. And you told me you were only 'pretty good'. Ha!"

"I got lucky," he said, scratching at the dirt with one foot.

"I've done this a few hundred times before, and mine still needed two arrows. But now for the really important question." Xantha drew a knife, and her expression turned serious. "Please tell me that you know how to clean these? Because I'd rather not have to do all the work myself."

Aytin drew the bronze knife Lin had given him in response. "That much I can do. The huntresses brought their kills back for us all the time." He examined the carcasses for a moment and then asked, "Quarter them?"

"That's what I was thinking." She eyed his smaller blade dubiously. "You dress them. I'll handle the skinning and ligaments. Pity we don't have the time to bleed them properly, but it is what it is."

It only took minutes for Aytin to clean out the entrails and chest cavity of his kill. The guts and lungs went into a shallow hole while he stored the organs away in a clean leather bag that Xantha provided. It was bloody, messy work, but work he had done exactly the same thing many times in the past.

"So if you didn't hunt, what did you do back at the keep?"

Aytin paused at the question, forearm deep in a pronghorn's guts. He thought for a time and then shrugged. "A little of everything, I guess."

"You guess? Your parents are the lord and lady of a keep, and a pretty damn successful one for that far out on the frontier. You aren't telling me that they let you lounge around all day eating honey cakes?"

"No, of course not," he said, then gave a grunt as he finally pulled out the liver. "But I never found anything I was really good at. Not like my brother and sisters."

"Oh?" Xantha made an expectant noise from where she was sawing through some ligaments.

"Well, Zara, my oldest sister, she's going to inherit the keep. Everyone always knew that. But she's great at that sort of thing. You know, making people like her and getting them to do what she wants."

"Hey, you're a perfectly likable sort for a runt, Tin."

He rolled his eyes at the much larger dragonette. "Thank you so much. But she's good at all the other leadership stuff, too. Organizing, figuring out problems, you know. She's in charge of a shift in the copper mines right now, but everyone knows that's just the first step.

"Then Stonar, my older brother, he got all the height I didn't."

"He's in the guard, right? I remember a dragonette that looked like a taller, muscled version of you."

"Yeah, he's in the guard." Aytin caught an odd gleam in her eyes, and then the tone registered. "No. Oh gods, no!"

"Ha! You're too easy!" Xantha laughed. "Relax, I didn't do anything but look... this time."

"I don't care! Keep your claws off my brother. You're like more than twice his age. And he has a girlfriend."

"Oh? A pity. But I'm sure with enough time- Hey!" She barely dodged a chunk of bloody gut hurled her way. "Okay, okay. I don't want to get these clothes any dirtier than I have to."

Aytin wasn't finished. "Swear you won't mess with Stonar." To emphasize his point, he held another length of dripping entrails in one hand. The implication was clear.

"Okay." Xantha dropped the mocking tone. "I swear I won't mess with your brother. Happy?"

The younger dragonette tossed the improvised projectile to the side in response. Then he went right back to work. The sun was only a bit more than a hand's breadth over the horizon and neither wanted to be flying home in the dark.

"So what about your other siblings?" Xantha asked, trying to restart the conversation.

"Suuie is my other older sister. She's apprenticed to the keep smith. He's also about the only one in the keep that can stand her for more than a day."

"That bad?"

"She's about as prickly as a needlefruit. I can't believe Lin managed to tolerate her long enough to get her to agree to help with this, much less finish it," he said, holding up his gifted bronze blade. "The two of them get into some epic fights, and somehow I always end up being the go between. I wouldn't be surprised if they have torn down the whole keep by now trying to get at each other."

"Lin is the huntress, right?" Xantha asked with some interest.

"Yeah, my little sister." He stopped cleaning out the chest cavity to stare off into the distance for a few moments. "I'm going to miss her."

The other dragonette nodded. "From the little display she put on, she knows her way around the sky. And her kit looked good. Well cared for, with all the essentials and none of the fluff. Definitely solid huntress material."

Aytin cocked his head. "You sound like you're speaking from experience."

She froze, back turned. After a half dozen heartbeats she resumed her butchering, but said nothing.

When no response came, Aytin went back to his own task. They worked in silence for several minutes before Xantha finally spoke.

"I was... a huntress once. Years ago. It didn't work out."

Aytin sensed there was more. He kept quiet, though. Years of being in the middle of family arguments had taught him when to poke and when to keep quiet.

"The keep had the fucking god's cursed luck," she eventually continued. "Two straight years of failed harvests. A plague brought in by a band of traveling mercenaries. Tax collectors that wouldn't see reason. And when there was a screw up, did they back their own? Hells on!" Her eyes flashed and she cut through the last joint with a vicious chop that buried the knife into the hard packed dirt.

That drew a wince from the kid, not only at the older dragonette's anger but at the abuse of a fine blade.

She ignored him, focusing on cleaning up the kill. A couple of quick knots and she had the haunches all hanging from a nearby tree.

"You done? Good. We're taking the choice cuts back to the crew. Faelon can bite me if he thinks I'm gonna hand feed him. So he can fly his fat ass over here for his share." She gestured towards the tree where the haunches hung like gristly ornaments.

"Now, this bag is your responsibility," she ordered, pointing to the smaller of the two sacks. "Drop it and you're explaining to the crew why they're getting shank instead of steak. And to Faelon why he's having to give up part of his share."

Both possibilities were equally frightening.