For the first time ever, national best-selling legend Mercedes Lackey draws from her
extensive knowlege of animals-and her professional background as an avian expert-to
create something truly special...
The most exciting, authentic and believable portrayal of dragons ever imagined.
It is a richly conceived, fully realized vision, inspired by the culture of ancient Egypt, the
legends of Atlantis-and the science of animal behavior and biology. This is how dragons
would live, breed, hatch, hunt, and bond.
The first book in this thrilling new series introduces readers to a young slave who dreams
of becoming a Jouster-one of the few warriors who can actually ride a flying dragon. And
so, in secret, he begins to raise his own dragon.
Vetch was an Atlan serf. Anger was his only real
sustenance—anger that the land he worked had once been
his family's farm, and anger at the kind of work he did—for
the crop he helped raise gave the Jousters their ability to
control the great dragons that had enabled Tia to conquer
more than a third of what had once been Atlan lands. It
seemed that Vetch's entire cruel fate revolved around
dragons and the Jousters who rode them. But his fate
changed forever the day he first saw a dragon. From its
narrow, golden, large-eyed head, to its pointed emerald ears,
to the magnificent blue wings which were spread to catch
the sun, the dragon was a thing of multicolored, jeweled
beauty, slim and supple and quite as large as the shed it
perched on. Vetch almost failed to notice the tall, muscular
Jouster who stood drinking from his water bucket. And when
Vetch's master raised his whip to punish the serf who had
dared to pause in his duties, the Jouster had stilled his hand.
"I need a boy," he said, and with that and a call to his
mount, Vetch found himself lifted above the earth and
transported like magic to a different world. If this Jouster
had tamed his dragon, perhaps Vetch too could tame a
dragon. And if he could, then he might be able to escape.
And if he could escape, maybe he could even bring the
secret of dragon-taming back to his homeland of Atlan. And
maybe, just maybe, that secret might prove to be the key to
Atlan's liberation....New Dragon fantasy from Mercedes Lackey. Here's her own description of the book.
Why Dragons?
A good question that; there is really no reason (speculation about racial
memory going back to the first primates notwithstanding) that dragons
should be such a persistent mythic theme. The earliest known reference
is in Babylonian literature, to the great dragon/goddess Tiamat, and the
latest known populate the shelves of the fantasy section of the
bookstores. Maybe it has something to do with the alien quality of
reptiles. Sooner or later every fantasy writer seems to have a go at
them, and I'm no exception to that. This time around, though, I decided
to take several different takes on the subject. Most of the current
dragon literature treats dragons as on a par with humans insofar as
intelligence goes. I decided to treat them instead as really big "birds" of
prey—featherless raptors the size of small airplanes, if you will. Now, as a
raptor rehabber, I know a fair bit about raptors, and I'm using that
knowledge in handling the behavior, the bonding, and the training of the
dragons in the Joust series. I'm also fascinated with ancient history, in
particular, the history of Egypt, and I'd wanted to do something in the
nature of a fantasy in that setting, but there's a bit of a problem with
that. Egyptian scholars are some of the nit-pickiest people on the planet,
and as Barbara Mertz (aka mystery writer Elizabeth Peters) has pointed
out, endlessly argumentative. They wouldn't like an Egypt with fantasy
elements; anything I got "wrong" would generate nuisance-letters. Any
book with a lot of fantasy-elements in it would open the floodgates. And
I had always wanted to do something with the Atlantis myth too; alas,
Atlantis doesn't do well commercially... But, if I took pre-dynastic Egypt
and the conflict between Upper and Lower Egypt, used Atlantis as Lower
Egypt, turned the whole thing into a fantasy setting and added
raptor-dragons...
Ah, now there was a plan! And the more I thought about it, the easier it
all fitted together, and the dragons—oh, the dragons! True
desert-dragons, designed to cope with and even thrive in hot sands. Not
fire-breathing; trying to work out things as big at that which fly and
carry a rider was going to be difficult enough to set up logically. It would
make them, more-or-less, the equivalent of WWI biplanes, with riders
perhaps dropping pots of Greek Fire, or snatching up military leaders to
drop them from a great height, and certainly spying and patrolling from
above. This made me think of the Flying Aces (which I am researching for
Phoenyx and Ashes, also upcoming from DAW) and the way they
initially dueled each other in the air with pistols, and even dropped bricks
on one another, before someone managed to arrange machine guns so
that they didn't shoot their own props off. Which gave me the whole
Jousters premise, as well. The culture of the ancient world gave me the
background of all of this, a background quite different than the usual
medieval European setting of the vast majority of fantasy today. How the
dragons fitted into that background would also be unique.
From there, everything just flowed. I'm excited, DAW is excited, and we
think this is going to be a terrific story.
—Mercedes Lackey
Books in this series in order are: Joust, Alta, Sanctuary & Aeyrie.
