Aerie

He felt much more human after a good bath, and not quite ready to go to sleep. But he also didn’t feel much like going back to the group he had just left. He stood in his own doorway for a moment, looking in the direction of the pens, wondering if he ought to go look in on Avatre, when a movement in the deep shadows beside the pool in this court made him start and bite back an exclamation.

And that in turn startled the person in the shadows who jumped and squeaked.

“It’s all right!” he said hastily. “Don’t be alarmed—”

As he said that, it occurred to him how much things had changed since the Magi were gone. A few moons ago, he would have gone into a defensive crouch, perhaps even called for help, certain that whoever was there was a spy set by the Magi, or one of the Magi themselves.

A breathless laugh answered him. “It is I who should be begging your pardon, Lord of the Jousters,” said the quiet young woman who had sat a little apart from the rest, apologetically. She got up and walked toward him, into the faint, warm glow of the lamp behind him. “I often come here when the chatter of the others goes on a little too long,” she added. “They are kind, and quite friendly, but they all come from the same circle, and they—” Now she hesitated. “I know that we are to think of ourselves as one Kingdom now, but I cannot help saying—they are Tian.”

Now that she had said more than a few words, he knew her accent. “And we are Altan,” he agreed. Even after all these many moons of working with the Tian Jousters . . . there was still that sense of “us” and “them.” He suspected it would take years, perhaps even tens of years, for that to leave them.

It was a very good thing that Ari was a patient man.

“And I am the daughter of a farmer, and they were priestesses,” she sighed. “I know that rank does not matter among Jousters, but . . . they speak of things of which I have no knowledge, of rituals and ceremonial things, of powers, and the people who have them. I only know how to bake bread and make beer.”

“And without someone to bake bread and make beer, those who serve the gods would quickly starve,” he pointed out, sitting down on the rim of the pool. “Besides, as you say, rank and origin have no meaning among Jousters. I am a farmer’s son myself. To tend the earth is an honorable profession. Please, sit and talk to me. I had as soon hear someone do other than flirt.”

“It is good to hear the accent of my home, even if I have no home to go to,” she said, then took a seat of her own. “It wasn’t the war, it was a flood. I think I may have been the only one left alive out of my village.”

He sighed. “If it was a flood, it was the war,” he said sadly. “The Magi of our own homeland caused those, sending terrible storms against the Tians to destroy their crops, to terrify the people, to keep the dragons grounded. The only problem was that the water all had to go somewhere, and it flooded Altan lands once it had done with the Tians.

“But—” she protested. “Did the Magi not realize this would happen?”

“The Magi did not care, so long as it served their purposes,” Kiron said wearily. “They aimed to rule both Alta and Tia, even if to do so meant leaving no more than half the people in either land alive. And I beg of you, ask someone else of this. Ask the other ladies; they are priestesses and no doubt know a great deal more than I. I only know that this was a war that could have ended long ago, which the Magi of Alta fostered, and they battened on it as a hyena feeds on corpses. Let us speak of other things. Let us speak of—your dragon.”

Kiron learned quite a bit about this new female Jouster as both spoke until they were tired enough to go to bed. He learned that her name was Peri-en-westet, that her young female dragon was the only one hatched here and that Peri had helped the egg to hatch just as he had helped Avatre. Peri described her gold-and-green beauty to him in such loving detail that he had to smile, hearing in her voice the same adoration he heard in every Jouster that ever raised an infant. She told him that she had named her dragon Sutema, which meant “reed,” because she was so slender and graceful. He very much doubted that any baby dragon could be described as graceful, but he was not going to tell her that,

He also learned something of her history, which proved to him that at least not all Tians were as vile to their serfs as his masters had been. In fact, they seemed to have been even moderately kind. Certainly Peri had not been made to starve as Kiron had, had had decent housing, and had even made some friends.

He also learned something she had probably never told any of the priestesses; that her friends had no idea what she was doing nor that she was going to become a Jouster. They all thought that she had some position at the Dragon Courts—cook or cook’s helper. A servant such as she was would be required to live where she worked. And as the lowly ex-serf, she would seldom be allowed time of her own.

“But why?” he finally asked. “Wouldn’t your friends be proud of you?”

She shook her head. “My friend is always talking about how important it is to know your place and keep to it. She is scornful even of those who send sons to the temples to learn to be scribes or priests. She would think I was being presumptuous.”

He shook his head in disbelief at how anyone could be so rigid in their thinking. “Well, she’ll have to learn someday,” he pointed out. “Once the Queen’s Wing starts flying, there will be no way of hiding who the riders are.”

“I’ll find a way,” she replied; he heard the stubbornness in her voice and had to smile.

“I expect you will,” he said then. “I expect you will always find a way to do something you truly want, Peri.” He stood up and stretched. “And with that, it is time for me to sleep. Avatre and I have a long flight ahead of us tomorrow. I hope that the wind will be at our backs for it.”

“I hope so, too,” she replied softly as he returned to his rooms.

EIGHT

THE body told us nothing, and the ghost had fled. We will have words with you soon.

That was the ominous message from the priests at Sanctuary, a cryptic statement that was waiting for Kiron when he and Avatre landed at Aerie.

Avatre landed in the golden light of early sunset, with the wind at her back, a fortuitous bit of weather that meant she was a great deal less tired than she had been after the flight to Mefis. Haraket was waiting there for them and handed him the note as soon as he slid down from Avatre’s saddle. It took less than a glance to know that all it meant was that the priests did not like the look of this either.

He looked to Haraket who had delivered the information, unspoken questions in his eyes as they both unsaddled Avatre, then fed her with the meat Haraket had brought. The older man rubbed his shaved head, and shrugged. “Do not ask me what it means,” he said. “Other than the obvious. They can’t tell what happened, they don’t like it either, and I think you can expect a summons to Sanctuary within the next few days.”

Well, that drove all thoughts of Aket-ten and his irritation with her out of his mind entirely. The flight had been long, and he’d had plenty of time to brood over her unreasonable behavior during the course of it. What had happened to the good-tempered, sensible girl he’d known in Alta and Sanctuary? Had she become jealous that he was the leader of the Jousters now? If that was her problem, he would have been happy to let her have this so-called “honor.” It was one he could well do without.

Well, that was what he told himself in frustration, but there were layers and layers of truth there. Part of the truth was that none of the Jousters, not even his original wing, would have accepted her as Lord of the Jousters, when they only grudgingly accepted him. Part of it was that he thought he just might be doing a reasonable job with this—although he dreaded to think what it could be like when and if there were more Jousters than just the few they had. And part of it was that he did like it that people were no longer treating him as a nonentity, nor as a boy who couldn’t possibly cope with the responsibility.

The idea that she begrudged him this made him angry.

He’d managed to stew himself up into such a state of irritation that when he’d found a kill for Avatre on the way back, she attacked it with the savagery of a dragon that was starving. In helping her make the kill, he’d managed to work off most of his anger, and got rid of the rest in butchering the remains for Avatre to eat at her second pause on the way back.

Now, though, it was clear he was going to have other concerns.

“I wish they would be less cryptic,” he groaned.

“They’re priests. I think it is an unwritten law that they must be cryptic at all times,” Haraket replied with a half grin. “Let me help you get your girl fed and bedded down,” he added, with a glance at the setting sun. “Then we’ll get you fed. I envy you those meals in Mefis—”

And that reminded him of Aket-ten and her half-thought-out scheme, and he groaned again. “Oh,” he said bitterly. “You would not envy me if you knew what I found when I got there.”

He unburdened himself freely to Haraket who, he reckoned, would be the best person to advise him on whatever troubles love affairs might bring his Jousters.

“In the name of Re-Haket!” Haraket swore, when he heard what Aket-ten had been up to. “Now I know why I never took a wife. Women! If it is not one thing, it is another with them. They are more trouble than a cage full of apes, and not nearly as entertaining.”

He looked so disgusted that Kiron smothered an involuntary laugh, and he glared at Kiron “It is not amusing,” he growled. “You have not yet needed to separate two men gone so wool-headed over a stupid wench that they went at each other with knives. And that was a mere flute girl, some doe-eyed bit that would have found herself a richer patron within the moon. These—this Queen’s Wing—” he made of the name a curse, “—will be full of creatures that cannot be turned out when the sun disk rises. Bah!”

“The Queen’s Wing is in the old Jousters’ Courts in Mefis,” he pointed out mildly. “And we are here.”

“And we will stay here,” Haraket snorted. “I will not complain again about the lack of bathing rooms, or the food, or the heat, if these things all keep those confounded women out of Aerie!”

He found himself wishing that Aket-ten could be here to hear all this herself. It would do her a world of good. He had no doubt that Haraket had a hundred tales of the horror that conflict over a woman could bring into the lives of the Jousters, and he found himself nursing a feeling of grim satisfaction that Aket-ten had failed to investigate this side of her plan.

The cat woke him before dawn. It had been sleeping on his stomach when he went to sleep himself, but it must have left for a while because suddenly he woke all at once as his shoulder was hit from behind. He snapped out of dreams, flailing for a moment, before the sound of clawed feet scampering off made him curse and sit up.

And just as well, too. Mere moments after the cat had made him a landing platform, some youngster he didn’t recognize came stumbling up the stairs, oil lamp in hand, to wake him. Warm light splashed across the stone wall before him, while behind him, his shadow danced, elongated and distorted. “Jouster Kiron!” the boy called, peering into the darkness toward Kiron’s sleeping place. “Jouster Kiron! There is a Priest of Haras here to see you! The Blue People brought him!”

That was more than enough to bring him fully awake. “I am coming!” he called, fumbling for his clothing. “Go back and tell him I will be with him in a moment.”

“He is at the Temple of Haras,” the boy said, and now Kiron thought he recognized the youngster as one of the acolytes of that god. “I will tell him you are on the way.” He turned and fumbled his way down the stairs, taking the light with him and leaving Kiron kneeling on his bed, putting on his loinwrap by touch.

It was by no means the first time that Kiron had dressed or left his home in the dark, and for once the cat did not try to trip him on his way out. Feeling his way to the stairs and down them, he kept one hand on the wall as a guide as he passed through Avatre’s pen. Avatre hadn’t even been disturbed by the intruder; she was still soundly asleep in her warm sands and did not stir as he passed by.

As he stepped out into the canyon that was the “street” here in Aerie, he glanced about at the other dwellings carved into the cliff faces. None showed any light, and a cold wind off the desert made him shiver. Hard to believe in just half a day it would be so hot that anyone sensible would be inside, where the rock walls kept the heat at bay. Evidently what the priest had to say was for his ears alone, at least for now.

Overhead, there was not yet a hint of dawn light, the stars all burned down, brilliant beads of electrum, from where they ornamented the Robe of the goddess Nofet, for whom Great Queen Nofret-te-en had been named. The moon was down already, leaving only Nofet’s Robe to give light.

But farther down the avenue, where the several “buildings” stood that had been taken as temples by those priests who had elected to leave the comforts of Mefis and what was left of Alta to establish a home for the gods, there was the warmth of lamp and torchlight reflecting off the carved rock. The temples tended to be illuminated all night long anyway. The work of the temples began early and ended late. For all that Kiron sometimes lamented the hard work of being a Jouster, the work of a priest was harder still.

He trod softly down the sand of the canyon floor, wondering yet again who it could have been that had carved this city out of living stone. The place was still something of a mystery, though they all knew now why it had been abandoned. In digging it out, they had decided that the wreckage had been wrought, not by the hand of time, but by one or several earthshakes very close together. They had found the places where several springs had been buried.

The water sources had been closed up so thoroughly that they must have been completely inaccessible right after the shakes. Although water was now available, it looked as if it had only lately been working its way to the surface.

Those, they had cleared enough that the water seeped up again, into holding pools created from cementing stones together and lining the inside with ceramic tiles, not as the old pools had been, carved out of the rock. In a place like Aerie or Sanctuary, in the heart of the desert, every drop of water was precious. One of the very first things anyone had done here, in fact, was to start securing all the possible sources of water. All the cisterns and cache basins at the tops of the cliffs had been repaired and made ready for any rain. Provisions had been made to keep and use every drop of water; if it was not suitable for drinking, it was saved and went for irrigation.

And, last of all, they had found something they had not yet cleared: what they thought was an entrance to a great underground cavern, like that in Sanctuary, a place where one of the daughters of Great Mother River snaked her way through the cool shadows beneath the rock and sand. That was a discovery without price. If it did prove to be a water cavern, it would mean a very great difference in people’s lives.

The springs they had found were sufficient for the population they had now—but not for one with the herds and flocks and carefully irrigated plots of garden that a city like this must have to sustain all the people that had once lived here. Only access to a water source like that in Sanctuary could have permitted that many people to live and thrive.

When that source had been cut off, in less than a moon the city must have begun to die. Certainly in less than a year it had been abandoned by all but the most stubborn. And, probably within ten years, even they had given up. Certainly not much had been left behind, not even things that would survive such as stone tools or metal objects.

The discoveries had been a stark warning to all of them, he thought as he passed one of the dwellings that had still not been cleaned out, restored, and taken over. They had the example before them; this could happen again. What they would do if it happened, he did not know. So far, all anyone had done was to make sure that no place that people had claimed to live in had any fractures running through the rock. Perhaps that was all anyone could do. Or perhaps someone might have ideas of how things could be reinforced, how they could find ways to make sure the water sources were never cut off again.

A torch burned on either side of the door of the structure that had been claimed by the priests of Haras, and there was light shining through the doorway, though there was no one outside. The two enigmatic carvings on either side of the door stared out and up at the stars. Kiron mounted the three steps between them and entered.

He paused a moment for his eyes to adjust to the light, but was almost immediately approached by the boy who had come to wake him. There was a lot of light in here; torches and lamps burned everywhere, with the scent of incense and perfumed lamp oil that would have told a blind man he was in a temple of some god.

“Priest Them-noh-thet is waiting for you, Jouster Kiron,” the boy said, bobbing his head diffidently. “Please—” he gestured toward an inner room.

The places that had been chosen as temples were not much like the ones that Kiron and the others had taken as their own. Here, the ceiling was higher, to accommodate the enormous, stylized statue in the first of the rooms, identical to the ones on either side of the door, a statue that looked enough like a hawk-headed man to satisfy the Priests of Haras. As Kiron knew, the structure was carved three to four times farther back into the rock than the ordinary dwellings, and dividing walls had been built inside to separate the sanctuary from the rest of the temple.

The boy took him to one of those rooms, hardly more than a cubicle, that contained a single lamp, two stools, and a table. One of the stools was already occupied.

Kiron did not recognize the priest, but he was young and looked fit; he’d have had to be fit to make the rigorous crossing of the ground between Aerie and Sanctuary in the short time since the body had been discovered, reported, and investigated at Sanctuary. Only someone on one of the racing camels belonging to the Bedu could have made the trip so quickly, and then only under the careful guidance of one of the Blue People themselves. The racing camels were not noted for a comfortable ride.

“Jouster,” said the priest, nodding at the other chair. “I have come on behalf of Sanctuary to beg a favor of you.”

That was not what he had expected to hear. He sat down quickly. “Just me, or the Jousters as a whole?” he asked. “Though, of course, we are all at the service of the temples.”

“The Jousters as a whole, at least a few of them, but you specifically,” said the priest, both hands clasped together on the table in front of him. “You see, what we discovered when we attempted to trace the path of that unfortunate guard, was . . . nothing.”

Kiron blinked; that didn’t make a lot of sense. He was vaguely aware of a chant beginning out in the main room. The first rituals of morning must have just begun. This must be grave indeed for the priest to be here, and not out there, among his fellows. “Nothing? I am not sure that I grasp what you are saying.”

“We found no trace of his passage, nor of any links to any border stations. It is as if he had never existed. When we made the assumption that he had come from the nearest border outpost and we had the Far-Sighted examine the place, we also found—nothing.” The priest paused significantly. “It is empty. There are no guards, no animals, no one and nothing in the settlement that supports it. There is no trace that anyone ever lived there, not so much as a single sacred cat.”

Kiron’s mouth went dry. How was this possible?

“Now, we are not entirely certain that the Far-Sighted are Seeing this correctly,” the Priest went on. “It could be that someone with magic is interfering with them. The Mouth of the Gods has no guidance on the subject, and is as baffled as the rest of us. We would like you to take however many Jousters you think necessary and fly there to investigate.”

He nodded quickly; it seemed the only possible plan. Whatever was going on, this death could not be the result of a simple quarrel. “We can do that. We cannot get there in a single day, however—”

Them-noh-thet waved away Kiron’s cautionary words. “No one expects you to. But by dragon you can go there much faster than anyone else. And you and your senior riders have had some experience with Magi. I am to come with you if you have any dragons that can carry two. I am—” Kiron saw his jaw tense “—highly conversant with dark magics. I can protect you from them, and if there has been any such thing employed there, I may be able to detect the traces.”

“We’ll find a way to take you,” Kiron told him immediately. There was no question in his mind about that. “It will take a little time to organize matters so that things run smoothly here in our absence. We will leave as soon as possible.”

Them-noh-thet nodded. “Then I will hold myself in readiness.”

This did not seem the time for an exchange of pleasantries. “I will start now,” Kiron replied, standing up. “I will be seeing you very shortly, I think.”

The priest gave him the little bow of equals, and Kiron took himself out.

He felt his own jaw tensing as he made his way out of the sanctuary, pausing only long enough for the deep bow of respect to the image of the god. This was not good, not good at all. What could have happened to make an entire settlement vanish?

Wait—not an entire settlement, he reminded himself. One had escaped.

Now, more than ever before, he berated himself for not having had the foresight to send out riders on a regular basis to scan the desert for lone riders. It would have been an excellent exercise for the younger Jousters. If he had—

Never mind. Now they must try and make up for that neglect. And the sooner he got his riders in the air, the better.

Breakfast was . . . very interesting that morning in the Dragon Courts of Mefis. Peri-en-westet said nothing about Lord Kiron to Wingleader Aket-ten. She didn’t have to. The other young ladies were saying quite enough as it was, rather too much in fact, and Aket-ten was clearly getting very irritated about it. The more nice things they had to say about Lord Kiron, the deeper a frown line grew between Aket-ten’s brows. They seemed oblivious to the effect they were having.

Or perhaps they were enjoying it. Some of them had rather mischievous natures.

For Peri’s part there was something more going on, something she was afraid to tell anyone just yet.

She had spoken for quite some time to Lord Kiron last night. And until that conversation it would never have occurred to her that Lord Kiron, the leader of all of the new Jousters of the Two Lands, the friend of the Great King and Queen, could possibly be the same person as the missing son Kiron of her friend Letis-hanet.

Even now the speculation seemed unlikely.

A logical person would say that there was not the least little chance in the world that something so impossible could be.

But—

Lord Kiron was a farmer’s son, from the borderlands between Tia and Alta, from lands taken by Tian troops.

The missing Kiron was from those same lands, and was about the same age as Lord Kiron.

Lord Kiron had been separated from his family as the lands were divided. Letis had lost her son almost immediately in one such division.

Lord Kiron had had at least one sister but was the only son. Letis, of course, still had one of her daughters with her, had lost others, and had had only one son.

Now, Kiron was a common Altan name. Kiron, son of Kiron, was not at all uncommon. Every village had at least one Kiron. But . . .

The more she looked at it, the more it seemed that there were too many points of similarity between the two. Kiron even looked rather like Letis; there was a great similarity in the eyes.

The complication was this: Letis had made it very, very clear that once her son was found, she was going to do everything in her power to make a match between her boy and Peri. And up until last night, Peri had always considered that idea to be the wildest of fantasies, somewhere between laughable and suitable only for the sort of thing one would amuse a child with.

Now . . .

If this was Letis’ son—

She left the rest of them teasing Aket-ten and went back to her baby dragon. No reason why she couldn’t continue to consider all this while she took care of the little one. Her hands could work undirected while she thought things through.

As she tended Sutema, tenderly oiling the baby’s delicate wing webs, feeding the little one until her stomach was round and full, then leading her to flop down on the hot sands in the sun to doze contentedly with the rest of the wing’s babies, she thought about Lord Kiron, and what it would mean, could mean, if he was her friend’s lost son.

He was a Jouster. He was Lord of the Jousters. And what better mate could there be for a Jouster than another Jouster?

Letis would heap scorn on her for having airs and presuming above her station for being part of this creation of Aket-ten’s under any other circumstances but this. If her own son was not only a Jouster, but Lord of all the Jousters of the Two Lands—to scorn that would be to scorn her own long-lost, longed-for son. She could say nothing to Peri, who would be the fittest bride there ever could be for such a man.

As for Kiron the man—

He was handsome, fit, young, but most of all, he was kind. If someone had come to Peri and said, “What are all of the things you could desire in a mate? Only say, and the gods will create such a man for you,” then Lord Kiron would have come very close to that ideal. She’d had moments, and many of them, when she had thought it likely she would never marry. And back when she was a serf, she had wondered if a mate would be forced on her, an old man, or someone cruel. Lord Kiron . . . Lord Kiron was like something out of the sort of story that a market storyteller would recite to charm the coins from pretty unmarried girls.

Well, it was worth thinking about this as at least a decent possibility. Why not? Even if Lord Kiron was not Letis’ son . . . now that Peri was herself a Jouster, was there any reason why she should not look on Lord Kiron as someone she might attract?

Not really. He was not of aristocratic blood. He was, in fact, as common as herself.

The only other possible rival—

Aket-ten.

As for the other young ladies—Peri thought she was on fairly safe ground there. Judging by the way that Kiron had spoken of the Tians in general last night, she thought he would never consider anything but another Altan. So her fellows of the new Queen’s Wing were easily dismissed. And they were priestesses, people with whom he had very little in common. It was one thing to pursue a pretty priestess or noble for light love, but Letis was right about one thing. When a man chose a woman for something permanent, he liked to have someone about who wouldn’t make him feel inferior, nor make him feel as if she was doing him a great favor by being with him.

Now, Aket-ten was, of course, the very first female Jouster. She and Kiron must have shared many adventures together, and Peri thought she might have heard some vague tale of how Kiron had rescued her from the earthshake that destroyed the capital city. Or maybe the story was that he had rescued her from the Magi. She, too, was Altan, and what with all that previous acquaintance, she was ahead of the game. But Peri had two advantages that Aket-ten did not have. She was of the same background, and the same rank, as Kiron. Aket-ten was nobly born, with all the unconscious arrogance of someone who never needed to think about whether or not her orders would be obeyed. This didn’t matter to someone who was already an underling, but at some point, that had to grate on a man.

And there was a third advantage, if Kiron really was who Peri thought he was. Peri already had Letis’ approval. Approval? Letis had essentially handpicked her as the mate for her son.

Aket-ten could never get that, try as she might. Letis did not at all approve of looking above one’s self for a mate; she did not at all approve of what she called the “presumption” of the “jumped up.” She had many things to say, none of them complimentary, about such liaisons. She would say them to her son’s face if he went, as she would put it, “chasing the hem of the skirts of a noble.” When Letis chose to use the weapon, she had a very, very sharp tongue. Mind, with the excitement of being reunited, it was likely that Kiron would be willing to agree to just about anything his mother asked of him, and Letis would never have to use that particular weapon.

But from the way that Aket-ten herself was acting, well . . . it did not look as if there was any interest there at all. Look at how she had portrayed Kiron to the others! And when he had been among them, she had given him very short shrift indeed. It was more as if Aket-ten considered Kiron a rival, and not a potential mate.

Perhaps that was precisely the case. She had been a priestess herself, after all. Priestesses were accustomed to power, and being merely one Jouster among an increasingly large number, with no chance that she would ever be given any leadership role, must have grated on her. But now she had the chance to make, not only a single wing of lady Jousters, but perhaps a force to equal or rival the males, if enough work could be found for them. But Kiron’s Jousters were essentially competition for her; at any point they could demand to be brought back here to the Dragon Courts, and there was no reason not to accede to that demand. Once they were here, what could the Queen’s Wing do that the male Jousters could not do as well or better? That, at least, would be what the naysayers would claim.

Surely that was the only explanation for the way that Aket-ten had made Lord Kiron out to be the worst possible sort of authoritarian and some sort of monster to boot, why she had insisted that he would immediately disapprove of each of them individually and the Queen’s Wing as a whole. Peri had expected someone large, rude, and angry, someone determined to put “the women” in their place, someone who would see nothing good and much evil in the very existence of the Queen’s Wing. And possibly someone old enough to be her grandsire.

She had certainly not expected the young, polite, affable and self-effacing young man who turned up at dinner. He had been good company, he had gone out of his way to make them all comfortable in his presence, and—above all—he had not made any of them feel as if he disapproved of them or what they were doing. Possibly that was all a deception, but if it was, he was a better fraud than Peri was able to detect.

But if Aket-ten saw him as a rival, as competition, it would certainly go a very long way toward explaining her attitude.

The one possible complication was this: in Peri’s admittedly limited experience, young men did not, as a rule, appreciate discovering that their mothers had picked out wives for them with no regard for what they wanted. Yes, in the first flush of the joy of finding each other, Kiron probably would do just about anything his mother asked. But once that wore out, he might very well decide he could pick his own wife, thank you.

If, however, Peri could manage to become friends with Lord Kiron . . . if she could even gain more interest from him than that, then when Letis discovered the identity of her lost son and presented him with a putative bride . . . . . . a bride who was already someone he liked . . . and who was a Jouster herself . . .

Peri smiled to herself. That would be very good indeed.

So, now, all she needed to do was to find a way to get herself and Sutema moved to Aerie.

NINE

FOUR Jousters—Huras, Oset-re, Pe-atep, and Kiron himself—set off from Aerie at the best possible time for flying, when the sun was at zenith and the thermals were at their strongest. Huras’ big female, Tathulan, who had begun from the moment of hatching by being the largest of the lot of hand-raised Altan dragons, and had remained in that position, carried the priest Them-noh-thet as well as Huras. The priest had clearly been impressed by her when he had seen her, and rightly so. Not only was she the largest, she was the most striking, with her coloring being an indigo blue shading into purple, which in turn shaded into red at all of her extremities. She was a quiet and dignified dragon, and even as a baby had not been given to much in the way of absurd antics. Steady and unflappable, she was the best possible choice to carry a second rider, although they would all take it in turns to carry the priest once Tathulan started to show signs of fatigue.

The dragons were fully fed and would be carrying their midday meal. They would hunt this evening, before they stopped for the night. It was very likely that nothing would trouble them in the night—it would take a foolish predator to attempt to kill a single adult dragon, much less four—but even if something did attack them, these dragons, who had trained to fly at night, would hardly be daunted by darkness. They should be able to make short work of attackers.

Them-noh-thet said that he could find water. Kiron hoped that was true. That was the one concern he had for this journey. He knew that if they found an oasis or a well, it would probably be in the hands of the Bedu, and that was all right. He had tokens of friendship and right-of-passage and water-right with him; any of the Bedu would honor those, particularly after the way that he and his Jousters had cleaned out that lot of bandits for them.

The real question was if they would be able to find the water in the first place. This was a part of the desert that Kiron knew nothing about, nor did the Bedu with which he normally dealt. They knew that there were tribes here, yes, but not exactly where their water sources were, nor if they would be on the line of flight. The dragons could probably get by on one day without water, but not two.

The desert grew harsher the farther east they flew, until at last they were passing above stark sand dunes with no sign whatsoever of plant life or, indeed, any life whatsoever. The heat blasted up at them from this inhospitable zone, as the sun blazed down on them from above. Only the dragons seemed to thrive here, actually flying better than Kiron had ever seen them before. The Jousters all bent their heads beneath the scant shelter of their headcloths, and did their best to endure the uncomfortable journey.

It was a good thing that they were carrying the dragons’ midday meal, because there was nothing larger than a beetle down there to hunt.

It wasn’t a large meal; they didn’t want the dragons to be ready to drowse. It was furnace-hot down there on the sand, and while that might be perfect for the dragons, the humans would bake like flatbreads in a hot oven.

Even up in the relatively cooler air, with the effective wind on them from the dragons’ flight, it was difficult. The sun felt like a hot pressing iron on them, flattening them against their saddles, and every place where flesh touched anything else, sweat oozed.

This was the part of the desert called the Anvil of the Sun, and well-named it was, too.

The Bedu crossed it, but few others. Most, if they had any sense at all, went north or south, to places of easier passage. But this was the shortest possible way . . . the fastest, if you could fly.

If you could endure the furnace heat.

Kiron tried not to think about it. He concentrated on the air moving over his skin, on shifting himself so that parts of him remained in shadow, on watching Avatre’s behavior. He had never yet heard of a dragon being overcome with heat . . . they reveled in it, soaked it up . . . but he’d never yet heard of anyone flying a Jousting dragon over the Anvil of the Sun. There’d been no reason, really. Jousting dragons had always gone North, to the border with Alta. Not East.

There was, after all, no reason to go East; the East was quiet. There had been no trouble on that front for ages.

From time to time, in the distance, tall pillars the color of smoke slowly drifted across the landscape. Sand demons, some called them, whirlwinds that were easily avoided, but which could strip the skin from anything that was unfortunate enough to be caught in their path. Those weren’t bad; it was the Midnight kamiseen, the huge sandstorms that could go on for a day and swallowed up the landscape. Those storms buried entire cities and—as in the case of Sanctuary—unburied them.

Kiron thought that the dragons could probably fly above such a storm, but he didn’t really want to put that idea to the test. What would he do, if they saw such a storm on the horizon?

Turn back, maybe. Hope that they could outrun it to shelter. Or try and see where the edge was and get there.

So he watched Avatre for signs that she sensed anything of the sort, and watched the horizon for that thin, dark line, the sky above it for the hazing of flying sand in the distance.

Slowly, the sun-disk traveled to the horizon so that it was at their backs. Slowly, the fierce heat eased a little.

On the horizon, Kiron spotted a haze of color that was not sand, did not have dust in the sky above it, and was hard and unmoving. He looked over at Tathulan, and waved his hand until he got the attention of the priest, then pointed.

The priest peered at the eastern horizon for a long time, then finally looked back over at Kiron. Water, he signed, using the signals they had all agreed on. Hunting.

Kiron sighed with relief and bent over Avatre’s shoulder. They had crossed the Anvil of the Sun without incident. The worst of the journey was behind them now.

He hoped.

At least, it was the worst he could plan for.

The dragons approached the area of the eastern border of the Two Lands in the last light of the fourth day of their journey. It would have taken a rider on a fast camel nearly a moon to make the same trip. The trek across the Anvil of the Sun, if it could be made at all, usually took days all by itself; traveling by day and night, knowing that getting across that hideous stretch of desert was more important than rest.

This was still desert land, but it was the sort with which they were all familiar. There was water here, there was wildlife, plenty for the dragons to hunt. The eastern border could even be termed “grazing land” as there was enough there for goats and camels at least.

But as they neared the outpost where they reckoned the dead man had come from, and the one that the priests most definitely wanted investigated, it rapidly became evident that there was something very wrong.

There were goats, donkeys, and camels everywhere.

“Everywhere,” being relative, of course; what he was actually seeing was the occasional little herd of goats drifting in the distance, a lone camel or so, a couple of donkeys. But there should not be goats roaming loose in little herds of three to a dozen so near a settled place. If they were wild, someone would have made a point of catching them and adding them to his herd. And if they were not wild . . . then what were they doing roaming loose, away from the watchful eye of their shepherd?

As for the camels and donkeys, they were even more expensive, and therefore a hundred times more likely to have been caught and penned. The price of a good camel could easily feed a man and his family for several moons.

The animals were fairly evenly spaced out as if they had been roaming loose for days. Herd animals did that, especially in sparse grazing areas.

This was delightful for the dragons, of course. It was easy hunting, and they were quite happy with it. But Kiron had a queasy feeling in his stomach, and he knew he was not the only one wondering with dread what they would find.

Behind them, the sun-disk drew near enough to the horizon that the light began to change, growing more golden, less white. Their own shadows stretched long on the ground beneath and ahead of them, as did the shadows of the scrubby trees and the occasional animal. Heat now radiated up at them from the ground, rather than burning down on them from above. And those passing shadows the dragons cast—they made the animals below them startle and flee, suggesting that other dragons had been coming here of late for the easy hunting.

There was a bump, a group of irregularities on the horizon, the wrong shape for a natural formation.

The town. Kiron gave the others the signal to drop down closer to the ground. He needed to be able to see what—if anything—was moving down there. The shapes disappeared for a while into the general landscape, then sharpened out again, now close enough to make out that they were buildings. And there was just nothing there besides those buildings. No sign of humans. No one on the road. There should have been people on the road, people coming into town from gathering deadfall, herdsmen bringing in the herds—

There should have been smoke from cooking fires.

Nothing.

As they approached their goal, more than just the absence of people going toward it struck Kiron.

It was silent.

A border town should be a noisy place. After all, it had sprung up purely to serve a garrison of men far from home. “Two taverns for every temple,” was the saying about such places. At this time of day there should be men carousing in the beer shops. There should be people calling in families for dinner. Flute girls and storytellers should be setting up near the beer shops. Children should be crying, goats bawling, donkeys braying.

But the only sounds were the barking and growling of dogs in the street.

Cautiously, they circled the dragons overhead, but the only things moving anywhere were animals, all running wild, mostly dogs and cats, with a donkey drowsing at the side of one of the town wells, and a goat incongruously on a rooftop.

And a pack of jackals slinking down the street, that dropped their ears and ran at the sight of the dragons overhead.

As they circled, Kiron glanced over at the priest, who was frowning in concentration as he gripped the straps that held him in the double saddle. But the priest finally shook his head and gave the hand sign for “land.”

Kiron had to hope that the man hadn’t sensed anything hostile.

He picked what seemed to be a logical spot, just at the outskirts of town and near one of the taverns, open and with plenty of room for the dragons to take off again if they had to. He was glad now they had all come armed. Five men and four dragons—that was formidable if they were up against humans. But if they weren’t—

He’d never seen a demon, nor any other supernatural creature, and he really didn’t want to. He couldn’t doubt their existence, given that he had seen the Magi at work, and had heard Kaleth speaking as the Mouth of the Gods, but that was all. He didn’t know anyone who had, much less anyone who had fought one. There were legends, of course; the trouble was, unlike Ari, he was no scribe to remember them all.

The dragons landed one at a time, Avatre first, as he gave her the signal to be wary. Armed with spears, bows and slings—and in the case of the priest, presumably magic—they moved cautiously into the town.

The streets were as deserted from ground level as they had appeared from above. They approached the first building cautiously. It was a tavern, with two small tables and six overturned stools outside, and a bundle of barley painted crudely on the wall next to the door. Huras motioned to them to stop, moved forward a few paces, and sniffed.

“Don’t smell anything rotting,” he said.

“Jackals—” Pe-atep pointed out reluctantly. “Wild dogs—”

Kiron shivered. That wasn’t anything he wanted to think about. If everyone was dead, that was almost unthinkable. But jackals . . . if jackals had gotten to the bodies here, this entire town would be haunted by hungry, unburied ghosts. And they would be very angry.

“I don’t think we should stay here after dark,” Oset-re said, nervously.

Huras squared his shoulders, and eyed the open door. The canvas door flap was down, so they couldn’t see inside. “I’m going into the tavern.”

“We’re all going into the tavern,” Kiron said firmly. “And for right now, we’re all sticking together. No one is going wandering off by himself, no matter what. I don’t care what we see or hear, we all stay in a group. Let’s go.”

They advanced on the building with no idea of what they were going to find when they pushed aside the door flap. Kiron felt sweat prickling all along his spine, and he gripped his spear tightly with both hands. The four dragons stirred and flipped the tips of their wings nervously, their eyes fixed on their riders.

Kiron reached for the canvas flap, and shoved it over on its rod, letting the last of the light from the setting sun come streaming into the main room. And what they found was . . .

Nothing.

No bodies, no blood, no sign of an armed struggle. The room was in a shambles, of course, but it looked random. Not the sort of thing that would happen because of a fight. Plague had been Kiron’s first thought, that the people here had been sick. That didn’t explain the soldier they had found, but maybe his fate was unrelated. People could have just crawled inside to die, leaving the streets deserted.

This had been a beer shop, as opposed to the sort of tavern that also sold food. They found overturned stools, opened jars of beer spilled on the two tables, and strangest of all, money on the counter, exactly as if someone had paid for beer and no one had collected his money. If there had been a fight, if some overwhelming force had come and taken the town, that money would not be there.

And if it was plague—people in a plague town don’t keep going to beer shops.

It looked almost as if something had gotten the attention of everyone here, something so startling they had all gone out into the street to look at it. But there was no sign of what had then happened to them. The back of the shop had been set up as living quarters, and there were no signs of anyone there either. The only thing that they did find that was an absolute indicator that something had happened very abruptly—the family oven had been full of bread, which was now burned to a cinder. So whatever had happened here, it had happened some time between when the shop opened and when the bread would have been taken out of the oven. Late morning or early afternoon.

It was clear that scavengers had been in the kitchen, but also in the beer shop. Any foodstuffs had long since been run off with. Some enterprising creature had determined that he could break the beer jars by shoving them off the shelves; presumably he and his friends had lapped up what they could before it ran away, dried up, or sank into the dirt floor. The floor under the shelves was littered with broken pots.

But that must have happened after the people had gone . . . and where did they go?

Kiron’s stomach turned over. Surely the entire town wasn’t like this? All right, finding bodies would have been horrid, but this, in a way, was even worse.

They made their way—with less and less caution—up the street, checking every building, and finding—nothing. No people. Shops and houses in disarray. It looked for all the world as if suddenly, in the middle of the day, everyone in this town had put down what they were doing and walked out.

From the barracks—where they found neatly-made pallets, weapons stowed, and where the kitchen had been torn to pieces by animals hungrily devouring every scrap of bread and meat they could find—to the huts of the shepherds, it all looked the same. Everyone in the town was gone. They found piles of soft swaddling where infants had been picked up out of their corners. They found withered flowers and sticks and little clay dolls where toddlers had been taken away from their play in the dirt. The half dozen student scribes in one of the temples had put down their pens and their potsherds and walked out, along with their teacher.

Everyone in this town had vanished without a trace.

Well—

Everyone but one; the lone soldier who had almost made it to safety. And not even his body had been able to tell them anything.

Aket-ten was more than irritated with Kiron now; she was just about ready to remove his skin and salt him. Bad enough that he had only turned up when he had some bad news to deliver to an official, worse that he just vanished in the morning as soon as he could get Avatre in the air without even trying to see her. For that alone she had every right to feel slighted. But then to have gone out of his way to be charming to every Jouster here except her . . .

The girls, in particular, were very annoying the next few days after he had left. They had been rather disgustingly impressed with his charm. And yes, he could be charming when he felt like it. It was rather too bad that he felt sure enough of her feelings that he didn’t bother to be charming to her anymore. But the girls certainly could have done without being so . . . . . . ugh.

It was “Lord Kiron said this” and “Lord Kiron thinks that” until she was ready to scream, throw something, or both. The only one that was sensible was Peri, who, as usual, was quiet and spoke only about her dragon, and didn’t go on about “Lord Kiron” as if he was the God Haras come down to earth.

Let them have to deal with him when he’s being excessively dense some time and see how they feel about him then.

Maybe it was that the other girls had all been priestesses. Aket-ten remembered what it was like back when she had been a Nestling and a Fledgling. The other girls never seemed to tire of talking about young men. Young priestesses all seemed to have more time on their hands than they should, though why that should be, she couldn’t imagine. She had always managed to find plenty of things to do with herself—studying for one. There were always new things to learn. Just because you didn’t have to learn them, that hardly meant you shouldn’t.

She was pondering just that when she passed by the pens and saw all of the babies in the middle one, piled in a drowsy heap with Peri and two of the others watching them, and she wondered where the other five girls were. And even as she wondered that, shrieks of laughter made her compress her lips and follow her ears.

She found them quickly enough. With three of the four couriers, who were taking them in turns on short little rides dragonback . . . they weren’t even wearing proper two-person saddles. The young men had the girls up in front of them, and were holding them in place with arms around their middles.

She reined in her temper with an effort, and stood very visibly in the door, arms crossed over her chest until someone finally noticed her.

It was one of the girls who wasn’t getting a ride who turned, saw her, and yelped.

That got the attention of everyone except one of the couriers and his passenger, who rather quickly reacted when one of those on the ground blurted, “Wingleader Aket-ten! What are you doing here?”

The three dragons dropped to the ground, and three girls slid down off of them wearing three very different expressions. One was defiant, one highly amused, and one simply looked bored. Of the other two, only one looked properly apprehensive, the other, the one that had yelped—

Was she actually looking down her nose at Aket-ten, like one of those lazy, good-for nothing girls that did nothing but lounge around a Court all day, looking decorative? Who did she think she was anyway? Every one of these girls had been minor priestesses with the very minor Gift of understanding the thoughts of animals. In the ordinary way of things, they would all, every one of them, have been sent off to some minor temple—or else, if nobly born, been relegated to wafting incense about or holding an ostrich-feather fan for the rest of their lives.

“I should be the one asking you all that question,” she said sharply. “I am where I should be. And that is no way to address your superior. So what, exactly, is going on here when you should be watching your babies?”

The one looking down her nose smirked. “Lord Kiron thought it was a good idea for us to learn how to fly so we would be ready when the babies were.”

Kiron again! Aket-ten opened her mouth to lash out at the girl, when suddenly something occurred to her, and instead, she smiled.

Nastily.

Apparently that smile got through to them. The identical expression of apprehension crept over all five faces.

She narrowed her eyes. “Lord Kiron suggested that, did he? Well, although I rather well doubt this was what he had in mind for his couriers to be doing, he just might have been right.” She turned her attention to the three boys. “I’m sure, couriers, that you have far more important things to do with your time, and your dragons, than give pleasure hops. Training, after all, never really stops, does it?”

They took the hint. One of them even saluted her as all three flew off.

She turned to her girls and crooked a finger. “Come along,” she said, in silken tones. “I want to introduce you to some new equipment. Since you all want to learn to fly so quickly, you are going to truly enjoy this. It is widely considered to be the highlight of training.”

She had, with an eye to the training, been looking for the same sorts of apparatus that she and the rest of the original Altan wing had used to learn how to stay in the saddle when combat flying. It had taken her some time to track down where it had all been stored. Now, she had no intention of having the Queen’s Wing in combat; much though she disagreed with Kiron’s strenuous objections to the idea, she also knew that he was scarcely alone in his objections. There were things she would be able to do without offending the sensibilities of people in a position to stop her. Putting the young ladies in combat was not one of them.

But she was not going to tell these girls that. Actually, she had no intention of telling them that what she was about to put them through was combat training. After all, if they had to fly through sudden turbulent weather, they’d need this sort of practice.

And a few bruises, wrenched shoulders, or occasional black eye would do them good. It would remind them that they were here to serve the Two Lands, not as some sort of decorative accessory. She had been very clear on that when she had brought them in, after all; the Queen’s Wing, regardless of what other people were being led to believe, was not merely here to provide a dramatic and beautiful backdrop for the Queen’s Royal Appearances.

If they wanted to be decorative accessories, they could always go back to their temples. Systrums and ostrich-feather fans were in plentiful supply.

“Here we are!” she said cheerfully, ushering them into the empty pen with unheated sands in it, and the selection of six bits of apparatus waiting for them. They stopped just inside and eyed the things with misgiving. “You wait right here, while I get some servants. Since you’re all so eager, there is no time like the present, right?”

It didn’t take her long; all that was required was one stop in the kitchen to send someone for six of the husky slaves who used to perform this very duty for the training Jousters. By the time she herself got back to the pen, the slaves were already there. But then, she had taken her time, wanting the girls to think about what they might be faced with. The slaves had surely run; she had sauntered.

The six men stationed themselves at each of the sets of apparatus. She walked over to the first of them. “I’m going to show you what real flying training is all about,” she told them, getting into the saddle at the end of the long pole poised on a fulcrum, and fastening the straps tightly before she stood up. She made very sure they were good and secure, too. “This will make sure that you’re really ready when your baby dragons are. After all, this is not that different from being a charioteer, and no charioteer trainer would ever put a green driver and green horses together.”

She nodded at the slave, who levered her up into the air, then let her carefully down again. Up, down, up—this was like the gentle flap-glide-flap of a relaxed dragon in perfect flying conditions. The girls relaxed a little.

“This is what your flying will be like under ideal circumstances,” she said. Then she raised an eyebrow. “But I am sure we all know just how often ideal circumstances come about. So most of your training will be so that you can stick with and guide your dragon under the worst conditions possible.”

She nodded again at the slave, who proceeded to throw her end of the pole in every direction possible for the admittedly limited equipment, as hard as he possibly could. She gripped the padded end of the pole and the saddle strapped to it with legs and arms, shifting her balance as the dynamics of the seat shifted, grinning a little as the slave grinned at her, grinning still more at the look of alarm on the faces of the girls. Oh, they had no idea. This was the easiest of the flying training.

Finally she signaled to the slave to stop. He let her down onto the sand, and she unbuckled the straps, then stood up, motioning to the others.

“Come on, then,” she said. “I thought you wanted to learn how to fly.”

By the time the babies were ready for their next feeding, the five who had found themselves “volunteered” for flight training were indeed sore, bruised, and even a little sick. “You’ll be here every day, twice a day, from now on,” Aket-ten told them. “You’ll take it in turns. Four of you will watch the babies and play with them, and start teaching them what they will need to know, while the other four of you train. I’ll send the first four back to get the other four when I think you’ve had enough.”

And then—we will graduate to the second stage.

Two of the girls suppressed groans, but Aket-ten wasn’t done with them yet. “It’s also more than time you started learning about dragon harness. As you just felt for yourself, properly fitted harness can save your life, while improperly fitted harness will kill you. You should never depend on a dragon boy to be certain your harness is right. You’ll be spending part of every morning learning how to care for, fit, and even repair your harness.”

“But—” the supercilious one began faintly.

Aket-ten cut her off with a look. “You are going to be couriers. You will spend at least half of your time somewhere where there will be no dragon boys, no harness makers, no one who knows how to help you. So you might as well start getting used to taking care of yourself, your dragon, and everything about both.”

They looked at each other, then back at her.

Finally, the supercilious one straightened and squared her shoulders. “Yes, Wingleader,” she said formally, saluting. “Now, by your leave, should we be getting back to the babies? By the sun, it should be feeding time.”

Aket-ten gave her an approving nod. Kene-maat, she thought. I have to start remembering their names properly. “Indeed you should, Kene-maat,” she replied evenly. “I will see you all at evening meal.”

That one just might make a good Wingleader herself, Aket-ten thought as she headed for Re-eth-ke’s pen.

This thought, however, did not ease her anger with Kiron.

He had put this notion into their heads. Furthermore, he had undermined her authority in doing so. If he thought they were ready for flight training, he should have told her, not them.

In fact, there were a great many things he should have been telling her. Such as where to find those saddle trainers. There were the other sorts of advanced trainers, too, the barrels strung on the ropes—one of the slaves had told her about those. She’d have to find someone who knew where they were stored.

And on top of all of that, why had he simply left without even telling her good-bye?

She felt her temper flaring again and stopped right where she was in the corridor to force herself to calm down.

Then she used one of the meditative techniques she had learned as a priestess to clear her mind. Because there were surely things she could do to make all this work better if only—

Ari was a Jouster. He knows where all of those things are. And he can probably outline the training for me.

She almost hit herself because that had been so obvious. It wouldn’t take him but a moment. He’d probably enjoy taking a little bit of leisure out to describe what he thought would be a good training regimen for her couriers. And he wasn’t set on undermining her.

She relaxed a little further and—

I can ask that Nofret be made captain of all the couriers here in Mefis.

That would take care of the little matter of Kiron’s couriers playing lazy games with her lady Jousters. She smiled. She could certainly think of things for them to do. Things that would keep them within the bounds of Mefis. There were plenty of errands to be run for the temples that would be done faster and more efficiently with a dragon courier. And as for them being ready at all times—she could have someone put up a pole and fly a pennon from it if the absent courier was needed.

She began to smile again. Yes indeed. That would keep them out of mischief.

And as for the girls . . . the day she couldn’t think of ways to keep them out of mischief, she might just as well find another rider for Re-eth-ke and retire to a secluded temple somewhere because she most certainly would have lost touch with reality altogether.

TEN

THE sun had just touched the horizon. The eastern sky had grown dark. And Kiron noticed now that even the smell of this town was wrong. The air was almost like that of the empty desert, with just a touch of musky goat to it. It should have smelled of unwashed bodies coming home from a day of hard work, of incense from the temples, of cooking food, of beer, of the cheap perfumed cones that flute girls used and the expensive ones that the well-to-do sported.

Everything conspired to make his skin crawl. This was different from Sanctuary and Aerie. There, the towns had been abandoned for so long that they had ceased to be places where you could imagine that in the next moment, someone would come around a corner. Here . . . this was like being in a nightmare. You just knew that at any moment you would wake up and the streets would be full again. Except that didn’t happen.

Avatre whined unhappily behind him. The dragons had been trailing them all through the town as if they, too, were uneasy about this place. Now Avatre came up behind him and bumped his shoulder with her nose, wanting comfort. Absently, he cupped her snout against his face.

“People just don’t vanish into thin air,” Pe-atep said suddenly, looking up, and raking his sweat-soaked hair out of his eyes with one hand. “They leave a trail. Assuming they all went to the same place, that would be a pretty wide track. I’m going to find where they went before it gets too dark to see their traces.”

With that, he stalked off, leaving the rest of them to scramble to catch up. Kiron was the first to move, motioning to the others to follow, and the dragons straggled along behind. Once, they startled a little herd of goats, which tried to run toward the desert; as if they were coordinating their attack, each of the dragons pounced on a different victim. All that hunting practice made it absurdly easy for them; they caught and gulped down their prey in nothing flat, and were shortly following close on the Jousters’ heels again.

They’d made a circuit of about a third of the ragged periphery of the town in the gray twilight when they discovered that Pe-atep was right in all of his assumptions. The people that were gone had gone somewhere, with some appearance of purpose. They had all gone in the same direction, it looked as if they had all gone at the same time, and they had left a trail.

Under normal circumstances the hard-baked desert ground would never have retained enough impression of feet for any of them to read; they were not, after all, skilled hunters or trackers. Pe-atep was the closest in that regard; he had trained the great hunting cats for the nobles of Alta, and thus had some minimal hunting skills himself. But the rest of them—Kiron had been a farmer ’s son and then a serf for most of his life, big Huras was the child of bakers, and Oset-re the protected child of nobles. What they knew of tracking could have been written on a fingernail with room left over.

But this was not a “few” people. Clearly, the entire town had passed this way, funneling through the streets and between the houses until they were channeled here to this spot. The scuffs and kicked-up dirt of an entire town’s worth of people, all condensing into a kind of army, and all heading in the same direction left a path as wide as an avenue in Mefis and as easy to see. The only reason they hadn’t spotted it before, from the air, was because they had approached low, and from the opposite side of the town. By the time they were near enough to see it, they had been concentrating on the empty streets, and thinking more of possible ambush or horrors to come than of what might lie on the eastern outskirts of town.

For this trail was headed east, without a shadow of a doubt. Men, women, children, children too small to walk on their own—all had come this way and gone off with no known reason. Across the border into lands the Altans knew nothing about.

“East?” Kiron said out loud. “What’s east?”

Could there have been plague, or at least sickness? Was there some famous healer in that direction that everyone had decided to go to? Had there been a prophecy, some utterance from one of the gods ordering everyone out? Kaleth wasn’t the only Mouth of the Gods in the world. . . .

And there were also plenty of people who would claim that title without having any right to it, too. Could someone like that be entrancing enough that people would do whatever he told them to do?

All four of the young men looked to Them-noh-thet, who was stroking his unshaven chin and frowning at a sky growing rapidly black. “This . . . is odd,” he said slowly. “Very odd. There’s nothing for them to go to. There is supposed to be nothing to the east of Tia, nothing at all, save a few wandering tribes of herders. No tradesmen, no merchants have ever bothered to go there. Not even the Bedu go there; it is wilderness . . . but . . .”

His voice trailed off.

“But?” Kiron prompted sharply. There was something about the priest’s expression that he did not like. “If we are to solve this, we must know even your speculations.”

“But this is where the Nameless Ones came from,” the priest said slowly and reluctantly. “They came marching across the border at a place very near here, according to the old records. That is why there was a border garrison here in the first place, to watch for them should they come again.” He rubbed his eyes with one hand. “There is no reason for anyone to go marching off in that direction, much less all of the people in the town. Something is very wrong here.”

Kiron snorted. That much was blindingly obvious.

The priest glanced aside at him. “I mean, something more than the obvious is wrong. I was sure I would find traces of magic here, that whatever had happened would be obvious to the trained Sight and the kinds of things I have with me. But—no. There is nothing other than the absence of the people and this track. None of my talismans are telling me of the presence of the kind of dark powers that the Altan Magi used,” the priest continued, peering uneasily down at the ground as the darkness of full night quickly descended. “In fact, I sense . . . nothing even of what I can see with my eyes. No more than did the Sighted among us from Sanctuary. I can see the buildings. I can see the signs of ordinary life everywhere. But what I see does not correspond to what I See. It is as if there never was a town here, that nothing has ever lived here but wild things. People leave echoes of themselves anywhere they have lived, and those echoes take years, not days, to fade. Yet those echoes are not here.”

Silence answered his words, and Kiron shivered. He knew nothing of magic except that it did follow rules—and the priest was talking as if all those rules had been completely violated. He sounds like I would, if Avatre suddenly turned on me with no warning.

“I am going to hunt while there is still a little light left,” Pe-atep said abruptly into that silence. “The dragons have fed, but we have not. We were counting on people to be here, on the garrison to take care of our needs when we got here.”

Kiron nodded slowly. “Yes, we were. But who could have thought—”

“No one,” Pe-atep said immediately. “This is not something you could have anticipated, Kiron, but it isn’t going to stop our hunger from making us weak if we don’t take care of ourselves. I will kill one of those wandering goats. That will be meat enough for us all, if nothing else.”

“I will see if there are stores of flour or the like,” Huras said slowly. “The scavengers can’t have gotten into everything. There plainly is nothing in this town to fear, not even ghosts—” He faltered to a halt. Kiron could empathize. When a place was this deserted, even a ghost would have been welcome, in a way.

And at least this was something constructive they could all do. Kiron took command of the situation. “Pe-atep, that is a good plan. We must sleep, and we must eat. Going to bed with our stomachs aching will not let us sleep. We cannot do much, even to return to Sanctuary, without food and rest. So let us divide ourselves—but carefully.”

He pondered for a moment. “Pe-atep and I will take the dragons to the courtyard of the Temple of Haras, then hunt. Them-noh-thet, go you to the Temple of Haras with us, and light the fires and the torches and see what you may find there. We will make that place our refuge; the wings of the God will surely shelter us.”

A pious statement that the priest nodded at, but which Kiron himself was not entirely sure he believed. After all, the priests were all gone, too . . . the wings of the God hadn’t done them much good.

But right now he preferred they didn’t think about that. They all needed some place that would at least feel a little safe. “Huras and Oset-re, see what you can find of foodstuffs that animals haven’t pillaged, get us water, and we will all meet back at the temple.”

The priest nodded; it was clear he was not loath to take himself back to familiar confines. Kiron couldn’t blame him, a temple must feel to him as a fortress felt to a soldier.

And perhaps, since he was Sighted and Gifted, he might be able to turn the temple into a truly protected spot. A border garrison town was hardly going to attract priests of any kind of power. In fact, it would have been surprising if even the Healer here could do more than pray and offer herbs and the knife.

“I think that the homes of the wealthier here might yet yield something we can eat,” Huras said. “Once we find torches, I will make a fire and kindle them, and then we will be on better footing.” The big man led Oset-re confidently off back into the town. They looked almost like a father and child, Huras towered so much over Oset-re.

“Let us seek the temple then, while we can still unharness the dragons without stumbling over straps,” Kiron said, catching up the reins of Wastet and Tathulan before they could follow their masters. There was a moment of resistance, a little tugging, and then the two yielded to Kiron’s insistence. They had been well trained, but more than that, they accepted Kiron and the other riders of Kiron’s wing as substitutes for their true masters.

“And while I can find the stores of torches and lamp oil,” the priest said and sighed. “At least I need not concern myself with being frugal. Clearly, no one is going to object if I burn a sennight’s worth in a single night.”

“Hardly,” Kiron said dryly. “Rather we are more apt to ask you to make more lights, not fewer.”

Treading carefully, the priest walking alongside them, Kiron and Pe-atep took all four of the dragons, which were beginning to make anxious sounds again, off to that courtyard. As were many temples, this one was set up to play host to dragons if need be. It would catch and hold the sun all day, and at night, the stone would radiate back that stored heat. There were stone basins that could be filled with fuel-bricks made of straw and dung to provide more warmth if the dragons got too cold. There was ample room for the four, and they all stopped whining and began to relax as they realized they were soon going to be allowed to sleep. Pe-atep and Kiron set about getting them out of their gear and stowing it off to the side, each set going to a different corner and stacked neatly. The priest greatly aided their efforts by bringing four torches as soon as he could find them and get them lit. The moment that saddles and harness were off, the four curled up together to share warmth and immediately went to sleep.

By this time it was fully dark, but the moon was already rising, and this turned out to be all to the good. It was a full moon and as Kiron and Pe-atep knew from experience, a full moon provided almost as much light to dark-accustomed eyes as any number of torches.

Leaving the temple to the priest, they stepped out into the street, and waited for their eyes to adjust. Kiron wished Aket-ten was with them. She would have known where the goats were . . . she could probably have lured one right into their hands.

On second thought, that was probably a bad idea. Maybe if they were actually starving to death, it would be different. But luring a goat with your thoughts just so you could kill it . . . no, there was something profoundly wrong with that idea. He made a mental resolution at that moment never even to suggest such a thing to her.

Better just to use what scant intelligence he had. How to think like a goat . . . ?

“If I were a goat, where would I go to escape jackals and lions for the night?” Kiron mused aloud.

Pe-atep chuckled, the first pleasant sound he’d made since they arrived here. “Have you forgotten already that goat we saw on a roof? He was not stupid, Kiron, he was quite clever. Lions and jackals can’t manage steep staircases very well, they wouldn’t be able to actually see goats on the roof, and it’s possible that they might even be so confused about where the scent was coming from, they’d never think to go up. If I was a goat, I would head for the rooftops, too, and I think I remember where he was.”

Pe-atep led the way quietly and carefully up the street. Carefully, with weapons in hand, because they had seen jackals, and there was the very real possibility of lions. With all the easier prey about, a lion or even a pack would probably not trouble themselves with humans, but why take the chance?

But they encountered nothing worse than dogs going feral, and Pe-atep’s memory was quite correct.

As they approached the house in question, they could actually hear the sound of hooves clicking a little on the stone of the roof, and heard a bleat of complaint. It sounded as if the first goat had been joined by several more. Well . . . on the one hand, goats did like to herd up. And if a lion did figure out it had to go up to find them, having several more goats up there would mean that the lion would have more than one target.

But on the other hand . . . having more goats up there meant more noise and more chance that a lion would figure out it had to go up.

I think, if I were that goat, I would go find my own roof.

“Hmm,” Pe-atep whispered, and scratched his head. “I had rather not go up there, try to take one, and frighten them. Being in the middle of a herd of frightened, kicking goats in the dark—”

Ugh, Pe-atep was right about that. Goats could do a great deal of damage with those sharp little hooves. Not to mention the horns.

“The first thing to do is see what things look like up there,” Kiron replied, after a moment. “It’s not as if they’re going to charge us or anything. The worst that will happen if they see us is that they’ll startle and try to run.”

“Huh. That might not be bad. If they jump off the roof—”

There was a thought. Surely there would be one out of the lot that would land wrong. “Keep that in mind. It’s not the worst plan I’ve ever heard.”

The two of them circled the building until they found the narrow, precarious stair that led up the outside to the roof. Feeling his way along the wall and taking great care not to trip, Kiron climbed up first and cautiously poked his head up over the low wall that rimmed the top.

There were about six goats there, most of them standing packed closely together with their heads hanging. Their even breathing told Kiron that five of the six felt secure enough here to doze. But one of them, a piebald, pricked its ears up at Kiron and craned its head forward, sniffing. It didn’t seem alarmed. In fact, after a moment, it took a step toward him, and then another.

Feeling a little like a traitor for getting it to trust him, Kiron made a tsking noise at it, as Pe-atep moved up beside him and went into a crouch. Switching its tail, the goat ambled over, looking as if it expected a treat.

It must have been somebody’s pet. Kiron tried not to think of the child that had probably made it into a pet . . . a child that without a doubt must have other things to worry about now than its pet goat. Assuming it was even in a condition to worry about anything.

Still, this was rather like—like Aket-ten using her Gift to lure a goat to doom. It made him a bit queasy.

He tried to remind himself that the poor goat was just as doomed. If not at their hands, a wild beast would surely get it before long. A goat that was a pet did not have many survival skills.

Kiron moved down the steps backward, still making little calling sounds. When the goat was about halfway down the steps, Pe-atep pounced, long knife in hand. And suddenly, this was a lot like helping Avatre make her first kills. He moved in to help.

It was over very quickly, without much in the way of noise or struggle to alarm the other goats of the herd.

“Should we try to frighten them?” he whispered. “See if we can get a second one?”

Pe-atep cleaned his knife and sheathed it, then paused to consider. “No,” he said finally. “We have enough to eat with this one, and without a cold room . . . no, I don’t think that’s a good idea. Besides, tomorrow we can start finding everything there is to eat left in this place, and we can make sure the dragons hunt for all of us. We won’t starve.”

Kiron nodded. With Pe-atep taking the front legs and Kiron the hind, they carried their prize back in the direction of the temple.

As soon as they rounded the corner, it was very clear that the priest had been very hard at work in their absence. The customary two torches burned on either side of the door, and light streamed out onto the street from that door. It was a welcome sight, and mitigated, a little, the undeniably disturbing effect of the otherwise silent and empty town. It was a sign of light and life.

Them-noh-thet himself greeted them by hurrying out from the back of the temple when their footsteps sounded on the stone. “Ah, good,” he said with relief. “I admit to you, this place is disturbing me.”

“It’s just too empty,” Pe-atep replied fervently.

“I am glad you were able to get this temple looking more lived in.”

The priest shrugged. “As much as a temple can. The rear part is better, the part where the priests and acolytes live. I have a fire going in the kitchen, and I have cleaned it up somewhat so we can work. I also found foodstuffs in storage jars, and herbs. We will not be eating half-raw, half-burned goat like barbarians; I have pickled onions and dates, and honey, and some other things, things the vermin and animals didn’t scent. Come, follow me.”

The temple kitchen was, as such things went, rather spacious. Open to the air, of course, though sheltered by a roof in case of rain. There were many storage jars in a room off to one side, a wide counter to prepare food on, a mortar for grinding grain into flour, troughs for kneading dough, two ovens for bread, flat stones one could build a fire on to heat for cooking, and three fire pits where things could be stewed in pots. And it looked as if they weren’t going to be starving any time soon. One waist-high storage jar alone held enough lentils to feed them all for a week, and there were several dozen such in that storeroom. Kiron was not unaccustomed to kitchen chores, but he had to admit to relief when Huras and Oset-re returned bearing the fruits of their own rummaging. He gladly stepped aside to let the son of a baker take over directing the rest of them. Huras was a big man, with correspondingly large hands, which performed startlingly deft work with the knives and other implements that Them-noh-thet had found. Once they had water from the well, the question of what they would eat in the morning was easily solved; lentil stew, which would use the scraps of goat that were left when they finished eating tonight.

The result was a surprisingly good meal, which they elected to eat right there in the kitchen area. It was, however, eaten in grim silence and with many glances over the shoulder toward the small open court behind the kitchen. The silence was intimidating, though at least here, they could pretend they were in the kitchen of a country house and not in the middle of a town.

At last Them-noh-thet cleared his throat awkwardly. “I intend to try to reach my fellow priests in Sanctuary tomorrow,” he said, “as well as attempt more magics that might tell us what has happened here. I think that we cannot return until we investigate this situation more—”

He looked at Kiron as if he expected Kiron to object, but the Jouster only nodded.

“As long as we have hunting for the dragons and food and water for ourselves, I don’t see any other course,” he agreed. “An entire town just walked off into the wilderness; we don’t know where they are, why they left, or who did this to them. We have to find out whatever we can, here.”

The other three nodded in agreement, and the priest looked relieved. “I don’t think we should sleep without a watch being set, though,” Kiron continued, “And I think we really ought to sleep with the dragons. It offers that much more safety.” He thought for a moment. “In fact, I—all right, this may sound strange, but I think we ought to sleep tethered to a dragon’s leg. That way, if something comes along and makes us want to go wandering in the desert, hopefully our dragons will wake us out of it.”

Huras scratched his head, looking relieved. “That’s a good idea. And I don’t think it sounds strange at all. Tathulan is very good about telling when there’s something wrong with me.”

“I think they’re all good at that,” Kiron agreed.

The priest looked from one to another of them, and finally asked, very quietly, “Would you mind if I joined you?”

It was not a restful night. But then, no one really expected it to be. Only the dragons slept soundly, and didn’t really seem to notice when their riders took heavy cords and tied themselves to a front foot. Then again, they’d had a hard several days getting here, and they were probably exhausted.

The Jousters should have been exhausted, too, but Kiron could tell that the others were sleeping fitfully if at all. Even Huras, who normally slept through everything, was tossing and turning. He took his turn at night watch, then settled down with Avatre again, and finally some time before dawn, did drop into an uneasy slumber.

It was a relief to do something normal and take the dragons out to hunt. They let all four of them kill and eat as much as they could; it would be no bad thing for them to doze most of the day and recover their strength.

They left the priest stripped down to his kilt, busily laying out all manner of things in the sanctuary of the temple. He looked up as Kiron passed. “It is a very good thing,” he said in measured tones, “both that all Temples of Haras are required to keep everything needed for the greater magical rituals, and that no one, so far as I can tell, has ever used these things here. I have pristine tools and materials.”

“Will you be needing anything from us?” Kiron asked, hoping that the answer would be “no.”

The priest shook his head. “I could do with a trained acolyte, but in matters this complicated, an untrained helper is worse than none at all.”

Kiron nodded. “In that case, during the morning we intend to consolidate everything useful here, and in the afternoon, we are going to follow the trail of the missing townsfolk for as long as we can.”

The priest’s mouth thinned. “I do not know what to hope for. It could be that ‘nothing’ is the best thing you can find.”

Kiron tried very hard not to think about that as he went out with Huras to scour the northern half of the town, including the garrison, for foodstuffs and water jars. After two trips with the latter, which were heavy, awkward, and bulky, he was feeling distinctly out of sorts. He really didn’t want to contemplate what it was going to be like to have to fill all the jars that Huras had lined up along the wall of the kitchen. The temple did have its own well, but it was still going to mean a lot of water carrying.

I thought I had done with toting water when I was no longer a serf.

Eventually, Huras deemed that they had enough jars, and he was able to go on to carrying—

Equally heavy things. Irksome. Exhausting. By midmorning he was sick of it. Fortunately, so was Huras. “Enough,” the young man said finally. “I am like to turn into a donkey at this rate. We have looted the best houses in this town; anything we find elsewhere will be inferior. We will look for gardens, I think.”

Kiron groaned but agreed.

But the gardens had long since been eaten up by the goats, which understandably preferred tender, well-nurtured plants to what they could find in the desert. The best that Huras could manage was to dig up some half-grown onions whose green parts had been eaten down to the ground.

Pe-atep and Oset-re fared no better, and the rest of the morning was spent filling water jars until their arms ached. Huras rewarded them, though, with a decent meal, and Kiron mentally congratulated himself that the big man was along, even though Huras had been picked for the size and strength of his dragon and not his culinary skills.

The priest came in as they were finishing their meal looking so bleak that Kiron put down, untasted, the honey-smeared flatbread he had been about to bite into. “What?” he asked apprehensively. “Your face is as long as Great Mother River—”

“I cannot speak with Sanctuary,” the priest replied. “Even though my powers find nothing in the way of dark magic here, or even any magic at all, I cannot sense them, nor, I suppose, can they sense me.”

All the dire things that Kiron could think of were quickly dismissed. The priest was an expert in his magic; he would surely have thought of everything Kiron could think of as the reason why he could not reach his fellows. Still. If magic was like water, could it be drained away? “No magic?” he said instead. “None? Isn’t there always some magic about? Amulets, charms, even if only half of those are genuine, shouldn’t you be able to sense them?”

Them-noh-thet gave him a sharp look. “What are you thinking?”

Kiron had to shrug. “I don’t really know. Is there something that drinks magic?”

The priest stroked his chin, which was now shaven again. “Huh. It is possible. I have never heard of such a thing—” He stared past Kiron for a moment, then abruptly turned and stalked back into the sanctuary.

Kiron and the others shared a look. “Priests,” Oset-re said dismissively. “Aket-ten is like that.”

“So she is,” Kiron replied, feeling both a touch of irritation and a touch of smugness, both overlaid by a profound wish that she was here. When she wasn’t being irritating, she had the ability to cut through to the heart of things, and to see them quite sensibly.

But—now. Bad enough that they were here themselves. That he was here. He didn’t want her in this place, this unhaunted place, where not even ghosts were lingering.

“Let’s get the dragons up,” he said, rather than saying anything more about Aket-ten. “We’ll follow where the people went for as far as we can.”

The track was easy to follow. And unnaturally straight. It looked for all the world as if the people had simply trudged over everything in their path, not stopping to go around obstacles and climbing down wadis and up the other side. There was no actual mark on where the border of Tia ended, of course; this was wilderness, who would care? The garrison had just been placed in a spot that seemed good for keeping an eye out to the east. But Kiron was fairly certain that they were well past that nebulous “border” by midafternoon. And the track showed no signs that the people who had made it were getting tired and needed to rest.

But then the dragons glided over the top of a rise—and the track abruptly ended in a muddle of footprints as if whatever had drawn those people out into the desert had stopped calling them, leaving them confused.

And on the other side of that muddle, another track began.

The four of them swooped in to land.

“Camel droppings,” said Pe-atep at once, pointing to the pile of dung. “And camel tracks.” He slid off his dragon’s back and began walking about, bent over, frowning. “Whoever was here, they weren’t here by accident. They camped here two, maybe three days—there’s a fire.” Now he pointed at a blackened smudge half covered with loose earth. “And look how the brush is browsed up. Whoever was here, came here expecting to intercept these people. They knew the townsfolk were coming.”

“They weren’t here to invite them to a feast either,” said Oset-re suddenly. He rose up from behind a bit of scrub with something in his hands, his face grim.

They all clustered around him. What he held in his hand was a bit of leather with a ring on it; it had broken where the ring was riveted to the leather, rendering it useless.

It was a slave’s neck collar, and the ring was meant to run a rope through, so that the slaves could be strung along like a string of pack animals.

Well. Now they knew why no one had come back.

“The dead guard,” Oset-re said, slowly. “He was probably riding patrol along the border, and whatever happened back there, he didn’t get caught in it. Then, when he got back to town, he followed this track, just as we did.”

Kiron nodded grimly. “Now we know who killed him. But where did these slave traders take our people?”

Pe-atep was already walking the site in ever-widening circles, and suddenly stopped. He looked at the other three and spread his hands in frustration. “I was thinking—a town full of people—that’s a lot of slaves. And there were a lot of slave traders here. A lot of slave traders.”

Kiron went to join him, and saw what Pe-atep meant. Camel and human tracks radiated out from the spot where Pe-atep stood. This must have been—like a feast for these traders. Because there were no signs of any struggle. Whatever held the townsfolk in thrall continued to keep them docile.

And as for where the townsfolk were—they were scattered to the four winds.

The four Jousters looked at each other in dismay. By now there was no telling where those people were. There were only four of them, and a dozen slave traders or more, and that was assuming that the traders had moved so slowly that the dragons could catch up with them—with more than a sennight of head start.

The townsfolk were gone, beyond recall.

With heavy hearts, they mounted back up, and turned back to the deserted city.

There was still a mystery to solve. Who did this? Why?

And how could it be avenged?

ELEVEN

DESERT wind flowed through the ventilation openings just under the temple’s roof, carrying away most of the thick incense smoke. Which was just as well, since the Priest of Haras had been undertaking so many rituals that it would otherwise have been impossible to breathe here. “I can find nothing,” Them-noh-thet said with frustration. He looked worn to a rag. He had not slept except when he had to, and Huras had been bringing him meals because otherwise he would not have troubled to eat. “Except that, yes, something is drinking the magic. I cannot tell where it is, because it drinks the magic as fast as I bring it up.”

Kiron rubbed his head. They had been here three days now and were no closer to solving the mystery. Nor were they in any position to do anything about bringing the stolen people back, and the longer they remained here without being able to speak to Sanctuary, the longer it would take for anyone else to know what had happened. Finally, he shook his head. “We must go back. We can do nothing more here.”

The others looked as if they were about to protest, then thought better of it. With a resigned look, the priest shrugged and knelt down to begin packing up his magical and ritual instruments. Kiron nodded with sympathy. “I understand. We have accomplished nothing other than to find a deserted town and to discover that the people and garrison are almost certainly now slaves. If any of you can think of anything we have not yet tried, I should like to hear it.”

Nothing. No one had any clever answers. They were all too tired to even try to think of some. As he had known was the case, since he wasn’t in any better condition than the rest.

He wanted a real meal, and he wanted a bath. But he would do without both if only they were getting answers here. Since they weren’t—it was piling misery atop futility to stay here.

“Very well, then. We fly back. Perhaps the priests at Sanctuary will have better ideas.” He glanced at Them-noh-thet, who shrugged wearily. The priest looked as if he had come to the last of his ability to think, and that was not a good state to be in. They were relying on him for defense against magic, but if he could not think clearly, that was a potential disaster.

He could tell them not to feel guilty, but it would be useless. He rubbed the back of his hand across his cheek and felt the grit under it. Enough. The wise commander knew when to order a retreat. The sun was going down; there was a beam of light pouring in through the ventilation slit in the western wall, to fall three fourths of the way up the eastern wall. That only happened as the sun-disk approached the horizon and was a good cue to tell them all that nothing more could be done this day. “Get a good night’s sleep,” he advised. “If you cannot do it any other way, broach that last jar of date wine. We’ll hunt before we leave and take as much as the dragons can carry.”

At least now he knew the locations of the watering places on the way back. The locations were engraved, not in his memory, but in the far better memory of the dragons. That would make things much easier for everyone; the dragons would make a straight flight from one to another, without the need to hunt for it this time. A dragon never forgot a place where there was something it needed, as he had discovered with Avatre, who would return, time after time, without prompting, to the same little wadi where she had cornered a gazelle, presumably hoping that another one would find the place to its liking. And more often than not, she did find some sort of prey there, though once it had been a very disappointing fennec fox that had slipped right between two of her talons and scampered away.

They all resorted to the date wine, even the priest. Huras put together a truly excellent if very limited dinner for all of them, but it seemed rather like a funeral feast. In a way, perhaps it was; the people they could not help might just as well be dead now. It was more than enough to make one think very hard about taking refuge in the wine. No one indulged too much, however; no one wanted to awake in the morning feeling as if his head had been put in the olive press and his gut was a colony of scorpions. And when the jar had been split five ways, Kiron noted as he went to bed that at least half of each portion had been poured out frequently for the god. He hoped that Haras got good use of it.

In the morning, it did not take long at all to hunt enough to take care of everything the dragons would need for a day. The goats that had taken shelter in the town made easy prey. The dragons ate well, and they all lumbered into the air burdened not only with their midday meal, but their evening as well.

Kiron pressed them all hard, and no one objected, not even the dragons. But once they were a day out of the border town, the priest had been able to tell his fellows what had been discovered—sketchy details, at least. Once they were down for the night, he had performed a very simple ritual that allowed him to scribe characters on a specially prepared piece of papyrus paper which somehow would end up on another like it in Sanctuary. And he, in his turn, could read characters that appeared on his piece of paper.

Return to Sanctuary quickly, was all that he got, which was what they were doing anyway, after all. The return trip was the mirror image of the trek out, with one exception, and that was when they split their party on the last day.

Kiron took up the priest behind him and veered off to Sanctuary, where Avatre drifted down to her old pen in the very last glimmer of twilight and sank down onto the heated sands with a sigh. At their midday stop, the priest had sent Sanctuary another message, telling them to expect him and a Jouster around sunset. So there were servants waiting with food for Avatre and another to help Kiron unsaddle her.

“There is a bath waiting for you, Lord Jouster,” said one of them. “And clean clothing. There is drink waiting at the bath, and I will bring a hot meal when you are finished.”

“That sounds . . . very good,” he replied, trying to maintain at least a semblance of dignity. He followed the servant to the bathing room that had been set up in the Temple of Haras, to which the dragon pens were attached, and with a sigh of gratitude for water he did not have to personally haul, upended the first bath jar over himself.

The priest, of course, had immediately hustled off with two acolytes that had been waiting for him.

And when he returned from his bath, the waiting servant told him that Avatre had roused herself long enough to eat, then flopped down and spread out her wings and was asleep in moments.

As for Kiron, fed and clean and finally in clean kilt and loinwrap for the first time in days, he thought he would surely be called on to contribute. The pens they had built here in Sanctuary were of the type that he himself had pioneered, with the Jousters’ spartan quarters in the pen itself, and this was where another servant bought him food, drink, and a small lamp to see by. But as he ate the meal that was brought to him, no summons came. When he found himself nodding off over the empty bowl, he gave up and stretched out on the pallet.

Dawn broke, and still no summons. After getting himself some food from the kitchens of the Temple of Haras, and waiting until Avatre herself woke and began to look restlessly about for food, he finally shrugged, found someone to pass the message to Them-noh-thet and Kaleth that he was leaving, and saddled Avatre up.

He was just about ready to mount up, when a boy came running up, and with him servants carrying meat that Avatre eyed with great hunger. Sanctuary still operated leanly, despite all the priests and temples here. Last night’s meal for Avatre had been a necessity, because they had arrived too late to hunt. The couriers were expected to hunt their dragons to feed them.

For Sanctuary to feed Avatre twice told him that the orders he was about to get were not to go back to Aerie.

“Jouster Kiron,” the lad said, breathless from the run. “You are asked by Kaleth, and through the priests of Haras by Great King Ari, to say nothing of what you found. Not even to your best friends.”

The servants spread out the meat for Avatre; it had already been cut up so that she could simply gulp chunks down rather than tearing at larger pieces, and she did so while he blinked at the boy’s words. This took him rather aback, but he could certainly see why this edict would be issued. Given that no one knew how the people had been lured from that town, nor who had done it, there might be panic if people thought even for a moment such a thing could happen again.

Might be panic? There most certainly would be. And rightly. It could happen again, and at the moment, they had no means of preventing it.

There were no answers to why it had happened, only more questions.

He nodded. There was great wisdom in this edict, but there was certainly more to come.

“You are further asked to go, not to Aerie but to Mefis, where the Great King wishes to speak with you at length,” the boy continued. “A courier will be sent to Aerie with your instructions for the Jousters.”

He thought carefully. A courier . . . there wasn’t a great deal that he needed to actually give in the way of instructions. Perhaps if the others were all untrained—but in fact, there were people at Aerie who were far better schooled in the management of dragons and their Jousters than he was. “You can send something from temple to temple, yes? Very nearly as swift as thought?”

The boy nodded.

“Then tell them that they are to continue as I left them.” His wing of wingleaders was more than competent enough to continue as they had been. Until the bandits changed their strategy, which was not likely for some time, there was no real need for him to be there, and even then— well, there were men with the Jousters now who all had more combat experience than he, the “old” Jousters, who surely, surely would be able to deal with such problems. All the administrative nonsense could be handed by Haraket. . . .

He felt a distant relief and a little guilt. Haraket had not wanted it.

But Haraket was good at it. As the Overseer for the Dragon Courts of Tia, he had handled all these things before: disputes over quarters, getting supplies, finding ways and means of doing just about everything. The circumstances had changed, but . . .

Well, perhaps Ari could come up with a way to sweeten the circumstances. And he was certainly now in a position to make such a request. Lord Haraket, with his own villa and land . . . not a bad thought.

Meanwhile it seemed he was needed elsewhere, and he had better put all possible speed into it.

Avatre finished the last chunk of meat and raised her neck to look at the sky, spreading her wings slightly. She was impatient to be gone, and she turned her head gracefully, to look at him as if prompting him.

“You are to make all speed, Lord Kiron,” the boy said, echoing his thoughts.

“We will,” he replied, and before he had finished the second word, Avatre, responding to his shift in weight, gave a tremendous leap and upward thrust of her wings and sent them both aloft.

They landed to the kind of reception that Kiron remembered from the old days of the Dragon Courts here; servants, rather than dragon boys, but otherwise it was a taste of the old days, except he had never been on the receiving end of the attention back then. It was a little disorienting, actually, to see the swarm and have the reaction that he should be down among them. He had scarcely unbuckled his straps and slid out of his saddle when there was a servant there unbuckling the harness, another with a barrow of meat for Avatre, a third filling her water trough. She looked surprised for a moment, then hunger overcame surprise and she dove into her meal.

Kiron, for his part, was taken away by yet a fourth servant, moving at a run toward the Palace. And if he had not felt the urgency of his situation so strongly, he would have been stunned at the mere sight of the huge building that crowned the avenue that the servant led him onto.

For all that his duties sometimes brought him here, this was the first time he had been in the Palace, and it simply did not compare to anything he had yet seen. The Dragon Courts and the temple attached to them were large, yes, and indeed the temple was fully large enough for a dragon, even several dragons, to walk about in comfortably. But he had gotten used to the low ceilings, the long, dark rooms of Aerie, the squat, sturdy buildings of Sanctuary. That was what his mind measured things by,

He had forgotten—if indeed he had ever truly realized—that the Great King’s Palace in Mefis was intended to impress to the point of intimidation.

He found himself approaching a building that was at least as tall as the cliff walls of Aerie were—except that the dwellings of Aerie were carved from something natural, and this was entirely built by man. Fat, carved and painted pillars made to look like palm trees rose up three tall stories to support the roof, and the front of the Palace was so wide that forty chariots could have lined up in front of it. The front door, of beaten plates of bronze, would have admitted Avatre or even Kashet without requiring them to bend their necks or tuck in their wings.

Inside, the first room looked like the sanctuary of a temple, with more rows of carved and painted columns upholding the ceiling, which was so far above Kiron’s head that Avatre could probably have flown in here, had the columns permitted it. And there must have been fifty torches illuminating the place.

From the dais and the two thrones at the far end, this must be the audience chamber. But the thrones were empty and the servant was hurrying on.

They passed through another chamber like the first, but smaller; presumably this one was for smaller gatherings of more important people. There were larger-than-life-sized murals here, of tribute being offered and captive enemies, and on the wall behind the thrones, there was an almost-life-sized dragon, wings spread protectively above the thrones themselves. Just as many torches burned here as in the previous room.

The servant hurried on, leading him into a chamber of about the same size, but clearly one made for a very different purpose.

This was a room full of scribes’ desks with rolls of papyrus paper in baskets beside them, ink and reed pens on them, and on one or two, works still being written and held down with scroll weights. Four doors led into this room, and, through them, he glimpsed servants coming around to light torches and lamps. There were a few, a very few lamps lit here, but not many. Work here was done for the day, unless the Great King or Queen would call for a scribe.

The servant led him through the right-hand door, taking him now toward the south, for the palace itself faced east. The next two chambers seemed to be places for officials to do business; the decorations here were paintings of the god Teth, who oversaw such things, and the furnishings were desks, chairs, and baskets of scrolls.

A wafting scent of roast duck tickled Kiron’s nose as they moved through the second of these rooms, and made his stomach growl. He hadn’t had duck or fish or goose, or anything that lived on or in the water, since leaving Alta. Well, fish. But they were dried. Nothing like the glorious roast fish he used to enjoy as an Altan Jouster. He turned his thoughts resolutely from food. He needed to concentrate on what, if anything, Ari might be asking him.

They passed into and out of a huge courtyard with a latas-pool fully big enough for swimming, rimmed with palm trees. There were piles of cushions, palm-leaf fans in baskets, and other things that gave him the impression that this was a spot used for lounging. But by whom? He did not know enough about court life to even venture a guess. From there, they passed into another part of the Palace where the ceilings were still high, but only a bit above “normal” height.

So far, every area they’d been through had been graced with stunning wall paintings appropriate to the room. In the scribes’ and officials’ chambers, it had been paintings of the god of writing and of diligent workers. Here, where he supposed these rooms were for entertaining, the murals were of dancers and flute girls, or of hunting scenes, or of the gods giving gifts of life and health to the Great King. The pillars were all painted to look like latas flowers, with the pillar being the green stem and close-furled leaves, the capital the blue-petaled flower spreading out to press against the ceiling. Here were low couches, more piles of cushions, and small tables holding objects it was too dim to make out. The effect was opulent beyond his dreams.

He hurried on, with the servant leading through more rooms seen only dimly as torches here had not been lit. They passed through another court with a pool, this one somewhat smaller and set like a blue jewel in a green garden. And from the far side of this court he could see what was presumably their goal, another set of rooms, where light and sound were spilling through an open doorway.

Glad to see an end to this journey, he followed the servant in and found himself in a room about the size of one of those that the officials had used. There were Ari and Nofret, bent over a table with something spread out over it. There were no torches here; instead, lamps provided much clearer, steadier light, including a lamp-stand at each of the four corners of the table. They were looking at a map, he saw, as he drew nearer. But it was the biggest map he had ever seen in his life.

A table to one side, pushed up against the wall, was laden with food: grapes, pomegranates, figs, flatbread and loaf bread both, honey cakes, butter and cheese, lettuce, green peas—and not that roast duck Kiron had scented but a glorious roast goose. It was missing one leg. The leg was in Ari’s hand, and the Great King looked very like the old Ari as he took bites as someone—from the war helmet, Kiron thought it might be Ari’s Captain of Thousands—pointed to something on the map.

“Kiron,” said Ari without turning around. “Get food and come over here and tell us exactly what you found. Kamas-hotet, where’s that map of Bukatan?”

A fellow with the sidelock hairstyle of a scribe went to a basket of scrolls and pulled one out without even looking at it, spreading it out on the table on top of the big map and weighing down the edges with little faience scroll weights in the shape of beetles so it wouldn’t roll up again.

Kiron didn’t have to be told what to do twice; his stomach felt as if it was pressed against his backbone. He heaped a platter with slices of goose, a slice of loaf bread spread with soft cheese, and grapes. “Kiron, come tell us everything you saw, from the beginning,” Ari said. “Here’s the map of the town you were in.”

Between bites, Kiron related everything that they had seen, from the moment they approached the place from the west, to the time the trail of the (presumably) now-captive townsfolk and soldiers ended and the trails of the slave traders began.

When he had finished, Ari and Nofret looked to the man in the war helmet.

“This was planned,” he said flatly. “It was planned for some time, and carefully executed. Let us leave aside how the townsfolk were bewitched; that is a matter for the priests to worry over. But look at this—”

He drew a line on the map with his finger, from the outskirts of the town to the place where Kiron guessed that the slavers had been, now marked with a red pebble. “I have planned many, many evacuations, Great Ones. I have had to evacuate towns and villages in time of war and in time of flood both. That distance is nearly exactly how long a group of people carrying children and infants can go before some begin to fall back because of exhaustion. I am speaking, of course, not of a measured and calm march, but of a forced one. In the ordinary sort of evacuation, people drop back all the time. In a forced march, fear bites at their heels, and only when the weakest are too tired to go on will you lose some. Whoever planned this knew all about such things. And whoever planned this did not want to leave so much as an infant behind.”

Ari nodded somberly. Nofret, however, looked sick and troubled. “Forgive me, but—as a Royal twin of Alta, where we bought and used many slaves, I know something of slave traders. It is not often they wish to be burdened with children; young children tire easily and cannot keep up with adults. They then must be carried or conveyed some other way. And infants—” She shook her head. “Infants on such a march? I never heard of such being taken. So why would they want all of the people in the town? It cannot be because they did not want to leave abandoned children to die—”

“You ask that—” came a low voice from a shadowed corner behind Kiron, so that he jumped in startled surprise “—whose land played host to those abominable Magi?”

There was a crisp tap on the floor of that corner as they all turned around to face the speaker. Nofret inclined her head. “It is something I would rather not contemplate, my Lord Priest,” she replied. “That some of the Magi could have survived . . .”

The shadowy figure seated there in the corner shook his head. “Bah. They learned their tricks from somewhere. It need not be the Magi of Alta behind this—though I would by no means be surprised to learn that some had indeed survived. It could be others of the same sort. It could be these are the source of their evil. It could be that this is evil of the same kind but a different source.”

Kiron made out more of the seated figure in the corner as his eyes adjusted to the shadows. It was a man in the simplest possible robes of a Tian Priest, with none of the ornaments that most boasted. With one difference. A clean bandage covered his eyes. He was blind.

“And don’t call me ‘my lord priest.’ I am no one’s lord. I am simple Rakaten-te. The name I was born with will do nicely.”

The bandaged, sightless eyes turned in Kiron’s direction. “So this is the young one you’ve put in charge of your new Jousters.” Kiron felt a kind of coolness pass over him, and had the sense of being weighed and measured, but for what, he could not have said. “He’ll do.”

Although the priest had a face that was unlined, and like all priests, his head was shaved so there was no telling if his hair was white or black, Kiron had the sense that he was long past middle age.

But there was that about the priest—not the least of which that he was seated in the presence of the Great King and Queen—that commanded a special respect. “Thank you, Rakaten-te,” Kiron replied, with the Altan salute.

“Oh, you would not thank me if you knew what I am, boy,” the priest said with a low chuckle. “I am the Chosen of Seft.”

Kiron blanched. He had only heard of the Chosen of Seft in the hushed whispers reserved for tales of angry ghosts and terrible revenge. Seft was worshipped, it was true—or rather, it was more true to say that that dark god, brother to Siris, was propitiated rather than worshipped.

Now all the gods had their dark side. The benevolent Haras was known to go quite mad at times and forget even who his friends and allies were. Nofet was the gentle goddess of night and women with child, but she also ruled over plague. And of course, there was the sun-disk of Re-Haket, which brought life but also death, both in the most fundamental of ways—light after darkness, but also the hammer on the Anvil of the Sun. Warmth that called seedlings out of the earth, and the fire that burned them where they grew.

Still! Seft! He of the underworld, through which the sun-disk must pass each night, he who murdered his own brother that he might have Iris to wife, the Father of Curses, the Brother of Lies . . .

“When you wish to catch a thief, young Captain of Jousters,” said the priest, a little smile playing over his mouth, “do you set a virtuous man to find him? Of course not. The youngest child will lisp the old saying, ‘set a thief to catch a thief.’ There is no one in all of Tia, aye, nor of Alta, that knows more about the dark magics than I. If you wish to hunt for the makers of the darkest of magics, you need someone who works such things himself. I am that person; I hold the Rod and Whip of Seft. It is why I was blinded when I was Chosen. The god himself marked me as his and made sure I could be nothing else.”

Kiron gulped. Blinded? They blind their priest? But—but—

The priest chuckled. “I was Chosen at birth, boy. I have known nothing else. Do not feel sorry for me, I can know more things with my four senses than you can with five. And take my advice. Never wrestle with a blind man. You will always lose.”

He turned his head back in Nofret’s direction. “The dark magics are one thing. Blood magic is another. The more potential life is cut short, the more power is generated. I have no doubt that whoever lured those people away demanded the infants and children as compensation. You might find a grave full of them, but more likely, the scavengers have dragged them all away. A wise precaution and one any blood mage would take to keep them from haunting their killers.”

Kiron felt a shudder convulse him, Nofret choked on a sob, and Ari’s face went blank. Even the Captain of Thousands muttered a curse. The old man looked at them all with pity.

“The truths that no one wants to hear are the ones most needful to be said,” the priest told them all. “That is the way of things. My lord Seft is the god of all hard things. Hear this: the ignorant say that Seft slew Siris to take his wife. That is the fool and the common man who think this, for they would have done so, had their brothers taken to wife the Star of the Universe.” He snorted with veiled contempt. “Here is the great mystery that we are taught in Seft’s halls—Siris had to die to become Lord of the Dead. The Dead required a Lord and King on the other side of the Star Bridge, and Siris knew he must be that King. Yet a god cannot slay himself, and he laid it upon his brother, who is the Finder of the Way, to find the way to slay him. So Seft did, that Siris could cross the Bridge and take up the Crook and Flail among the Dead.”

“But what of his taking the Lady Iris?” asked Nofret sharply.

“Oh, that,” the old man said with a sly smile. “She was alone and a widow and the fairest of all the goddesses, with breasts as firm and round as young melons, and lips as sweet as pomegranates, so say the scrolls. Who could blame Seft for taking her into his house? Even a god is sometimes a man.”

Nofret flushed, though whether from annoyance or embarrassment, Kiron could not have said.

“But you did not ask me here to hear of the loves of the gods,” Rakaten-te continued. “You asked me to tell you whether or not this was dark magic, and I tell you it is, of the darkest. That those children are gone tells me that. I cannot tell you who or why, but I will uncover the mystery.” He turned to Kiron. “This will take time. You, Jouster, will wait here in the Dragon Courts while I do my work. I may yet require a dragon and his rider.”

There was only one reason why the old man would want him to wait. . . .

He started to open his mouth to say that there was not a chance under heaven that he would take an old blind man out to the deserted city. Started. Then he thought better of it.

What, after all, did he know of magic? Not much. And of the terrible magics the Magi used? Nothing at all.

It might be that the only way to unravel the mystery would be to take this man to where the mystery was.

“If I can send a younger man, I will,” Rakaten-te said, with a wry twist of the lips. “I have no more desire to undergo the rigors of such a journey than you want to take me on it. But it may be that I will need to go. Save the Great King, you are the most experienced Jouster riding these tamed dragons that there is.”

Kiron nodded reluctant agreement.

“You also have faced the Magi personally, Kiron,” Nofret pointed out. “You know something of what to expect.”

He nodded, though reluctantly, and the urgent discussion moved on to other aspects of the situation. And try though he might to stay awake, he found himself yawning when he no longer needed to answer questions.

At last Ari took pity on him and dismissed him. But only after calling in a servant to guide him back out again. A good thing, too, or he would have gotten lost.

He checked on Avatre; she could have been a stone for all that she moved. He thought about stumbling as far as his usual quarters—

But the sand was soft and comfortable and he thought he would just curl up with her for a little.

And that was the last thing he knew until dawn brought a chorus of birdcalls and the stirring of all things in the Dragon Courts to wake him.

TWELVE

IT had all started like a perfectly unremarkable day. Sutema woke, ate, begged for caresses, and slept again. Peri then got her bath and fresh clothing, as always, reveling in the scent of the clean linen and marveling anew that she had the luxury of clean clothing every single day. Then she went in search of food for herself before the day’s lessons, both for Jousters and little dragons, began. There had been some fuss over the last few days about comings and goings from the Palace, but really, though those who had been priestesses might find such things worth chattering endlessly about, for Peri, it was not anything that would make any difference in her life, so she ignored it.

And that was where “ordinary” ended. Peri stopped in surprise at the doorway to the courtyard where all of the Jousters and Jousters in training ate, and stared, hardly able to believe her eyes. It was Lord Kiron. What was he doing here? No one had said anything about him appearing. It wasn’t as if he was a courier, to come and go unannounced.

He looked very tired, and he was plainly wearing a borrowed kilt, as it was a little too long on him and extended down over his knees. He must have arrived last night.

Perhaps all that business that the other girls had been so excited about had brought him; with so many comings and goings between all of the temples and the Palace, perhaps this was something that would make a difference to the Jousters.

Then something else occurred to her, that last night, it was rumored, the Chosen of Seft himself had made a visit to the Palace.

The Chosen of Seft! The Altan equivalent was Sheften, and in one of the rare cases of total accord between the Two Kingdoms, in both the Altan and Tian pantheons, the god had betrayed and murdered his brother, and tried to force his brother’s goddess-wife into marriage. Seft was the lord of dark doings, of rumors and shadows and hidden knowledge. His Chosen almost never left the Temple of Seft.

For indeed, Seft was worshipped, as was Sheften, and openly; both gods had temples, but that was largely on the basis of the idea that it was better to coax the god into leaving you alone than it was to leave him alone and take the chance that he would turn his attention on you.

Among the ordinary people, the serfs and the slaves, the tales of what went on in those temples ranged from the prurient to the profane. In general, anyone wishing to propitiate the god into indifference simply delivered his or her sacrifice at the door, to be collected by the silent and faintly menacing acolytes, then hurried off. Seft’s Temple was not a place where you wanted to linger—oh, no.

And yet—it was said among the Jouster-priestesses that, other than being a place where shadows instead of light ruled, and the most sacred sanctuary was all in darkness, the temple of Seft was, if anything, more ascetic, more spare, than any other in Mefis. That there were mysteries there too deep for common folk even to begin to understand. That Seft’s priests never offered their aid with dark magics and cursing, even when one came to them precisely for that purpose, and that no matter what occurred there, it had a profoundly important purpose.

Frankly, Peri didn’t believe them. First of all, they were all priests together, and priests protected each other, even when there was something bad going on. She remembered a scandal from her own home village and one of the temples there, and not that of Seft either, but of Ghed, who was a jolly god, and one of the few for whom there really were no darker or more violent aspects. People reasonably assumed that any house of Ghed was a safe one for children. The priest had been taking advantage of the little girls, inviting them to come and decorate the altar with flowers, then filling them full of palm wine, and when they were too dizzy to think, filling them with something else entirely. And what had happened to him when he was found out? Nothing. Other than that he was whisked away and another priest put in his place. He suffered no punishment at all so far as Peri knew. The other priests of other gods would not say nor hear a word against him, in turn saying only that “The matter is dealt with.”

Ah, no. Priests stuck together, and she would trust nothing from former priestesses without confirmation. Nor from priests either, but from common ordinary people who had seen things with their own eyes.

But there was no reason to doubt that the Chosen of Seft had made a long visit to the Palace last night, and that was a curious thing indeed. The very servants were talking about it as they brought the meat for the baby dragons this morning, and she had heard murmurs of astonishment coming from over the kitchen wall before she had left last night.

Reclusive did not even begin to describe the Chosen of Seft. He had not emerged from his temple even when the Royal Family itself was in the thrall of the Magi. So why should he come out for the sake of one who was (to be totally honest) a bastard offshoot of the Royal Bloodline? Was it only because Ari was all that was left of that line?

That was what had the lady Jousters all a-twitter last night. Temple talk, palace talk, again, and once again, nothing she could really share. She’d listened to it without speaking while she ate, then took her leave. She had gone back to Sutema and then, since this was a rare night when she was not watching over all the babies, she paid a visit to Letis, with the intention of extracting every bit of information about her missing son Kiron as ever she could. The more she knew about the boy, the more likely it was she could match him with the man. Or not. But that, after all, was the point.

Letis, for her part, was never reticent about talking about her long-missing son. She filled Peri’s ears with tales of the boy, which included the sorts of things that Peri was really hoping to hear, since they were stories that it was unlikely some other boy would match. These were the sorts of things that most mothers liked to tell about their children, unique and often funny. One such was an incident where he and his eldest sister had gotten into a quarrel, and she, furious and helpless because her mother had supported Kiron despite his being in the wrong, had waited until he got too near to her, then dusted his hair with the flour she had just finished grinding. And that, in turn, had made him so incoherently angry that Letis had feared he would take the pestle and beat his sister with it, and had separated them both for the rest of the day.

Letis found that incident utterly hilarious; she thought it funny that the eldest girl, the one she seemed to think not much of, would be so angry at being put “in her place.” And she saw nothing wrong with supporting her adored son even when he was wrong, because he was the only boy. Peri for her part could only reflect that it was, in a way, a very good thing that Kiron had been separated from the family at so young an age, or he would have been spoiled beyond all correcting as a child, and that alone probably would have led to an early death among slaves and serfs. But perhaps Kiron’s father had taken a firm hand with his son and kept the boy from becoming too full of himself.

She had not had the slightest notion when she came back late from her visit, and fell onto her pallet, that her quest for ways of identifying Letis’ son would be put to the test so soon. She stared at the apparition with blank astonishment that would have been embarrassing and obvious if Lord Kiron had glanced in her direction.

Lord Kiron, however, was not alone. Two of the other female Jousters in training were sitting at the same table as he was, and two of the four couriers as well, and presiding over all of them was Lady Aket-ten. All five of them were throwing questions at him without regard for the fact that the poor fellow was trying to eat.

She took a deep breath, and walked in with as normal a demeanor as she could manage, both excited, and apprehensive. What if he found her questions impertinent? What if he thought she was rude and intrusive? What if he turned out not to be Letis’ lost son? She felt her throat tighten and her hands grow damp with nerves. The others, however, paid not the least attention to her. They were all too busy quizzing the poor young man on why he was here and why he had spent so much time at the Palace last night.

That was a piece of information she hadn’t had until that moment. So he had come in last night! Probably he had arrived about sundown, after she had gone off to visit Letis. When she had returned, she had gone straight to her bed, so of course no one would have told her anything. She held her peace and simply watched and listened.

He ate slowly and deliberately, and did not allow them to rush him, nor make him try and talk through a mouth full of food. It shortly became painfully clear that he was not going to tell them why he was here, except that he was on “the Great King’s business.”

“And what of the Great Queen?” Aket-ten asked testily, brows furrowing as if she considered the omission some sort of slight.

“Hers, too,” came the laconic reply. “They are one in this matter, as in most other things. Surpassingly in concord, are our rulers. Others could do well to follow their example.”

Peri winced. Aket-ten did not seem to notice the veiled allusion to her own behavior. It would be a lot better if Aket-ten didn’t pick at him in front of the others. That can’t be good for discipline. “And what is this matter?” she persisted. “We are the Great Queen’s Wing! Should we not be told?”

“There is nothing to tell,” Kiron replied, and took a bite of bread and honey. “I have not leave to discuss any of it.”

Let it rest, Aket-ten, Peri thought, wishing that her wingleader was as good at reading human thought as she was at reading animal.

“How long will you stay?” Aket-ten then said, taking a different approach.

“I do not know.” Another bite of bread and honey; Kiron chewed and swallowed meditatively.

Aket-ten bristled, as if he had somehow insulted her with the simple answer. “I am the Overseer of the Dragon Courts now,” she responded, drumming her fingers on the table with impatience. “I am responsible for provisioning everyone here. There is another dragon, another Jouster to feed, to care for. How am I to plan for both of you if I do not know how long you are to stay? What if my allotted provisions run short?”

“As I am on the Great King’s business, you may apply to the Great King’s vizier,” Kiron replied, and this time under all his seriousness Peri was sure she saw a twinkle of amusement in his eye. He was getting a certain amount of pleasure from thwarting her, even tormenting her with his secretiveness. “I am sure he will leap to assist you in any way possible.”

She heard laughter in his voice, then. So he was teasing Aket-ten! She wondered if Aket-ten realized this.

“You were at the Palace for simply ages,” said Min-kalet, she of the slender ankle and slightly nasal voice: the former, which she displayed whenever she could, and the latter, which she seemed unaware of. She leaned over the table, ignoring her own breakfast in her eagerness. “Lord Kiron, were you with the Great King and Queen? Was there a feast? What did you do there?”

“The Great King and Queen were my friends before they ascended the thrones of the Two Lands,” Kiron replied looking as if he was choosing his words with great care. “It is rather surprising, really, that I have not been there before. They had need of me, so they summoned me here; it was a thing of duty, not of pleasure, though it is always a pleasure to see them. There was no feast, but we had roast goose.”

“Glazed with honey and stuffed with dates?” exclaimed slender West-keri, who had an unbridled passion for food of all sorts. “Or basted with butter and stuffed with bread and raisins? Or stuffed with a duck that was stuffed with a chicken that was stuffed with a quail that was stuffed with an egg?”

It was a daily wonder to Peri that West-keri remained so thin. She and her young dragon were a good match; both always seemed to be hungry.

“Just plain roast goose,” Kiron smiled. “Though that was more than good enough. At Aerie, we do not get such things; we are too far from any water for goose or duck, too far into the desert for much that is fresh of anything.” He raised an eyebrow at the girl. “I do not think you would like it there. It is more like living in a camp in the desert than living in a city. One day, perhaps, it will be a place like any other city, but that is for the future.” Then he shrugged. “At any rate, this was nothing more than sharing an evening meal. It was not a feast, as I told you.”

“It should have been.” One of the couriers chimed in, and Peri smothered a smile when she saw the hero-worshipping look on his face. “They should have summoned you to reward you. You should have been given the Gold of Favor and the Gold of Honor, Lord Kiron.”

Kiron laughed aloud. “To what purpose? When I was his dragon boy, Ari had a chest full of the gold, and never even looked at it. I am no courtier to wear that nonsense about; there are no festivals, no feasts at Aerie, we are working far too hard for such things. Serving well is enough of an honor.”

Aket-ten rolled her eyes, when Kiron was looking the other way. Then he glanced back and caught her at it and his eyes glinted. “I am going to get no satisfaction from you, am I?” she demanded.

“You said yourself, you serve the Great Queen and answer only to her,” Kiron replied, a little smile playing over his lips, but sounding as innocent as a child. “Go and ask her yourself.”

The exasperated look that Aket-ten gave him made Peri hide another smile. Peri’s only real rival here was doing herself no service with her attitude. Not that Aket-ten seemed to care.

Finally, she found an opening in the conversation to ask about Kiron’s childhood, a moment when he reminded them all that he was from a very simple background and was more at home in the rough surroundings of Aerie than the Palace—“Unlike you, Aket-ten.” That was when Peri metaphorically pounced. He seemed very grateful for the change in subject, and as a consequence readily answered questions that under other circumstances would have been considered impertinent, not to mention prying.

And the more she asked . . . the more points of identity she had. He had the right number of siblings and the right ages. And although Letis-hanet was a very common name for an Altan woman—it meant “flower of the goddess”—still, there was that point of identity as well. Unfortunately all he remembered of his sisters were the pet names he had for them, which didn’t match what Letis had called them. But other than that, she soon had almost all the evidence she needed. Until she pulled out the final jackal for her game board . . .

“Surely your sisters cannot always have been inclined to spoil you at every opportunity!” she laughed. “Surely there must have been times when you were at each others’ throats! I have never in all my life heard of siblings who did not fight, especially eldest with youngest!”

He smiled a little. “Well,” he began, slowly. “There was one time—”

And as he recited the story, with much laughter all around, she knew that she had what she needed and wanted. It was the same incident. Him winning the argument only because his mother said he should. His sister going red in the face with anger. The handful of flour thrown into his hair. Him going red in the face with anger as the “insult” sent him into a senseless fury. His mother finally intervening, separating them for the rest of the day, only to bring them back together again at sunset and force them to apologize to each other.

“Oh, now I can admit that I was completely in the wrong,” he laughed. “And I know now that the reason I became so angry was precisely because I was in the wrong and would never have admitted it then. But I was an arrogant little toad then, and as sure that I was the ruler of all about me as any Great King.”

“Aren’t all boys?” she teased.

“And all girls are the Princesses of the Household, and just as arrogant in their way!” he challenged her. “There was many a time when my sister won an argument only because my grandmother supported her with no more reason but that she was a girl and must therefore know all things!” He chuckled. “That was the great rivalry in that house; my father ’s mother supporting the girls because my mother supported and spoiled me. And yet, let a neighbor so much as deign to hint that any of us were less than perfect, and lo! The ranks were closed, the armies assembled, and they faced the enemy as one!”

Peri laughed, able to see it all so clearly, for exactly the same situation was true in most of the village families she had grown up around.

By then, bored with it all, the rest had drifted away, even Aket-ten, who looked rather determined to, in fact, go to the Great Queen and demand to be told what this “business” was all about.

Well that was her outlook. Peri was only interested now in one thing. This was Letis’ son; this was the young man that her friend was determined she wed. And she liked him—oh, how very much she liked him, indeed!

And he was smiling at her as he had not smiled at any of the others.

Her heart lifted, and an unexpected thrill went through her.

She felt her breath catch, she flushed—and she quickly turned the conversation back to his past. Because now she wanted to hear it. All of it.

Because it was his, and no other’s, and she wanted to know everything, everything that had made him what he was.

When the little female Altan Jouster in training took herself off to her duties, Kiron rose and stretched and immediately forgot all about her. Her simple questions, her conversation, had been a much-needed distraction, but now he needed to return to the Palace. Not to hare off after Aket-ten—though he was going to have to apologize to her at some point for teasing her in front of her wing—but because it would be better if no one had to send a servant to go looking for him if he was needed. And because if he was going to have to take the Chosen of Seft back to the border, he might need some special arrangements and the best person to arrange those was probably Ari’s own vizier.

As he had partly anticipated, he was expected at the Palace, and arrangements were already in place for him to bypass most of the protocol that others had to thread. He did have to present himself to the Keeper of the Door as any other petitioner, but once his name was known, the man nearly turned himself inside out to get Kiron straight to the rulers. Within moments, he was put into the guidance of one of Nofret’s personal servants and taken straight to Ari and Nofret’s private quarters, just as he had been last night. This time, however, the rooms that had been empty were thronged with people, many of whom looked at him with curiosity, envy, or both as he passed.

It was to a different set of rooms that he was taken this time, in the womens’ wing, and by the opulence, the wall paintings of Queens being greeted as equals by various goddesses, it was Nofret’s own suite of rooms. Which was—and he would have expected this, if he had just thought about it—where he found Aket-ten, alone in one of the rooms set aside for those who were especially favored of the queen. Servants there offered them both drinks and little dainties; he declined, but Aket-ten took a delicate goblet of pomegranate juice absently, staring at him with a rueful expression on her face.

“Aket-ten, I really need to apologize—” he began.

Just as she blurted, “Kiron, I have been a pigheaded goose—”

They looked at each other, and laughed nervously.

“You have, and I have,” he said. “And we were both wrong, and that is of little importance right now. Now . . . did they tell you what is toward?”

“A very little. Enough to frighten me half to death. Could some of the Magi have escaped?” she asked, and she truly did look frightened. “Do you think they really have set themselves up in the east?”

She shuddered. Well, he couldn’t blame her. She, not he, had been the one they had held captive. She, and not he, had been the one that had seen the evils of the Magi in a very personal way; they had, not once, but twice tried to drain her of her power and spirit, and she had felt their dreadful power at first hand.

They had cut her down out of the sky and taken her captive, and the last thing she had seen as they dragged her away had been Re-eth-ke lying in a crumpled heap on the ground. She, not he, had been the one to think she had lost her dragon forever.

To contemplate the idea that some of those same Magi could still be alive must be the stuff of her worst nightmares.

He had to shrug. “There is no telling. That is what the Chosen of Seft hopes to learn, I suppose. But as he rightly said last night, the Magi are not the only ones of their sort in the world. He pointed out that they had to learn their magic from somewhere . . . and that is the border over which the Nameless Ones came.”

She bit her lip. “That is another thing I would rather not think about. The Nameless Ones . . . what if we must face them again?” She rubbed her hands together nervously. “And another thing . . . we thought we knew why Aerie and Sanctuary were deserted. But what if we were wrong? What if it was magic that lured their people away—magic of the Nameless Ones—”

He grimaced; he didn’t want to think about this either.

That is for wiser heads than mine—Ari and Nofret, Kaleth, and the Chosen of Seft. Not one simple wingleader. “How are your Jousters?” he said instead, changing the subject, and grinned. “Have you found the need to set a watch on beds yet?”

She groaned. “I cannot do that, they are adults. Much though I wish I might. And when I move them to Aerie, it will be worse.”

“Why move them at all?” he asked, invoking logic. “There is no real need, is there?”

“I—” she began, and was interrupted by the entrance of the Great Queen, who looked every inch the Great Queen indeed.

Nofret wore the tall ceremonial headdress, rather than the soft, draped cloth with the cobra headband. It was not as heavy as it looked, being made of starched blue cloth, adorned at top and bottom with a ribbon of gold. The headdress, however, was the only thing other than her dress about her that was not heavy. She wore a collar of gold, coral, lapis lazuli, and turquoise beads, and a matching belt that encircled her hips and dangled two ends down to the floor. This, in turn, matched the beading on her sandals. She sported both upper and lower armbands of enameled gold as wide as Kiron’s palm, and carried the same ceremonial crook and flail as Ari did; both of enameled gold, the stringers of the flail being composed of beads that matched the rest of her jewels.

Underneath all this, she wore a gown of closely pleated mist linen. Each such gown took one girl the better part of a day to wash and iron all the pleats back in. The jewels were so heavy that Nofret often changed gowns four and five times a day.

And the first thing she did when she entered the room was to hand over the crook and flail to the appropriate attendant, while her hairdresser came to lift the headdress from her head, revealing that she kept her hair cropped closely. It was the only sane solution. There were so many ceremonial hairstyles for a Great Queen, and all of them were so complicated, that the only way to deal with them was to wear wigs.

Another attendant came to lift the collar over her head with both hands, while a fourth removed the belt. Nofret herself kicked off her sandals and sank onto a couch with a sigh.

“Court would not be nearly so difficult if I didn’t wear enough jewels to sink the royal barge,” she complained, reaching for the fruit juice a fifth attendant brought her. The gown was now in crumpled ruins, rendered distinctly sorry looking by the heat and humidity and the press of the jewels. It hung limply from her shoulders, all the fine pleats vanishing. She sprawled onto the couch and allowed her attendants to fan her. “So, Ari told you the simple version, I trust?”

Aket-ten nodded her head.

“The complicated version is still simple at this point. There is too much we do not know, and the gods are not speaking to Kaleth. Tedious of them. Life would be so much simpler if they revealed everything to us like sensible beings.” She handed the empty goblet to one of the attendants. “Kiron is here to transport whatever priest the Chosen of Seft designates to go back to the town. We want Kiron to do this because he is the most trustworthy of an already trustworthy lot and because of all of his experience. And because the Bedu trust him. That is no small thing.”

“I feel very badly that I can do nothing,” Aket-ten said plaintively. “It seems as if there should be something I can do. . . .”

“Train your couriers,” Nofret replied instantly. “No, do more than train them. Your young women will be carrying messages of a sensitive nature, and it is imperative that they learn discretion. Make them see that they cannot conduct themselves like the little temple gossips they once were.”

Aket-ten rolled her eyes. “Ask for a miracle,” she muttered though Nofret probably couldn’t hear it.

“Seriously, Aket-ten, if they become nexuses of gossip, they will ruin the reputation of female Jousters for all time.” Kiron put in. He had not wanted these women, but now that they existed, he had no intention of permitting them to fail. For all of their faults, he had seen them with their baby dragons, watched them grit their teeth and throw themselves into training. They were Jousters. “Just tell them that.”

“Precisely.” Nofret passed her hand through her cropped tresses. “They are not stupid, Aket-ten, or you would never have chosen them.”

She nodded, chin firming.

“Enough of that,” Nofret continued. “It is of little importance.” She leaned forward and fixed them both with a steady gaze. “Kiron, the Chosen of Seft wants you here. So, Aket-ten, I am promoting both of you. Kiron, you are, as of this moment, confirmed as Lord of the Jousters. Aket-ten, you are his wing-second and speak with his authority. Ari agrees.”

As the two of them started, and then stared at each other in shock, Nofret continued. “Above all else, Ari is a scholar and a scribe, and he has remembered most of the little that is known about the Nameless Ones. And if everything he thinks is true—” She paused.

“Then the Jousters may be the one thing that stands between us and their darkness.”

THIRTEEN

AKET-TEN gave Kiron a sharp look, but said nothing.

Then, crumpled dress and all, Nofret once again became the Great Queen. “And make it clear to the Queen’s Wing that we are going to teach them combat,” she said to Aket-ten, with a touch of challenge in her voice.

Kiron started. “Wh-what?” he stammered. He glanced at Aket-ten to see if she had instigated this, but she looked just as startled as he was.

“I am going to order you to either teach them combat yourself, or assign a senior Jouster to do so, Kiron,” said Nofret, fixing him with a gaze that warned him she would accept no other answer than “yes” right now. “When Aket-ten began this project, I had no intention of ever letting these young women within a hundred leagues of fighting. We may not have such luxury now. The Chosen of Seft has emerged from his seclusion. The High Priest of Haras tells me that this happens only when . . . there are drastic changes in the wind.”

“More drastic than the destruction of Alta’s capital?” Kiron managed.

Nofret grimaced. “That,” she pointed out delicately, “would not at the time have been the concern of the Chosen of Seft, who is, after all, a god of Tia.”

“Hmm.” Kiron had to agree with that.

“So we have not the luxury to plan for anything but the worst.” Again Nofret hesitated. “Ari is not happy. But we are one in this. We may need every Jouster we can muster and if some of those are women . . . so be it. If need be, Ari and I will ride to battle.”

“There is something you have not told us,” Aket-ten said suddenly. “It is more than just the Chosen of Seft coming out of seclusion.”

Nofret bit her lip. “It is not just that Ari has unease about the Nameless Ones. The gods are not speaking to Kaleth because of a sudden there is no clear future. Those with the ability to see into the futures see nothing but mist and shadows. Something has changed. Some new factor has entered onto the stage, and with that, everything has changed.”

Aket-ten blinked. “How is that possible?”

Nofret shook her head. “Do not ask me these questions! I am no Winged One! I only know what Sanctuary has told us. If I had even a hint, it would help.”

There was silence for a moment as even the discreet handmaidens paused and tendered each other worried glances. “Bah!” Aket-ten said finally. “We managed well enough when the Winged Ones were drained and could not Foresee. And what do peoples do who have no Winged Ones? We will find ways.”

Nofret regarded her for a moment, then nodded. “So we shall. And now you know what I know.” She paused a moment more. “Now that I have spoken to both of you, I would like you to do something, Aket-ten. I would like you to go to Aerie and speak with our friends, as their friend, and rather than having Kiron order someone to train them, find one willing to help to train the Queen’s Wing. It may be that if you were to go and ask them yourself, there would be less . . . friction. I do not know, but it is worth trying.”

“You can use my quarters, if it takes you more than a day,” said Kiron, with a shrug, then felt moved to add, if she was feeling sensitive about it. “I will be here, so I will not need them. Or if I am not here, I will be ferrying the Chosen of Seft. In either case, I will not be there.”

She had the grace to look uncomfortable. “I have not been the easiest of friends,” she began awkwardly.

Nofret snorted, an unusual and un-queenly sound. “Take the reconciliation of lovers’ quarrels elsewhere, if you please,” she said dryly. “If your quarters are not sufficiently private, then tell my vizier you may have use of the royal barge.”

Kiron couldn’t help it; he burst out laughing. Aket-ten flushed, glared, then gave in with a wry shrug. “Very well, O my Queen,” she said. “How else may we serve you?”

Peri could scarcely believe her good fortune. Lord Kiron was remaining for at least a day, perhaps more, and would be supervising their training in Aket-ten’s absence. Now was her chance to impress him with her diligence. Not that she wasn’t diligent all the time, but now he was here to see it.

She threw herself into the training with an enthusiasm that only grew whenever he complimented her. She listened with fierce concentration when he gave instructions or related some story pertinent to what they were learning. Today was only the second day that they were using the suspended barrel, and she stayed on it far longer than she would have thought possible.

When they’d all had their turn, he chuckled a bit, and motioned to the servants manning the ropes. “A real workout, if you please,” he said, climbing into the saddle, and not fastening any but the main strap. “I would like the Queen’s Wing to see what turbulence looks like.”

The slave hauled the barrel aloft, and at his signal, began pulling at the ropes with twice and three times the strength they had been using with the girls. The barrel, with Lord Kiron firmly in the saddle, began to move.

Peri’s eyes grew big as she watched the barrel being thrown about the air above the converted pen like a bit of debris in a windstorm. And he stuck to the barrel as if he was part of the saddle. She could scarcely believe her eyes. As for the others, when she glanced at them, she could see that they were also dumbfounded. There were at least two instances of the thing being sent upside down.

Lord Kiron signaled to the servants, who ceased their tugging, and once the barrel had stopped moving, lowered it back down to the sand.

“This, Jousters, is why you need to practice before you take your dragons up for the first time,” he said, as he unstrapped himself and stood up, breathing heavily. So it hadn’t been as easy as it had looked from the ground. . . . “I am not saying that having your dragon in the midst of a thunderstorm is like that—it is different, and thus far we have managed no way to imitate that. For instance—there is the nausea-inducing plummeting spiral, that makes you certain you are going to die. But this, at least, begins to prepare you for the experience.”

“But—” one of the other girls began. “We are only to be couriers—”

“And as couriers there is no telling when you must deliver an urgent message. But—” Lord Kiron looked them over measuringly, “circumstances are such that the Queen has ordered you to have combat training as well.”

Shocked silence descended.

“If any of you do not feel that you can accept this, please say so now,” Kiron continued. “We know that while baby dragons much prefer their surrogate mothers over anyone else, that affection can be transferred to a new surrogate if—”

He was interrupted immediately by all of the young women trying to talk at once. He folded his arms and put up with it for a little while, then cut them short with an abrupt gesture for silence.

“You will be carrying messages of great importance,” he pointed out. “Urgent enough to require that a Jouster make all speed with them. Enemies both within and outside the Two Lands may often want to stop you. How our dragons are trained is no secret now, so it is entirely possible that some enemy could train a dragon and rider of his own to come after you. A single skilled archer could be sent to shoot you down. And if there is fighting, you may well find yourself carrying messages to those in command of our troops. The Queen is not minded to send you into danger without preparation, and neither am I. But if you do not feel equal to this task, there is no shame in stepping down, and there are a dozen male Jouster candidates waiting for every new dragon that I—”

This time he was interrupted, though most respectfully, by Kene-maat, who, when the former priestesses were all responding as a group, tended to be their spokesperson.

“We are equal to anything, Lord Kiron,” she said, raising her chin as the others nodded. “Whoever thinks that women have no courage is a fool. But we had thought that there were objections enough to our mere existence, without encouraging further ire against us by giving us combat training.”

“And who but you of the Queen’s Wing and I and the Great King and Queen are to know it is combat training?” he countered, giving her a hard look. “Consider this a test of your discretion.”

She blushed, and Peri knew why. Of all of them, bold Kene-maat had the loosest tongue.

“I am taking you seriously,” Lord Kiron said at last. “You should take yourselves seriously. Certainly the enemies of the Two Lands will do so. They cannot afford to do otherwise.”

It had been a strange day. It was about to get very much stranger.

Peri was helping Sutema exercise her wings, getting the little dragon to chase her and play “tag,” wings flapping with excitement as she did so. Sutema’s eyes flashed with delight; this was one of her favorite games, and she would play it until she had to flop down in the sand, panting with exertion. And eventually she did just that, then dozed off suddenly as all young creatures tended to do. Peri took the moment to go looking for something—a bench that could be weighted down with stones, perhaps—that Sutema could jump onto and hold while she flapped her wings, as Peri had seen young birds do on the edge of a nest.

But she had not gotten very far before she ran into a servant who was evidently looking for her.

“There is a person in the kitchens, Jouster, looking for you,” the servant said, looking at her oddly. “She says that she knows you, and seemed surprised that you were not in the kitchen.” The servant sniffed. “We thought at first she was looking for a place herself. Her name, she says, is Letis-ha—”

And at that moment, a harried and slightly overheated looking Letis came hurrying around the corner from the same direction as the servant had come. “Peri!” she exclaimed, catching sight of her younger friend. “I thought that as today was your free day, and mine, too, I would come spend it with you, but these people did not seem to know—and what are you doing out here—”

And at the exact same moment, rounding another corner, came Lord Kiron. “Jouster Peri!” he called. “I wanted to ask you—”

They both stopped short, staring, not at Peri, but at each other. Letis turned white, and put her knuckles to her mouth. “Kiron?” she whispered, eyes as large and wide as any gazelle’s.

Meanwhile Kiron had put one hand on the wall beside him to steady himself. “Mother?” he gasped. “Mother—is that—”

Letis shook her head, hard, and rubbed her eyes. “Kiron?” she faltered. “S-son?”

And in the next moment, oblivious to anyone else, they ran to each other’s arms. Both talking at once, laughing and crying, Peri could only catch snatches of what they were saying.

“. . . look just like your father . . .”

“. . . Ari’s vizier searched, but couldn’t find . . .”

“. . . Iris is with me . . .”

“. . . thought you must be . . .”

“. . . knew you would be . . .”

Finally, Letis pulled a little away from Kiron and actually looked at him. “What are you doing here? This is where the Jousters are. Are you a dragon boy?”

Kiron flushed. “I’m a Jouster, Mother. Actually, I’m Lord of the Jousters. At least for—”

Letis frowned suddenly. “This is no time to be making up—”

“Lord Kiron!” Yet another servant came pounding up. “Lady Aket-ten wishes you to come to the Palace. You are urgently sought for by the Great Queen.”

Kiron cursed. “Of all the times—Mother, this is Peri-en-westet—”

“I—” Peri just knew that Letis was going to say “I know who she is, I came looking for her,” but Kiron didn’t give her the chance.

“She’s one of the Jousters from the new Queen’s Wing. She can tell you all about what is going on. I will be back as soon as ever I can. Don’t leave until I am back.” With that, Kiron set off at a run, the servant that had come to get him trailing along behind.

Letis turned slowly to look at Peri, clearly still in something of a state of shock.

Finally she spoke, her eyes narrowing. “What did he mean, you are a Jouster?”

“You cannot be a Jouster.”

It was about the sixth or seventh time Letis had said this, and Peri was getting rather tired of it.

“Are you saying that Kiron, Lord of the Jousters of the Two Lands, friend to the Great King and Queen, and your son, is a liar?” she finally snapped.

Since she had rarely used even a harsh tone with her friend before this, the anger in her voice took Letis aback. She stepped back a pace, and regarded Peri with narrowed eyes and furrowed brow, an expression which made her crow’s-feet wrinkles even more prominent.

And, in fact, which made her look rather like the evil old mother-in-law of storytellers’ tales.

But she isn’t, Peri reminded herself. It is hardship and suffering that put those marks on her. Not an evil temper.

“You never said you were a Jouster. You said you had work at the Dragon Courts,” Letis finally said.

“And so I do. Being a Jouster-in-training. Would you have believed me if I had told you I was to be a Jouster of the Queen’s Wing?” Peri countered, reining in her own temper.

“You cannot be a Jouster,” Letis said flatly. “This is some foolish whim of the foreign Queen. Women cannot be Jousters, commoners cannot be Jousters, and no Tian will allow an Altan Jouster to exist for very long. Once the nobles of Tia get wind of this, you will find yourself on the street outside the Dragon Courts, and count yourself fortunate if you have not got stripes on your back to boot.” She nodded decisively, convinced by her own arguments.

“Your own common-born Altan son is Lord of the Jousters of the Two Lands, the Queen’s Wing is approved by the Great King as well as the Great Queen, and there are both Altan and Tian Jousters in Aerie at this moment,” Peri countered, with growing irritation. “The wingleader of the Queen’s Wing is Lady Aket-ten, also Altan, also a woman.”

“But not a commoner!” Letis pounced on that like a bird on a beetle.

Peri sighed in exasperation. “Fully half the Jousters of the Two Lands are common-born now,” she retorted. “High birth is no great recommendation for getting a dragon.”

“You will never get a dragon,” said Letis.

“I have a dragon, which I am going to now!” Peri snapped, and turned on her heel to stalk off in the direction of Sutema’s pen. Letis remained where she was for a moment, then ran after her. Peri did not look back. She had never before seen this side of her friend—angry, bitter, and determined to be right even when she was completely wrong.

It made Peri wonder belatedly what sort of mother-in-law she would make.

No matter. Sutema’s pen was not that far, and Letis had kept her arguing for so long that the little dragon was awake and looking for her surrogate mother. With a yelp of joy, she lumbered across the sands to Peri as soon as Peri appeared in the door.

With a yelp of a different sort, Letis leaped backward into the corridor.

Peri paid her no mind, being far too busy reassuring Sutema that all was well, for the dragon was acutely sensitive to mood and had sensed Peri’s irritation. When golden chin was scratched and emerald brow ridges were rubbed, and Sutema was soothed into happy playfulness again and busy with wrestling a bull’s leg bone into submission, only then did Peri turn back to the doorway where Letis stood uncertainly.

“Rather substantial for something that doesn’t exist, don’t you think?” Peri said.

Letis eyed the dragon with apprehension. “They’d take it away from you,” she said weakly.

“Sutema is a she, and they can’t take her away. She is bonded to me. It is how the new Jousting dragons are raised, from the egg or nearly, tame and bonded to one rider.” That was not exactly the truth, but Letis would hardly know that. “She cannot be taken from me.”

Letis eyed the dragon with misgiving. “But women—”

“Make as good a Jouster as a man, if all one is doing is courier work,” Peri said firmly. “This frees men to hunt bandits.”

Letis looked as if she was digesting this. “I cannot like this,” she said sourly. “This is too much rising above your place.”

“Your son is Lord of the Jousters of the Two Lands,” was all Peri said. “And now it is time for me to feed my dragon.”

Letis beat a hasty retreat, and Peri did not see nor hear from her for the rest of the day, although the servants said she had gone to Kiron’s quarters and was waiting there for him.

That was fine with Peri. This was not at all how she had planned for this to go. . . .

Kiron’s head was swimming by the time he got to the Palace. He could hardly believe it. After all this time—

And it wasn’t as if he hadn’t been looking for her . . .

Well, admittedly, he hadn’t personally been looking for her. One of the scribes in Ari’s service was, trying to trace her through the various sales of their land. But hers was not an uncommon name, and the war had complicated matters, and so far the scribe had had no luck.

But to have her simply turn up like that—He was happy—oh yes—but he was as much shocked as he was happy. And she looked old, old and bitter.

Well . . . given all that she had suffered, it was no surprise that she looked bitter. Really, he should have been surprised if she had not.

Still, Jouster Peri-en-westet was Altan, and would take care of her until he got back. He ran on to the Palace, trying to regain a sense of calmness. This was duty, and duty came first. Duty always came first.

Where did she come from? Where has she been? And how did she come to the Dragon Courts? And as important as how, why?

She couldn’t have been looking for him. She had been as shocked to see him as he was to see her.

By now, he was a familiar sight in the Palace. Servants parted crowds to let him through. He arrived at Nofret’s rooms without any significant delay.

He half expected Rakaten-te to be there, but it was another, a junior priest of Seft, who waited diffidently for his arrival.

Nofret gazed at him somberly, as did—Ari! He had not expected the Great King to be here in the middle of the day, but one look at Ari’s face told him why. The Priests of Seft had no good news for the Two Lands.

“This will be ill hearing,” Nofret said, as he bowed to her and to Ari, then waited for the latter to wave him into a seat. “The Chosen of Seft had already sent word, so I decided to wait until we were all here to listen to it.”

Kiron nodded and sank into a chair. The young priest cleared his throat with care.

“Our sort of hunting has found a place where the darkest of magics have been performed,” the priest said. “And, as was warned, there are many deaths in that place. It is not far from where your trail from the city ends—

“So the deaths were probably the children and elderly.” Kiron felt ill. The priest nodded.

“We all will want you to confirm that,” Ari said into the awkward silence. “When you go back out there, we’ll want you to find the place where the bodies are.”

Kiron nodded; there didn’t seem to be any sort of graceful response to that order. Then again, a graceful response really wasn’t what was needed. “Has anyone been chosen to go from your temple yet?” he asked with great care and deference.

“The Chosen of Seft believes it will be himself, but the god himself will decide,” the priest replied, with a look that warned he should ask no further. Kiron closed his mouth on all the other questions he wanted to ask. “And, as yet, we have been as unable to See past that barrier as the priests in Sanctuary.”

Kiron shivered at that, for it implied that the magic that had hidden the town was either very dark indeed—or very powerful. Or both.

“There is a flavor about it of the Magi,” the priest was continuing. “But also a flavor of another sort. Something very . . . foreign. And that is all that I can tell you at this time about the magic. As for when you must be ready to leave, Lord Kiron, it will be at the end of three days. By then, the Chosen will have completed his preparations.”

Kiron nodded, as did Nofret and Ari. “By then, Aket-ten will be back,” Nofret observed, “and Kiron will be free to go. You had better begin making your own preparations, Kiron.”

Taking that as a dismissal, Kiron bowed and backed out of the room.

Nofret and Ari scarcely noticed, so deep were they in plans with the young priest. This was fine; Kiron had no real head for strategy, and he knew it. The best thing he could do now was to go back to the Dragon Courts and begin writing out his requisitions.

And, of course . . . deal with his mother. Who was probably still waiting for him

He made himself hurry.

He had expected to find Letis with Peri. Instead he found her waiting in his rooms.

“By the gods, it is you,” she said from out of the shadows of the little palms planted in their jars beside the pool. “Kiron—you look so like your father—”

And then she began to weep, and he caught her in his arms. He felt helpless and awkward then, and gradually it dawned on him why.

This might be his mother, but she was also a stranger to him.

The mother he had loved and cherished was gone into the past. He had no doubt that this was his mother. The trouble was, he had no idea who that person was anymore.

And he had even less of a notion how to let her know this thing.

FOURTEEN

THE Chosen of Seft might be blind, but there was nothing wrong with the rest of his senses. He sat in a shaded corner of Avatre’s pen, wearing the same tunic as Kiron himself, and because he was not used to riding, a pair of the leggings that Heklatis called “trews” such as the barbarians wore, to keep his legs from being chafed raw on the inside. “Curious,” he said to Kiron, as the latter patiently tested every bit of harness and rigging on an increasingly impatient Avatre. “You seem both apprehensive and relieved at the prospect of this journey. I can understand the apprehension, but not the relief.”

Kiron took his time in answering the implied question, and not just because he was trying to avoid that particular subject. Even if Avatre was getting impatient, Kiron had no intention of taking off without making sure of every piece of equipment, every buckle, every strap. There would only be three people out there this time; himself, the Chosen, and—Aket-ten. If anything went wrong, there were only two that really had the skill to fix things. And if one or both of those two were incapacitated, the result could be very ugly. So Kiron was taking every step he could think of to prevent anything from going wrong.

The Chosen said that the fewer living people there were in the area, the easier it would be for him to “read things.” He did not specify what “things” he would be reading, nor how, and Kiron was not entirely sure he wanted to know. The more he learned about magic, the less he wanted anything to do with it himself.

The surprise had come when the Chosen informed all of them that he wanted Aket-ten to accompany them and assist him. Kiron gave the priest a sideways glance as he tightened another strap, then adjusted it minutely. And not for the first time, he wondered; could they really trust this man?

The reasons seemed good, sound, logical as he enumerated them for the little conference. Aket-ten was still technically a priestess, was definitely still a Winged One, had been trained to assist at rituals. “She also has been used by the Magi,” the Chosen had said bluntly. “That left a mark on her that I can use for many purposes. It is one of the laws of magic, that things that have once been touched still retain the traces of that touching.”

Oh, Kiron could certainly understand it. He didn’t like it, but he understood it. And there was no real reason why she shouldn’t go, no pressing duties with training her wing, because she had returned from Aerie with two victories. Huras, the patient, had agreed to be the trainer for her new Wing—and word from Haraket that he was, grudgingly, giving living room to the Queen’s Wing in Aerie once they were trained and on duty. Aket-ten was thrilled, though she would have been less than thrilled had she heard what Huras had to say privately about it.

“Haraket’s still predicting doom,” the big man had said with a rueful smile, and an apologetic shrug. “He says that the girls will only serve to make the men act like idiots. But, he says, ‘Better to have them acting like idiots under my nose, than having them finding excuses to fly off to Mefis every time I’m not looking. ’ He also thought it might discourage them, or even make them quit, if they left the luxurious life they have here and had to put up with what our life is like.”

Haraket definitely had a vindictive streak in him. And no, although Peri was used to hard living, none of the priestesses had ever done without very much. When they discovered the state of the food, the fact that they were unlikely to get twice-daily baths or relax in bathing pools, and that everything was in short supply, it would not make them happy. They would not like Aerie, or at least, they would not like it as it was now.

Well, none of that was going to happen until the little dragons were old enough to fly the enormous distance from Mefis to Aerie. And that would not be any time soon. They weren’t even flying yet, much less flying with weight or for any distance at all. Who knew what would happen between then and now?

But having Huras in charge of training the Queen’s Wing freed Aket-ten for this journey, which pleased the Chosen. Kiron was still not entirely certain how he felt about her coming with them. On the one hand, it would be very good to have Aket-ten to himself for a while. On the other hand, it meant that she was going into a potentially very dangerous situation. On the one hand, she was capable and competent. On the other hand, this was magic, and unknown magic to boot.

“So,” the Chosen prompted, breaking into his thoughts. “What is it that makes you relieved right now? I would have thought, with all we are hazarding, you would have been entirely uneasy.”

Kiron sighed, and gave a last tug to his saddle harness. “It is nothing, really.”

The Chosen gave him a skeptical look.

He felt oddly like someone who has been caught in a lie. “Why do you want to know? It is only something personal . . . .”

“In magic, all things reflect one another and are reflected in one another,” the Chosen said calmly. “I would not ask if I did not feel the need to know.”

Kiron considered that. He really didn’t want to discuss his feelings . . . but if this was going to affect the magic, he didn’t have a choice. “It is truly nothing. Only that . . . my mother—”

“Ah. I heard something of that. Long lost to each other, discovered by accident in the Dragon Court. Like a market storyteller’s tale.” The Chosen’s lips quirked a little. “I take it this was not the storyteller’s ending.”

Kiron sighed. “No . . . she wants me to . . .” He shook his head. The Chosen tilted his to the side.

“She wants you to be something you are not. She wishes to have again the small boy that was separated from her, who is always at her side, like a faithful hound, has no inconvenient duties that take him away from her, and who always obeys the least little wish his mother might have.”

That was close enough. Too close for comfortable hearing, actually. He shut out the far-too-clear recollection of unceasing demands that he drop everything and get the family’s farm back, that he give up being a Jouster and go back to his “real work” of being a farmer. Assertions that he would do this if he really loved his mother. Prim lectures on “knowing your place,” and dark hints that all the people he called “friend” were merely using him and that once he had done what they wanted, he would find himself out of the Jousters and without a dragon. Three days of this, nonstop, every waking minute he had been with her. It had begun with subtle hints. It was far, far past subtle now. “Something like that . . .” He gave a last tug to the harness; good, it was as solid as the hand of man could make it. “It will be easier on you, sir, if we take off from the landing courtyard.”

The Chosen got to his feet. “Very well. Lead the way. I shall follow.”

Kiron gave a soft whistle, and Avatre got to her feet. He led the way into the corridor; usually, they took off straight from the pen, but he and Avatre had taken off from the landing courtyard often enough that she followed him with no sign of confusion.

He couldn’t help but contrast this mentally with the “old days,” of the dragon boys having to lead their charges with chains. Mostly they had been so drugged with tala that they didn’t resist, but sometimes—sometimes it had taken two or even four strong handlers, with the danger that the dragon might stop resisting and start clawing or biting.

Aket-ten was waiting for him, already mounted on Re-eth-ke, when he arrived. In fact, there was quite a little audience to see them off, even though only he, Aket-ten, the Chosen, and Huras knew where they were going and why.

Letis was there, of course, and to his relief the presence of the Chosen of Seft was enough to keep her from asking questions he couldn’t answer, or making any kind of a nuisance of herself. Huras had brought the Queen’s Wing, under the guise of having them watch an expert flat take off. He and Kiron exchanged nods, while Aket-ten gave him detailed instructions that she had probably already given him twice over.

Kiron went straight to his mother and hugged her tightly, then kissed the top of her head. “I will see you soon, Mother, as soon as the Chosen releases me,” he told her. She had begun hinting that he should allow her and Iris to move here—but Jousters had never had family here before, and at the moment he was reluctant to break that tradition. Instead, with the help of the Dragon Court overseer, he had settled her and his poor, damaged sister in their own little house, and arranged for them to get provisions and anything else they needed from the Dragon Court. There was that tradition, thank the gods; though Jousters seldom married, there was an arrangement for the care of dependent parents or siblings within reason; small houses in a little area near the court, mostly now as empty as the court itself. For now that would do, until he came up with another solution.

“When will that be?” she asked, her voice anxious.

“Only the Chosen knows, Mother,” he was able to answer. She spared a nervous glance for the man who had already been helped into the second saddle behind Kiron’s. Kiron gave her another kiss, then turned and trotted for Avatre, not even waiting for the dragon to extend her leg to scramble into the saddle ahead of the Chosen.

“Ready?” Aket-ten asked, and didn’t wait for his answer, sending Re-eth-ke into the sky.

And Kiron was only too pleased to follow.

“Wings!” shouted Peri, raising her arms, and Sutema flapped her wings madly, raising a huge dust cloud that made her very glad she had decided to do this in the landing courtyard rather than the pen. The little green-and-gold dragon clung for her life to not one, but two perches, one for the hind feet and one for the front, made of palm-tree trunks on legs that were weighed down with bags of sand and gravel. It had taken some persuasion to get her to climb up there, and more to get her to understand what Peri wanted, but now this was one of her favorite games. It made Peri wonder if there was something about the strengthening wings that gave the little dragons a strong urge to flap. The others, all younger than Sutema, were starting to do the same thing, and Huras had ordered three more sets of the perches after seeing Sutema exercising on them.

Despite the dust, Peri was enjoying herself. The wind from Sutema’s wings was a fine thing on a hot day, and the way Sutema’s eyes flashed suggested that she was having a lovely time.

The other dragons were being exercised, each by his or her own Jouster, as Peri had been exercising Sutema a few days ago, by running them about in games of “chase.” Huras had a very interesting way of dealing with the tendency of the other girls to delegate such things to someone else—usually Peri. Aket-ten had confronted them on it, which had simply made most of them shrug and privately roll their eyes and mostly ignore them. Huras had caught them at it, telling Peri that they were going bathing and “would she play with the babies” then starting to walk off in a giggling, gossiping group without waiting for her answer.

But Huras had blocked the door with his considerable bulk and looked at them all reproachfully.

“If it was only once,” he said, as they stilled, “I would have no issue with this if Peri does not. But the servants tell me that you do this every single day. Is this fair? Does Peri somehow not want to bathe in the heat of the day because she is not a priestess like all of you are? Is this how you want others to think of you, as the pampered priestesses who foist all of the work on Peri? Because they do.”

It had been an interesting moment. Some had looked crestfallen, some shamefaced, some astonished, as if it had not even occurred to them that they were doing this. Peri had felt rather gratified, because on the whole, she liked all of them, and she wished that they were not doing this to her. They made her feel like—

“You are treating Peri as a servant, not as a fellow Jouster, nor a friend, which—if she is not—I am sure she would like to be,” Huras continued, in an echo of her own thoughts. “She is senior to all of you in this wing, yet she does not demand that you defer to her.”

Left unspoken, but certainly not unfelt, was the rest of that sentence. Do not require or expect that she should defer to you.

The entire encounter had been very gratifying for Peri. It remained to be seen whether the others would truly take it to heart, but she suspected that Huras would be continuing to keep an eye on them.

As for Sutema—

This was much more vigorous an exercise than being chased by Peri around a pen, or even the landing courtyard. It did not take long before Sutema was open-mouthed, panting, and exhausted. It was time to take her back to the pen, and there would be time afterward, once Sutema was napping, for Peri to have a swim herself.

And she wanted one; she was hot, sweaty and dusty, and the shaded pool in the center of the courtyard she shared with the others was appearing more inviting by the moment.

Only Sit-aken-te was there, and the lanky young woman waved languidly at Peri from where she was immersed up to her neck in cool water. Her body was invisible under the water-lily pads that covered the surface of the pool. For once, careless of the extra work for the servants, Peri stripped off her tunic and dropped it to the pavement, then sank into the cool water herself.

“A pity Lord Kiron is gone,” Sit-aken-te said lazily.

“How so?” Peri asked, with a faint feeling of guilt. Had the others noticed all the time she had spent with Kiron? Did they guess at the game she was playing? It was a delicate balancing act. Because Letis, along with the other demands she was making on her son, had wanted to present him with his wife-to-be as a fait accompli, and press him to wed her.

Peri was absolutely certain in her own mind that this would do her no good at all. She managed to persuade Letis to concentrate on what was, in Letis’ mind, the more important issue anyway: getting the family home back.

It had been a long and tiring “discussion”—it was an argument, but that was not what Letis called it. Patiently, Peri had pointed out that Jousters seldom married, to which Letis replied that Kiron wouldn’t be a Jouster once he had the farm back. That was when Peri had nodded and said, “So the important thing is for him to concentrate on that, then, and not get diverted.”

She hated being so duplicitous, but she knew that having Letis present her now would only mean that Kiron would lump her in with all of the other pressures his mother was putting on him, and that would spell the end to any thoughts of love.

No young man really cares to have his mother pick out his wife, after all. Perhaps the noble-born and wealthy were used to that sort of thing, but they could afford concubines and mistresses and more than one wife. A young farmer needed to be sure that the wife he was getting was one he wanted. And though Kiron was no longer a farmer, and probably never would be one again, he thought like one of the young men in her village.

Meanwhile Peri had continued her quiet campaign. But if the other women had noticed . . .

“How so?” the other woman laughed. “He is easy on the eyes, that one. And much more amusing than our sober trainer or our quarrelsome wingleader.”

So they hadn’t noticed. She smiled with relief. “Now that is a true thing.”

Her campaign was going well. Kiron sought out her company when he had time. He called her “restful.” She spoke always of things he cared about—dragons, mostly, telling him of Sutema’s antics, asking his advice. A man liked having a restful wife. Peace in the house; that was what they liked. A man liked to be deferred to.

It would be a strange sort of life. She could not imagine giving up Sutema, so they would be Jousters together, of course. What would that be like?

Hmm. Probably much like life now. Well, that was hardly a bad thing. Life now was very good, and she really could not see a way to improve on it.

“Hesh-ret is flapping his wings hard now,” Sit-aken-te said into the hot silence. “I was glad when he tired, because he had long since worn me out. I think I will persuade him to use those perches tomorrow.”

“You should use some other command than ‘fly’ when you want him to exercise his wings,” Peri warned. “You’ll want to use the word ‘fly’ later when he is really flying. I use ‘wings.’ But it really doesn’t matter what word you use as long as the dragon understands what you mean.”

Sit-aken-te laughed quietly. “Now that is a very true thing. Are you cool now? We could go study one of those scrolls Huras brought with him.”

Peri flushed. “I cannot read,” she said reluctantly.

Surely Sit-aken-te would stare at her in uncomprehending astonishment.

“I did not think you could, which is why I said we should study it together,” the young woman replied. “You are sensible and practical, and we can, I think, do a commendable job of sifting grain from chaff together. Unless you had rather go to placate that friend of yours.”

“Placate?” It hadn’t occurred before to Peri that this was what she was doing with Letis. But it was, of course. That was exactly what she was doing.

The lily pads moved a little as Sit-aken-te shrugged. “One doesn’t choose one’s friends’ friends. But I would not spend nearly the time with her that you do, if it were me. She does not approve of us, nor of your being one of us, and will not accept that you wish to be here. I would have reached the limit of my patience long ago. But then, she is not my friend. She may have many worthwhile qualities that I cannot see.” The other woman chuckled a little. “And I must admit, her voice grates on me. I never could bear people whose words say one thing, while their spirit says another.”

Peri blinked. “I must be missing something,” she said carefully. “Whatever do you mean?” Was this a priestess attribute again?

“Hmm. It is a matter of paying a little less attention to what she says and more to the tone of her voice and the look in her eyes, the way she moves,” Sit-aken-te explained. “She says that she is proud of her son, and yet I can tell that she is angry that he has risen to so high a place. She defers to us, and yet I can tell that she despises us because we are nobly born. Her words are soft and mild, yet her heart is full of bitterness and anger. I can understand why she would be so, of course, and in her place I should probably be just as bitter and angry. But this does not make her a comfortable person to be around. And if she would simply admit to you and to herself that this is how she feels, perhaps she could rid herself of some of it.”

“She lost much,” Peri replied, feeling as if she had to defend Letis now.

“So have others, on both sides,” Sit-aken-te pointed out with justification. “But—there, you see, it is not my place to judge. I merely say I do not find her a pleasant person, and I would spend less time in her company than you do. If you would rather—”

The other woman rose from the water, and reached for a cloth to dry herself, though it was so hot that the faint breeze dried her before she even picked the oblong of linen up.

“No, no, if you will be so kind as to read the scroll to me, I had much rather do that while the little ones nap,” Peri said hastily, also standing. “You do me a great favor.”

“Well, and I do owe you for far too much time you spent watching over my dragon,” the young woman replied, with a smile over her shoulder, as she shook back her hair and wrapped the linen around herself.

Peri did the same, feeling touched and a little surprised at the same time.

“Huras is right; we have been . . . hmm . . . taking advantage of your good nature,” Sit-aken-te said. “It is time to change that.”