Sanctuary

She gave him a long and level look—but this wasn’t the first time he’d hunted on the ground while she waited in the air and her frustration vanished as she realized what it was he meant to do. She pushed herself off, the dust blowing up in a huge cloud that made him cough and cover his mouth and nose, as he headed into the narrow crack of a canyon.

The transition from light into shadow was startling; the dust didn’t follow him for more than a pace or two, the temperature dropped, and he had to pause a moment for his eyes to adjust. He found himself in a passage just big enough that he couldn’t quite touch the walls when he spread his arms wide, with a worn path running right down the center of it. Rough stone walls towered high above his head, showing mostly the effect of wind erosion to smooth them out. When the wind whipped down through this place, it must howl like a jackal.

The crack was one of those twisting and turning affairs, and he went around a couple of corners before he found the oryx that Avatre had scented. In fact, he practically blundered into them. The crack had begun to widen at that point, and they were milling about restlessly; his sudden appearance took them entirely by surprise, as their startled snorts proved.

For a moment, they just stood and stared at him out of astonished eyes, then a couple of them danced sideways, as if trying to make up their minds whether to run or stand their ground.

A stone from his sling against the leader’s flank and a wild shout decided them.

Within moments, the herd was off and running again, this time concentrating on him, and not on whatever was above. Which was exactly what he wanted, of course. He had no intention of trying to bring any of them down with his sling; he was going to drive them ahead of him until they burst out into some place where Avatre could get to them.

Whooping at the top of his lungs and swinging his sling, he urged them on, his voice echoing above the pounding of their hooves as they charged away from him. At some point this crack would widen out enough that Avatre could dive in from above, and by now she had already found just such a place. She was probably perched on the edge of the cliff above, waiting to plunge down as soon as the herd galloped into ambush. He and she had played this game before. The thunder of hooves echoed back to him, along with squeals and grunts—and then, a scream.

He put on a burst of speed of his own. The crack did widen out, rather abruptly, turning from a passage to a sun-drenched dry valley, and as he ran out into the sunlight, it was to see the last of the oryx vanishing into another canyon, and Avatre in the middle of the space with her talons on not one, but two dead oryx, feeding on one with a savagery born out of frustration as much as hunger.

But that wasn’t what stopped him dead in his tracks. Avatre was devouring her prey in the middle of a deserted, and heretofore hidden, city.

EIGHT

AVATRE was oblivious; she had an oryx in front of her, another beside her, she was ravenous, and all she was interested in was getting herself on the outside of that beast. Kiron, however, stared in astonishment, and it wasn’t until his mouth began to dry that he realized it was hanging open and shut it quickly.

Kaleth had told him he would find a city. The thing was, Kaleth had not told him what kind of a city he would find. He had expected something like Sanctuary, newly uncovered in the sand, perhaps with the rounded lines of Sanctuary’s buildings. And truth be told, he had expected something more derelict even than Sanctuary, with roofs gone, walls caved in. Even if it was made of that strange stuff Sanctuary had been built of, the legends all said Sanctuary had been buried (and preserved) in a single day. He calculated the new city to have been abandoned over the course of years.

This was a city hidden in canyons, and it had not been built of the hard stuff of Sanctuary. It had not been built at all. It was carved out of the living rock of the cliff face. It didn’t look abandoned at all—well, except for the fact that there were no doors, and no shutters for the windows. Otherwise, he would not have been at all surprised to see people come hurrying out of those doors to see what the noise was about.

There was—so he had been told—a temple like this in Mefis, the funerary temple for one of the many Great Kings buried across the river in the City of the Dead. As he stared at building after building, turning slowly in place, he could see resemblance to the buildings of Alta and those of Tia, but not as if this was a blending of the two styles. The style of carving here was older, simpler—more as if this was the father of both styles, and each had gone its own separate way.

The amount of work here made him shake his head a little in disbelief. Every bit of cliff face was carved, in clean, simple, geometric lines. And these buildings were not single-storied, either, which made a vast difference from both Altan and Tian styles. Two and three sets of windows looked down into the canyon from each site.

There must have been thirty separate “buildings” —or at least, building facades—in this canyon alone. Each one was subtly different from the one next to it. That might reflect the tastes of the original owners, or it might reflect the passage of time—each building having been carved later or earlier than the one next to it. The pale gold of the sandstone of these cliffs made the whole city look as if it had been made of that precious metal.

He had to know what these buildings looked like inside! Were they just caves, or were they as elaborately carved inside as out? Could people actually live in them?

We could carve the doors wider on the bottom floors to let our dragons in; make a sand pit there if the ceilings are high enough. . . .

It looked as if the bottom floors had been made with dragons in mind; twice as tall at least as the ones above. But the only way to find out, was to look.

He headed for the nearest, after another glance at Avatre to be sure she was all right, but she was nose-deep in her prey, and oblivious to anything else. He crossed the threshold—noting as he did so that there were places for hinges and, presumably, doors which were long gone—and paused inside for his eyes to adjust to the darkness.

For dark it was, despite the windows cut into the façade. Kiron could see, however, this was a man-altered cave. And yes, the ceiling here was as tall as in the Temple of Haras in the Court of the Jousters in Mefis, a place where Kashet had walked comfortably. A dragon could live here.

The interior was simple: a box of a room, with thick square pillars holding up the ceiling, the spaces between fully wide enough for two dragons to pass. It was a big box, though, and that high ceiling gave it a cavernous feeling. After his first feeling of vague disappointment, he realized that the simplicity was the opposite of crude. Floor, ceiling, and walls, all were polished so smooth that when he touched the wall, and then the floor and the pillars, they felt like sueded leather under the hand.

And at the rear of the room, climbing up toward the ceiling, was a stone staircase. So there were more stories above this.

He moved toward the back, hearing his footsteps echo in the emptiness, feeling the room growing cooler and cooler as he got closer to the rear and away from the windows. This could be very good. With magic heating the dragon’s sand, the bulk of the stone would keep living quarters more than tolerable, they’d be comfortable.

And this was where the Jousters would eventually live?

Could there be any more perfect place for them to live?

He found himself smiling, then grinning with glee. How could anything be better? There was more rain here, as evidenced by the signs of flash floods and the bits of green here and there. But you wouldn’t have to worry about rain when your dragon’s pen was sheltered by all this rock. And there were midnight kamiseens, but when you were behind this sort of wall, who cared? The worst that would happen would be that you had a bit more sand to sweep downstairs into the pen. And if this became a city for Jousters and their helpers—

There might be problems in supplying all those dragons with food if there were no temple sacrifices to feed them, unless—

Sanctuary is going to be a city of temples. No law says we have to feed the dragons in their pens. That had been a necessity with the wild-caught, tala-controlled dragons; put two together while feeding and you’d have fighting. Not the current lot. So long as everyone had enough food, they ate peaceably side by side. And they had all learned that although a dragon wanted a nap when she was full, she didn’t have to have one. They flew perfectly well on a full stomach. They had to, after all, a wild dragon didn’t laze about after making a kill, and neither could the tame ones. So there might not be any issue here; you could fly to Sanctuary for the morning feed, go out on patrol from there, come back for the midday feed, go out on the second patrol, return for the evening feed, then come back home. The dragons would complain at first, but only until they realized that breakfast came at Sanctuary without having to hunt for it.

He looked around as his head came up through the floor of the next story; it was identical in every way to the room below it, except, of course, for the view from the windows and the height of the ceiling. He took a walk around the room, trying it on for size. It was comfortable; very comfortable. A brazier near the windows would keep it warm—or you could go down and spend the night with your dragon in the sand. The one thing it lacked was a place to bathe—well, there was nothing of the sort in Sanctuary either. No point in getting beforehand with things.

There was another story above this one—this time the room was a little smaller, but not by much. The view was amazing. Short of being on the back of a dragon, there was no view like this anywhere. Beneath him, the white-gold sand of the canyon stretched like a fat snake between the carved walls—and from here, looking down at how regular the floor of the canyon was, he had the feeling that it, too, had been smoothed by stonemasons.

How long had it taken to build this city? And why? Sanctuary supposedly had been a stop for caravans crossing the desert, but what had this place been? There were no legends telling about it.

And why had it been abandoned?

Perhaps because the caravans stopped coming?

Perhaps there had been something here worth mining, and when it ran out, so did the prosperity of this city, and gradually, people left it to the oryx and the lizards.

Across from him, stood a building façade with false pillars framing a mathematically precise doorway and windows with beautiful simplicity. Each façade reflected a different personality; some very rigid and formal, some less so, some so pure in their simplicity that they made him think of some of the temples in Alta. Some had false urns carved into the rock, or the stylized forms of gods that looked familiar, yet strange, reduced from the realistic, if rigid forms he knew to the kind of sketched-in shape that an artist would rough out before carving the details. Yet, he could tell by the elegant curves and carefully smoothed surfaces, these images were in their finished forms.

Yes, there was Thet, or something like Thet—the curve of an ibis-bill thrusting out of the otherwise featureless head, but as smooth as a bone fishhook. And there was Pashet, in her feline form; two of her, in fact, flanking a door, with the barest curves for brow ridges, and no sign of eyes or nose, and yet more the essence of cat than anything but a real, living feline.

After he had studied them, he began to have the feeling that he would never quite look at the images of the gods in the same way again. These seemed so much more powerful, purer.

From here, he could see four more canyons branching off from this one, and in at least two of them, there were more buildings. How many Jousters and dragons and their helpers and families could be accommodated here? Fifty? A hundred? More?

He felt dazzled by the idea. A city, an army of Jousters, whose duty was to guard the borders, and the priests of Sanctuary, and protect the caravans coming across the desert. Jousters who could actually have families—perhaps raising sons and daughters to ride dragons themselves? Dragons flying to mate, and new dragonets being raised from the egg by the children of Jousters. The vision was nothing less than intoxicating. Could that possibly come to pass?

I’m getting ahead of myself again. Far ahead. We’ve a long way to go before we’re safe from the Magi, and that has to be taken care of first. He shook his head. All that was for the future; for right now, he needed to keep his eye on the immediate needs.

Still, he ought at least to investigate this place and get some idea of how big it was, and whether it was all in as good a repair as this building was. Kaleth would want a report, and so would the others. Even if they weren’t going to be able to move here in the immediate future, they would still want to know everything about the place.

He trotted back down the stairs and out into the canyon. Avatre had finished her first oryx and was beginning, in a much more leisurely manner, on her second. She looked up as he neared and made a little noise of inquiry.

“Eat, sweetheart,” he said, and passed on to the next building.

All the ones in this first canyon proved to be in excellent repair, although despite the uniform appearance of the facades, only a third of them were actually three stories tall once he looked inside. It was clear why; in some, the rock had flaws that would have made cutting a third floor dangerous, and in others, it appeared that work had stopped before a third floor could be put in. He wondered about that, but cutting so much rock was difficult and dangerous, and perhaps these places had all begun with single stories, then as the owners acquired wealth, second and third levels had been added.

He couldn’t imagine how a family would cope with the noise of having someone cutting away at the rock above them until the room was completed, though.

Maybe they’d moved elsewhere until the work was finished. Aket-ten would probably be full of theories about these people, but unless they ever found, say, wall paintings showing how they had lived, her hundreds of questions would go unanswered.

When he’d finished taking inventory, he found that a third of the structures were limited to two stories, and a third were only a single story inside. The rock itself told the tale for the most part; there weren’t too many of these places where the carvers had simply stopped without a good reason.

He moved into the first side canyon, and here, he met with his first disappointment.

This canyon, much narrower than the first, was nothing like as grand. The facades were simple blocks of stone, where the rough face had been sheared off in a flat plane, and the windows and doors were just geometric holes in the rock. Many of the facades had fallen, choking the entrances; it looked as if they were victims of earthshakes. The carving here was inferior, too, with nothing like the fine finish in the first canyon.

So, in this city, too, there were the wealthy and the not-so-wealthy. It was quite possible, actually, that farther down this canyon—or others—he would come to a place where the living spaces were nothing more than caves crudely recut.

The second side canyon was similar, and a third was completely blocked by fallen stone.

As in Sanctuary, however, there was no sign that people had ever shared their city with dragons, not even the wild, tala-controlled kind. That was disappointing, though he was sure that the buildings could be fitted with the sort of things the dragons needed.

And there was no obvious water source, which was more worrying. Given the evidence of earthshakes, he had to wonder if the reason that the place had been abandoned was because a tremor had cut off the water source and it had failed.

In the fourth side canyon, however, which was almost as wide as the main canyon, the buildings were virtually intact—and had a sense about them that they were not private dwellings, but public places. Temples, perhaps, and schools, libraries, records houses, courts—he couldn’t have told why he felt this way, there was just something about the facades that seemed impersonal, yet open. Certainly they were all more uniform than the ones in the first canyon, even though the carving was just as high a quality.

As he approached the largest he caught a whiff of—water!

He sniffed eagerly; yes, there was no doubt of it, he smelled water! There was another scent along with the moisture; a hint of sulfur, that suggested that this might be a hot, rather than a cold spring. That was all right; they could make do. They could build catchments and cisterns for rainwater, so long as there was a water source that wouldn’t run dry.

Thinking now of nothing but the water, he broke into a trot, noting that for the first time he’d found a building that already had an enormous front entrance. Quite large enough for a dragon, actually—

Without thinking, he hurried toward that entrance, and the increasing dampness to the air as he neared made him move faster. From the scent, there was a lot of water there! Maybe as much as flowed beneath Sanctuary!

Then an angry hiss from the darkness made him stop for a moment, while his feet refused to move.

The hiss came again. And it wasn’t the hissing of steam escaping from a vent in the rock.

Slowly, never taking his eyes off that black rectangle of a door, he started to back away. His heart had started again, but now it was pounding, and he felt very much like a mouse that had inadvertently walked up to a cobra’s den. There was something moving in there, back in the deeper shadows. Something big. And he had a pretty good idea what it was—

Move slowly. Don’t run, or you tell it that you’re prey. Keep your eyes on it, and hope that it doesn’t decide you’re prey anyway.

It would be the height of irony if he had come through all he’d weathered so far, to be eaten by a wild dragon through his own inattention and carelessness.

If I get out of this one, I don’t think I’ll be telling the rest just how I discovered there were dragons living here.

He had managed to get about halfway back up the valley when the wild dragon inside that building made up its mind to charge him. Maybe it decided that it wasn’t going to let him get away. Maybe it thought he was going to bring back other humans—if it was a former Jousting dragon, it wouldn’t want to be caught again.

For whatever reason, he glanced back for a moment to see how far he was from the main canyon, and when he looked back, a thing that seemed to be all teeth and talons and three times the size of Avatre was bearing down on him.

Despite that he had thought he was ready to face an attack, he wasn’t.

All he could see was death with teeth as long as his arm, and eyes that held nothing but rage.

He couldn’t help himself; he screamed with fright, the sound was driven out of him, and his heart, which had been racing, now pounded like a madman’s drum. He ran backward as fast as he could go, still not daring to take his eyes off the beast. Bad decision; he tripped and fell and landed sprawling, and the dragon kept coming.

He scrambled in the fine sand, desperately trying to get to his feet without taking his eyes off the beast. “Get away!” he yelled shrilly, knowing the creature would never obey him, yet madly hoping for a miracle. “Get back! Back!”

It kept coming. He scrambled up, but he knew he could never get into cover quickly enough, and as the beast came close enough to rear back for a strike, he screamed, unashamedly—

Then felt himself shouldered aside as Avatre counter-charged.

He fell down, but this time he didn’t try to get up. She got within talon range of the wild dragon, swiveled to put her whole body between him and the other dragon, and put her head down, hissing defiance.

With a snort of astonishment, the other dragon, a green, skidded to a halt. He was much bigger than Avatre, but she caught him by surprise, and as she stood between him and Kiron, tearing at the sand with her talons, neck outstretched and hissing furiously, he backed up a pace, his neck stretching upward, eyes wide and shocked.

This was a strange dragon in his territory. A strange, young dragon, who should have given way to him. But she was defending the creature he had thought to make a meal of!

Kiron watched the wild dragon blinking at her as surprise turned to bewilderment. Wild—or now-wild, for although he didn’t recognize the beast, he thought that it probably was one of the Tian Jousting dragons. Most wild dragons avoided humans; they fought back with particularly nasty weapons, they didn’t taste as good as oryx or wild ass or ox, and there wasn’t as much meat on them. Wild dragons mostly didn’t see humans as worth the bother.

But a Jousting dragon would know the difference between an armed and an unarmed human, and a Jousting dragon wasn’t as good a hunter as a wild dragon. He’d settle for anything he could catch.

Poor thing, he was caught now in a war with his own instincts. Avatre was a youngster, and his instincts said she was off-limits to fighting. She was female, and that, too, cooled his aggression. But she was protecting the enemy—and standing between him and his next meal.

Kiron got to his feet again, and moved slowly, very slowly toward Avatre. This was not the time to startle her. She might turn around and lash out at him without knowing who she was striking at.

She glanced back at him briefly, and when the green male made no further move to attack, raised her head a little and turned it so she could watch both of them at the same time, though she was still hissing like a steam vent and kept most of her attention on the other dragon.

Kiron moved up beside her and put his hand on her shoulder. He’d never felt her so hot! She almost scorched his hand. He had the feeling that in this case he was going to be a lot safer on her back than on the ground. But he didn’t want her to crouch; that might give the other dragon a chance to attack. “Avatre,” he said quietly. “Leg.”

Without taking her eyes off the green male, Avatre slowly backed up a pace, then extended her foreleg for him to use as a step to vault up into her saddle. The moment he was in place, she straightened her neck, and still keeping her eyes on the other dragon, began to back up.

The male remained where he was, still looking thoroughly bewildered. Kiron, meanwhile, was losing no time in fishing for his restraining straps; he wanted to be buckled into place and quickly.

He hadn’t quite realized how frightened he’d been—and was!—until he tried to get the straps buckled and discovered that his hands were shaking so much he was having a hard time with that relatively simple task. He fought with the metal and leather, and it felt as if someone had glued all of his fingers together. They just wouldn’t work right—

Come on! he told himself, fiercely, feeling his heart pounding so hard he had to swallow around the pulse in his throat. If she has to fly for it—

But the straps were not cooperating, and neither were his hands. As Avatre reached the mouth of the side canyon, the green male suddenly made up his mind to charge again. And this time, instead of charging back, Avatre leaped for the sky.

And he only had one strap fastened.

With a yell, he grabbed for the front of the saddle and hung on for dear life, wedging his feet into the chest straps and clamping his legs hard against her sides. Forget the reins! She sideslipped and turned in the air with a lurch that sent his stomach where his heart had been, and put his heart in his throat. Fear ran through him like a bolt of lightning as he nearly came out of her saddle.

With tremendous wing surges, she threw herself upward. He clung like a flea on the nose of a racing camel, while she clawed for height. Height was her only hope if this green decided to challenge her after all. The only way that a smaller dragon could win against a larger was to have the height advantage.

But as he dared a glance down—in between trying to wedge himself more firmly into the saddle and trying not to be sick—he saw the green claw the ground, snort, and stare upward at them.

He wasn’t going to follow. Either he wasn’t that hungry, or he didn’t want to have to work that hard for his meal.

A couple of wingbeats later, Kiron saw him retire back into the building where he was making his den. So if he wasn’t going to pursue—time to get Avatre down before he fell out of her saddle!

And Avatre responded to his frantic directions to land on the top of the cliff. It wasn’t the best place in the world to pause, but as his heartbeat sounded in his own ears like the pounding of war drums, he managed to get the saddle straps fastened securely around him and tightened down, and gave her the signal to take to the air again.

This time she made his heart race for an entirely different reason.

Instead of leaping up and using her powerful wings to send her higher in surging jolts, she looked down into the canyon, seemed to make up her mind about something—and pushed off from the cliff.

And fell——and fell—fell almost three stories, then at the last moment before she hit the canyon floor, snapped her wings open just as it seemed as if she was going to hit the sand. If this hadn’t been exactly the kind of maneuver they had practiced to run against the Tian Jousters, he’d have probably dropped dead out of fear. As it was, he found himself yelling involuntarily and once again hanging onto the saddle for dear life just before she turned the drop into a climb.

By the time she was flying high, drifting sedately from one thermal to another on the way back to Sanctuary, he was dripping with sweat, the waistband of his kilt and the roots of his hair absolutely saturated.

If I never have to go through that again, I will be very, very grateful.

He could have been killed. Avatre could have been hurt. It could all have gone horribly, horribly wrong.

Yet as the fear wore off, the exhilaration of what he had just discovered replaced it. Not only had he found Kaleth’s mysterious hidden city, but he had found wild dragons and they had a place where they could incubate any eggs that were laid!

Avatre was still agitated, but not seriously so. She seemed more concerned about him, turning her head to look back at him from time to time as if to reassure herself that he hadn’t come to any harm.

Well, with all that yelling, she had probably thought he’d gotten hurt. He leaned over her shoulder and patted her neck, telling her what a fine, brave lady she had been, and how proud he was of her. After he’d done that for the third time, she finally heaved a great sigh, her sides inflating and deflating under his legs. Then he felt her relaxing, stretching out, lengthening as her muscles let go. She stopped looking back over her shoulder at him, concentrating on the far-off smudge on the horizon that was Sanctuary.

He half expected her to try to land, as usual, in the old communal pen, but to his pleased surprise she spiraled in on her new pen and dropped down lightly and under complete control precisely where she belonged.

He was off her in a moment; and within the space of time that it took to unsaddle her, he realized that except for her emotional agitation, which was mostly fading, she was by no means as tired by her exertions as he had thought she would be. She had just spent an overlong hunt, had faced down an older dragon, and made a fear-charged escape flight, and she wasn’t really breathing heavily. All this hunting for themselves was putting the dragons of Sanctuary into better physical shape than any of the Jousting dragons had ever been.

Which meant—could they actually face down wild dragons on a regular basis? If they could, then two or three could go out when nests were discovered, and hold off the mother if she turned up before an egg was successfully taken.

“Kiron!” Pe-atep called from the door to his pen. “Any luck?”

“The best!” he replied, “Come on, you’ll all want to hear about what we found today!”

NINE

THERE were eight fertile eggs in the hatching pen, claimed by six Altan and two Tian dragon boys, one of whom was Baken. At last, the slave who taught all of them the best way of training young dragons to be ridden had won not only his freedom but his own dragon. Kiron was both amused and bemused to see how the acquisition of his very own egg had changed him. He had gone from a young man who was all business about the beasts he was training, to one just as egg-obsessed as anyone else who had ever been granted the chance to hatch out a tame dragon of his own.

Those eggs came from four different clutches; only half of the eggs had proved to be fertile, and all four clutches had been abandoned before the female in question began incubation. To Kiron’s mind, and to Ari’s, this meant that the females must be former Jousting dragons, who were too inexperienced to know what to do, and whose mothering instincts had not yet fully awakened. Which, in turn, meant that their theories were right. At least some of the Tian Jousting dragons had not gone back to the desert and the hills near Mefis when they fought free of the last of the tala. Two Tian boys were with some curious Bedu their own age watching two more dragons to see if they’d abandon their clutches, too. There were six more would-be Jousters waiting besides those two if all of those eggs proved worth incubating.

Quietly, Kiron took Kalen and Pe-atep aside when they knew that at least some of the eggs were going to hatch. He intercepted both of them after their dragons were bedded down for the night, before they went looking for something to eat for themselves. Lord Ya-tiren had issued a standing invitation to the Jousters to come to his kitchen whenever they needed to be fed, and they had jumped at the offer. Anything other than have to eat their own cooking. . . .

But Kiron wanted to talk to these two alone, and had asked Aket-ten to bring food for four to Avatre’s pen. She had been so curious about the odd request that she hadn’t even registered a weak protest.

She was waiting with the plain fare that all of them subsisted on these days; flatbread, vegetables, herbs, and whatever the Jousters scavenged from their dragons’ kills. Kiron had decided a long time ago that meat was meat, and it was better to wrestle with a bit of tough wild ass in freedom than the sweetest cut of young calf with one eye out for the Magi. Since he didn’t hear any complaints from the others—except, perhaps, the sort of complaining one always heard in situations like this one—he thought it reasonable to suppose the rest felt about the same.

“I suppose you have a reason for this little party,” Kalen said, blunt as ever. “And from the look on her face, you didn’t tell Aket-ten what it is.”

The interesting thing about Kalen was that although he was small, thin, and almost as dark as a Tian, he was nothing like the falcons he had once tended. He was more like one of the small brown owls, always watching, silent and still—and when he moved, moving so quietly you were unaware that he had until he was gone.

“We have eight fertile eggs, and more coming, I expect,” Kiron replied. “That’s eight new Jousters. They’ll have to be trained—we’ll have to train them, once they get into the air. And then?”

“I don’t think we should have a wing any larger than eight,” Kalen said, after a moment of struggle with his strip of meat. “Eight’s more than enough to muck up coordination. More would be impossible to keep track of.”

“Exactly my thought,” Kiron agreed. “And now we get to the reason why I had you all choose colors in the first place. Eventually, each of you will have a wing, and each of your fliers will wear one of your colors, so we can tell who the wingleader is because he has two.”

“Oho!” Pe-atep said, raising his eyebrows. “Now it makes sense!”

“You two are the two steadiest, and you’ve come from lives where you were used to being in charge of something other than servants,” Kiron continued, as Aket-ten nodded sagely. “I want you to take the first two new wings as wingleaders. But if you don’t feel equal to it, I want to know now, please, so I can take my third or fourth choice.”

“Oh,” Pe-atep said, with a glance at Kalen, modulating his deep voice into a more conversational tone. “I think we can manage. These dragon boys aren’t really boys at all. They’ve been training young wild dragons with that Baken fellow. And they’re the faithful, the ones that stuck after the tala wore off and the dragons escaped. The Altans are our own dragon boys from home, so they should be all right, too.” He smiled, then frowned. “The only question is, how are we going to feed all those growing dragonets?”

“Kaleth says he’s arranging something with the Bedu.” Kiron replied. “That’s all I know.”

But Kalen, the former falconer who shared that passion with the nomadic desert dwellers, snickered. “What he’s arranging is cattle raids in Tia. The priests have told the Bedu where the sacrificial herds are, how they’re guarded, and how to frighten off the herders. The Bedu either don’t believe in our night-walking ghosts, or don’t care. They’re going to come in by night, convince the herders that they’re demons, and ride off with the herds.”

Kiron stared at him for a moment, and then began to laugh. Pe-atep looked at his friend with something akin to affrontery.

“What?” Kalen demanded.

“But those cattle are meant for the gods!” Pe-atep protested.

“If the gods put this idea in Kaleth’s mind, I suspect they don’t care,” said Kalen carelessly. “And besides, the priests can sacrifice them here just as well as there.”

“Well,” Pe-atep said, with some reluctance. “Ye-es.”

“And if people begin to get the idea that the actions of the advisers have so displeased the gods that their priests have abandoned the temples and night demons are stealing the sacred herds, that’s good for us.” Kiron remembered only too well his former master’s fear of the night demons and hungry ghosts, and Khefti-the-Fat was by no means the only Tian to fear those supernatural creatures so profoundly that any misfortune that befell after dark was immediately laid to their influence. So if actual (as opposed to imagined) catastrophes befell the gods’ own property—there would be no doubt in anyone’s mind that if the gods had not yet abandoned Tia, they were certainly angry.

“Ah, now that’s a stone that can strike a rock and rebound to hit the caster in the head,” said Kaleth, strolling in at the end of that sentence. “There is always a problem, you see, with making people afraid of you. Ari and I were just discussing this. I trust we are welcome to this discussion?”

“It started with me asking Pe-atep and Kalen to be the wingleaders for the new wings,” Kiron replied, as Ari joined Kaleth in the doorway. “Ari, I—”

“I don’t need to be wingleader of anything,” Ari replied, with a mournful, harried expression. “I have enough to concern me. When I am in the air, unless it is hunting, I want someone else to be in charge for a change. It will be a relief not to have to think a hundred moves in advance.”

Kiron sighed. He felt a little sorry for Ari—but only a little. The responsibility might be a burden, but everyone else was carrying burdens of their own these days.

“Explain to me how striking fear into the hearts of the Tians is bad for us!” Kalen demanded.

“Because fear is a sword with no hilt,” Ari replied. “It is as like to be turned against you as against the right target.” He sat down on the edge of the platform. Avatre opened one eye, saw who it was, and wriggled her way around so she could plant her head on the stone beside him, silently demanding a head scratch. Ari absently obliged. “Here is how it goes. The priests vanish. The Great King will surely not say they have run away! No, the advisers will concoct some wild tale of how they were abducted by Altan Magi, and the proof of it is the very bodies of the acolytes that proved to the Tian priests that their own lives were in danger.”

“But nobody will believe that,” said Pe-atep, then added doubtfully, “will they?”

“There are, and always will be, people who are so loyal to their leader that they will believe no evil of him, even if he were to commit the murder of an innocent before their faces,” Kaleth replied with a heavy sigh. “They would say that the victim was a threat, or that the leader was mistaken, or worst of all, convince themselves that the victim somehow deserved it and brought the punishment on himself. So, yes, there will be a solid core of those who will be convinced that the Altans somehow made away with the priests and murdered the acolytes, even though they know the acolytes were summoned to the Great King’s palace and were never seen alive again. In fact, I have no doubt that such tales are being bruited about as truth even now.”

“So, we have the vanished priests, who might have been done away with by evil Altan sea witches,” Ari continued. “And to this, you add the cattle raids and the night demons. Well, who could have sent those evil creatures but the Altans again!”

“And then, the last piece falls into place,” Kaleth said sadly. “I have seen this. I wish I had not. When the fear and hatred are built up, then comes the next edict. The gods have turned their faces away, not because they disapprove of what the Great King and his advisers decree, but because they grow weary of softness, and to bring them back, it is time to worship their harsher faces. It is time to purge the nation of those who do not support the Great King in all he says and does. It is time to rid the country of those who believe the time has come to speak of peace.”

Kiron winced. It was true enough that the gods always had two faces—a kind and gentle aspect, and a darker side. Even the Altan goddess of Healing was also the Dark Lady, the bringer of the sleep that ends in death. But the Tian gods took this to an extreme—the god of justice was also the god of revenge. The goddess of love was also the goddess who devoured men, heart and soul. Even the great sun-disk who brought life and light was also the Scorcher of Earth, who withered all before him.

Pe-atep took on a stubborn look. “The people will not abide it,” he said. “Look what was happening in Alta before we fled! They will grow weary, worn down by fear until they are accustomed to it—and then they will see the truth! When they realize they have little left to lose, the veil will fall from their faces and they will rise up and—”

“And that will be long in coming,” said Ari dully. “The truth is, the less people have, the more fiercely they cling to it. And the less likely they are to risk losing what little they have. Not all slaves are like Baken, striving to be freed. Most think only of the next day, the next round of bread and jar of beer, and no further than that.”

“Left to itself, it would be long in coming,” Kaleth agreed. “But it will not be left to itself. There is Sanctuary; we will not sit idle while the Magi have it all their own way.”

Ari roused at that and shrugged. “True. And even though it may be turned against us, we must have those cattle. There will be hungry mouths to feed, and no way to feed them, else. The Bedu have secret canyons in which to hide them, bringing over only what is needed, for we surely have no way to feed so many beasts here. Are you two going to take Kiron’s offer?”

Pe-atep looked at Kalen, who grinned. “I suppose we must,” said Kalen. “If only to show him how a true wingleader handles his men!”

Cautious exploration of the new city had proved that there were two water sources—or, rather, that the hot spring fed into an underground cistern that also collected rainwater from all over the city, mingling the two sources. The constant addition of springwater kept the cistern fresh, and by the time the sulfurous water from the spring was diluted by the rainwater, it was as drinkable as the source beneath Sanctuary. A wing of wild dragons was using the city to den-up in, but the mere presence of the Jousters and their dragons was making them uneasy, and Kiron suspected that they might well choose to move on without being harassed or driven out.

And refugees from both Alta and Tia continued to trickle in—by ones and twos and small family groups now, rather than entire Great Houses or temples full of priests. Kaleth and the priests of both nations had managed to establish escape organizations for those who were desperate enough to try hunting for a myth rather than endure another day in lands in which the Magi were growing ever more powerful. There were still Tian temples—those in which there was not, and never had been, a tradition of magic—where the priests still remained in place. The Temple of At-thera, for instance, the goddess who, in one of her aspects, was the Divine Cow, the Holy Nursemaid who nurtured the rest of the gods as children with her sweet milk. She was a minor deity, and her priests and priestesses often came from rural and modest backgrounds. There was no great prestige in serving her, so no great families ever offered their children to her service. But there were small temples to her scattered across the countryside, and it was easy to move escapees from one to the other, as humble pilgrims looking for the blessing of children, unnoticed, until one moved out of Tia altogether.

Most of these new refugees were Healers, the sort who, like Heklatis, used magic in their Healing, and to say that they arrived in Sanctuary profoundly divided in their emotions was something of an understatement. Healers had a sense of duty so powerful it bordered on the suicidal, and it took a great deal to persuade them to abandon their patients and their duty. But many of these men and women also reported disturbing encounters with Magi, encounters that were disturbing because afterward, they could neither remember what had happened, nor exercise their magic for a time. A typical example—a call would come concerning a brain-storm, the sort of thing that only a Healer who used magic could cope with. He or she would follow the servant ostensibly sent to fetch him; the servant would lead him to a veritable wreck of a house that looked utterly abandoned—

But of course, many homes in Alta looked like wrecks these days, what with all the earthshakes. Plenty of people went on living in the ruins—where else could they go? So the Healer would go in, and find he had been called to the bedside of a Magus and——and he would come to himself back at the Temple of All Gods with no recollection of how he had gotten there. He would find, if he tried to use his Healing magic, that it was as if there was a well within him that had been drained dry. Within a few days, he would be able to Heal again, but this experience would be nothing like the sort when a Healer simply overexerted himself. It was—so one reported—actually painful to work Healing magic for a time, as if something had been ruthlessly torn out within him, with no regard for what was damaged when it was stolen. And that was more than enough to send most of them looking for an escape.

Not all of them came to Sanctuary. Plenty went to Akkadia, which had a fine school of Healing, and where Healers of every nation, even nations at war with Akkadia, were considered sacred and always welcome. Some took ship with the tin traders, for Healers were always welcome on such long and uncertain voyages, and some in Tia went south, into the lands called the Kingdom of Saambalah, ruled by the Lion Folk, strong and skillful warriors with blue-black skin who sometimes came north into Tia to serve as fighters for hire. There, Healers were so eagerly sought after that they were considered royalty of a kind, and commanded the highest wages—wages which were necessary, since there was no temple to support them. Five and six villages would pool their resources in order to attract a Tian Healer and keep him in comfort and even luxury.

There was a long tradition of alliance and mutual cooperation between the Lion Folk and Tia. Once every few generations, one of the Lion Kings would even send a daughter to the Great King of Tia as a wife, to renew the bonds of alliance between the two lands.

“And what will happen when the Lion Folk learn of what the Great King’s advisers have done to the acolytes they took, do you think?” asked Lord Khumun of the latest arrival, a Healer with the blue-black skin of the southern race, the child of one of those well-paid warriors and his wife, who had elected to settle in Tia rather than return home when his fortune was made. The Healer was a very old man, his head of curly hair as white as clouds was a startling contrast to his dark skin.

“I cannot speak for a king, nor even claim to have some way of knowing how the great and powerful may think,” the old man said carefully. “You must know that though I have letters from time to time from my far kindred, I was raised in Tia, and am a Tian at heart. But what I can say is that if I were the King of Saambalah, I would watch my borders very carefully and look to my warriors. It may be that the Tians, whose hunger increases with each season, will hunger for more land. It may be that they will hunger for the other precious things in the south, the gold and ivory, incense and spices. It may be that they look upon the strong men and handsome women, and desire a new kind of slave, and to have at no cost that which they now must hire. For now, they have their war with Alta to pursue, but when that war is over, what then? There will still be an army. And the Great King may turn his eyes elsewhere to employ it. If he cares not that these Magi prey upon his own people, even to letting them eat the power of his Healers, he will care even less that they prey upon outsiders.”

Lord Khumun thanked the old man, then looked at the rest of the council. “Another Altan Healer arrived this morning, and says that he has disturbing news. It was disturbing enough, evidently, that when the Bedu heard it, they put him on racing camels to get him here.”

Kiron thought that Kaleth already knew what the disturbing news was. After all, he had seen a great deal in those visions of his, and something this disturbing was something Kaleth would surely have gotten a glimpse of.

Oddly enough, though Kaleth did not look surprised, he did not look as if he actually knew anything either. It was more as if he had expected bad news, known it was coming, but didn’t know what the shape of it was.

Kaleth nodded agreement when Ari said, “Then we should see him now, if he is not collapsing of exhaustion.”

The messenger might not have been on the verge of collapse, but he was showing the effects of his journey far more than any refugees they had yet seen thus far. His long hair, left long in the Altan fashion with two small braids at each temple, was still tangled from the journey; his skin was sunburned and red, and he was clearly unsteady on his feet, but his voice was strong enough when he spoke, if a bit harsh.

And he recognized Lord Ya-tiren and Lord Khumun, who flanked Ari and Nofret. By design, something like an audience chamber had been set up where the council met, and where urgent messages were heard. Ari and Nofret sat side by side on slightly taller stools than the two Lords who sat on either side of them. It was an arrangement meant to show who the real authority was.

The messenger looked at them all in exhausted confusion, then must have decided that they were the closest thing he recognized to a King and Queen and their advisers.

“My Lords. And Lady,” he said, his voice hoarse and rasping. “I was sent by the Healers of the Temple of All Gods, for there is grave news from Alta City that you must hear. There are two new faces on the Twin Thrones. The old Great Kings are dead. And it is whispered that their deaths came neither by accident, nor illness, but by the hands of men.”

Lord Ya-tiren winced; Lord Khumun only looked angry. Ari remained as unreadable as a statue, but Nofret—

Nofret nodded with resignation, as if this was news she had long expected to hear. She was not surprised, this only confirmed her deepest fears.

As the rest of the people in the room buzzed and murmured, Kiron stole a glance at Kaleth. He expected that Kaleth would look smug or, at least, unsurprised.

He didn’t. He didn’t look surprised either, but it wasn’t as if he had somehow foreseen this happening, at this moment.

That—was interesting.

The messenger held up his hand for silence. “The Great Ladies were wed to the Twin Heirs, even before the Days of Mourning were begun, much less completed,” he continued, and the disgust and affront in his tone told how most, if not all, of the citizens of Alta must have felt at the news. “The mortuary priests had not even come for the bodies before they were wed to the men who are now the Great Kings. Magus Pte-anhatep and Magus Rames-re-bet now sit in the Great Hall and reign. Before the death of the old Kings could be proclaimed, their earlier betrothal to the young princesses was dissolved and they were wed to the Twin Queens, all in a single afternoon.”

“I cannot imagine how this could have surprised anyone,” Nofret said aloud, her head up, as she surveyed the murmuring crowd. Her dark eyes shone with some of the anger and hatred she must have been holding back all this time after Kaleth’s twin brother, Prince Toreth, was murdered. “Especially not in the court. The Great Kings set their seal upon their own death sentence the moment they allowed those men to be adopted into the Royal Houses and declared twins. Surely none of you actually believed they would wait for little Che-at-al and Weset-re to grow up and wed them to take the Twin Thrones and become the Kings? It was an excuse. And anyone who does not believe that the death of the Kings was anything other than murder is a fool!”

“I do not think you will find anyone in Alta to naysay you, Gracious Lady,” the messenger rasped. “The Magi now rule in Alta virtually unchallenged and alone; the Great Ladies are seldom seen, and never on the Twin Thrones. When they are seen, they are silent, and move like those who walk when sleeping. That is the sum of what I came to tell you.” He paused a moment, then added in a very subdued voice, “May I remain? I do not wish to return to a place so altered and so near to madness.”

It was Ari who got to his feet and said, in a voice pitched to carry beyond the room, “Never will we turn anyone away from Sanctuary, be he Altan or Tian, or half-crazed Akkadian—” the latter with a glance at Heklatis, who kept his indignation down to a poisonous glance.

Aket-ten nudged Kiron in the ribs. “That’s important!” she whispered.

“That it was Ari who said that to an Altan?” He nodded. He was starting to see how this business of being in charge of people worked. Well, more people than just a single wing of young Jousters. There were things you had to do, ways you had to deal with people. Ari might say he was unprepared for all of this, but really, he was much better at it than he thought, and he was improving with every day.

The messenger was taken off, and Ari and the rest of the council settled in to discuss what they’d learned. It was fundamentally obvious, though, that there wasn’t much that Kiron could contribute, so he excused himself, and Aket-ten followed him out.

“Are you as depressed as I am?” she asked him, in a voice full of resignation.

“Probably.” He sighed, then felt his spirits lift, just a little, when she slipped her hand into his. “I suppose I’ve been expecting it, but still. . . . I keep hoping someone back in Alta will manage to poison all those scorpions, or that they’ll turn on each other and stab each other to death—”

“That might be just what happened in a way,” she replied. “You know how Marit and Nofret told us that the Magi were always at each other’s throats. Those three so-called Advisers that turned up in Mefis just might be Altan Magi who lost some sort of confrontation.”

He groaned. “If anything, that makes it worse. They’ll never give up the war! Why should they? The longer it lasts, the greater their power!”

“And I don’t want to think about it anymore,” she said, cutting him off. “Or at least, not right now. I want to see this city of yours, and there is absolutely nothing that we need to be doing right now. If we leave now, before either Re-eth-ke or Avatre are really hungry, we can find out if dragons can hunt together when there’s no urgency to the hunt. And then you can show me the city.”

Kiron controlled his expression with an effort. He had been trying to get Aket-ten alone ever since they all arrived here in Sanctuary, but one thing and another had always interfered with his plans. But it seemed that she had some plans of her own—

“Let me just leave word—” he said, because the one rule he had imposed on all of them, himself included, was to never fly off dragonback without first telling someone where you were going. If he or Avatre or both had been hurt by that wild green dragon back when he’d first found the new city, at least someone would have known the general direction to go looking.

That done, he hurried for the pens, to discover that Aket-ten was already in the saddle and waiting, with Re-eth-ke perched on the wall, fanning her silver-edged blue wings while Avatre watched them both with no sign of hostility. His breath caught as Aket-ten turned her head a little; she and her dragon made a wonderful pair. Re-eth-ke’s scales shone the same blue-black as Aket-ten’s hair; Aket-ten’s lithe body moved so easily with Re-eth-ke’s that the two of them might have been a single creature, like the human-horses in Akkadia that Heklatis told tales about. The linen tunic she wore was exactly the same as the boys all wore, but it certainly looked better on her than on any of them. . . .

She turned toward him at that moment, saw him, and grinned and waved. He felt his heart pound a little faster. His feet certainly started to move as if his whole body was suddenly lighter.

And his hands, when he saddled Avatre, seemed to have eyes at the ends of his fingers.

The mere thought of being far away from Sanctuary with only Aket-ten made him feel almost deliriously happy.

“Got your sling?” she called when he was in the saddle at last, and Avatre shuffled her feet impatiently, waiting for him to give her the signal to take to the air.

He nodded, and held up the sling for Aket-ten to see. He didn’t have to ask if she had her bow, it was there, with her arrows, in the quiver at her hip.

But she waited, as a good Jouster should, for him to go up first. He was the wingleader, after all, even if today the wing consisted of two.

Re-eth-ke fell in slightly behind, a position that seemed to take less effort to hold, for the dragon who wasn’t in the lead didn’t have to cut through the air. All he could figure was that air acted like thin water, and the lead dragon cut a wake that the ones behind could ride. He decided that since there were two of them, he would try for a more challenging prey today: wild ox. Ordinarily, he wouldn’t go after one. They were tough, and even Kashet found them a challenge. As a consequence, they hadn’t been hunted much in his territory, so they were plentiful and unafraid. This might be the time to take down one or more. The dragons weren’t hungry yet and could probably be persuaded to cooperate in a joint hunt—

Especially since one of them was being flown by Aket-ten.

“Wild ox!” he shouted to her, over the flapping of the dragon’s wings and the wind in his ears.

She nodded. Her main Gift as a Winged One was that she could speak to animals. She—and to tell the truth, the priests and priestesses in charge of the Fledglings—had thought that a lesser Gift. But if it had not been for her ability, she would never have been able to save Re-eth-ke from mourning to death after the murder of Toreth, whose dragon she had been.

And, thanks to Aket-ten’s abilities, the training of the entire wing had been swift and smooth; much smoother than it would have been had she not been able to explain to the dragons exactly what their riders wanted.

He had a good idea that she was “speaking” to both dragons once he told her the quarry he planned to hunt, and when Avatre looked back over her shoulder at Aket-ten several times, he was sure of it.

“Stooping runs?” she called forward, over the steady whump, whump sound of the dragons’ wings. He nodded. That meant that he would dive in first, trying to stun the quarry with a stone, but not allowing Avatre to close and bind. Aket-ten and Re-eth-ke would follow, with Aket-ten using her bow. Then he would come in again, and this time, if they’d managed to do enough damage, he’d let fly with a second stone and allow Avatre to attack and bind. Meanwhile Aket-ten would be ready to come to his rescue if the ox turned on them.

It was a maneuver they had worked out to use against chariots. They’d never actually had to use it in that manner, but they’d practiced it enough that it should work.

The burning air coming up from the baking desert smelled of dry grass, furnace-hot earth, and a faint hint of animal musk. A herd of oryx saw them and went to shelter under a grove of thorn trees. They only got a glimpse of camels from a distance, as wild goats scattered and fled away into the hills, and a herd of wild asses ducked into a canyon too narrow for dragons to get into. Not that any of those ploys would work against a dragon partnered with a human, but it showed they were used to being hunted from the air now. Which might mean more wild dragons were somewhere about.

Finally, he spotted what he was looking for—a herd of six or seven wild oxen grazing on the tough, sparse grasses in the lee of a hill.

Clamping his legs on Avatre’s saddle, he got a rock in his sling, and sent her into a long, flat dive, with the oxen at the end of it. Just before she reached them, and their heads came up to stare belligerently at him, he whirled the sling and let fly, striking the nearest right between the horns. It staggered and went to its knees, as Avatre pitched up and began working her wings, trading speed for height.

In the end, the kills were a little anticlimactic. With two dragons attacking, rather than one, even a tough wild ox didn’t have much of a chance. The hardest part was pulling Avatre off her kill to help Re-eth-ke with another, and that was the moment where it helped to be hunting while neither of them was hungry. The pull of the chase and the kill combined with Aket-ten’s persuasion overrode the need to eat.

But when both were finally down on their respective kills, Kiron deemed it wise to allow both dragons to stuff themselves. Even so, they could hardly eat more than half of the kill, and he and Aket-ten got the unpleasant but necessary chore of dividing up the remains so that neither dragon was unbalanced nor overburdened with the extra meat.

His original intention had been to leave it in the back of one of the bigger houses while he and Aket-ten got a chance to spend a little time alone together.

But that was before they reached the city.

They came in on an odd tangent that took them over a part of the city where midnight kamiseens had dumped a great deal of sand, half-burying the entrance to the houses, and filling the canyon to a depth that a dragon would find comfortable—

And, in fact, to a depth a dragon was finding comfortable.

The sprawl of scarlet on the pale sand was startling, but not nearly so startling as the four mounds uncovered when she looked up at them and moved her wing. Eggs! There was a nesting dragon here—

As if Aket-ten really did have the Gift of hearing human thought as well as animal, both dragons tilted over and soared back so they could all get a second look.

Since the female didn’t seem at all disturbed by them, Kiron sent Avatre in a little lower this time. He didn’t like what he saw. The female’s ribs were starting to show, and her movements were slower than he liked. She wasn’t in good shape, and when she crouched over her eggs and mantled her wings over them, Aket-ten called out, “She won’t leave them—and her mate’s not bringing her food!”

As the words left Aket-ten’s mouth, he was already sending Avatre back for a third pass, and sawing at the cords holding the ox quarters to Avatre’s back. Luck and timing were both with him; the first quarter landed nearly under the scarlet female’s nose, and the second within easy reach.

As he looked back over his shoulder, he saw Aket-ten doing the same—and the nesting female devouring the gift as if she hadn’t seen food in a week. Which she probably hadn’t, actually. She wasn’t wasting a scrap; she might be eating quickly, but she was eating neatly.

He sent Avatre up to land on the cliff above the nesting female, and a moment later, Aket-ten landed beside him. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” she called, as Re-eth-ke backwinged to land.

“If you’re thinking we need to keep feeding her, yes,” he said, watching the wild dragon make short work of the first quarter, and leap on the second, with one eye on them and the other on her food. “Mothering instincts like that need to be fostered, not allowed to die out. But I’m wondering. Because that dragon looks—familiar—”

“Wondering what?” she asked, sliding out of Re-eth-ke’s saddle, and coming over to stand at his knee, still watching the wild dragon eat.

“I’m wondering if she isn’t Coresan,” he said slowly, peering at her and trying to match up what he saw with a memory. “Avatre’s mother. . . .”

TEN

SO I think it’s Coresan,” Kiron finished. “And—look at her! She doesn’t even react to us being here now!”

They both took a look down into the floor of the ravine, where the dragon was giving her entire attention to the food and not even looking up at them.

“I think she can hear my voice from here, and I’m sure she recognizes me, or she’d be watching us,” Kiron continued, thinking aloud. “She’s the only wild-caught dragon in either Alta or Tia that spent a significant amount of time on half-rations of tala while also being tended by humans. And I was the human who made sure she was properly fed and tended during that period. I think she knows exactly who I am, I think she pairs good things with me, and I think she might trust me, at least at a distance.”

“It would be awfully good if we could get one of her eggs,” Aket-ten said, wistfully, gazing down at the dragon with one hand shading her eyes. “But I know we’d never get her away, given how she’s protecting them. But she’s such a good mother and Avatre is magnificent—”

Kiron sucked on his lower lip. “But if we bring the food in a little closer to her each day, we might be able to get her to let us close enough that the dragonets take humans for granted. If they see us feeding her, when they fledge, they might come to us for food.”

“Maybe—closer,” Aket-ten mused. “If I can get close enough to her to talk to her, she might let us quite near, and when I can talk to the dragonets, I can make sure they know humans are all right. Especially if I get a chance to touch them. That won’t happen right away, but—but given time, if she starts leaving them to hunt, I think I can get right to them.”

He looked at her askance, trying not to let her see how horrified that idea made him. It was one thing to approach a tala-drugged wild-caught dragon in a pen. It was quite another to approach an undrugged dragon tending eggs or youngsters. “Are you sure it’s worth even trying?” he asked cautiously. Cautiously, because he knew exactly how Aket-ten would react to being told she shouldn’t do this.

Poorly.

“Oh, this is probably one of the least-clever things I’ve ever considered doing,” she admitted cheerfully. “But it’s still something I think I can do and, more importantly, get away with.”

Re-eth-ke snorted anxiously, and Aket-ten patted her shoulder. “I feel the same as Re-eth-ke does about you getting close to Coresan,” Kiron admitted. “I’d rather you didn’t try at all. I didn’t actually think about trying to get as close to Coresan as I did when she was in the pens.”

Aket-ten shrugged, and then put her hand on his bare knee, and the touch made him feel very—odd. Good! Oh, yes. But—odd. Like all his skin was doubly alive. Aket-ten seemed oblivious to the effect she had on him. “That’s all I’m going to do, really. I don’t have to get close enough to touch her to talk to her.”

He looked down at her. “I don’t like it. But I won’t tell you not to. You’re the Winged One. The gods might not speak to you as directly as they do to Kaleth, but maybe they’re the ones saying you should do this.” He laughed ruefully. “And to think I was planning to have you all to myself for part of the afternoon! Trust a dragon to interfere with that!”

She blinked at him, then, unexpectedly, blushed. “I like you, Kiron,” she said, quite out of nowhere. And that would have been fantastic, except it was the sort of statement that was usually followed by “as a friend” or “you’re my best friend” with the implication it shouldn’t go any further.

He felt his heart sinking. “But?”

Then she shook her head, blushing harder, and his heart rose again. “No buts. I like you—rather a lot. I’d rather spend time with you than anyone else I know. And it’s not because you keep making a habit of rescuing me either.”

His heart rose further, and he tried desperately to think of something clever to say. Unfortunately, he couldn’t manage to come up with anything. Awkwardly, he put his hand over hers. “I just—think you should stay you,” he said, and cursed his thick tongue for not managing anything more eloquent.

“Well, that’s good, because it would be very difficult being someone else!” she laughed, her eyes twinkling. But he got the feeling she understood what he was trying to say. That he didn’t want her to change, didn’t want her to stop taking risks just because he was terrified she’d be hurt. Maybe someone else wouldn’t have felt the same, but he had been a serf, and he knew what it felt like to have chains, visible or invisible, binding you. He wouldn’t do that to anyone else, but especially not her.

And she didn’t say, as he half-expected her to, “Well, we should be getting back.” Instead, she stood there at his knee while they both watched Coresan finish the meal they’d brought her and settle herself around her precious eggs, then fall asleep.

“Do you think she’s starting to trust us already?” Aket-ten asked.

“Maybe. I don’t know.” He sighed. “We need to get back.”

“Yes, we do.” But she sounded reluctant. Nevertheless, she mounted Re-eth-ke and looked to him for direction. He gave it, sending Avatre up with powerful wingbeats, rather than letting her take her preferred path of diving down into the ravine and then trading speed for height at the last minute. He guided her away from Coresan’s valley at an angle. Re-eth-ke followed; Coresan did not even raise her head to watch them, which made him think that Aket-ten might be right, she might have already decided they weren’t going to hurt her or interfere with her or her eggs.

They caught good thermals all the way back, which speeded up their return journey considerably. Most of the wing was waiting for them at the pens; for a moment he was afraid, as Avatre spiraled in to land, that something had gone wrong. But as they got nearer the ground, their expressions, of varying degrees of mischief, made him think otherwise. No, they were there to tease him—or tease both of them.

Not if I give them something to distract them first.

“Ari!” he called, as soon as Avatre folded her wings.

“Coresan is nesting in the New City, and she recognized me!”

All right, maybe saying that it was Coresan and that she recognized him was an exaggeration, but it got their attention, even though no one but Ari could know who, or what, Coresan was.

As he slid off Avatre’s shoulder, and began unharnessing her, he gave them a detailed account of what had happened. Ari’s eyes glittered with excitement as he asked further questions; all of them were excited, really, once they understood the implications. “—and Aket-ten is going to try to ‘talk’ to Coresan,” he finished, and had to hold a flash of anger when Ari, rather than expressing concern over such a dangerous idea, overflowed with enthusiasm for it.

“That would be ideal!” Ari said, “With Aket-ten there, once we get her close enough she can communicate with them, I’m sure Coresan will let us help with her dragonets. After all, the males help to feed and tend the nest, and we’re the closest thing she has to a mate right now. Her instincts must be telling her she needs the help, and if she was as starved as you say, between the food and what her instincts are telling her, we can probably get Aket-ten as close as she let a dragon boy in no time.”

He could picture that all too easily. What’s more, he remembered Coresan snapping those formidable jaws right over his head, and it was even easier to picture her making that show of aggression into a real attack on Aket-ten. And he very nearly started trouble over such a cavalier attitude, when Ari suddenly got a taste of what the bitter brew of anxiety tasted like.

Because—“I want to help tend these dragons,” said Nofret, stepping forward from behind Menet-ka, her head up and her expression firm with determination. It occurred to Kiron at that moment that she looked very much the Queen.

Ari’s face was a study in dismay. “But—” he began. Nofret cut off his objections with an imperious wave of her hand. “I want a dragon, too, Ari. If we’re to be co-consorts, as the Altan tradition demands, we must be equals in all things. How can we appear before your people or mine in that state of equality if I am riding behind you, like—like a piece of baggage? Besides, it is not fair to Kashet to keep asking him to carry double. I want a dragon of my own.”

By the sun-boat! She’s come a long way from the woman who clutched me like death and didn’t dare look down! He couldn’t help but think this was all to the good. And if she was willing and ready to do the work needed to get a dragon, all the better.

That was not how Ari felt, though, if his expression was any guide. “I absolutely—” he began.

Just in time, Kiron managed to kick Ari surreptitiously in the shin, while simultaneously saying, with innocent enthusiasm, “I think that’s a good plan, Nofret. We already know that Coresan throws intelligent and steady babies. If Aket-ten can get her to accept us, the dragonets will do the same, and if you start tending and feeding the babies alongside their mother, you’ll have the best of both worlds, a dragonet that’s tame, but knows she’s a dragon. It’s going to take time, a lot of work, and concentration, though, I hope you realize that.”

Ari opened his mouth again to protest, and Kiron kicked him in the shin again. He shut his mouth with a snap, and Nofret smiled at both of them. “Thank you for being reasonable about this,” she said and excused herself. “I’ll go talk to Heklatis and Lord Ya-tiren about shifting audiences and meetings to after sundown when the time comes.” She laughed a little, and winked at Kiron. “At least I can sleep in my own bed! You can leave me with them when you go to hunt, and get me at sundown, and that should serve very well.”

Bethlan and Khaleph stuck their indigo and green noses over the wall to Avatre’s pen and whined; they were hungry and wanted to go out to hunt. Since it didn’t look as though there was going to be any more excitement, the rest of the wing went off to saddle their dragons to take them out to hunt the last meal of the day.

The rest of the wing—except Ari, who turned on Kiron.

“Why did you kick me?” he demanded, with a face full of wrath.

“I was saving you from doing something stupid,” Kiron retorted. “Didn’t you pay any attention to Nofret’s expression? One word about forbidding her to do anything, and you’d be arguing about it for moons. That’s assuming she even talked to you at all after being told you were forbidding her to try! Ari, she was the Queen-in-waiting! She’s not used to being told she’s forbidden to do something that’s perfectly reasonable.”

She’s not asking to do anything worse than Aket-ten is planning on doing. And you thought that was an excellent idea!

“Reasonable?” Ari yelped. “She wants to spend time with a wild dragon! What’s reasonable about that?”

“Aket-ten is going to do the same thing, and you were all for that. And Nofret not only wants a dragon of her own, I think she needs one,” Kiron replied. “The eggs we’ve got have already been spoken for—and besides, I don’t think that she’s up to the challenge of raising one from the egg; she doesn’t have the time, for one thing. I don’t think her idea of the partnership is the kind of tight bond that the rest of us have with our dragons. I think she’s looking for something of the kind you’d get from a tame cheetah or a lion. She’s a very—” he groped for a word, “—self-contained person. Marit is the more dependent of the twins. Nofret never wanted pet dogs, for instance, but she loves cats. I think that doing the double-rearing, if it can be done, will give us a much more independent-minded dragonet.”

Ari looked off in the direction Nofret had taken. “You kicked me because if I’d said that I forbade her to do this, she’d never have forgiven me, and I would have undone all the courting I’ve done with her.”

Kiron coughed. “I don’t know about never. . . .”

He left the sentence hanging in the air, though, because he did want Ari to think about it, and think about it hard.

Ari looked away from him for a moment, and cursed. “This is why I never wanted to have anything to do with noblewomen!” he said under his breath. “With a paid flower, you know where you are—”

Now Kiron was right out of his depth. All he could do was shrug. Ari looked over at him, and his expression turned wry. “As if you’d know anything more about women than I do.”

“I know they don’t like to be treated as if you have a right to order them about,” Kiron said carefully. “No more than you do!”

Ari sighed, and closed his eyes for a moment, then shook his head. “At least you kept me from a mistake that was likely to cause trouble. Kashet is probably starving; I’d better get into the air.”

Kiron snorted, and turned his attention back to making Avatre comfortable. She hadn’t had a sand scrub today, and when she saw him getting out the buffing cloths and the oil, she was nearly beside herself with happiness. Making her happy soothed his nerves, and his nerves definitely needed soothing. He was out of his depth. . . .

What am I doing? I’m the son of a farmer, I used to be a serf—

“Can I help?” asked Nofret from the doorway. “If I’m going to have a dragon, I need to learn how to care for them.”

And this is a daughter of the Royal Lines and the nearest thing we have to a queen. And I’m going to be taking her to a wild dragon and somehow making it possible for her to bond with a dragonet. And Ari, who was my master and is her betrothed and is going to be our King, just asked me for advice on how he should treat her. Haras help me, is she going to ask me for the same? And I don’t even know what to say to Aket-ten. This is insane.

He nodded, and she made her way along the walkway to stand beside him. He showed her how to use the sand to buff Avatre’s scales, how to gently scrub away flaking skin, and how to oil the exposed skin afterward. “I hope you don’t think I want a dragon for the—the look of prestige,” Nofret said, after they had worked together for a while. “It’s not just that; it isn’t even most of the reason. I didn’t really see that much of Toreth to understand what having a tame dragon was like. I’ve spent so much time in Ari and Kashet’s company that I couldn’t help but see how he has such an amazing bond with Kashet, and—and I wanted my own dragon, when I saw how close they were. Mind, I do think that to be taken as seriously, and as his equal, I must appear in every way to be his equal—”

Kiron nodded. “From what I know of the Tians, I think you are right. They have no Great Queen—only the Great Royal Wife, which is not at all the same.”

“So I need a dragon.” She carefully buffed a patch of dull scales. “But now that I’ve gotten used to flying, and I’ve seen Ari and Kashet just being together—Kiron, I am just as eaten with dragon envy as any of those boys out there with their eggs in the hatching pen, and if I could spare the time to tend an egg, I would go looking for one myself! Mind, if this works, I hope my dragon has a slightly different personality. Kashet is more like a dog, and I think I would get along better with a dragon like Re-eth-ke, who is more like a cat.”

Kiron had to laugh at that. “Aket-ten said the same thing. My father used to tell my mother that women liked cats better than dogs, because they recognize that they are like cats themselves!”

Nofret laughed herself, making Avatre crane her neck around to look at her. “There’s some truth to that,” she admitted. “I don’t like slavish dependence. Do you think that I’m mad for wanting a dragon, too?”

“I don’t think anyone is mad for wanting a dragon.” They were just about finished with Avatre, and when Kiron stepped back, the scarlet dragon picked her way daintily to the center of her pit, then spread herself out luxuriantly over the top of the hot sand to bask.

“You’re frightening Ari, though,” he continued, picking up the cloths and oil flask. “It will be dangerous. Not as much for you as for Aket-ten, but Coresan won’t be drugged, and her reactions will be sharp. I honestly don’t know what her behavior is going to be like, or even if it will be consistent from day to day.”

Nofret spread her hands wide. “Shouldn’t we be able to learn that by watching her while we approach her?” she asked, reasonably. “I promise, if she looks as if she’s going to be dangerous, I’ll give up the idea. It’s going to take enough time as it is. But I do have my reasons, and a great many of them, and I think they’re all good ones.”

He looked at her soberly, wondering if she really understood what she was letting herself in for. How much the bond with her dragon would affect her.

Then he decided that it didn’t matter whether she understood now. When it happened, she would. And when it happened, well, she wouldn’t regret whatever sacrifices she had to make.

“She’s beautiful,” Nofret said, in tones of awe.

“She’s a bit scrawny still,” Aket-ten countered. “but she’s rounding out again.”

It had taken less time than Kiron had thought to get Coresan—and there was no doubt now, it was Coresan—to allow both Kiron and Aket-ten quite close, and on foot, on the ground. Her hunger, combined with her need to stay with her eggs, and her recognition of the dragon boy who had tended her so well (despite how much he had changed), made her much more cooperative than Kiron had expected. Her behavior was nothing near as erratic as it had been when she had been drugged either. Before too terribly long, Coresan was stretching out her neck and gazing longingly at the bucket of sand and the buffing cloths and oil Kiron had brought with him. By the time they were thinking about bringing Nofret along, she let him give her a sand bath; by the day after that, it was Aket-ten doing the honors, and of course, once Aket-ten could touch the dragon, things became much simpler. At first Coresan reacted to Aket-ten’s power with startlement—and it must have been odd for her, having that contact inside her mind. It took her most of a day to get used to it and calm down. But once she accepted it, and knew that not only could she communicate with Aket-ten, but Aket-ten could “talk” to her in the same way, she seemed to realize this was an excellent state of affairs.

At that point, it was time to introduce Nofret to the dragon.

Avatre was still significantly larger than Re-eth-ke, so Nofret rode behind Kiron. The difference between this ride and the one they had taken to get Marit and Nofret to Sanctuary initially was amazing. Then, Nofret had hidden her face and clutched at Kiron, and once, when she had realized how high they were, she’d shrieked loud enough to startle Avatre. Now she watched everything avidly, her grip on his waist and the back of his saddle just enough to keep her steady and balanced, and when he looked back at her, she was smiling, and her kohl-lined eyes were wide and bright.

According to Aket-ten, Nofret had said that Ari was still trying to persuade her, more or less delicately, to give up on the idea of having a dragon. This was why she hadn’t told him she was coming along today.

The moment they had landed, she had slipped down Avatre’s side to stand facing Coresan, as Kiron untied the butchered goats the Bedu had brought—the first fruits of their raids on the Tian Sacred Herds. Coresan, of course, knew what was coming, and though still standing vigilant guard over her precious eggs, was swaying side to side with eagerness and hunger. She did look immensely better than she had when they had first found her. Her scales were shiny and clean, and although she was lean, she no longer had bones showing. Her golden eyes were bright, and the membranes of her wings supple, smooth, and a healthy copper-orange in color. Kiron privately thought that Avatre was much more beautiful—he liked Avatre’s deep scarlet, and didn’t much care for the lighter, more coppery shade of her mother. But there was no doubt that Coresan was impressive.

Aket-ten had landed before Kiron had, and was about to drag a goat quarter over to the eager and visibly hungry dragon. “Should I take that?” Nofret asked eagerly, as she stepped forward.

Well, that’s a good sign! She’s not afraid at all!

“Not just yet. We want her to get the edge off her hunger first,” he cautioned. “Let Aket-ten introduce you to her; she’ll have to get quite close before she can use her magic.”

Though visibly disappointed, Nofret nodded, and once about half of Aket-ten’s load was inside Coresan, Aket-ten motioned that Nofret should come take the next quarter over.

Kiron and Aket-ten were quite used to hauling large chunks of meat about, but poor Nofret staggered for a moment under the unexpectedly heavy burden. Once again, though, she gamely rose to the challenge, and pulled the haunch to the waiting dragon.

Coresan eyed the newcomer carefully. Nofret didn’t look anything like Aket-ten; she was taller, willow-slim, and even her hair was different—since Lord Ya-tiren and his servants had arrived, she had been able to wear her long hair in the noble style of thousands of plaits ending in beads, so that every time she moved her head, she rattled pleasantly, like a systrum. Nofret made no sudden moves, only looked the dragon squarely in the eyes as she’d been told to, and waited for Coresan to take the meat.

The dragon looked extremely reluctant to take a step nearer the stranger, despite what Aket-ten had “said” to her. Instead, she stretched out her neck as far as it would go, and with the very tips of her jaws, snagged the skin of the haunch in her teeth and dragged it to herself, keeping one eye on Nofret at all times.

Interesting. No snapping, no testing. Coresan hadn’t been whipping her tail around either. She’d become much more predictable and even-tempered since she’d been flying free. Perhaps some of her irritability had been because she had been chafing to be gone, even under the influence of tala.

With every piece of meat Nofret brought, Coresan allowed her to get closer. And when she had finished, and was ready to curl around her eggs for a nap, Coresan actually allowed Nofret to put a hand under her chin for a brief moment.

When Nofret turned back to them, she was practically afire with excitement, and Kiron hid a smile. When he thought about how aloof she had been back in Alta, scarcely noticing the dragonets, and compared how she had been then to what she was like now, it was clear that being around Kashet and Ari had caused a fundamental change in her attitude.

“This is amazing!” she exclaimed in a whisper, as Coresan sighed and slipped into the deep breathing of slumber. “I’ve watched Ari feed Kashet, of course, and even helped myself, but this is a wild dragon! And she’s letting me touch her!”

“You don’t have to whisper around her, in fact, it’s better not to,” Aket-ten said in a conversational tone. “When you try to be quiet, you tell her that something’s sneaking around, and she’ll wake up.”

“Well, she’s not exactly a wild dragon, but she’s as close as we’re going to get,” Kiron acknowledged. “She was born wild, and she remembers being trapped, which is likely to make her even warier of humans than a fully wild dragon. So, are you determined to stay here until we go on the afternoon hunt?”

Nofret nodded firmly. “I brought my sling,” she said. “I might be able to kill some desert-hares or pigeons that I can give her as tidbits, and if not, I can at least practice my aim. I know this is going to be hard—”

“Mostly, it’s going to be boring,” Aket-ten advised. “She’s sleeping a lot, since we’ve been feeding her. That’s just as well, since she doesn’t dare leave the eggs until they hatch.”

Nofret shrugged. “It can’t be any worse than some meetings,” she replied. “It certainly will be more entertaining than standing attendant to the Great Queens. Much though I would have enjoyed doing so, I wasn’t allowed to hurl stones at anything while I was a lady-in-waiting.”

Aket-ten grinned, and Kiron had to chuckle. “Then here’s your waterskin—if you need to refill it, the cistern is over there, inside that building with the latas columns—” He pointed at one of the false fronts carved into the wall of the ravine across from them, and Nofret nodded. “If you see wild dragons, either stay close to Coresan, or go inside a building with doors too small for them to get through.”

“Should I give her a sand bath?” Nofret asked anxiously.

Aket-ten shook her head. “Not yet. She’ll tell you when she’s ready for you to touch her. She doesn’t wallow in caresses like Re-eth-ke does, but she does like being scratched under the jaw, and when she solicits you to do that, she’ll be ready to take a sand buffing from you.”

“We’ll be back in the afternoon,” Kiron said, and tried not to feel too anxious. Nofret was no wilting latas; she had hunted river horse and crocodile, and even lions. She had been living in extremely primitive conditions in Sanctuary long before the rest of them arrived. Still—when Ari found out—

“I think we ought to do some hunting for the city,” he said aloud. “As long as you don’t have anything else to do, Aket-ten.”

She raised an eyebrow at him but didn’t object. And this way they could do flyovers to make sure Nofret was all right——and avoid Ari—

“We could bring Nofret smaller game that way,” Aket-ten agreed. “That’s more how a mate would feed Coresan anyway.”

So that was exactly what they did; they went back to Sanctuary just long enough to leave a message as to their intentions, then flew out again. Hunting in tandem, they managed to bring down several of the smaller gazelles over the course of the morning and afternoon, more than enough to not only keep Coresan fed, but to bring back to Sanctuary, where they would certainly be put to good use. Every time they did a flyover, it looked as if Nofret was getting on quite well. She was erring on the side of caution, staying out of what Kiron calculated was Coresan’s threat-perimeter, but staying well within sight. And Coresan must have been eating, because most of the time when they did a flyover, she was asleep with a distinct bulge in her lean middle.

Finally, in the late afternoon, he and Aket-ten made their own hunts and kills, took up what was left over, and brought it along when they came to pick up Nofret. She was in very good spirits, and Coresan had lost some of that wary watchfulness. This was definitely another good sign.

Which was just as well, because as Kiron knew, when they finally returned—they would all have some explaining to do to Ari . . . and that was something he was not at all looking forward to.

Nofret gave Coresan one last feeding and climbed up behind Kiron. As Coresan watched with interest, but no alarm, they headed home.

ELEVEN

ARI was waiting for them. As they banked in at a steep angle necessitated by the stiff breeze over Sanctuary, it was easy to spot the lone figure waiting in Avatre’s pen, and just as easy to recognize it as Ari. He was the only one likely to be wearing a Tian-style kilt rather than an Altan-style tunic who was also likely to be waiting for them.

This was not good. At least, not as far as Kiron was concerned. Glancing over at his partner in this particular escapade as she sideslipped toward Re-eth-ke’s pen, it looked to him as if Aket-ten didn’t think she needed to worry——well, she probably didn’t. Ari wouldn’t blame her, he’d blame Kiron.

Fortunately, Ari was the only one waiting in the pen. It would have been painful to be verbally flayed in the presence of the rest of the wing, even if he didn’t deserve it. After all, Ari had, in theory, agreed to this. And it wasn’t as if Nofret wasn’t her own woman, and perfectly capable of making up her own mind about what she wanted to do and how she wanted to do it. But Ari would still blame him.

As Avatre lined herself up on her target, Aket-ten and Re-eth-ke touched down inside her own pen, and Avatre backwinged, preparing to drop down onto the sand. Kiron braced himself for the assault.

And it came as soon as Avatre furled her wings. “Kiron!” Ari called, his chin set. “I—”

“You’ll take up your grievance with me, not Kiron, Royal Husband,” Nofret said, swinging her leg over and sliding down Avatre’s back. She staggered a little as she landed, then made her way around the walkway to confront her betrothed, arms crossed over her chest in a way that should have warned Ari that no matter what he thought, he was going to lose this particular argument. “I am the one who organized this expedition to be introduced to Coresan. Not Kiron. I have the right to command him. There was no danger, as Aket-ten introduced me, and Coresan accepted me within the time of her first morning feeding.”

Ari’s mouth opened and closed, without anything coming out. Kiron decided that he would just pretend nothing was happening, and untie the hide full of leftovers that Coresan hadn’t eaten. Nofret continued to stare at Ari with her arms crossed, her chin held high, her black eyes narrowed. She looked uncommonly like one of the statues of the Great Tian Kings, lacking only the crook and flail in her hands to finish the appearance. Ari could hardly have missed the resemblance.

For his part, Kiron was wondering which was going to be extended this time—the crook—or the flail.

After a moment she softened. So, it would be the crook. “Ari, I must do this. I don’t know why, but something within me says that I need to share the parenting with Coresan, that the work has to be done by me, personally. Perhaps it is nothing more than my need to prove that I am as worthy of a dragon as any of you who raised your own from the egg; I don’t know. I only know that it is important, and that I can’t take an egg from someone who already has one, or has one promised to him. So don’t place any blame on Kiron. If he and Aket-ten had not agreed to help me, I would have found another way to go out there. And they kept very careful track of me the entire time.”

Kiron thought about verifying that, then thought better of it. This was shaping up to be a lovers’ quarrel, or at least, almost a lovers’ quarrel, and he knew better than to put himself in the middle of something like that.

Neither side would welcome his interference, and both might turn on him. He’d seen that before.

So he shouldered his burden of green hide and meat and walked around the walkway on the other side of the pen, trying to look as if he wasn’t even aware the two of them were there. Either the ploy worked, or else they elected to ignore him the same way he was ignoring them, because neither of them looked at him as he edged sideways through the entrance. Avatre, of course, could not care less who was in her pen as long as she was left alone to flop down onto the hot sand and bask before the sun went down. She was full, quite happy, and all was right with her world. If two humans, neither of whom was her rider, wished to make mouth sounds at each other, so long as they got out of the way when she rolled over, they could do so wherever they wished.

Kiron breathed a sigh of relief as he got out of sight. He might not be out of danger yet, but at least Ari was going to have to deal with Nofret first before the older man came down on Kiron.

He never did learn what Nofret said to Ari, nor what Ari said to Nofret. Whatever it was, when Ari caught up with him, later—much later—that evening, it wasn’t to give Kiron a dressing-down.

Kiron was looking forward to joining the wing in Lord Ya-tiren’s kitchen, which was where he and the others were all taking their evening meals these days. After delivering his load to Gan, whose green dragon Khaleph had not had a particularly successful hunt, he had gone checking on all of the new boys with their new eggs, making sure they had been turning the eggs properly, and listening at each one for signs that all was right within. Satisfied that everything was going along exactly as it should, he joined the rest for the evening meal with Lord Ya-tiren’s household. Normally, he and the rest ate with the servants rather than the family; it seemed enough of an imposition to have Lord Ya-tiren’s servants preparing their food without also inflicting themselves on the family as well. Besides, Kiron had the feeling that falconer Kalen, cat keeper Pe-atep, and baker’s son Huras, all common-born, would feel very uncomfortable at the table of a nobleman—and never mind that they were all, from highest to lowest, actually eating the same diet. He had set the standard by insisting on eating at the kitchen, and the others had simply followed his lead—even Orest and Aket-ten, even though it was their father’s kitchen they were eating in. “It’s all politics with Father,” Orest explained after the first few evenings. “It’s generally him and Ari, Nofret and Marit, and Lord Khumun and Kaleth, and sometimes the priests from Tia, all politicking and planning. Look, I just want them to tell me what they want me to do, and I’ll do it. Just don’t make me sit there until my head aches, listening to them!”

Kiron didn’t blame him, and Aket-ten must have felt the same, since she joined all of them as well almost every night. It was a particularly jovial evening; even with the possibility of Ari’s wrath descending on him, Kiron enjoyed it. The extra hunting that he and Aket-ten had done had made it possible for the household to have meat this evening, and it had been very pleasant to enjoy the sort of meal he’d gotten used to in the Jousters’ Compounds of both Tia and Alta.

And when Ari joined them after the torches were lit, which was at the point that they were just about finished with their meal, though he looked worried and a little unsettled, he didn’t immediately seize Kiron and haul him away. Instead, he sat down with them, got a jar of beer and a bit of honeyed bread from the cook, and glumly started eating, only to stop after the first few mouthfuls.

“Nofret will be going out to stay with Coresan and her eggs—and later her dragonets—from now on until she bonds with one herself,” he said abruptly. “Since that’s in Kiron’s territory, I expect him to keep an eye on her, but I’d like the rest of you to try to do the same in turn. I know it will be difficult, but it’s the season of the rains, so it should be a bit cooler here in the desert, and I hope not so hard to stay out all day.”

Orest blinked. “Ah—” he began. “You’re going to keep watch also, aren’t you?”

“I . . . I will,” Ari said, with exaggerated care. “But I don’t want to give her the impression that I am being—over-protective.”

Kiron braced himself, expecting one of them—probably Orest, who had all the tact of a charging river horse—to say something disastrous. But instead, Gan gave Ari an understanding look, poked Orest in the ribs with an elbow just as Orest was opening his mouth, and said smoothly, “Nofret’s determined to have a dragon; that’s not a bad idea. Among our people, the two Queens rule as equals with the Kings, or at least, they have until this last sorry lot. I could have thought of easier ways to get her one, but women and cats will do as they please, Ari, and men and hounds just have to endure it. Why don’t you and I go join Heklatis as soon as we’ve finished eating? He may have some ideas to help keep her safe out there.”

Orest gave him an indignant look, opened his mouth again, and on his other side, Oset-re stepped hard on his foot, smiling as he did so.

Ari looked up at that with faint frown—then smiled. “You know, that might not be a bad idea.”

Kiron heaved a sigh of relief that he hoped he managed to hide. Let Gan—who had had so many affairs with girls that they were practically stumbling over each other on their way to and from his bed—and Heklatis, who although he was not minded to women, still had a very great deal of sexual experience, romantic and otherwise—sort Ari out. He was still trying to figure out how to tell if Aket-ten thought of him as a friend, a kind of surrogate brother, or something else entirely. She was never less than friendly, but—well, serfs weren’t encouraged to think of girls, even if he’d been old enough to be interested while he lived in Tia. And afterward—well, in Alta, he’d been frantically busy, and anyway, Aket-ten hadn’t spent any great amount of time with him until the Magi took an interest in her. And at that point, he was concentrating on how to keep her safe, rather than how he felt about her, or she about him.

He hoped she had begun to look upon him as a great deal more than a friend and surrogate brother, but she was not exactly forthcoming about how she felt, and while she was very good at reading animals’ minds, she was curiously blind to the reactions of people around her.

Or at least, she didn’t act as if she knew what he was thinking.

Yes, he reminded himself, as he got up from the table and headed back to Avatre’s pen in the darkness. But I don’t know what I’m thinking, so I shouldn’t expect her to, now, should I?

All he knew for certain was that he would rather be in Aket-ten’s company than out of it. That when he was around her, his skin felt as if it had a life of his own. And that he would often lie at night under the stars, looking up at them, and feeling ridiculously happy to know she was probably gazing at the same stars.

But he had no idea if she felt the same, if she would react poorly if she knew how he felt, or, perhaps most importantly, how her father would react. He was only a farmer’s son; she was a noble’s daughter. And while the present circumstances had made them more equal, they were not actually equal, and it was impossible, for him at least, to forget that.

He wandered back to the pens through the quiet streets of Sanctuary, keeping an eye out for the scorpions that liked to come out at night. Not that there were many of them anymore. The dragons thought scorpions were extremely tasty, small as they were, and they never lost an opportunity to snatch one up, like greedy children licking up a bit of honey from a scale insect or the end of a blossom. Scorpions evidently knew this, and had mostly deserted the city.

As he was passing Re-eth-ke’s pen, he heard a soft whistle from the doorway, and stopped. “Are you particularly sleepy?” Aket-ten called from the darkness.

“Not yet,” he answered truthfully. “Why?”

“Because one of the Bedu said there’s something remarkable going to happen tonight, and for the next couple more nights, and I thought you might want to come with me and see if they’re right.” He couldn’t see her face, but there was a smile in her voice. “They tell me it’s a good thing that there’s no moon, because we’ll be able to see it much better.”

His curiosity now piqued, Kiron nodded. “Why not?” he replied.

“Excellent. Come on, then.” She emerged from the shadows with something heavy draped over her arm and took his hand. “You can see better than I do in the dark anyway. We need to get up on a roof. Preferably one where someone isn’t already sleeping, and one not near where anyone is going to be burning oil lamps or torches.”

Fortunately he knew a roof that fit that very description. “I know just the place,” he replied, and led her through the maze of pens, feeling his way as he went. It wasn’t that he could actually see better in the dark than the rest of them; it was more that he was able to sense where walls were without actually running into them. No one ever gave a serf or a slave a lantern to see by; he’d just learned to do without them as a boy, and the sense had stuck with him.

Beyond the pens, in the labyrinth behind the temple that the Jousters had been intending to take over, and now no longer needed to since the Thet priests of Tia had solved the problem of keeping the dragons warm in winter, there were several half-ruined and empty buildings in the process of being renovated. None of them were done yet, since the construction of dragon pens had taken precedence. Like all the buildings in Sanctuary, they had flat roofs that had external stairs leading up to them—and probably, like the buildings in Tia, those had been meant for the people who lived in those buildings to use as sleeping places in good weather. Right now, though, they weren’t being used at all—perhaps because they were at the very edge of the city, and people were understandably nervous about sleeping in a part of the city where jackals were known to prowl at night. Where jackals went, sometimes, so did lions, and the prospect of waking up to a lion’s hot breath in your face was one that did not appeal. Kiron didn’t really think that lions would dare an area where dragons were, but you never knew. Pe-atep, who knew better than any of them what cats thought, said the same, but added that old, hungry, desperate lions might dare to go anywhere that they thought there was easy prey, and nothing was easier than a sleeping human. So until there were so many people here that a really effective wall could be built and a full night guard could be posted, it was probably better to err on the side of caution.

That was more than enough to keep people inside at night to sleep, with the doors closed and the shutters barred.

So as he led Aket-ten up the narrow stair, it was with the certainty that the rooftop would be just as unoccupied as she had wanted.

“Oh, this is perfect!” she said with enthusiasm when they reached the top. “Here—”

She took that draped something off her arm—in the darkness it was hard to tell just what she was doing—but he heard the sound of heavy cloth being shaken out, and a moment later she was tugging his arm downward as she sat down on the roof. He put out his hand as he went to sit beside her, and felt the rug she had spread out on the stone. “Lie down on your back,” she said, “and look up at the Seven Dancers.”

The Dancers were a cluster of seven stars well known by that name to both Tians and Altans. He did as she asked, and no sooner had he begun to relax and wonder just what this marvelous thing was he was supposed to be looking for, when—

—a brilliant streak of light flashed from the third Dancer to the tip of the star formation called the Dragon’s Tail.

“A falling star!” he exclaimed, with surprise and delight, and as more streaks appeared against the blackness, pointed upward. “Look—another—and there—and there—”

“The Bedu say that tonight the Goddess of Night weeps for her dead lover,” Aket-ten replied. “The Mouth told Heklatis and the Thet priest about it, and I overheard them talking about it. They didn’t seem to mind my listening. Heklatis says his people say it’s the sparks from their smith god’s forge as he’s making arrowheads for the Huntress Goddess, and the Thet priest says it’s the lost ghosts who’ve had someone to make them a shrine rushing across the Rainbow Bridge to the Summer Country, but that usually you can’t see this in Tia because it’s the middle of the season of rains. Which is why we Altans never see it either, I suppose. There are other star-falls over the course of the year, but nothing like this one.”

Kiron blinked, and tried to remember if he had ever seen such a thing—but as a serf, he’d always been so tired he fell asleep as soon as he was prone, and as a dragon boy he had paid more attention to first Kashet, then Avatre, than to the goings-on in the sky. There was no set season for lost spirits to go to the Summer Country so far as Altans were concerned. When your family built your shrine, you just went.

He certainly didn’t remember ever seeing anything like this. There were so many bright streaks across the sky that it seemed as if all the stars should have vanished by now. But they were still there, so maybe it was the tears of a goddess—or the sparks from a heavenly forge—or something else that no one had even thought of yet. They were all coming out of the area of the Dancers, so maybe it was star petals that the Dancers were throwing.

Whatever it was causing this—it was beautiful. And as he lay on his back, he felt Aket-ten’s hand close over his, and hold it.

“I think you did a good thing for Nofret by helping her, and letting her go out to Coresan,” Aket-ten said softly. “She needs to prove herself to Ari. She told me that she thinks he’s seen too many spoiled noblewomen with nothing but idle time on their hands; that he thinks she was a lot more pampered than she was. She wants to prove to him that she can do things, that she can be his full partner in just about everything.”

“She doesn’t intend to fight, I hope,” Kiron replied, staring up at the falling stars with a sinking heart. “If it comes to that, I don’t think that’s a good idea. I know that being on a dragon evens things out a lot, but—”

“If she has to, she’ll fight, just like everyone else here. If Ari fights, I know she intends to be there. And it’s because she can’t bear the thought of something happening to him, and her not being right there to do whatever she can if it does. It’s horrible, being left behind, not knowing what’s happening. It’s worse than going out to fight in the first place. When you care about someone, it’s unbearable.” A pause. “I feel the same way about you.”

His heart stopped sinking, and with a jolt, seemed to leap into his throat. “Uh—you do?” he managed, sounding stupid even in his own ears.

“Of course I do! It would be horrible to watch you fly off and not know if you were coming back!” She sounded indignant. “I care more about you than—than anyone. Even Orest. Even my father. There isn’t anyone I would rather be with, for the rest of my life.” She squeezed his hand. “I don’t know if it’s right, making promises before we know if we’re all going to get through this without being killed, but I told my father he might as well not bother making any betrothals for me, because if I couldn’t marry you, I wouldn’t marry anyone.”

“Aket-ten!” he exclaimed, with trepidation, delight, and a touch of horror. “You didn’t! When?”

“When he first got here, of course.” She laughed into the darkness. “I told him that night we all had our welcome dinner together. I didn’t want to take the chance that he’d get all worried about what was going to happen and decide that he wanted to see me safely married. And he said he wouldn’t dare make any betrothals after such a declaration, because I’d probably tell Re-eth-ke to eat him if he tried.”

“I—” he tried to think of something gallant to say, but his heart was racing with elation, and he could only manage a single fumbling sentence. “I’d fight even your father to be with you—except that I’d be afraid that would break your heart, seeing the two of us fighting. I’d throw myself off a cliff rather than break your heart.”

“Then it’s a good thing you don’t have to fight him, because he likes you, and said we can consider it settled between us.” She giggled. “And Mother likes you even better. She told Father that if he dared reject you as a suitor, he’d be sleeping on the floor in the kitchen from now on. Orest doesn’t know about it yet, of course,” she added thoughtfully. “Neither Father nor I told him because he’d be an idiot about it. He’d either decide you weren’t worthy or else he’d go completely the other way and want the whole thing settled immediately, and we can’t have that until everything is—well, normal again. Or at least, until you don’t have to be wingleader and fight. Or until he figures it out for himself, which he might, since he isn’t quite as stupid as he used to be.”

“Or—” Kiron said thoughtfully, feeling a slow smile spreading over his face, “until I make him think it is all his idea. If I do that, he won’t rest until he’s got your father’s consent. Besides, it will give him the chance to act important, as if you couldn’t possibly consider me unless he suggested it.”

“That’s brilliant! And that’s why I love you!” Aket-ten exclaimed, and she rolled over on her side just as he did the same. But they both misjudged how close they were to each other and somehow, as they turned toward each other, they managed to find themselves kissing and—

—and it was like falling into a scalding spring, except that it was good, it was wonderful, and he didn’t want it to stop—

—and Aket-ten broke it off first, but not until they were both hot and breathless.

She said she loves me—

We don’t dare complicate things. His thoughts were all tangled up in possible consequences, even while his body wanted him to go right back to what it had been doing, and reminded him of all the times he’d seen lovers entwined by accident, since no one ever paid any attention to serfs. And that ache in his groin demanded that he do something now, and if he didn’t—

He flushed all over and willed himself not to move.

“Not—” he said, feeling as if it took every ounce of willpower he had to say the word. “—now. Aket-ten I want to, more than anything, but not now.”

“No—” she agreed. “We can’t.” She sounded as breathless as he felt. Well, small wonder. His body wanted one thing and wanted it very badly, and his mind knew it would be a very bad idea. There were already enough complications in their lives. They didn’t need more. “We haven’t the right, we have to think of the things we have to do. We can’t be lovers yet. Not until things are—better. There might be babies, and we need every dragon and rider we have. I can’t take the time for a baby right now.”

“But—” he managed.

“Yes,” she sighed, and brushed his hair off his forehead in a way that made him shiver. Then she pushed him away a little. “But the moment we’re free—you’d better find a quiet place big enough for both of us!”

Somehow, a completely unspoken agreement had passed between them. Maybe that ability of talking to animals did extend to humans sometimes.

Whatever it was—he was content. For now anyway. Maybe not forever—probably not forever—probably not even for too many moons. But for now.

And all he had to do was to convince his body of that. . . .

TWELVE

THE next morning, and for every morning after that, Nofret was waiting to be taken out to Coresan without anyone having to fetch her. Aket-ten told Kiron that Nofret had arranged all of her audiences and meetings for the evening, after she came back. And she was brought back, every evening, if not by Kiron, by one or another of the other Jousters because no one was going to allow her to remain in that deserted city, unprotected, after darkness fell. No one knew what might prowl there, anything from cheetah to other dragons. There would certainly be poisonous snakes and scorpions. There might be ghosts or other evil spirits.

And Ari fretted, though he said nothing, and he was very careful to fetch Nofret home no more often than any of the others. In a way, Kiron couldn’t blame him for being anxious about Nofret’s welfare. If it had been Aket-ten out there alone, he’d have fretted, too—and as far as he or anyone else knew, unlike Aket-ten, Nofret didn’t have any special powers to protect her or help her. He’d have trusted to her good sense, but he couldn’t help but wonder—did anyone who would insist on spending time with a semiwild, nesting dragon in a deserted city crawling with unknown hazards really have good sense?

There were other ways of getting a dragon. She could even wait until next year. . . . What did she have to prove? She was already given all the deference anyone could ask for from the Altans in Sanctuary, and if the Tians didn’t quite understand yet that she was due the respect of a coconsort, they would soon work it out.

All he could guess at this point was that the person she was trying hardest to prove something to was—herself.

Still, she was clever, and if Coresan wasn’t exactly taming, she had come to accept Nofret’s presence and food without a sign of nerves or suspicion. Nofret still couldn’t touch her unless Aket-ten was around, and she still kept her body between Nofret and her eggs, but then, Coresan had watched while Kiron himself stole one of her last clutch, so he couldn’t blame the dragon for being cautious. No matter how many times Aket-ten “talked” to Coresan to reassure her, surely the first thing in her mind when she saw Nofret’s eyes going toward the eggs was that the human was going to take one. It did make him wonder, though, just how much Coresan was able to think—and if she was somehow able to recognize Avatre as her own offspring. And if so, was that making a difference in how she treated the humans who were with Avatre?

The days stretched on, much the same except that they slowly got a little longer every day as the time for the rains arrived and passed. Or what would have been rains, if much rain actually fell out here. There were brief cloudbursts, followed by an explosion of flowers and greenery, but nothing like what was happening in Tia, and to a lesser extent, in Alta.

More refugees arrived, still trickling in by ones and twos, or at most, a family group. The Tians reported that the demonically ferocious storms that had hammered Tia consistently for the last several years had not appeared this season—only the “normal” storms, the ones to be expected, followed by the general rise of Great Mother River for the annual inundation. The Great King’s new advisers were taking credit for this, claiming to have found a way for all Tian priests to work as one. And also claiming that this was why only the lesser priests were still in their temples.

Kiron had wondered how they would explain the absence of so many priests. He’d been hoping that they wouldn’t be able to.

The Altan refugees reported with shudders that fear was the byword. Boys barely into their teens were being conscripted for the army, and the Magi were reputed to be examining and taking select children as young as six. They claimed these children were going to serve in the Palace. But no one ever saw them there, and who would want a child that young serving them?

But no one complained because there were always terrible things happening: murders, poisoned wells, other acts of sabotage, all blamed on Tian agents within the city. You couldn’t even trust your own neighbors, said the refugees. You never knew if they were Tian agents—or if they would denounce you as a Tian agent.

At least, for the moment, the earthshakes had stopped, and the Magi were not lashing the earth with the Eye, burning out nests of so-called traitors and the hidden strongholds of agents within the city (or so they said). So even though rain saturated the city every day, people were trying to rebuild their houses. Some of them were anyway. Some who had nowhere to go in the Altan countryside, like the ones who made their way across the desert with the help of the Bedu, had decided that terrible as the Tians must be, it was better to face them than huddle in terror in a wrecked house in Alta.

Kiron knew, or thought he knew, why the Magi weren’t using the Eye at the moment. He thought it rather likely that they simply couldn’t. The burning lance of the Eye used sunlight, somehow concentrating it into a weapon, and with the sky overcast constantly during the rains, there was no sunlight for it to use. And although earthshakes were perfectly normal occurrences in Alta, he had also noticed that every time they used the Eye, there was an earthshake, as if using it somehow disturbed the earth as well—which would be why the shakes had stopped.

And as he watched the faces of Aket-ten, Kaleth, and the Tian priests, he knew that they knew why those young children were being taken. These were the youngsters that would have been Nestlings, had there been anyone in Alta to train them. Those with arcane powers who had not fled were mostly comatose from being repeatedly drained to serve the uses of the Magi. So the Magi needed a new source of power—just as the “advisers” in Tia had needed a source of power.

It made him feel sick; sicker still that there was nothing, realistically speaking, that he could do about it.

Meanwhile, the Tian priests had found a way to call and direct the rare rains kamiseen, to enable it to uncover still more of Sanctuary. It didn’t look as if they would be running out of buildings any time soon. Or—so Kaleth confided to him—treasure. There was enough to pay the Bedu, enough to put some glory into the shrines of the gods and give the priests something in the way of regalia again. The gods were providing still, it seemed.

So the days lengthened, and the nights shortened, and the refugees came in, and what passed for the rains here in the desert ended.

And then, at long last—the hatches started.

The eggs in the hatching pen began cracking first, and that triggered the need to contact the Bedu to start raiding the Tian Sacred Herds. There was no way that Sanctuary could feed the growing population and the hungry dragonets on hunting alone. They needed meat, and a great deal of it.

By this point, the Herds themselves had been moved to make those raids possible without penetrating too far into Tian lands. Those priests that had not fled to Sanctuary were colluding with those who had, and had brought the herds to grazing grounds seldom used, right on the edge of the desert. The excuse was that the herds were looking thin and sickly, a bad omen, and something that could be easily remedied by taking them to fresh pastures. And why should the advisers care what happened to the herds? They played no part in the sacrifices, cared nothing for omens or portents or other priestly matters, and probably thought that they had more important things to worry about. With the few novices that they had managed to get their hands on used up and dead, they were forced to turn their attention to other sources of power. Rumors had come via the priestly caste that one of the advisers himself was making a tour of temples; only now, forewarned, the priests were making very sure he didn’t find the source of power he was looking for—those few priests that had not left their posts who were god-touched. They were moving one step ahead of him, from temple to temple.

And there were too few of those advisers to make a search among the Tian children for those who had not yet fully shown the hand of the gods on them. Kiron had a notion that the Tians, unlike the Altans, would not take tamely to having their children taken—not after those novices were found dead.

Then again, the Tians were not living in the shadow of the Eye either—nor under the baleful gaze of several hundred Magi.

Now that the season of rains and floods were over, the assault on the Altan border, however, had been renewed. Once again, there was a steady flow of casualties on both sides, to feed that unspeakable appetite for the magic and power of lost life.

It was maddening to know that there was nothing those in Sanctuary could do. . . .

The first of the sacred sacrificial animals began arriving in Sanctuary about the time that the little dragonets came into their full and voracious appetites.

These were beasts sacred to the gods, however, and it was Nofret who suggested that the Tian priests actually undertake the full ritual sacrifices they would ordinarily have done, rather than simply butcher the beasts or allow them to be butchered.

“I can’t see any reason why not,” she said, at the evening meeting after the first lot of cattle and goats was driven into the pens waiting for them, a meeting which Kiron was attending in his capacity of wingleader and strongly interested party. “And I can see every reason why you should. We have a much larger temple now—the one the Jousters were going to take and don’t need. It has an inner shrine and a proper sacrificial table. And I think it is a very bad idea to cheat the gods of what is, after all, rightfully theirs.”

“But—” The Thet priest looked at her askance. “They are not your gods, Lady.”

“Pah. Who was worshiped there before? It looked enough like Lord Haras as to make no difference, but it was probably called by a different name. And in a thousand years, the Falcon-headed One will probably have yet a third name. I do not think the gods care what names we use, so long as we do good and not evil. They are the gods of both Altans and Tians at this point, and it doesn’t matter a hair what name you call them by,” she replied instantly. “You have never consulted a woman about this, clearly. We women are pragmatic about such things; we call upon whoever we think might answer us, with no nonsense about whether it is your god or mine. I have even been known to invoke one of Heklatis’ Akkadian goddesses now and again.”

The Thet priest brightened at that. “It could be,” he said, with some deliberation, “that with the number of sacrifices from Tian altars growing fewer, and those from the Sanctuary altars growing more numerous, they might be inclined to actually remove their favor from Tia and bestow it here. The impression we are trying to create may become the actuality.”

“That, too, was my thought,” Nofret said briskly, as Kaleth smiled slightly and Ari looked very thoughtful indeed.

“Even if the Jousters had needed the temple, under the circumstances I would have said to take it,” Ari said gravely, speaking up for the first time this evening. “Let us give all the gods their due, Tian and Altan together. If they look with favor upon us, so much the better for us all.”

And so, the hatching of the dragonets, that had caused so much concern about eroding resources, proved to be the source of a great improvement in the lives of everyone in Sanctuary and of the Bedu as well. The Bedu made their painless raids—the only injuries were to a couple of too eager youngsters who fell from their swift desert-bred horses and broke a bone or two. They moved the herds to secret oases, and for their pains got ten percent of the beasts. Only as many of the sacrificial animals as were needed were brought, moved by night to Sanctuary, to give up their blood on the altar, fulfilling their destinies. And their flesh fed not only the dragonets, but the full-grown dragons and the people of Sanctuary. There was not the overabundance of meat there had been in Mefis—that would have been a criminal waste, since there was, as yet, no way to store it in great quantity; cold rooms, it seemed, took more effort than heating the pens. And unlike in Mefis and in Alta, where there were so many sacrifices in a day that there was always some wastage, every littlest scrap was used. But the overall improvement in diet made people feel less as if they were undergoing great hardship and sacrifice to live in Sanctuary. And another added benefit—so many hides available meant that not only was there an abundance of leather for sandals and belts, blacksmith aprons and other domestic needs, there was plenty for shields and new saddles and harnesses, and even chariot covers. For the first time, a handful of craftsmen from both Tia and Alta began to make the swift-moving chariots used for both war and hunting, to train Bedu horses to pull them, and to allow the charioteers from Lord Ya-tiren’s household to train others.

And not too very long after the last of the eggs in the hatching pen cracked and gave up a handsome little blue dragonet, Coresan’s clutch began to hatch.

“Should I help?” Nofret asked anxiously, as Coresan prowled around and around the rocking egg.

“No,” Aket-ten said immediately. “Keep away from her. She’s on edge, and while she’s all right with us being within sight, even I can’t tell what she’ll do if you try to get any nearer.”

“Within sight” was something of a misnomer. In fact, they were up on the cliff above the nest. Aket-ten and Re-eth-ke had come in first, realized immediately that the first of the eggs was hatching, and cut off Avatre, Kiron, and Nofret, waving them up to the cliff. Kiron was more than willing to follow her lead in this. He had never seen a dragon with hatching eggs before, and according to Ari, they got positively bloodthirsty until all the hatchlings were safely out and fed. He had said that they should all hatch nearly at once; dragons didn’t start incubation until all the eggs were laid, so that there wasn’t much more than a day or two between the oldest and the youngest.

One of the five eggs Coresan had laid was clearly infertile; she had pushed it off to one side, out of the nest. The others were moving, one violently. And it sounded like there was tapping coming from all of them.

Suddenly Coresan stopped prowling, and practically leaped on the egg that had been moving the most. Trapping it between her foreclaws, she tilted her head to the side, and—

Kiron watched avidly. He knew what must be coming. Dragon egg shells were thicker than the walls of water jars and a great deal less fragile; they had to be, to contain the developing dragon safely. But that meant they were hard. He, Ari, and every other human that had ever helped an egg to hatch had been forced to use hammers to help the baby inside crack the shell. But no one knew how dragons assisted their young. Not even Ari, who had studied dragons nesting in caves to keep the hatching young out of the rains, and had been unable as a consequence to get close enough to see the crucial moment.

He, Nofret, and Aket-ten would be the first humans to witness the event, and it would solve a great mystery, for dragon teeth were hardly formed in a way that would let them be used like hammers or chisels, and no one had ever seen a dragon pick up anything in its foreclaws to use like a tool.

Coresan tilted her head to the side, listening intently to the baby within. Then she bent to the egg, and licked a spot on the top. Then she waited a moment, and with the tips of her very front fangs, began scraping at the same spot. Then she stopped, licked, waited, and scraped again. After the third time, Kiron realized that the shell where she had licked was flaking away.

“Something in her saliva must be eating at the shell!” he exclaimed. “Or making it more brittle!”

And now that all made perfect sense. He already knew that a dragon’s droppings would burn the skin of anyone foolish enough to touch them without gloves, so it stood to reason that there might be something caustic or acidic in the dragon’s saliva. No wonder they could gulp down bones without harm, and without the bone bits appearing fundamentally intact out the other end!

“I hope we aren’t traumatizing the little ones we’re helping to hatch with all the banging,” Nofret replied, her brows furrowing with sudden worry.

Aket-ten laughed. “What would be worse, the banging of the hammers, or that scrape-scrape-scrape?” she asked. “It certainly isn’t quieter. I don’t think we’re hurting anything.”

“They respond to the tapping,” Kiron assured her. “Aket-ten is right, I don’t think tapping or scraping makes any real difference; either sound tells the little one inside the egg where it needs to work to get out.”

As abruptly as she had begun, Coresan stopped, and let go of the egg. It balanced on its end for a moment, then rolled over on its side, and with a shudder, a roughly triangular piece popped off, and the very end of a snout shoved through the hole.

They were too far away to actually see more than that, and then only because the deep red snout was such a strong contrast to the mottled-cream-and-sand-colored egg, but Kiron remembered very well what that moment had been like for Avatre. After the first tremendous effort of cracking the shell, she had simply rested quietly within in it for a few moments, taking her first breaths and gathering her strength to finish the job. Her then-tiny nostrils had flared with each panting breath, and at that moment he had wanted to tear the shell apart to free her.

But he hadn’t, because hatching babies of any sort were in a state of transition. It was quite possible to harm them irrevocably by rushing things. Every farmer’s child knew that.

Coresan now came back to the egg, and began to lick it again, starting from the broken, and presumably weakened spot, and working her way back from that point. The egg and the baby inside it remained quiescent for a short time, then the rocking began again. Coresan confined herself to licking this time, occasionally stopping to make muttering noises at the baby. Whether these were meant to be reassurances or encouragement, Kiron couldn’t tell for sure.

But within a much shorter time than he remembered, the egg cracked open and lay in two halves on the sand, and the dragonet sprawled out inelegantly, a tangle of ungainly wings and limbs, panting with exhaustion.

Now Coresan began frantically licking the baby all over—to clean it? Certainly the dragonet was clean and dry in a much shorter time than Avatre had been under Kiron’s inexpert care. Her ministrations had the effect of moving it away from the shell, which she bat-ted out of the nest with her tail. She licked and nudged until the little one was in a much more comfortable-looking position, curled up with his wings tucked in around him, in the sun to soak up the heat.

Then, and only then, did she begin looking around—and then looked straight up at them.

And snorted.

It did not take having Aket-ten’s god-touched Gift of Silent Speech with animals to read Coresan’s look at that moment. It said, as clearly as could be, “What are you doing up there with my food, when I need it down here with my baby?”

And Nofret did not need any urging to scramble up into the saddle. Kiron had already decided that if Coresan showed willingness to permit Nofret close, it should be she, and not he, who delivered that first meal to mother and offspring. Coresan accepted all of them, but it was time for Nofret to attain a special level of trust, if she was going to be able to get near the babies. He and Avatre had practiced the concept of taking someone other than him on her back off within a reasonable distance; now, he waved at Avatre in the proper signal, pointed at Coresan, and called, “Take her down, girl!”

Nofret couldn’t control or guide Avatre yet, but she didn’t have to. As she clung to the saddle, Avatre did a “gentle” launch, leaping up and out with wings spread, rather than diving off the cliff to snap open her wings at the last possible moment. And with Coresan watching and fidgeting with impatience, she spiraled down to the ground near—but not too near—the nest.

The meat had been divided up into portions manageable by one slender woman; as Kiron and Aket-ten watched, with Aket-ten in Re-eth-ke’s saddle, ready to fly in and force Coresan off if the mother dragon turned aggressive, Nofret untied the first of the bundles and dragged it over to Coresan as the dragon rocked from side to side. Tail lashing with impatience, Coresan actually left the nest to come and take it from her before she had gotten halfway there!

Nofret had the presence of mind to drop the meat and back up a pace or three before Coresan reached her. But she showed no fear, and Coresan showed no aggression. There was a moment of eyes meeting, then both of them turned and retraced their steps, Nofret to get another load, Coresan to take the food to her weary infant.

Aket-ten merely nodded, but of course, she would have known if Coresan was feeling anything but hunger and impatience to get the food. Kiron, however, felt a burden of concern lift from his shoulders.

One less thing to worry about.

Now that he could relax, it was fascinating for Kiron to watch as Coresan tore off the tiniest of bits with her front teeth and offered them to the baby, who sniffed, opened his mouth—it was a “he” by the incipient “horns”—and gulped it down. Coresan continued feeding him, as Nofret returned with her second burden. The female dragon paid no attention to the human at all, as Nofret brought the meat right up to the edge of the nest and left it there, the nearest she had ever come to the eggs before this moment. It appeared that their plan was working; Nofret had risen to a new level of acceptance.

Then again, all of Coresan’s attention was on this, her first baby (or at least, the first one she knew of) and she had no time for anything else.

Nofret was at the edge with the last of the meat bundles when Coresan finally finished stuffing the youngster and looked up. Kiron held his breath again, but Coresan only blinked benevolently at her benefactor, and got slowly to her feet, stretching as she did so, then paced over to Nofret in a leisurely manner. Nofret stood her ground.

Kiron held his breath. Aket-ten looked entirely relaxed, but Coresan’s reputation back in Mefis had been that she was unpredictable.

“Unpredictable” was not what they needed right now.

Coresan looked back over her shoulder at her sleeping baby, then dropped her head, picked up a shoulder of beef, and took it back to the little one, where she proceeded to feed herself.

Only then did Nofret turn and go back to Avatre, climb into the saddle, and wait for Kiron’s whistled signal to tell Avatre to return.

It was only when Nofret got up onto the cliff with them that Kiron saw she was sweating and trembling, and any rebuke he had been planning on giving her about taking chances died on his tongue.

She slid out of Avatre’s saddle and her knees buckled; Kiron and Aket-ten both caught her and helped her to sit on the ground.

“I didn’t know she was going to do those things until she started toward me, and then it was too late,” Nofret said, shivering with reaction. “Coming to meet me was bad enough, but then stalking right over and taking the meat practically from under my hand—I thought I was going to die right then and there! And once she started moving, I knew I didn’t dare back away, or I might become prey—”

“I’m glad you remembered that,” Kiron said, awkwardly patting her shoulder. “You did very well! And you were right to meet her eyes.”

“You did wonderfully!” Aket-ten exclaimed. “And we won’t tell Ari any details. You’ve done it, Nofret—she’s accepted you as a feeder, if not a nest tender. Yet.”

“Yet?” Kiron responded instantly, with astonishment. “You think Coresan is actually going to accept Nofret as a nest tender?”

“She’s already thinking about it,” said Aket-ten, with a nod toward the feeding dragon. “Or—well, not thinking about it, it’s just that she’s been on the nest herself for a long time without a break, and she’s starting to feel impatient. She wants to fly, she wants to stretch her wings, she wants to hunt for herself and the babies, and all of that is lying under the nest tending and getting stronger every time she looks at Nofret. So when the go feelings are stronger than the stay feelings, if Nofret is there, I think Coresan will just leave, as if Nofret was another female dragon or her mate.”

“Would that mean—” Nofret’s color was coming back. “—would I be able to get right in with the babies?”

“She just might push you in with them,” Kiron said thoughtfully. “It’s what she’d do with another dragon, Ari says. Younger siblings with no nest of their own, or older daughters are often used to tend the nests for mothers whose mates are inexperienced and don’t know to help tend the nest. It depends on how much like another dragon she thinks you are.”

“One step at a time!” Aket-ten interrupted. “It’s enough that Coresan is letting her bring the meat right up to the edge of the nest! And—oh, look!”

She pointed down at the nest, where another egg, this one slightly larger than the first, had begun the violent rocking that had signaled the beginning of real hatching for the first egg. Coresan abandoned her meal and, with a nudge to make sure her first offspring was properly positioned, went to aid the second.

“We’re going hunting,” Kiron told Aket-ten. “Unless you want to—”

“Oh, no, I’d much rather watch!” Aket-ten said, with undisguised enjoyment. “If Coresan finishes what Nofret brought her, I’ll fly her down with the next load myself.”

Satisfied that his partner had things well in hand, Kiron leaped into Avatre’s saddle, and gave her the signal to fly. Avatre was only too happy to oblige. He had the feeling she found all this baby tending and baby watching to be utterly boring and pointless.

“It’s all right, girl; this will be over before too long,” he called to her as they angled out over the desert in search of prey. “Then things—”

He stopped himself before he could finish that with

“—can go back to normal again” because it wasn’t likely that they ever would. Or could. And he wasn’t going to make a promise he would only have to break, especially not to Avatre, whether or not she understood it.

“—things will let us move Nofret and her new dragonet back to Sanctuary,” he said instead. Because at least that was a promise he had some likelihood of keeping.

THIRTEEN

THIS is driving me mad, you know,” Ari said, in a completely conversational tone, as he and Kiron stared down into Coresan’s ravine. Coresan was dozing on one side of the nest, Nofret was sitting on the other side, and the dragonets were tumbling all over each other in between them, in a clumsy, awkward tangle of wings and limbs. They looked like a moving pile of jewelry.

Kiron was getting very, very tired of hearing Ari fret over Nofret’s safety. Nofret herself wasn’t putting up with it, which was probably why Ari was fretting at Kiron instead of his Royal Wife. After a fortnight of this, Kiron was at the end of his patience, too. And, truth to tell, Kiron was rather jealous; there had been so much public pressure for the two of them to become an official couple that even if they had been indifferent to each other, they’d have probably been officially married by now.

As opposed to his own situation. He and Aket-ten were both considered too young for any serious commitments, and even if they had been older, well—they still had duties and responsibilities that didn’t leave a lot of room for anything but those duties and responsibilities.

There wasn’t any special public ceremony to make a couple man and wife, not even for two people who were functioning as rulers, even if they didn’t have thrones or crowns. But there was no doubt that Ari’s courtship of Nofret had succeeded, seeing as they were sharing a sleeping chamber . . . even if Kiron hadn’t already known they had privately gone before both Kaleth and the High Priest of Thet to make their union official.

And Kiron was jealous. But also apprehensive. It was one thing to want Aket-ten so badly his loins ached—but it was quite another to pair off like Ari and Nofret had. There were consequences to that, above and beyond the obvious, consequences he wasn’t at all sure he was ready to deal with. For instance, Lord Ya-tiren might decide that her husband ought to be trying to curb some of Aket-ten’s more outrageous escapades, and not her father. In fact, Lord Ya-tiren might even insist on some similar condition before he would bestow his approval on the match.

Kiron was quite certain such a thing was entirely beyond his abilities. Aket-ten was going to do exactly as she always had, and no one was going to be able to stop her once she made up her mind about it.

He was also not so secure in his position as wingleader that he thought he dared to tip the balance among them by turning an unofficial and private relationship into a public one. Aket-ten was part of the wing, after all, and if they were husband and wife, the others might reasonably expect there was favoritism going on.

And there were other consequences, too; and lots of them. Those were nothing more than the tip of what might be a very, very large rock under the sand dune. Consequences like—as Aket-ten had said herself—babies. Whatever mysterious means there were that women in Alta and Tia used to regulate such a thing, they evidently weren’t available here in Sanctuary yet, if the rash of big bellies among Lord Ya-tiren’s household and the Tian priestesses was anything to go by.

Still—on the other hand—there was a wing full of handsome young men that Aket-ten flew with every day. True, Lord Ya-tiren had given his consent, but all of them were better matches for her than a former serf who had never been anything more than a simple farmer ’s son. Granted, the nobles weren’t lords of anything right now, but they had the blood and—

And he could make himself crazy with thoughts like that in a very short time.

So between one thing and another, he was coming to the end of his patience with Ari’s fretting.

“Nofret says she’s fine. Aket-ten says Coresan has accepted her as another dragon,” he snapped. “There is never a time when someone with a dragon isn’t in the air around here to make sure nothing can get at her or Coresan—not that I think anything could show up here that Coresan couldn’t or wouldn’t handle on her own. Enough, Ari, she knows what she’s doing, we know what we’re doing, so give us all a little credit for caution and good sense, will you?”

Ari looked taken aback by Kiron’s tone. “I just—worry,” he said.

“Well, it’s stupid to worry for no reason.” Kiron set his chin. “If you have to worry, worry about something we’ve got reasons to worry about. There’s plenty of those.”

Ari said nothing, but he had the grace to look chastised. And he did stop fretting, at least for the rest of that afternoon, which proceeded as it always did. They hunted, going out in turn, while Aket-ten went back to Sanctuary and brought back sacrificed animals—sheep, today; it was Hamun’s turn to be sacrificed to, and in the interest of encouraging harmony, the priests of both Alta and Tia presided over and attended the sacrifices for both sets of gods.

In the interest of harmony. . . .

Kaleth had some ideas on that score. “If both sets of priests preside now, well, it won’t be long before they’re agreeing on a fixed set of rites, and the two sets of gods merge into one.” It certainly seemed to be working.

If only other problems could be solved so easily.

As the sun-disk neared the horizon, Ari collected Nofret—Kashet was still the biggest, strongest dragon in the wing, and it was much easier for him to carry double. Maybe snapping at Ari had done some good; at least outwardly he didn’t act as anxious when he got Nofret, and she seemed more relaxed as they all headed back home, flying high to get the advantage of the cooler air.

Odd, though, how quickly he, at least, had gotten used to the desert. The heat just didn’t seem to bother him as much anymore.

He had no idea how prophetic those words about “worrying over things we have reason to worry about” would be.

Because as they arrived back at Sanctuary and started dropping down toward the buildings, they could see that the place was like an overturned beehive, with people milling about and forming little knots of tense conversation. One of Lord Khumun’s men was waiting for them as they approached their pens, standing on top of the dividing wall, waving frantically at them.

That’s not good. . . .

“Council chamber,” was all he shouted up at them, eyes shielded against the wind of the dragon’s wingbeats as it kicked up sand. “It’s an emergency!”

“You go!” Aket-ten called over to him and Ari and Nofret. “Land there, and send the dragons back! I’ll take care of them and rejoin you when I’m done!”

Kiron didn’t have to be told twice; he signaled to Avatre to abort her landing; with a grunt of effort, she rowed for height, and after a moment of confusion and hesitation as he resolved the conflict between habit and Ari’s new direction, Kashet followed her.

They landed in the street outside the council chamber—the building now serving only the dual purpose of being the place for meetings and Kaleth and Marit’s home, rather than as a full temple as well. Ari and Nofret were out of the saddle and on the ground as soon as the dragons furled their wings, and running through the doorway before Kiron had even thrown his leg over Avatre’s back. He slid down her shoulder, then turned and slapped Avatre on the foreleg, and called “Home!” and she shoved off from the ground without hesitation. He felt a momentary burst of pride at that; it had taken a long time to train her to follow an order without him on her back, but it was more than worth the effort at times like this one. Kashet, however, looked momentarily confused.

Kiron whistled and got the big male’s attention. “Kashet,” he said firmly, and making the “up” gesture with both hands. “Fly! Pen!” Kashet didn’t know the word “home”—which to Avatre meant two things; both Sanctuary itself, and any pen in which she had spent more than a couple of nights. But he did know “pen,” and “fly” as separate concepts—he just didn’t know what “fly” meant if Ari wasn’t on his back.

Kiron had done a lot more training to make Avatre autonomous from the beginning than Ari had ever done with Kashet. He’d had to; on their trek to Alta, he’d needed to be able to direct Avatre in hunting from some other place than in her saddle, because sometimes he needed to drive the game into Avatre’s waiting talons. Kashet, on the other hand, had never had to meet that challenge. The dragon looked at him with his head to one side, as if he was hearing some strange sound he didn’t recognize at all.

“Pen,” Kiron repeated, putting as much emphasis as he could on the simple word. Kashet knew what it meant, and he’d just seen Avatre fly off in that direction—surely he could reason out that he was meant to go there, too. . . .

Kashet blew out his breath in a puff, then turned away, but instead of flying as Avatre had, he stalked off through the streets afoot. People scrambled to get out of his way, not with any sign of fear, but only because the streets of Sanctuary were very narrow, and there wasn’t really room for a dragon and even a small person to pass side by side in them. He was going in the right direction.

Maybe he remembers walking all those corridors in the Jousters’ Compound, Kiron thought, He was used to walking in the Compound, rather than flying. Well, as long as it gets him there on his own, he can walk or fly as he chooses!

He turned to enter the chamber himself, reasonably sure that Kashet would get himself to where he belonged, because even if he got confused, by now one of the other Jousters would have heard he was stalking through the streets and come to guide him back. Or else Aket-ten would send someone to get him.

Or both, Kiron thought, as he slipped in through the doorway, and started to edge around the walls to get to his spot among the other councilors.

He saw that there was a woman in the gown of a priestess—a compromise between the tightly-pleated mist linen of the Tian priestesses, and the loosely-draped, heavier linen of the Altans, this was mist linen for coolness and comfort, but without pleating, and held in place by twin shoulder pins and a belt. Most other women of Sanctuary wore purely Altan gowns, since most women here were Altans.

“. . . and every one of them has confirmed it,” the speaker was Tir-ama-ten, the Priestess of Beshet of the Far-Seeing eye. She looked very unhappy. “I do not know how it is that those whose Gift is to see forward did not warn us about this!”

“Because, Great Lady, their gaze was confused and befogged,” Kaleth said soothingly. “As my gaze has been increasingly confused and befogged. We have known this was happening, as the Magi make the future more uncertain. There is no responsibility to be laid on you or on them; rather, allow me to thank you for always having the eyes of one of your Far-Seeing Priestesses keep watch over the Winged Ones of Alta. Your duty is to the people of Tia, not of Alta, and yet you have been bending your eyes to my folk. If you had not, we would never have known they were besieged until it was too late.”

“Besieged?” Kiron said—though it was not really a question. “The Magi, of course.”

“And every armed man of their private guard they can put around the Temple of the Twins,” Kaleth confirmed. “I think they would have used the army to break down the doors, except that they knew the army would not obey them in such a task.”

“I wonder how they get even their private guard to attack priests,” Lord Khumun said, looking grim. “To raise hands against the servants of the gods—”

“They grow bold, these Magi,” said Pta-hetop the Tian Thet priest. “First they move to take our acolytes, and now your priests. I wonder that they do not use your army.”

“I do not think they could gain obedience from the army to move against the servants of the gods,” Haraket said. “Oh, yes, it has happened in the past—the far past—of our land, but only when the priests themselves were corrupt, so corrupt that the people wept beneath their heels.”

“I think you are right,” Kaleth nodded. “We had two warnings it was happening today; one from the acolytes of Beshet, the other a cry for help that I heard from those trapped within the temple.”

“According to my acolytes, the siege began this morning. Somehow enough of the Winged Ones mustered strength and will to bar the temple doors against the Magi,” said Tir-ama-ten, her face a study in anger, though the gods being so insulted were not technically her own. “When the Magi could not get at the Winged Ones, they immediately mounted an armed siege. But it is a curious sort of siege; they mount guard around the temple and let no man in or out, but otherwise, do nothing.”

“I think they do not dare—yet,” Heklatis said, with a nod of his grizzled head. “The Winged Ones are much beloved of the people. The Magi may be saying that the Winged Ones are in danger, and that they are being guarded for their own protection.”

“It may be so. Fortunately, the temple might have been designed to withstand such a siege,” Kaleth replied, making a soothing motion with his hand. “And before my contact with him was blocked, the Winged One who called to me told me that the temple itself is well-provisioned and has its own well of pure water. The great danger is that the Magi will decide to use the Eye on them.”

Kiron shuddered, and Nofret made a little strangled sound in the back of her throat. Kiron was just as glad Aket-ten wasn’t here to have heard that. She had a great many friends in that temple. He remembered only too well seeing the Eye lash down out of the Magi’s Tower. It had been a fearsome sight that had left nothing but earth turned to glass behind it.

“I don’t think they will yet,” Ari said, thoughtfully. “If they do, they’ll lose the very thing they are anxious to have back—and they will earn themselves the hatred of the people. Fear is one thing; it is useful to them, but hatred? Hatred is dangerous. Hatred turns fear into anger, and anger turns inaction into action. No, I think they’ll wait for a few days at least, to see if they can force the Winged Ones out with hunger or thirst. And when that doesn’t work, they’ll try some sort of magic first, I think. Maybe try to enspell them from outside and make them walk out, or at least open the doors. Then, perhaps, they will try to get a traitor inside, to open the doors from within. Mind you, I don’t think they would hesitate for a moment to kill your Winged Ones if they can’t use them anymore. But I believe they will hope to find some other way, not the Eye, and that will take time.”

I hope you’re right, Kiron thought apprehensively.

“That is my judgment, too,” Kaleth agreed. “So we have a window of time during which we can get the Winged Ones out of their trap.” He looked straight at Kiron.

Kiron felt his eyes widening as he realized that Kaleth intended him and his Jousters to rescue the Winged Ones. “There are only ten of us!” he objected. “We can’t carry more than a single passenger, perhaps two, if they are children! That would take—”

“—days,” Ari interrupted, with a nod to Kaleth. “Or rather, nights, because I am in no mood to have that fire-sword you lot call an Eye burning me out of the sky. Kiron says he thinks it can’t work without sunlight, so there’s another reason besides stealth to fly in darkness. We couldn’t be better set up for this. We’re in the sickle moon, and it’s waning toward the three nights of dark; we’ll have full moon in a fortnight, and I’m willing to try flying in a full moon. We’ll just have to be careful.”

“Even more careful,” Kiron countered. “But—flying by night, even under a full moon? It’s never been done! The dragons are asleep as soon as the sun goes down!” He tried, and failed, to imagine flying in the darkness. It would be worse than flying in a storm, because no matter how high you went, you wouldn’t be able to see anything. How could you know where you were? Even at the full of the moon, how could you tell what was below you, or even how near it was?

“So there’s no reason not to try, because the Magi won’t be expecting it,” Kaleth countered serenely. “We don’t need to get them far, just out of the city proper, and then our human smugglers can take it from there.”

“We can take them to my sister Re-keron’s estate,” Lord Ya-tiren said instantly. “She has been one of our agents from the first. I can have word to her by the time the moon begins to wax. She can hide some and scatter the rest, so that they come to Sanctuary by ones and twos. No one will trouble her; she is known to take dangerously ill patients, and if she bruits it about that she has those with a pox—”

“But we need more than that!” Kiron said, throttling down his emotions as best he could. Not that he didn’t want to help the Winged Ones escape, but he wanted to have a reasonable chance of getting everyone out alive! “We need something to distract the Magi and their men from the temple, or we will never get more than a few Winged Ones away!” His stomach clenched, as he thought of trying to maneuver Avatre down to a landing when he couldn’t even guess where the ground was. “The only way we can get them is off the roof, and the only way we can do that is if we have light up there to see where to land. We need something so distracting no one will notice lights on the roof—” He shook his head. “I never thought I would ever say this, but we need something like an earthshake—”

Kaleth went white, and Marit put her hand on his arm.

He straightened, eyes wide, pupils dilated, and Kiron felt a touch of chill on the back of his neck

“What do you see?” Marit asked, urgently.

He stared straight ahead. “Fire—” he whispered. “Fire and smoke in the city, and fire from the sky, and then—then the earth crying out—”

He went rigid, sitting bolt upright, with his arms stretched rigidly along his thighs, and the chamber fell silent. The hair stood up on Kiron’s arms, his entire body went cold, and he had seen this before. Kaleth was in the grip of a vision, but not the “ordinary” sort granted by the powers of a priest or a Winged One. This was a vision sent straight from the hands of the gods, and their presence hung heavily in this room—now he was no longer Kaleth, once Prince of Alta. Now he was Kaleth, who spoke for the gods themselves.

“Train your dragons, Wingleader,” Kaleth said, his voice echoing hollowly, as though he spoke in a room much larger than this one. “Train them to trust you to be their eyes in the darkness. And make your ways of escape, Altan Lord, and ready your refuge. Watch well, Tian Priests, for only you will know when the time has come to act. This one will speak with the Winged Ones this night, and none shall prevent his voice, nor theirs, from being heard. Unhallowed fire will come from the sky, and the earth shall cry out after, and that will be your moment. So prepare to use it, and use it well, for there will not be another chance.” Kaleth’s face had a kind of inner light to it, as if it was a lamp made of alabaster, and his eyes looked into places no human was meant to see.

Kiron stole a glance at the Tians, who had never seen Kaleth speak as the Mouth of the Gods before. From their widened eyes and startled expressions, they knew very well what they were seeing and hearing. And they were also astonished beyond measure.

Has it been that long since one of theirs had that power? he wondered.

Well, it didn’t matter, for a moment later, that inward light faded, and Kaleth somehow—diminished—and became himself again. And, with it, that paralysis compounded of awe and a touch of terror eased, and it was possible to move.

Move, the Tian priests certainly did. Pta-hetop threw himself on his face, and the rest of the Tian priests followed suit before he was halfway to the floor.

“Oh, do get up,” Kaleth said mildly, rubbing his eyes and looking down at them. “Worship the gods, not their instrument. Do you honor the scalpel—or the surgeon? The hammer or the jewelsmith? The pen or the scribe? It is no great virtue of mine that makes me the tool of something greater than I.”

“Your humility is—” Pta-hetop began.

“—justified,” Kaleth said firmly. “I am a man, I have a gift, but it belongs to the gods and they may take it from me if they choose, just as they gave it to me. Now get up, so that I can tell you what they showed me. I hate speaking to the backs of heads.”

Slowly, and with some reluctance, the priests rose and resumed their places, although they still regarded Kaleth with trepidation and awe. Well, Kiron couldn’t blame them. He’d seen Kaleth serve as the Mouth several times now, and it never failed to make him want to fall on his face.

“At some point before the Winged Ones run too short of supplies, the people of Alta are going to take note of the fact that literally nothing is going into or out of the Temple of the Twins,” Kaleth said, as Marit held his hand. He was looking rather white about the lips, which was normal after he’d been granted a vision or used as the Mouth, and in this case, he’d been served with both. “I think it will be on or about the time of the full moon, but my vision didn’t give me too many details of that sort. They’re going to mob the temple to demand that the Winged Ones be let out. Finally, the Magi are going to loose the Eye on them.”

“No!” That cry of anguish and protest was wrung from several throats, Kiron’s among them, when Kaleth held up his hand.

“Don’t worry. They haven’t yet completely gone mad—they’ll be creeping the fire along at less than a walking pace. They’ll mean to frighten the mob away, not to really kill anyone.” Kaleth frowned. “I don’t think it’s out of kindness, though. I think it’s for some other reason. Maybe they’re afraid if they use the Eye openly on people who only want to protect their Winged Ones, the people will turn on them. Or maybe they think if they indiscriminately or openly kill too many with the Eye, people will flee the city in such numbers that there will be no one left to serve them. I don’t think even the army would remain if they overstepped this time.”

“They’ll use the Eye—” Heklatis repeated, and snapped his fingers. “By the gods! I just put things together! Using the Eye will trigger an earthshake, won’t it? And that’s our distraction!”

Kaleth nodded, looking sick but resolute. “Yes, it will. As it has from the beginning; most of us never noticed it because they used the Eye so seldom. I don’t know why it invokes an earthshake, but it disturbs something beneath the surface of the earth, and the more they use it, the worse the shake. By moving the beam of the Eye slowly, they will be using it for quite a long time, and the earthshake that follows, which will come right after sunset, will be very bad indeed.”

“Very bad?” Heklatis sucked on his lower lip. “Length of shake proportionate to time of use, chasing a mob—it’s going to be worse than anything we’ve seen in our lifetimes.”

“Yes,” Kaleth replied, and shook his head. “Terrifying, and even the Magi will be afraid. There will be fires all over the city, a great deal of chaos, and the guards watching the temple will, for the most part, flee. And that will be the distraction you need, Kiron. For that night, and the next three, there will be no one watching the temple; instead, the Magi will order the doors blocked or sealed shut, certain that the people will have too many problems of their own to think about releasing the Winged Ones, and equally certain that the temple will also have its share of deaths and injury. They will trust to the Eye and the earthshake to drive the Winged Ones out and into their hands.”

Kiron felt nausea in the back of his throat; he had endured the aftermath of one earthshake that had wrought terrible destruction in Alta City. He didn’t want to think about what this would do to a city already afraid and demoralized. “I would rather not have such an opportunity at that cost,” he replied.

But Kaleth shook his head. “It is none of our doing, or of the gods’,” he said firmly. “The Magi have already put all of this in motion, and it will happen whether we use the opportunity or not. They have chosen to besiege the Winged Ones, the people will come to protest, and they will use the Eye, triggering the shake.”

“Then we must make use of it, and take the bitter herb and make a medicine of it,” Ari said, standing up. “We have a plan. Let us put that into motion.”

Train your dragons to trust you to be their eyes in the darkness.

Easier said than done. And without Aket-ten, it would have been impossible.

First, the dragons did not want to be kept from their warm sands when the sun went down. They whined and complained and rebelled as much as if they had been asked to fly in the rain. If Aket-ten had not been able to tell them it was a needed thing—though she could not explain to them in ways they would understand why it was needed—it would not have been possible to keep them from their pens and well-earned sleep.

Second, they truly, passionately, fearfully did not want to fly once the sun was down, even when it was only dusk, and not true dark.

Because, according to Aket-ten, they could not see a quarter of what their humans could see once the brightest light was gone. As they lined up in the last light of the day, heads down and tails lashing, their apprehension was so thick Kiron could practically taste it.

“It is the opposite of cats,” she said, putting a comforting hand on the quivering shoulder of Re-eth-ke, whose objections to doing this unnatural thing were as strong as any other dragon’s, despite Aket-ten’s constant reassurances in her mind. “They may be able to see a mouse from the clouds by day, but they cannot see an elephant at fifty paces once the darkness comes.”

Kiron and Baken racked their brains to try and devise some training that would lead the dragons to trust in their riders, and in the end, it came down to breaking all of flying down to the simplest of parts.

First, and hardest—landing in the dark. If they could manage to give their beasts the confidence that they could do this, that they could trust their riders to be their eyes, everything else would follow.

They all began by taking their dragons up just as the sun set. Now, this was actually an advantage. The dragons could still see, and they were very anxious to be down again—

So, as soon as the sun-disk dropped completely below the horizon, they all allowed their dragons to descend. Slowly. Very, very slowly.

Which the dragons were all perfectly fine with—they were having trouble seeing, and were paying, as a consequence, exquisite attention to every tiny nuance of signal that their riders gave them.

Then Kiron made them take off again, as the dragon boys, now freed by the coming of dark from tending their dragonets, lit the fires they would use to land by.

This time, it was dusk, not sunset, and not all of them would rise. Kiron had figured as much; if they wouldn’t, he’d told the others not to force them; eventually, it would come. They might not be able to clearly see the rest of the wing taking off, but they could hear it, and instinct would urge them to do the same.

Avatre answered to his order; a measure of her trust in him was that she whined and whimpered but did not hesitate, though her wingbeats were heavy and reluctant. He put her to flying in a slow circle with the fires below at its center. When he peered through the dusk and counted, he found he had been joined in the air by Aket-ten and Re-eth-ke, Ari and Kashet, and Kalen and Se-atmen. Ari’s Kashet was still visibly blue, even in the dusk; Re-eth-ke, however, was hardly more than a shadow with silver edges. And brown-and-gold Se-atmen was merely warm shades of gray. That made something else occur to him; it was going to be difficult, if not impossible, to tell each other apart. They would have to have everything perfectly coordinated once darkness fell, and stick strictly to the plan.

But he could feel Avatre’s panic under his legs, in her trembling muscles and the way she darted her head around, trying to see the other dragons that she could hear. And he knew that she wouldn’t rise a third time tonight; she was terrified of a collision in the dark, and rightly so.

Of all of them, Kashet was probably the most panicked, because he was the most set in his ways, the least used to being asked to do the unusual. Only the love he had for Ari had driven him into the sky in the first place. “Ari!” he called into the growing darkness. “You down first!”

Kashet was a wind and a shadow below them, as he spiraled down toward the four fires, for those, at least, he could see. And he didn’t make a graceful landing—it was certainly the clumsiest he’d made since he learned to fly properly—but there were no sounds of disaster, and in the flickering firelight below, Kiron made out the dragon shadow scuttling out of the square, clearing it for the next pair.

“Kalen!” he called, but Se-atmen, having seen, however dimly, one dragon make a safe landing, was already on his way down.

“You first,” Aket-ten called to him. “Re-eth-ke will stay as long as I need her to once the sky isn’t crowded anymore.”

He didn’t intend to ask twice, for Avatre was straining her head toward the ground, whining anxiously, and he let her follow her instincts and the firelight, in a tight spiral down toward the light. But he could feel how much she trusted him and his eyes in the way she angled her flight to every shift in his weight, and the way she began her backwing instantly when he tugged on the reins. Her landing was much more graceful than Kashet’s had been, nearly as good as a daylight landing would have been. He jumped from her back and quickly led her out of the square of light, and none too soon, for not even Aket-ten could hold Re-eth-ke back when she knew she was going to be allowed to land.

He didn’t wait to watch it; Avatre was straining toward her pen, and he wanted her to have the reward of good work as immediately as possible. She followed his lead through the streets and corridors open to the sky that he had ordered left dark, with no torches or lanterns as were usually in place. The dragons had to learn to place all their trust in what their riders “told” them, and this was a good, safe way for them to continue the night’s lesson. Avatre knew her pen as soon as they stepped across the threshold, and with a cry, she waded out into the sand without waiting for him to unsaddle her.

And it just didn’t seem fair to make her get out again.

So he removed her equipment right where she stood, even though he hadn’t had to work so hard since the first time he’d unharnessed Kashet. Then he left her to work herself into her wallow, and she was asleep before he’d finished putting the equipment on its racks.

He joined the others by prearrangement in Lord Ya-tiren’s kitchen, where they were all enjoying well-earned jars of beer.

“They hated it,” Orest called, spotting him as he came in. “They were terrified. If it hadn’t been for Aket-ten, we’d never have gotten them up.”

“But they did it anyway,” Kiron pointed out. “And four of them actually took off again in the dark and landed a second time. I wish we could try this blindfolded and increase our training time, but we also need them to learn to use what little they can see. Ari, I am amazed Kaleth went up for you on the second try.”

“Not half as amazed as I am,” Ari replied, gulping down half his jar at a single go. “I think I was almost as frightened as he was. I thought he was going to fly right into you, and so did he.”

“We need more room,” Gan said decisively, shaking his head to get the hair out of his eyes. “Separate fires. They won’t be as frightened if they can’t hear other dragons flying so closely above them. That was why Khaleph wouldn’t rise; he heard the others and dug his talons in and wouldn’t move, and I know he was afraid of a collision. So more fires.”

“Or torches,” said Oset-re. “Four torches ought to give plenty of light.”

Good answer! “We’ll do it,” Kiron said instantly. “Absolutely. If it will make them feel more confident, we’ll do anything we have to.”

“Yes,” Huras said slowly. “I think we will. I think we can do this.” He looked around at all of them, that Altan baker’s son who had never been more than two streets away from his home before he’d become a Jouster and a rider of one of the first full clutch of dragons to be raised from the egg in Alta. “I thought you were mad, you and Kaleth together—but after tonight—yes. We can do this.”

“Yes, we can,” Ari replied, not quite slamming his empty jar on the table. “Yes, by the gods, we can. We have to; there’s no question. And we will.”

FOURTEEN

TEN dragons rose into the hot, late-afternoon sky, heading into the west, and climbing steeply for as much height as they could get. The higher they were, the less likely it would be that someone on the ground could see riders on the dragons. If anyone—other than the Bedu—saw them, Kiron wanted the watcher to think they were wild. Every bit of this scheme was fraught with peril, and every moment of it contained some potential for mischance. If it went off unthinkably well, no one would know how the Winged Ones escaped. If it all fell to pieces, either the dragons would refuse to fly, or be unable to rescue everyone, or the Winged Ones would refuse to take to the skies, or someone would find out in advance how they were to get out, and where their refuge was, and seize them as they landed.

Realistically speaking, Kiron expected their outcome to fall somewhere in between. There wasn’t much more that they could do that they hadn’t already done to keep everything a secret.

Aket-ten’s Aunt Re had already spread the word that she had taken patients with the pox into her care, and to bolster that tale, several artfully made-up “patients”—in reality, more covert escapees from the city—had been brought by donkey cart to her estate.

Interestingly, no one was as yet making any attempt to stop people from leaving the city, so long as they were perfectly ordinary sorts. These were not perfectly ordinary sorts; they were lesser nobles, and had already been turned back once, probably because they had tried to leave with everything portable they owned piled up on carts behind them. This time they had smuggled their portable goods out ahead, and themselves out as Re-keron’s patients, rather than trying to leave with all their goods and gear at once. And probably someone would steal some of those possessions on the way, but that was the price they would have to pay to get any of it out. They should count themselves lucky, or so Kiron thought, to get out with more than their skins and the clothing they stood up in.

There was no way of telling if the Magi would have allowed them to leave had they simply walked out on their own two feet without taking all their belongings—or if the Magi didn’t care about the goods, but had no intention of allowing any of the city’s elite to leave. Forewarned by his children and Kaleth, Lord Ya-tiren had taken the precaution of moving people and goods in small quantities over a period of two fortnights, then had made a great show of taking the household, as he often did, to his riverside estate. He had encountered no opposition, but when it was discovered that he was not to be found, perhaps the Magi had decided that there would be no more such defections.

The nobles who had been turned back had quickly found one of Lord Khumun’s covert agents, who had seen them as the ideal candidates for the initial move of the greater plan of rescue. He had suggested the disguise as pox victims; they had no idea that they were just one more item in a much larger plan.

They had arrived at Re-keron’s home several days ago and were already gone, but Re-keron was keeping up the fiction that she was still tending them. As predicted, no one had ventured anywhere near the boundary of the estate as marked by the plague marker stones. It was by no means the first time Re-keron had taken in such people. She had a reputation for being able to make amazing cures, and an equal reputation for eccentricity that made people go to her only as a last resort.

There were some things not even the Magi could compel a man to face, and the pox was one of them. No one had bothered to follow the donkey carts, and no one was going to go past the plague marker stones until Re-keron herself took them away.

Re-keron’s son trained horses to pull chariots. He had a huge, bare-earth training ground hemmed in on all four sides by a wall for that purpose. That was where the dragons would be landing, just after dark. There were supposed to be fire pots all around the perimeter, and to every third one, some salts of copper had been added to make the flames green and blue. It should be easy to spot, even in the darkness, from the air. Aket-ten had flown there and back several times to get the timing right so that they would arrive after darkness fell.

It was a good plan. Kiron only hoped that it would work exactly as they had mapped it out. There were a great many things that were out of their hands. They couldn’t predict exactly when the earthshake would strike, for instance, nor how much damage it would do. They couldn’t know how visible they would be when they landed on the roof of the temple.

And no one knew if the earthshake would be felt as far as Re-keron’s estate or if the dragons would be so frightened by it that they would refuse to make the first flight out that night. Aket-ten had tried to explain it to them, but this was something that was going to happen in some nebulous “future,” and dragons were not very good at understanding things like “the future.”

At least Avatre was no longer afraid to fly after darkness fell. She didn’t like it, and he didn’t blame her, but she wasn’t afraid, and she was willing to trust him to keep her safe. In fact, of all the dragons, the only one still showing some fear of flying by night was Kashet—once again, perhaps, because he was the oldest and the least used to changing his ways. But for Ari, he would do anything, and he was certainly proving that now. They were flying right outside of what Kashet considered to be “safe” territory, known lands, and they were doing it at sunset. Soon enough, it would be dark.

It had been Nofret’s turn to fret tonight. Ari could not be spared from this mission. Kashet and Kashet alone was big enough to take some of the heaviest of the Winged Ones. Nofret had not made a scene, but she had been white-lipped and wide-eyed, and her farewell embrace was as fervent as even Ari could have wished.

“I cannot come this time,” she had said, as they drew apart, “but the next time, I will have my dragon, and I will never leave your side!”

Kiron’s shoulders were tight with apprehension, but he tried not to communicate that to Avatre. He actually had to fly without looking in the direction they were going, for the setting sun was straight ahead, and they were flying into it. Instead, he kept his eyes on the ground, judging their height by the landmarks they passed over.

Shadows stretched long blue fingers over sands turning ruddy with the light from the setting sun. It was easy to make out every dune, every wind ripple, by the shadows they cast. From time to time, he spotted one of the Bedu on a camel, smaller than an ant, standing a motionless guard atop a dune or a ridge. They were there to keep watch over the desert, looking for spies along their path.

But they had an advantage that the Magi did not. They had the gods with them. Kiron kept reminding himself of that.

Thanks to Kaleth and the Tians, the Magi could no more use their powers to spy on Sanctuary—or even find it—than Kaleth could use his to spy on their counsels. They might guess that it existed, but they could not know where, nor could they know how many people had fled to it.

And they could have no idea that there were still dragons that answered to the hand of man. And that was their best weapon at the moment. It was a secret that would probably not survive the rescue of the Winged Ones, but for now, the one direction that the Magi would not look for interference coming from was “up.”

The two most dangerous parts of this mission were the physical landings and take offs, and being able to remain hidden at Aunt Re’s for the three days they thought it would take to get everyone out.

At least the one thing they would not lack was food for the dragons—or for themselves, for that matter. Re-keron’s estate was very wealthy, so much so that she did not charge for her ministrations; she could afford to be a Healer as a hobby. It was that wealth, and her reputation as a doer of good works, as well as the distance from the capital, that had so far kept her safe from the Magi.

The shadows below were blending into one another, with only the tops of things still gilded with the last light. It was possible to look at the sun now; it was a flattened ball on the horizon, red as a pomegranate. Desert was giving way to marginal land, and Kiron could only hope that anyone who saw them would think them a string of swamp dragons going back to their nests along the Red and Black Daughters of Great Mother River.

The last of the sun tipped below the horizon as they flew over the first signs of arable land, and Kiron saluted the god in his heart, asking in a brief prayer for his blessing. Overhead, the stars on the robe of Nofet, the Goddess of Night, began to shine.

Oh, sweet and gentle one, you who are the keeper of the shadows, make your shadows to hide us from your enemies and ours! he prayed, as the sky darkened. Hold your hand above us; let the night demons go to haunt those who have sent so many needlessly to their deaths—and shelter us from all those who would do harm to us.

This was the next tricky part of the journey; they had to find the Black Daughter before the last light faded, so that they could follow it to Re-keron’s estate. Kiron took a quick glimpse over his shoulder, and with great relief, saw that the nearly-full moon was already above the horizon. So at least, once they actually found the river, they’d be able to see it by the moonlight on the water.

As the sky turned black and filled with Nofet’s Jewels, he felt a moment of panic—looking for the Black Daughter, and still not seeing it—

And then, at last, a glint of moonlight on the water, and there it was. With what was almost a sob of relief, he turned Avatre to follow it downstream, toward the sea, toward Alta once again—

The others followed him, like a skein of geese. No fear now that anyone would spot them from below—or know what they saw, if by chance they did catch a glimpse of a shadow crossing the moon.

As they winged their way across the star-strewn sky, their dragons’ wings making the pattern of three beats and a glide, a feeling that all of this was a dream came over him. It was certainly unnatural. He should not be flying by night. No dragon ever flew by night before. From below came an entirely different set of sounds from those that came up during the day; the song of the nightingale, the barking of dogs, a snatch of song from a hut as they passed over it, and in the distance, the bellow of a river horse. The scent of the river came up to his nostrils, thick, heavy, and very wet; a complicated aroma of mud and weeds, latas and lily, fish and decay. Overpowering for a moment; he had completely forgotten that scent in the relative absence of scent in the desert. It filled him with sudden memories of his first days and nights in Alta, his first days and nights of freedom. . . .

It had taken so long to get to Alta City once he had crossed into the lands that Alta claimed! But then, Avatre had been young, and not nearly so strong as she was now. And they were not going to Alta City; Aunt Re’s estate was one of the farthest from the city on this river.

It had taken him most of three days to get to the city. It would take them most of the night to get to Aunt Re’s Great House. That was a long time to be flying without thermals to help, but the dragons were all fit and well fed, and thoroughly rested. There would never be a better time for this.

The first lights appeared below, marking the homes of farmers, fisher folk, the occasional Great House. Each time, Avatre looked longingly toward them and whined, but obeyed when Kiron gave her the signal to fly on. This was something they had not been able to train for, but apparently the general habit of obedience was enough.

He would have liked to call to the others, but voices carried in the darkness, and voices out of the sky would certainly alert people below. Even if they thought it was ghosts or demons, they might be tempted to peek. So they were maintaining strict silence until they landed.

It was a curious thing—he would have thought, if there was any such thing as ghosts or night-prowling demons to be seen, they would have been visible from above. Yet there was nothing, or rather, nothing out of the ordinary, though once he did get a glimpse of the astonishing sight of a herd of river horses on land. He would not have thought their ponderous bulk could have been sustained out of the water.

The moon passed, slowly and with all the regal deliberation of the goddess that she was, from east to west. The dragons flew on, but Kiron sensed Avatre growing weary, putting more effort into her wingbeats, and he pummeled his brain to try and remember how long Aket-ten had said it would be before they saw Aunt Re’s fires.

And just when he was starting to really worry—he saw them.

A welcome sight they were, too—several furlongs away from the river itself, a blazing rectangle of yellow and blue-green, to his dark-accustomed eyes the center of the training ground looked as bright as day. And there was no holding Avatre back either; she spotted it, and put on a burst of energy to reach it. Like it or not, she was going to land there!

He glanced behind at the eight other shadows ranged out in a V-shape from either of Avatre’s wings, and saw that their dragons, too, had spotted the fires and come to a similar decision, for they had stopped the pattern of three beats and a glide and were plowing through the air with will and determination.

It was a very good thing that the training ground was as large as the old Landing Court of the Jousters’ Compound in Tia because there was no holding back any of them. Avatre landed first, but only by the smallest of margins. The rest came in anyhow, picking a spot by virtue of the fact that no one else was in it. In a way, the landing was an anticlimax; while it wasn’t done neatly, it was completed with no injuries or collisions.

Only when all of them were down, and the dragons’ wings were furled and the riders out of the saddles, did anyone emerge from the gate at the end of the training ground. And then, it was not someone, but an entire procession of people, headed by a very formidable-looking woman in a fine, if plain, wig and an equally fine, if plain, linen gown. No jewels adorned Aunt Re, but she didn’t need them to denote her authority. Her erect carriage, her challenging gaze, and her rather formidable prow of a nose marked her as someone to be reckoned with.

But she smiled as Aket-ten ran toward her and flung her arms around her neck, and gestured to some of her servants to extinguish the fire pots.

“Where is the wingleader?” she called.

“Stay,” he told Avatre, and approached Aket-ten’s aunt, giving her a bow of respect when he came within a few paces of her.

“Well done, boy,” she said warmly. “That was no easy journey.”

“It was the easiest part of what we are to do,” he said somberly, and she nodded in agreement.

“My people have brought meat for your dragons; do you wish to remain with them, or would you care to eat in the dining chamber?” she asked.

Kiron ran his hand through his hair, and made a rueful face. “I think we had rather eat in the dining chamber, but had better remain with our dragons,” he replied. “They’re going to be uneasy enough as it is, and they don’t like to be parted from us.”

He had halfway expected her to be offended, but to his surprise, she broke into an enormous smile. “Well said!” she exclaimed, clapping her hands together. “I like a man who thinks of his beast’s and servant’s comfort before his own! I raised my sons that way, and I cannot count the number of times one of them has declined a feast to sit with an ill or birthing animal, and rightly, too!” She turned to Aket-ten. “You’ve chosen well, niece, you may keep him.”

Kiron felt himself growing warm, and even though most of the fire pots had been extinguished, he saw Aket-ten blushing. No wonder Aunt Re had a reputation for being eccentric! And no wonder the Magi had not challenged her! He rather pitied them if they tried.

But she paid no attention to their reactions; instead, she turned to her servants and gestured, and they began bringing, first wheelbarrows full of meat, then the makings for sleeping pallets, while off to one side, a few more patiently stood, laden with platters of food.

The dragons, already exhausted, wolfed down their meat with weary determination to get as much into their bellies as they could before they had to lie down. Each of them chose a place to curl up on hard-packed earth that still held some of the sun’s warmth in it; most of them chose places close together, with only Avatre and Kashet choosing to be a little aloof. Interestingly, Aunt Re’s servants showed no fear of the dragons as they moved about, helping the equally weary riders spread pallets on the ground next to their beasts, then coming to offer them food from the platters.

And as Kiron made his selections, he felt as if the first part of their ordeal had been well-rewarded, for he hadn’t seen food like this since they had left Alta. Fresh fruit, dripping with juice, milk as well as beer to drink, cheese, duck, fish—oh, fish! He would have felt ashamed to help himself so greedily to the fish, except that he saw out of the corner of his eye that even elegant, aristocratic Gan was digging into the fish with the glee of a sweet-starved child and with as little regard for manners.

Aunt Re observed them all with a maternal smile on her face. “It does my heart good to see healthy boys enjoying food,” she said, ostensibly to Aket-ten, but loud enough for them all to hear. “The gods put good food on this earth for us to appreciate it, and it is blasphemous to do otherwise. And as you can see, I follow that creed!” Then she laughed, and patted her ample middle.