Alta

onions and a little meat. He did not have a great deal to pack either. By the time she was finished—leaving nothing but the halter rope this morning!—so was he.

And so, apparently, was the Mouth. Vetch looked up to see the Mouth waiting in the shelter of the date palms, the halter of a camel in one hand. Once Vetch was aware of the preparations, the Mouth made the camel kneel, and mounted, curling one leg over the front of the saddle and locking a foot behind the other knee, then giving the beast the command to rise. With a groan of complaint, the camel climbed back up to his feet and the Mouth started off, tapping the camel’s shoulder with a crop to make it trot.

The kamiseen whined, filling the silence that the Mouth left behind; carried on it were the smokes of cooking fires, and the breath of the deeper desert where even the Bedu did not venture. Vetch took his time in harnessing Avatre; it wasn’t as if they would have any trouble finding their guide once they were in the air! In fact, they would probably spend a lot of time circling overhead as the camel crossed the desert beneath them at what would seem to be the pace of a tortoise compared to that of the dragon.

And that was, in fact, exactly what happened. Although the rider was out of sight by the time Avatre pushed off the ground with Vetch on her back, it was not long before Vetch spotted their guide, and it took relatively little effort to catch up.

Avatre was a fine flyer now, and Vetch was used to the bounding wingbeats that left the stomach somewhere behind. In fact, unless he actually thought about it, he never even noticed it; he was so in tune with her, it sometimes felt to him as if they were part of a single, united creature, conqueror of the air.

At first, Avatre had to do a great deal of actual flying, doubling back and forth across their guide’s path in that peculiar combination of flying and gliding that the dragons used when there were no thermals to ride. And the air of early dawn was cold enough to numb the feet and hands and nose; Avatre didn’t like it much, and to tell the truth, neither did Vetch. He shivered in the chill, and was just grateful that the kamiseen gave Avatre something to ride. If this had been still air, she’d have had to work a lot harder. It was the gods’ own gift that she had made her First Flight at the beginning of the kamiseen, for the wind had aided them all across the desert. Had it not been the season of the wind, he had the feeling that they would be making old bones together in the sand, even now.

But as the sun rose and the sand began to heat up, he stopped shivering and Avatre was able to switch from tacking back and forth on the wind to flying as hawks and falcons of the desert did, spiraling passively up one thermal, then gliding down until she found another to repeat the process, following roughly the same course as their guide. For his part, as far as Vetch could tell from above, the Mouth was singularly unperturbed about whether or not they were keeping up, but kept the camel at a steady, ground-eating lope. Fast enough to make good time and the sort of pace a camel could keep up indefinitely.

Vetch was keeping an eye on the horizon as well as on their guide, and when, shortly after midday, a thin line of green appeared along it, he was not at all surprised that their guide chose the shelter of a thicket of acacia trees to stop at, and dismounted. The Mouth didn’t wave to Vetch from below, but then again, he didn’t need to, for the message of the green horizon was clear enough. The Mouth had brought them to within sight of land claimed only by Alta; peaceful land, where he would not run into either fighting, or Tian Jousters. It was time for him to leave the desert and his guide.

Avatre drifted down to the waiting Bedu, and backwinged to a graceful landing—she’d gotten a great deal better at them than she used to be! And the Mouth nodded toward the horizon as soon as she had folded her wings.

“Half a day, and you will be where you wished to be—across the border, in Alta. I hope that this proves to be truly what you desired,” the Mouth said.

Half a day—That seemed about right. In the clear air of the desert, things were a lot farther away than they seemed to be to one who had been born in the land reclaimed from the swamp. He shaded his eyes with one hand and peered out into the western distance, the faint haze that marked the beginning of land where things could grow. He licked dry lips. “It has to be what I truly desire, doesn’t it?” he replied, as straightforward as the Bedu had been. “There’s no place else for me to go.”

“You undertake a different sort of trial, when you cross that border, young Kiron,” the Mouth persisted.

“And perhaps things will not always be to your liking. We of the desert know little of the dwellers in the marshy delta of the Great Mother River, for they have little to do with us, and we have nothing at all to do with those of the Seven-Ringed City itself. I cannot tell you what to expect other than the advice I have already given you. It may be that you go only from one hazard to another.”

“But I will be free,” he said softly, with one hand on Avatre’s neck. “And so will she. Perhaps we need remain only long enough for her to grow to her full strength and size, and if things are not as I had hoped—well, it will be easier for us to escape again, should it come to that.”

The Mouth’s head bowed slightly. “This is so.” The other stared with Vetch to that distant haze of green. “Then, I can only say, your gods go with you.”

Kiron touched his brow, his lips, and his heart in thanks and farewell. He gave Avatre the signal and, with a tremendous shove of her legs, she launched for the sky.

When he looked back over his shoulder, he saw that the Mouth had already turned the camel and was heading back in the direction of the clan’s encampment. Which was just as well, since he had no intention of following the advice about not hunting to the letter. While he and Avatre were still in the desert, they still had hunting-rights, and he was not going to assume that once they crossed into that belt of green, they would immediately find a place where he could obtain the tremendous amount of meat that she needed to sustain her.

So long as he kept that green in sight, they had a goal. They had already come so far north before turning back toward Altan lands that any interception by Tian Jousters on patrol was next to impossible. So while they would probably camp tonight inside that belt of green, before they reached it, he would be certain that Avatre had eaten her fill.

When they found an exceptionally strong thermal, he sent her up as high as she could go, remembering how the first time he had been carried a-dragonback he had sworn he would never, ever set foot off the ground again. It had been an utterly terrifying experience for one who had never been any farther from the ground than the flat roof of his father’s farm-house. To have that experience while lying face-down over Ari’s saddle, when he had never seen either a Jouster or a dragon up close before, had only made it worse.

And to tell the truth, the first few flights with Avatre had been almost as frightening. But he had known very well that he should not and could not walk across the desert, so he had gritted his teeth and tried to guide her, and somehow, they had learned to fly together.

Only on the latter half of the journey had they actually learned to hunt together, however. Their first few efforts, singly and together, had been less than stellar, and for a while, he had relied on the Bedu more than he had liked.

Now, though—he was actually rather proud of their ability to feed themselves. They had even worked out more than one technique, and Avatre had learned how to dive, rake with her claws, strike, and hover on commands that could be either physical or verbal. She had even learned to tow or carry something on the other end of a rope; a hard lesson to master, when her natural instinct was to either fight it or give in and flop down at the end of the tether.

This sort of desert—on the very edge of the fertile lands—had a lot more in the way of game than it might appear. There were wild camels, asses, and goats, animals that had escaped from the Bedu; there were also herds of gazelle (Avatre’s favorite) and smaller game.

And lions. And Kiron (he must think of himself as Kiron!) had learned that he could often rely on the lions to show him where the other game was.

So when, as they circled up the thermal, he saw a pride of lions trotting purposefully toward the north, far below them, he raised his eyes and looked for the cloud of dust that might be telling them where the game was.

Avatre had learned the same signs, and her eyes were keener than his. Before he had seen the telltale plume of slightly thicker dust carried on the kamiseen wind, she had made her turn out of the thermal and was gliding down in a new direction, north and a bit west, bringing them closer to the green horizon.

It took two more thermals, and they had left the lions far behind, when the herd of wild asses came into