Alta

direct them, they’ll put my bedroom where I’ll be hearing chatter and clatter all night long, and my study in the darkest room of the lot. I promise though, I will wait for you at supper.”

His spirits rose again. “I’ll hold you to that promise,” he said, and led Avatre off to the grooming pens feeling very much better.

At supper, however, despite his attempt to sit with Aket-ten in an unobtrusive corner of the enclosure, the others spotted them and settled themselves at the table, completely ignoring some fairly fierce glares on his part.

This eating area could have been the duplicate of the one in the Tian compound; there were the identical wooden tables and benches, the plain stone walls, and nearly the same cooking smells. The only real difference was that besides the movable awnings on lines overhead, the four walls supported permanent awnings as well, held up on posts, so that the area open to the sky was considerably smaller. And beneath the cooking smells, the scent of the compound was much different—with so many swamp dragons here, and with the canal so near, the air was always humid and full of water scent.

No wonder the Tians are envious of us. We have so much water we have to find ways to getting rid of it, but once you move from the Great Mother River, there is nothing worth having in Tia.

He wondered what Aket-ten would think of that observation. If they had been alone, he probably would have asked her opinion. But with the others around—well, they’d probably think he was an idiot.

He sat there, tongue-tied, while Gan kept Aket-ten laughing with his imitations and his cleverness. He couldn’t help but notice her admiring glances at Oset-re’s handsome profile—and neither could Oset-re.

Huras, however, seemed to be on Kiron’s side. He had no more advantage than Kiron did in flirting—his father the baker surely did not move in court circles!

And, in fact, he probably had a bit less of an advantage, for although he was frighteningly intelligent, he was not much inclined to speak unless he was spoken to, and his large frame and stolid expression often made people think he was stupid. While Kiron didn’t think that Aket-ten had made that mistake, Huras also seemed far more interested in what Aket-ten could tell him about Tathulan than about herself.

Since Huras was at the outer end of the table, he got the serving dishes first—and he kept spearing the choicest bits and passing them directly to Kiron with a nod toward Aket-ten and a conspiratorial wink. Kiron was good at taking hints; he passed the bounty on to Aket-ten, and at least got the reward of a nod of thanks and a smile.

And Toreth also seemed, obliquely at least, to be helping Kiron. When Gan was being a little too clever, Toreth deflated him with a barbed bit of wit of his own. And when Oset-re started moving to put that handsome face of his in the best possible light, he asked, innocent as a child, “Are you posing for a statue, Oset-re? I should wait until I had earned my first Gold of Honor if I were you.”

Aket-ten had the grace not to laugh at these stabs at the others’ vanity, but she hid a smile behind the cover of her jar of beer.

“Aket-ten,” asked Orest, suddenly, quite out of nowhere. “What was going on when you left? Did you really lose your other powers?”

The group around the table went very quiet, although the chatter from the rest of the eating-court covered the silence.

“Why do you ask?” she said, in so low a voice that they could hardly hear it. Then—“Never mind,” she continued. “I will tell you all about it, if you all will come to my courtyard later tonight.” She looked around at all of them. “Kiron and Toreth trust you with their secrets; I can do no less.”

Toreth started a bit at that, but said nothing. Kiron held his tongue as well. But the rest of the meal was eaten in a peculiar silence—not uncomfortable, but awkward. The boys were not sure what they were going to hear, but they were fairly sure it wasn’t something that went well with mild flirtation. Which, Kiron thought, was surprisingly perceptive of them. But it seemed as though when they were prevented from flirting, they—or Oset-re and Gan at least—didn’t know what else to say to her.

In a way, Kiron could sympathize. The things they normally chattered about—the dragonets, the plans for training—didn’t fit in with the usual definition of “polite conversation around a young lady.” They had no way of knowing that such things would be as interesting to Aket-ten as any of the boys around the table.

Not that Kiron had any experience with “polite conversation around a young lady.” He hadn’t the breeding or the family background, so he decided that he wasn’t even going to try coming up with witty repartee. He’d just talk to Aket-ten, like he would talk to anyone else, like the two of them had talked when she was still with the Healers.

So he and Toreth filled the void. Toreth passed on news from outside, and he reported what he had learned from the older Jousters about how the fighting was going. There actually wasn’t much Jousting going on, not with those storms continuing to keep Tian dragons out of the sky. So instead of Jousting, the Altan dragon riders were acting as scouts, and disrupting the Tian camps by means of a number of clever attacks. For instance, setting fire to the wagon-loads of fodder for the chariot horses not only frightened the horses and even ran some off the picket lines, but made it necessary to send for more fodder or try and find grazing. And dropping jars full of deadly black scorpions and poisonous adders into the camps was more than just a disruption. For the first time in years, in fact, the Tian lines had been pushed back. Several small villages had been retaken, and the Tians who had arrogantly moved in had fled in confusion. Kiron’s only complaint was that at least half the credit for the recent string of victories had to go to the Magi, who kept Tian dragons grounded. Eventually, Aket-ten—looking as if she wished to stay—excused herself, saying she had to supervise the servants setting up her things.

Between them, Toreth and Kiron probably could have kept that particular conversation going all night. But there were, of course, chores to be done, dragonets to be settled into sleep, before they could gather in Aket-ten’s new quarters. Of all of them, Kiron had perhaps the lightest duty; the babies needed a last extra feeding to sustain them in their sleep, and they were growing so fast that they all had to have their sensitive skin rubbed with oily cloths before they went to sleep, or they might scratch too hard and damage themselves. Avatre needed nothing more than a little extra grooming, and to be told what a glorious dragon she was and that Kiron would be back soon. She settled into her sand with a sigh of pure pleasure, and was fast asleep in moments as the moon rose over the walls of the compound.

So he was the first to present himself at the door to Aket-ten’s courtyard. It hardly merited the title; it couldn’t have been more than fifteen paces in length or width, and boasted a tiny, square pool with a few latas, a single fish, and a square stone box in which a small acacia tree grew, scenting the night air with its blossoms. There was only one bench; Aket-ten was setting out pillows even as he arrived, and lighting lamps and torches around the walls. Somehow he felt relieved that she was not bringing them into any of those rooms. He helped her with the latter, allowing her to go back into one of the rooms for more cushions.

There were no mosaics adorning the pool, only the plainest of white tiles; there were no paintings on the walls. It had, after all, been a courtyard shared by a dozen servants, all crammed on pallets into three of the four rooms around it—the fourth room being the bathing room, of course. But Aket-ten seemed completely pleased with her new domain.

“Are you all right here?” he asked doubtfully.

“I feel safer here than at home,” she replied, “And I wouldn’t trust living with the Fledglings now no matter what the senior Winged Ones promised me.” She sighed, and sat down on a cushion at the edge of the pool, trailing her fingers in the water. “I don’t trust them anymore; I can’t. I think they would give me over to the Magi in a heartbeat. I couldn’t stay with the Healers either; I was in the way. They were quite polite about it, but I was an inconvenience at best, and I didn’t have a great deal in common with them. Healers are—very passionate about what they do, and I just didn’t share that passion. Here I’m at least useful.”

“I believe you would find a way to be useful no matter where you were,” said Toreth, coming in on the end of the statement. “I should warn you, though, Lord Khumun will have our heads if we stay too long here, tonight or any other night.”

“I’ll chase you out before you get yourselves into trouble,” she replied, as the rest straggled in. “I have duties of my own, too—ones I might as well tell you now, because it answers my brother’s question.” She looked around at everyone but Kiron. “No, I did not lose my powers—which were Animal Speech, the Silent Speech with a fellow Winged One, and the Far-Seeing Eye. I did not have the Seer’s Eye, which imparts a view of the future; I did seem to have it at first, but it was the Far-Seeing eye, not the