Aerie

—above all—he had not made any of them feel as if he disapproved of them or what they were doing. Possibly that was all a deception, but if it was, he was a better fraud than Peri was able to detect.

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

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

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

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

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

NINE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you could endure the furnace heat.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He hoped.

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

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

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

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

There were goats, donkeys, and camels everywhere.

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