Aerie

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

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

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

And then—we will graduate to the second stage.

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

“But—” the supercilious one began faintly.

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

They looked at each other, then back at her.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She relaxed a little further and—

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

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

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

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

TEN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Could there have been plague, or at least sickness? Was there some famous healer in that direction that everyone had decided to go to? Had there been a prophecy, some utterance from one of the