The High Priestess moved out of the shadows like a ghost, startling him. “New orders, Wingleader,” she said gravely. “Orders sent through me to you, from the Mouth of the Gods who is called Kaleth. There is no reason to stay, and your presence will bring danger to Re-keron as the Magi seek for your dragons. Come home, he says. We will scatter, and come to Sanctuary safe.”
Kiron swallowed down his nausea and looked at the others. “Can you all make the flight?” he asked.
One by one, they nodded as Re’s servants handed them identical bundles to his. Even Aket-ten looked up, face smeared with tears and soot, and nodded. And he felt, at that moment, a terrible, aching need for the desert, for a place that was clean, where people did not put each other to the flame because they could not be controlled.
And where other people did not stand by and watch them do so. He had thought the Tians were cruel. What the Magi had turned his own people into was something far worse—people who now were so afraid for themselves that they had lost every vestige of morality.
“Right,” he said harshly. “Let’s get out of here.”
And that was what haunted him, the entire flight back. The priestess had called it a “rot.” If so, it was a rot that killed the conscience, and maybe the soul along with it. Those people had watched the Magi drag the Winged Ones away, day after day, and had done nothing. They had watched the Magi’s men lay siege to the temple for weeks, and had done nothing. The mob that had finally gathered to protest had done very little, and had scattered quickly when the Eye was used. And it
should
have been possible to save the Winged Ones; why had the army not rebelled at their treatment? No point in saying they were under orders either; since when was it right to follow orders you knew were immoral?
And tonight, they had watched while the Magi’s men prepared to burn the temple to the ground, and had done nothing.
And it had all begun long before this. Hadn’t they been spending these last moons simply looking the other way while friends and relations were denounced and hauled away? Hadn’t many of them been willing to make accusations of their own to prove their “loyalty” and turn suspicious eyes away from themselves?
And why? Because they were too attached to possessions, to the city itself, to flee? Because it was easy to look away when the Magi were only hurting the foreigners, or the nobles, or the people in the next Ring that you didn’t know, and because when you looked the other way once, it was easy to keep doing so?
Or because it was easier to believe the lies that the Magi told? Easier not to think for one’s own self? Easier to accept at face value everything that was told to you?
It gnawed at him all the way back, and when he and Avatre finally landed in the gray light of dawn, he felt as if he could not sleep until he had cleaned his body of the stench of burning. He went down into the cavern, and took a rare bath, scrubbing himself until his skin felt raw to be rid of the smell.
He went to find Aket-ten, but she was nowhere to be seen. Maybe that was just as well. He wasn’t sure he could offer her any kind of comfort, when she had just seen a place where she knew people burning to the ground.
When he staggered off to his bed, Avatre was already asleep, and as he gazed on her, he felt a moment of envy to see her, so calm and peaceful, with no nightmares to trouble her sleep.
They certainly troubled his, that night, and for many nights to come.
And yet, sooner than he would have thought, things got back to normal, or mostly normal.
Perhaps it was because he had not actually seen the temple burning. Only Ari had endured that particular sight, and maybe his experience in fighting had hardened him somewhat to such things. Maybe it was because, once the last of the Winged Ones arrived, there was another shrine made to the memories and spirits of those who had been lost.
Maybe it was nothing more than time—time which was, of a certainty, filled.
It would have been far worse had Aket-ten actually witnessed the horror of the burning temple, but the others had turned her back at the halfway point, and all she knew was that it had burned, and those who were left, with it. She sought Kiron out the night after their return to Sanctuary, and spent all of it weeping herself sick in his arms. It was a very long night; perhaps the longest in his life, save only one. He would have spared her that distress if he could have.
And yet, this was the face of war from which she had been sheltered. Death, and not death in battle, but terrible, useless, needless death, the deaths of those you knew, cared about—even loved.
War was no longer an abstract to her. And, in fact, neither was death.
After that, though he was sure it preyed on her mind as nothing in her life ever had before, not even her own fear, she never said another word about it.
She drooped despondently about for a while, and that was worse than if she had wept and raged and railed against the Magi. And he was tempted—oh, how tempted!—to weigh his pain against hers; the miserable deaths of father, mother, sisters against the deaths of her friends.
But he didn’t. You couldn’t weigh pain as if it was the Feather of Truth. He knew that now, something he had not known before Toreth’s murder. One pain couldn’t outweigh another; no pain could balance out another. In the end, all pain stood alone.
And that wasn’t something he could tell her either. It was something she would have to learn herself.
Eventually, she regained her spirits as the Winged Ones trickled in a few at a time, and she was able to gain some sort of consolation with them. This was one place in her life where Kiron felt absolutely helpless to give her exactly the kind of consolation she needed. He didn’t know these people; they hadn’t been his friends. He could only mourn them in the abstract—and it wasn’t as if he didn’t already have enough deaths in his life to mourn.
And it wasn’t as if their days didn’t have plenty to fill them.
Not only were the dragonets hatched out in Sanctuary growing rapidly and requiring preliminary training, but Coresan’s family was doing so as well, and he had a whole new problem to deal with.
Nofret was besotted. It was all anyone could do to get her to tear herself away from the dragonets every evening, and she was beside herself with impatience to get out to them in the morning. Kiron wouldn’t have credited it. He would have thought that while she would feel some affection for them, she wouldn’t have felt that bond that every other Jouster with a hand-raised dragon did.
But there was not a shadow of a doubt; she obsessed over those dragonets just as if she was their own mother. In particular, she was attracted to a gorgeous little creature of Thurian purple shading to deep scarlet that she named “The-on”; the smallest of the lot, but still larger than the smallest dragonet back in Sanctuary, for once again, Coresan had thrown an outstanding clutch. And this little female was just as attracted to Nofret as Nofret was to her. Every day, she ventured nearer and nearer to her human watcher, always with one eye on her mother, who would snort warningly whenever her offspring drew too near to the human. But every day, what Coresan considered “too near” grew less, until one day while Coresan was dozing and all of them were worn out from playing, the dragonet waddled over to Nofret, dropped her head in Nofret’s lap, and fell immediately asleep.
Nofret froze, not daring to touch; Aket-ten and Kiron tensed, Kiron signaling Avatre to be ready to dive in to the rescue if need be. Coresan raised her head, gave Nofret a penetrating look, and dropped her head back down to her own foreclaws, closing her eyes.
After that, Coresan allowed Nofret to touch, clean, and play with all four babies, and even to feed them. In fact, the older and more clamorous the babies got, the more she seemed to welcome the help. Aket-ten reported that Coresan was coming to think of Nofret as another dragon; a very peculiarly shaped, tragically dwarfed, and inadequately scaled dragon, but a dragon, nevertheless.
Even Ari began to relax when he saw how Coresan acted around Nofret. The peculiar thing was, even as Coresan acted as if Nofret was a dragon, she continued to make threat postures whenever any other humans ventured too near. Aket-ten couldn’t explain it.
“Nofret is a dragon, and we aren’t, not in Coresan’s mind,” was all she could say. “Maybe it’s because we always dropped food from a height, and Nofret was the first to bring it to her on the ground. Maybe it’s because Nofret doesn’t look like a Jouster.”
“Then if Coresan lays again and we can find her and the clutch, we have to replicate everything we did this time,” he said firmly. Aket-ten nodded.
There was no change in either the situation in Alta or in Tia, and Kiron was content to leave all such weighty matters in the minds and hands of those his senior in experience and wisdom. Often enough, as he lay staring into the dark at night, he thought of the uncertain future and he felt, with Orest, that he would rather, far rather, not think of it at all. That he would rather be told what to do.
But that was the path that had led here in the first place—people giving over thinking to others, and doing what they were told, believing what they were told to believe, even when it went against their own good sense and all reason.
Still, he was glad enough to have something else to occupy his mind, however temporarily.
As the days passed, the babies began to exercise their wings, pumping them vigorously and making little hops into the air. Those back in Sanctuary were learning to bear saddle and rider, and exercising against weight. Coresan’s offspring, however, were not to be meddled with. They would be fledging soon—
“—and I have no idea how we’re going to get The-on to follow me,” Nofret said, as Kiron and Avatre flew her out to Coresan’s nest the morning after the first of the Sanctuary dragonets had made his First Flight. “I know Coresan’s getting restless. Are they like cats, where they move their nest periodically?”
“Not so far as I know,” he said truthfully. “I wish I could tell you more, but all I know is how the hand-raised ones act.”
“Well, I’m afraid she’s trying to move the nest, and if the little ones follow her, we might never find them again,” she fretted.
As they swooped in to land, it looked as if Nofret’s fears might be well-founded. Coresan was pacing, fanning her wings, then pacing again, peering up at the sky whenever she snapped her wings open. The babies were imitating her, and they usually were not awake at this hour.
Aket-ten landed Re-eth-ke beside Avatre on the canyon floor, as Nofret hurried over to Coresan and the dragonets with the first lot of meat. Coresan took it—
Then, uncharacteristically, began to eat it herself, leaving it to Nofret to feed the little ones.
Aket-ten watched them with her eyes narrowed and a speculative look on her face.
“What?” Kiron demanded.
“I don’t—know,” she said slowly. “There is something very odd going on.” She continued to stare. “I’m trying to encourage the little ones to stay with Nofret if Coresan flies.”
Coresan finished her first portion, and looked straight at Kiron, rather than Nofret. And snorted, in that old imperious fashion he had come to know. He didn’t need Aket-ten’s interpretation to take down another portion of meat and drag it over to her. She seized it, and began tearing chunks off of it, one eye on him, and one on the sky.
It took a third and a fourth to satisfy her, and not once in all that time did she feed any of her babies, not even when they came to her, nudged her portion, and begged pitiably. After a while, the beggar would go right back to Nofret, who was infinitely more reliable, if rather too slow. . . .
Then, when the fourth helping was a memory, Coresan stood up, raised her head and stared at Nofret for a very long moment, as if measuring her for something.
Nofret stopped feeding the dragonets, feeling the eyes of their mother on her, and turned.
She swallowed hard—and visibly. Coresan had Nofret fixed in an unwinking gaze, and Kiron didn’t blame Nofret for a sudden surge of unease. He started to loosen his knife in its sheath, but Aket-ten stopped him with a gesture.
“It’s not what you think,” she whispered.
Just then, Nofret began to slowly back away from the dragonets. It wasn’t the first time that Coresan had leveled a challenging stare at her, and always, once Nofret began to move away from them, Coresan stopped challenging.
Not this time.
This time, Coresan took the two enormous strides needed to reach Nofret, bent her head down before anyone could react, and shoved Nofret in the gut with her nose, tumbling her back into the midst of the dragonet pack.
And then she turned, spread her wings wide, and with a few lumbering steps threw herself into the air. Within moments, she was a dot in the sky. In another, she was gone.
“She’s gone!” Aket-ten said with astonishment.
Kiron shrugged. “Off to hunt, I suppose,” he said. This wasn’t the first time she’d gone off to do so; the only real difference was that this time she had very graphically put Nofret in charge of the babies.
“No, I mean she’s
gone,
” said Aket-ten. “She’s gone for good! I felt what she meant in my mind. She left Nofret in charge, and now she’s gone for good and she’s not coming back!”