“Huh,” said Kalen, when Gan went back to his pen, still ranting. “Don’t worry about it, Kiron. This is just his way of exhausting his fear. We’re all scared—if we can’t rely on the Winged Ones to warn us anymore, what are we going to do?”

Kiron realized that the falconer was right. With one exception—himself—it wasn’t what had happened that was the disaster, it was that they hadn’t been warned.

In the end, the reports that came from the rest of the city were not as disastrous as Aket-ten had feared. Many people (in fact, virtually anyone who had a garden) were sleeping in their gardens for the sake of coolness, and so were safe when the shaking began. There were deaths, though, and many, many injuries, and people all over the city were asking why there had been no warning.

Aket-ten would have taken up her very rudimentary Healing kit and gone out to help the Healers, except that both her father and Lord Khumun forbade her to do any such thing. Lord Khumun told her so first, when she came to him to ask permission to leave; a note from her father (who evidently knew his daughter well) came a little later.

Kiron had gone with her, after failing to dissuade her from her fixed purpose himself. He hung back as Lord Khumun gave her a very stony glare. “The dragons are a hair’s breadth from going mad with fear,” Lord Khumun told her sternly. “Every time there is an after-shaking, they bellow worse than after the first shake. Who is there to soothe them if you go running off in the city? And just what do you think several dozen terrified, loose dragons would do, if they broke loose from their chains, and escaped the compound?”

Aket-ten looked as if she had eaten something very sour. Then she took another deep breath, and bowed her head in obedience to Lord Khumun’s orders.

And he was right, of course, excepting only that several dozen newly freed and terrified dragons would probably do nothing worse than fly off. Still, there was always the chance that one would decide to get a bit of his own back, as it were. And Aket-ten was the only person in the compound that could soothe the dragons. By now, some of them were so upset that they didn’t want to eat, which meant until she got them quieted, it wouldn’t be possible to get tala into them either.

Kiron didn’t want her out there for reasons of his own. If she was right, and the Magi were taking up the Winged Ones as well as the Fledglings, then the moment she stepped outside the compound walls, she was in danger.