Avatre started back, eyes wide—then, cautiously, eased her head forward, sniffing suspiciously at the outstretched palm.

And the most astonishing thing of all happened; the moment that Avatre’s nose touched the girl’s hand, the dragon relaxed. Relaxed entirely, in fact, and went from a pose that warned she was ready to fight, to looking as if she was back in her own sand pit with only Kiron beside her.

And she sat, then stretched out at full length on the stone. She kept her eyes fixed on Kiron, but with no signs of concern at all, as if she knew that no one was going to hurt either of them.

“She’ll be all right now, Tef-talla,” the girl said, confidently laying her hand on Avatre’s shoulder and reaching up to scratch under her chin.

Kiron would have experienced a surge of betrayal and jealousy at that moment, except that was the exact moment that the Healer chose to place both hands on his chest, and he was far too busy thinking about how much it hurt—

And then, once again, he wasn’t thinking of anything at all.

When he came to himself a second time, he was lying in a bed. It was not the sort of hard, flat couch that the Tians used; this was more like the fabric frames on low legs that the tala fruit was dried on, but much stronger, of course. And instead of a hard neck rest, there was a soft pillow beneath his head. That, and the sultry breath of a breeze that moved over his face, full of the scent of greenery and water, told him that he was not in Tia, even before his mind caught up with his wakefulness and he remembered why he was lying on a bed.

In fact, this was the sort of bed he had used as a child, when his father Kiron was master of his own farmlands, and those farmlands had been in Alta, not Tia.

There was a linen sheet over him, which was a very good thing, since he quickly discovered that he’d been cleaned up, which was good, but also that he wasn’t wearing anything beneath that sheet, which could have been embarrassing.

Well, that wasn’t entirely true; his chest and presumably his back had been expertly bandaged, so he was “wearing” bandages. But when he opened his eyes, the first thing that he saw was that the girl he had rescued was in the same room with him, and he was glad that they’d given him something to cover his nakedness.

Then his second realization was that he wasn’t in a room, it was a courtyard, open to the sky, which was made necessary by the fact that—his third realization and a great relief—Avatre was also with him. She looked as pleased with herself as could be, and she’d been unharnessed, wiped down, and seemed too contented to be hungry, so someone must have fed her.

And besides the girl and Avatre, there were three men in this courtyard, all standing at his bedside, conversing with one another in low tones.