Kiron would have liked to remain there, giving Avatre the caresses and affection she lived for, but there was no leisure for that this morning. The cramped quarters of the sand pit made it necessary for almost everyone to leave in order to get saddled, which would mean another delay in taking to the air, and this was a day when no one could afford much in the way of a delay.

Kashet was the first to get out—by virtue of his size and strength, he simply hooked his front talons into the parapet and climbed out over the roof. The first time he’d done that, Kiron hadn’t been the only one who’d gasped and shrunk back, expecting the wall to come down. But either they were all very lucky, or Kashet was a shrewd judge of construction; he hadn’t left more than a scratch or two on the top of the wall. Kiron still didn’t know what the walls of Sanctuary were made of. It looked like hard-packed sand, or sandstone, but it wasn’t, and it was tougher and stronger than anything Kiron had ever seen before. The walls weren’t made of stone blocks either; the entire city could have been carved from single pieces of stone. There were no signs of seams or block lines, and although the corners and edges were all rounded as if scoured that way, at a guess Kiron would have said that they had been carved or sculpted that way on purpose from the beginning, given that nothing much seemed to mark them. Whatever material those walls were made of, it was something that stood up to the abuse of dragons climbing all over them.

Nor could Kiron have put an original purpose to this courtyard that now served as the dragons’ sand wallow. When the wing had come to Sanctuary, the space had been filled with sand still, left that way on purpose for the dragons’ use, and the doors and windows that had once looked into the yard had been blocked up at Kaleth’s orders. It was about the size of the landing courtyard at the Jousters’ Compound in Tia, which made it just about big enough for ten dragons. Now—if somehow, there should be more dragons one day—

I will leave that in the hands of the gods, Kiron told himself. The gods had provided for these ten; he would have faith that they would provide in the future. Or else he and Ari would come up with some clever plan to create more wallows and shelters somehow.