She took that draped something off her arm—in the darkness it was hard to tell just what she was doing—but he heard the sound of heavy cloth being shaken out, and a moment later she was tugging his arm downward as she sat down on the roof. He put out his hand as he went to sit beside her, and felt the rug she had spread out on the stone. “Lie down on your back,” she said, “and look up at the Seven Dancers.”

The Dancers were a cluster of seven stars well known by that name to both Tians and Altans. He did as she asked, and no sooner had he begun to relax and wonder just what this marvelous thing was he was supposed to be looking for, when—

—a brilliant streak of light flashed from the third Dancer to the tip of the star formation called the Dragon’s Tail.

“A falling star!” he exclaimed, with surprise and delight, and as more streaks appeared against the blackness, pointed upward. “Look—another—and there—and there—”

“The Bedu say that tonight the Goddess of Night weeps for her dead lover,” Aket-ten replied. “The Mouth told Heklatis and the Thet priest about it, and I overheard them talking about it. They didn’t seem to mind my listening. Heklatis says his people say it’s the sparks from their smith god’s forge as he’s making arrowheads for the Huntress Goddess, and the Thet priest says it’s the lost ghosts who’ve had someone to make them a shrine rushing across the Rainbow Bridge to the Summer Country, but that usually you can’t see this in Tia because it’s the middle of the season of rains. Which is why we Altans never see it either, I suppose. There are other star-falls over the course of the year, but nothing like this one.”

Kiron blinked, and tried to remember if he had ever seen such a thing—but as a serf, he’d always been so tired he fell asleep as soon as he was prone, and as a dragon boy he had paid more attention to first Kashet, then Avatre, than to the goings-on in the sky. There was no set season for lost spirits to go to the Summer Country so far as Altans were concerned. When your family built your shrine, you just went.

He certainly didn’t remember ever seeing anything like this. There were so many bright streaks across the sky that it seemed as if all the stars should have vanished by now. But they were still there, so maybe it was the tears of a goddess—or the sparks from a heavenly forge—or something else that no one had even thought of yet. They were all coming out of the area of the Dancers, so maybe it was star petals that the Dancers were throwing.