“I don’t know. She only told me that no other man could ever fill her life the way We-ra-te did, so she wasn’t going to try to find another husband, that the estate was pretty much running itself and what little it needed ought to be her eldest son’s purview anyway, so she needed something that would fill her thoughts and her time, if not her life.” Aket-ten shrugged. “If you were going to ask me, I’d say it was probably something she’d wanted to do before she was sent here, and wasn’t allowed.”

“She’s a wonder,” Kiron said, looking at the gate through which she had exited.

“She’s every bit of that.” Aket-ten yawned. “Now I want to sleep. If that earthshake comes tomorrow, we’ll need all the rest we can get.”

Kiron nodded, looked around, and saw that pretty much everyone else had come to the same conclusion. Ari was already asleep, with his hand on Kashet’s foreleg. The others had curled up in various other positions of contact with their dragons, each taking comfort from the other in this strange place. Aket-ten bent and softly kissed his forehead before taking herself to her own pallet, and he found the most comfortable position for himself, with his back against Avatre’s belly.

Sleep was a long time in coming, as he played over in his mind all the possible variations the rescue could have, and tried to think of others that hadn’t yet occurred to him. But eventually, sleep did come, and took all further thoughts and plans away.

FIFTEEN

FIFTEEN

THE dragons slept like so many statues, and for a while, so did their riders—until the sun rose a bit too far and it was too hot for a human to take, even those used to the heat of the desert. As the riders woke, one by one, the dragons roused just enough to eat, but went back to sleep immediately. Kiron worried about turning their night and day all round about for them, but there really wasn’t a choice, not if they were going to have any hope at all of rescuing the Winged Ones. Still, as he stumbled with the rest to the shelter of the canopies Aunt Re’s servants had erected, stomach a bit queasy, thoughts fogged, and head aching, he wondered—if the humans felt this unsettled, how did the dragons feel?

He fell asleep again almost as soon as he’d had a drink and gotten into the shade, as had the rest. The rest! They were flat as dried-up lizards on their low Altan couches, made to stand as near to the ground and the cooler air near the floor as possible without actually being on the floor. It probably would have been cooler inside, but none of them wanted to leave the dragons.