Which the dragons were all perfectly fine with—they were having trouble seeing, and were paying, as a consequence, exquisite attention to every tiny nuance of signal that their riders gave them.

Then Kiron made them take off again, as the dragon boys, now freed by the coming of dark from tending their dragonets, lit the fires they would use to land by.

This time, it was dusk, not sunset, and not all of them would rise. Kiron had figured as much; if they wouldn’t, he’d told the others not to force them; eventually, it would come. They might not be able to clearly see the rest of the wing taking off, but they could hear it, and instinct would urge them to do the same.

Avatre answered to his order; a measure of her trust in him was that she whined and whimpered but did not hesitate, though her wingbeats were heavy and reluctant. He put her to flying in a slow circle with the fires below at its center. When he peered through the dusk and counted, he found he had been joined in the air by Aket-ten and Re-eth-ke, Ari and Kashet, and Kalen and Se-atmen. Ari’s Kashet was still visibly blue, even in the dusk; Re-eth-ke, however, was hardly more than a shadow with silver edges. And brown-and-gold Se-atmen was merely warm shades of gray. That made something else occur to him; it was going to be difficult, if not impossible, to tell each other apart. They would have to have everything perfectly coordinated once darkness fell, and stick strictly to the plan.

But he could feel Avatre’s panic under his legs, in her trembling muscles and the way she darted her head around, trying to see the other dragons that she could hear. And he knew that she wouldn’t rise a third time tonight; she was terrified of a collision in the dark, and rightly so.

Of all of them, Kashet was probably the most panicked, because he was the most set in his ways, the least used to being asked to do the unusual. Only the love he had for Ari had driven him into the sky in the first place. “Ari!” he called into the growing darkness. “You down first!”

Kashet was a wind and a shadow below them, as he spiraled down toward the four fires, for those, at least, he could see. And he didn’t make a graceful landing—it was certainly the clumsiest he’d made since he learned to fly properly—but there were no sounds of disaster, and in the flickering firelight below, Kiron made out the dragon shadow scuttling out of the square, clearing it for the next pair.

“Kalen!” he called, but Se-atmen, having seen, however dimly, one dragon make a safe landing, was already on his way down.