And yet, this was the face of war from which she had been sheltered. Death, and not death in battle, but terrible, useless, needless death, the deaths of those you knew, cared about—even loved.

War was no longer an abstract to her. And, in fact, neither was death.

After that, though he was sure it preyed on her mind as nothing in her life ever had before, not even her own fear, she never said another word about it.

She drooped despondently about for a while, and that was worse than if she had wept and raged and railed against the Magi. And he was tempted—oh, how tempted!—to weigh his pain against hers; the miserable deaths of father, mother, sisters against the deaths of her friends.

But he didn’t. You couldn’t weigh pain as if it was the Feather of Truth. He knew that now, something he had not known before Toreth’s murder. One pain couldn’t outweigh another; no pain could balance out another. In the end, all pain stood alone.

And that wasn’t something he could tell her either. It was something she would have to learn herself.

Eventually, she regained her spirits as the Winged Ones trickled in a few at a time, and she was able to gain some sort of consolation with them. This was one place in her life where Kiron felt absolutely helpless to give her exactly the kind of consolation she needed. He didn’t know these people; they hadn’t been his friends. He could only mourn them in the abstract—and it wasn’t as if he didn’t already have enough deaths in his life to mourn.

And it wasn’t as if their days didn’t have plenty to fill them.

Not only were the dragonets hatched out in Sanctuary growing rapidly and requiring preliminary training, but Coresan’s family was doing so as well, and he had a whole new problem to deal with.

Nofret was besotted. It was all anyone could do to get her to tear herself away from the dragonets every evening, and she was beside herself with impatience to get out to them in the morning. Kiron wouldn’t have credited it. He would have thought that while she would feel some affection for them, she wouldn’t have felt that bond that every other Jouster with a hand-raised dragon did.