Kiron didn’t agree with that in the least, but there was no point in arguing. “Just remember what they did to the Winged Ones,” he repeated, and stepped back.

Aket-ten was only waiting for that, it seemed, because she was in the air and flying toward Alta the moment he was clear of Re-eth-ke’s wings. Menet-ka gave him a sympathetic look, and then sent Bethlan into the sky after her. And all he could do was to watch after them.

“She feels as if she has to do this, Kiron,” said Nofret quietly in his ear. “She feels guilty that she didn’t manage to save all of the Winged Ones; she thinks if she’d just been brave enough, or fast enough, or—something, the gods only know what—she’d have been able to get them all out. You can’t argue with that sort of guilt; it doesn’t answer to logic.”

“Well, if she wants me to treat her as if she’s a logical person, she ought to behave like one,” he replied, irritation momentarily overcoming his feeling of sick dread.

Nofret gave him a crooked smile, and patted his arm. “This is logical,” she pointed out. “No one is going to take her seriously if she doesn’t do everything one of the boys is doing.”

And what, after all, could he say? The Far-sighted Priestesses saw nothing—well, they actually could not see anything anyway, for the Magi had now effectively blocked their ability to See inside the Seventh Ring. But they had no intuitions of anything going wrong. Kaleth saw nothing, and the gods had not spoken through him to warn them. By all logic, he was overreacting, being overprotective of Aket-ten.

And yet, he was certain, so completely certain down deep in his soul that this was going to end in disaster that he avoided everyone else for the rest of the evening, and all but hid in Avatre’s pen. She seemed to be just as uneasy as he was—

But that could just be because she’s picking up my unhappiness, he reminded himself, and tried to soothe her even if he could not himself be soothed.

And he resolved not to sleep. They were supposed to return before dawn, and he was going to be awake—

Despite his best efforts, he dozed off, sitting in Avatre’s sand, some time after the middle of the night. And it was a cry of wordless anguish coming from above that woke him.

It woke him out of nightmare into nightmare. And he knew. He knew, without being told, what that haunting cry on the wind meant. The nameless dread he had been laboring under turned to the certainty of disaster, and as he struggled to clear the fog of sleep from his eyes and stagger upright, he felt, not an anguish matching the wails now coming from the landing field, but a kind of numbness.