Menet-ka nodded miserably. “I couldn’t see how many hit or where; enough anyway, that she just—just crumpled her wings and fell out of the sky. They were both screaming and screaming—it was horrible, hearing them scream like that.”

He could see it; in his mind’s eye, he could see it. The javelins filling the air, the dragon folding up in pain. He could almost hear Aket-ten’s scream of fear and anguish. . . .

“She hit the ground with Aket-ten still in the saddle, and she absorbed most of the impact,” Menet-ka continued, unconsciously pulling at his own hair with his right hand. “But I knew she hadn’t been that high, just skimming the rooftops—I pulled Bethlan around, and I saw Aket-ten moving, and I tried to get down to her—”

What? After all that, he expected to hear that she’d broken her neck in the fall!

She was alive—but she was also a Winged One.

He felt himself shuddering. By now she might be wishing she’d died in the fall.

“You mean Aket-ten’s alive!” Gan shouted incredulously. “She’s all right! We can go back, we can rescue her!”

But Menet-ka shook his head, bleakly, and voiced the same thoughts that were running through Kiron’s head. “The soldiers were just all over her before I could even get Bethlan’s head around. They’ve got her, Gan—the Magi have her. And you know what they almost did to her before! The soldiers spotted me and started shooting, and I couldn’t hold Bethlan; she was scared, scared by seeing Re-eth-ke drop out of the sky and hearing both Re-eth-ke and Aket-ten screaming, scared of the arrows, I couldn’t hold her—” Kiron heard the emotion, the thought behind the words. I failed her.

I should tell him it’s not his fault— But he couldn’t. He couldn’t bring himself to tell Menet-ka what he himself did not feel. It was Menet-ka’s fault, and his. He should have trusted the presentiment of disaster. Menet-ka should have kept her from going down into the fog; should have insisted on turning back the moment they saw the fog.

Menet-ka looked up, past the others, and saw him. The others followed Menet-ka’s gaze, and an echoing silence fell, one those silences in which, no matter how it is broken, it just sounds wroing.

He stared at them, stared at their stricken expressions, at the guilt in Menet-ka’s eyes, at the pain in Ari’s face. Stared, and finally, because there was nothing he could say to any of them that would not simply have brought more pain, he turned away.