They took themselves to a sand blow from which all the water had drained, and which had absorbed sunlight and was now satisfactorily, by draconic standards, hot. The dragons promptly made themselves wallows, and Kiron looked with longing at a patch of lush grass shaded by date palms nearby.

Gan yawned. “I could sleep for a week!” he exclaimed.

“Me, too,” Orest agreed, as Aket-ten and Kiron exchanged a glance and hastily looked away. But Orest—observant, for once—caught it.

“Oh, here,” he said gruffly, giving his sister a shove so that she stumbled and ended up in Kiron’s arms. “Stop mooning at each other. You thought you’d never see each other again, and now everything has turned out fine! Or—well, fine for us! Act like flesh-and-blood people for a change and do something about it!”

Kiron felt himself flushing and grinning at the same time. “I don’t know,” he said to Aket-ten. “Should we really give him the satisfaction of following his advice?”

“Yes,” she said decisively. “It’s the first time he’s ever given good advice on anything. We’d better take advantage of it while it lasts!”

She put her arms around him, and he held her while the others sauntered pointedly away. This was not going to be easy. In fact, they were going to have a long, hard slog to get to that attractive future Kaleth had promised. Two enemies were being united into a single people, and that alone was going to make for a thousand problems.

But for now, there was a little peace, and someone to savor it with.

“You’re right,” he said to the pair of merry brown eyes turned up to look into his. “We should. Good advice from your brother is too rare to squander.”

“Hmm,” she replied, and raised one eyebrow. “Shall we let this lot of sluggards loll about while we go take a flight?”

A flight—a flight where they were not hunting, not scouting, not doing anything but fly, together. As if responding to their very thoughts, Avatre and Re-eth-ke heaved up out of the sand wallow and came trotting over to them, making eager little noises.

“I think,” he replied, with his heart already soaring into that free, blue sky as he looked down into those eyes, “that would be perfect.”