He was thinking about this so hard that when a voice came out of the dark, he nearly leaped out of his skin.

“It seems I am not the only one who is looking for a little peace.”

Gan recovered first. “Kaleth?” he said incredulously, peering into the shadows in the lee of their building.

“The same.” A long, lean shadow detached itself from the rest, and moved toward them, resolving into Kaleth. “It seems that there will be a celebration, and I dislike being the skeleton at the feast.” Kaleth approached them, slapping Kiron lightly on the back and Gan on the arm. “I thought I would come spend some time with my friends who I have seen far too little of lately. Besides, there is a slight difficulty in being the one who speaks for the gods. When people are sober, they look at you out of the corners of their eyes and are afraid to speak to you. And when the date wine has flowed too much, they suddenly wish you to trot out your trick, like a prize flute girl who can play while bent over backward.”

“Well, that’s one trick I can do without,” Gan said fervently. “Unless the gods are telling you how we are to feed all these new mouths.”

“Ah! I don’t need the gods for that. Come up on the roof and we’ll catch the evening wind, and I’ll tell you.” Kaleth sounded a lot more cheerful, and Kiron felt some of his own melancholy melting. They all went up onto the roof as he had suggested, and sprawled on the warm stone with him. Baked in the sun all day, though the temperature of the wind off the desert was dropping, the stone under them—and the sands of the dragon pen below—radiated heat, and would for the rest of the night. Down below, the sounds of the dragons dozing recalled nights that seemed a thousand years in the past, when they had gathered in one or another of the pens while the dragonets slept.

“We have water, which is the main thing,” Kaleth said, after a long silence. “Some of those folk that Ya-tiren brought with him are growers, and not the usual sorts of Altan swamp farmers either. These are the fellows that cultivated his city manor gardens. They know how to grow things in containers, with a trickle of irrigation. And in all that maze that the storm just uncovered is a manor where things were grown in just that way. But we won’t be growing food.”

“We won’t?” asked Gan.

Kiron found a wind-smoothed curve of stone that just fit his back, and tucked himself into it. Kaleth sounded more like his old self tonight than he had in a very long time.

“No. We’ll be growing things worth more than food—yes, even here, in the desert. Spices. Medicines.”