Mercedes Lackey - Alta

She has a point, Kiron conceded.

“So now I assume you want us to get you—where?” asked Gan.

“To Kaleth,” said Marit immediately. “He’s managed to get three messages smuggled to me since he left. The last one said, ‘The hawk rises above the storm; the desert finds its own.’ ”

Kiron, Heklatis, and Aket-ten exchanged looks. It was Heklatis who spoke, slowly, as if he was thinking aloud.

“The boy has the Seer’s Eye,” he said. “And he’s with the Mouths, who presumably have something of the same and can teach him how to call visions instead of waiting to be struck by them. We all know how he feels about you, Marit—” she colored, and Nofret bit her lip, and looked pensive, “—and it is reasonable to assume he has been trying to watch you from a distance. So it is also reasonable that if we can get you to the edge of the desert, he will know, or possibly already knows, where you will be.”

Aket-ten shrugged when Marit looked to her for confirmation of this speculation. “I can’t think of any other interpretation. The question is how can we get you there quickly, and with as little to track you by as possible?”

“Amulets will take care of the latter,” said Heklatis, sucking on his lower lip. “But—”

“We fly you out,” Kiron said suddenly. “That’s what the first part of the message means! Or we fly you as far as Avatre and Re-eth-ke can take you in half a day. Thank the gods this happened during the rains! Aket-ten and I have already gone up above the clouds, and the winds can take us a long way without the dragons tiring, Re-eth-ke can carry double, since two girls are light, Avatre is big enough to carry double and baggage—”

“Ha!” said Heklatis, slapping his thigh and startling them all. “Hoist on their own tackle! I can borrow those winds that the Magi are using, or one of them, anyway, to take you straight west in the morning, and straight east in the afternoon! As fast as that air is moving, it will take you all the way to the desert and back with no one the wiser!”

Aket-ten grinned for the first time. “No one is going to miss us for that long, are they?”

Kiron shook his head. “No, they won’t. And even if someone were to come out to watch us, they won’t stay for long, because there’s nothing to see once the dragons are in the air. Look, here’s what we’ll do—”

Marit and Nofret slept in Aket-ten’s room, secure in the knowledge that with Heklatis’ guardian goddess there, the Magi would not be able to spy on the chamber. In the morning, everyone behaved absolutely normally. The Magus did not even glare at them more than usual; Kiron suspected that this might be because he was not aware that two of Heklatis’ “blessed” statues had come to roost elsewhere. It had occurred to him before he went to sleep that night that the Magus could not seem to sense other magic unless he actively ran into it, either by trying to use his own magic, or by physically crossing it. So, since he would not try to go into a dragon pen anymore, they were safe from discovery for a while. Of the lot of them, if he was searching for pockets of discontent or conspiracies among Toreth and Kaleth’s friends, he would be looking at the nobly born boys who had been the twin princes’ childhood friends, not Kiron or Aket-ten. Kiron, after all, had no real power and no influential friends except Lord Ya-tiren, who was well known for his retiring nature. And Aket-ten had been playing the part of a frightened mouse.

They went out to practice, as usual. And, as often happened, a couple of dragon boys, muffled in rain capes and carrying heavy bundles, went out to the practice field, ostensibly to assist. But there wasn’t anyone in the compound who noticed their departure—as Heklatis was supposed to make very sure—and there wasn’t anyone at the practice field to see their arrival—as Kiron and the rest made very sure.

They all landed for equipment checks, and the dragon boys moved in among them. There certainly wasn’t anyone to see that when the dragons took off again, Aket-ten had a second rider strapped in behind her, while Kiron had another and both bundles.

Avatre lumbered heavily into the air, taking a good long while to get up to speed with her triple burden. She didn’t complain, though, and Kiron didn’t feel any faltering in her wingbeats, so he assumed that she was all right with the extra weight. When he gave her the signal to go up farther than she was used to in this weather, though, he sensed her hesitation. He gave it to her again, with a little more force.

She thought about his command for a moment, but before she could make up her mind, Re-eth-ke shot past them, heading straight up into the clouds. Either that decided her, or else Aket-ten had managed to “speak” with her to tell her what they wanted, and that there would be sunlight up there; with a snort, she followed.

The journey was a repetition of the one they had taken on that pair of swamp dragons when he and Aket-ten had gone up to spread the dust—but without quite as much of the buffeting inside the clouds as the last time. As Avatre was hit by contrary winds, by unexpected updrafts and even a downdraft or two that made his stomach plunge and his passenger scream with fear, he thought that the turbulence was perhaps half that of the initial storm. And if that pig of a swamp dragon could handle it. . . .

His steadiness seemed to give Avatre confidence, and she fought her way back after every obstacle. Finally, she lifted her head a little as if she sensed something.

At that moment, it seemed to Kiron that the rain-filled mist above him was marginally brighter.

With a mighty surge of wings, and the added help of another unexpected updraft, they burst out of the clouds and into the sunlight.

Despite their head start, and Re-eth-ke’s lighter burden, it was a moment or two after that before Aket-ten and her passenger lumbered up into the light, and they did so a good six furlongs away from Avatre. Following Kiron’s signals, Avatre wheeled toward them; he wanted to be closer before they tried the next part of the journey.

It was then that he noticed that his passenger was clutching him around the waist so tightly that, if he had not been wearing the Altan Jouster’s broad, thick, leather belt that protected the midsection, he’d have been having trouble breathing.

“Are you all right?” he called back over his shoulder.

“No,” said a strangled voice in his ear. “But don’t stop.”

He spared a brief thought of poor thing for her, but had no time for anything more; the next bit would be tricky and required a lot of concentration. As he now knew from experience, the winds up this high were layered; while he had never yet come across one layer going in the completely opposite direction of another, he had encountered winds moving at right angles to each other. The Magi probably paid very little attention to their magic once they set it in motion, and as long as the rains went south, that was all they cared about. There was a single channel of wind up here, above the clouds and rain, that Heklatis had “purloined,” deflecting it so that instead of going north to south, it curved off to the west. It would be high, Heklatis had told him. Perhaps higher than he had ever flown before, and Avatre, who could read the winds better than he, and who had more experience than Re-eth-ke, would have to find it. He signaled to Aket-ten, who nodded vigorously, then sent Avatre up.

She was not at all averse to this idea; this clear, dry air was much more to her liking than spending the day trying to fly through the pouring rain.