“This foul creature was sent.”
He looked up, startled to find that he was no longer alone. Heklatis stood there, face set in a mask of rage, toeing what was left of the cobra.
“What?” he asked, somehow getting the word past the lump in his throat.
“This was no accident, and no act of the gods,” the Healer said flatly. “This snake was sent. It is a Fetch, a thing called into a place by magic, and commanded to act by its master. Someone brought it here specifically to attack and kill the prince. I can taste the magic, smell it, a vile odor—” He shook his head, the gray-streaked curls of his hair bouncing. “They must not have known there would be a Magus here, or they would have covered their tracks.” He glanced over at Kiron, who was staring at him in bewilderment. “You don’t understand what I’m saying, do you? Let me put it simply. The Magi murdered Toreth, and did it in a way that would look like either an accident, or a god-sent curse, depending on how the murder was interpreted. And they did it before anyone outside the court learned what it was that brought Toreth before the Great Ones. They did it while his disgrace was still vivid in everyone’s mind, and before anyone got a chance to think about what he said and wonder how much truth was in it.”
“Murder?”
The word was an echo of the same one in Kiron’s mind, but it came from Lord Khumun’s lips.
Heklatis looked up, toward the door to the pen. Kiron turned as well. Lord Khumun stood there with an expression as stony as the Healer’s was full of anger.
“Yes, my Lord,” said the Healer. “Murder. There are many ways of covering the truth, and that is one of them—to silence the truth teller, permanently.”
Lord Khumun did not look surprised. “I feared this,” he said heavily, “But I hoped—he was only a boy—”
“He was Prince and Heir,” replied Heklatis flatly, as the dragon continued to keen. “They could not afford to let him live. And look to yourself, my Lord. Your star has been rising of late, and the Magi, I fear, will brook no rivals now. And they are clearly no longer content with simple opposition; they have chosen annihilation for those who would stand in their path.”
Kiron would never have imagined Lord Khumun blanching, but he saw that very thing now. And if Lord Khumun was afraid—
The Lord of the Jousters swallowed, and then seemed to notice that Kiron was still sitting there. “Go to your quarters, Wing-leader,” he said, but it was not with the bark of an order. “This changes nothing except the size of your wing.”
The lump of grief rose again within him. “Yes, my Lord,” he managed to choke out, and then, at last, the tears began, and he stumbled out of the pen, blindly, feeling his way back to his own pen and the comforting presence of Avatre.
Except that Avatre was as agitated as he was, and whimpered deep in her throat. The keening wail of the grieving dragonet was cutting across the entire Compound, and as the dragons awoke to it, they began to add their chorus of agitation to her howl of mourning. As he threw his arms around Avatre’s neck, she curled it down around his shoulders and whimpered into his ear while he wept against the soft, slick surface of her chest.
And wept. And wept. Whenever he thought he had himself under control, his control broke again; it was the dragon that did it, her lamenting filled the whole compound and still there was no end to it, and all he could do, all anyone could do, was to mourn with her, until he had cried himself into a mummy, into dust, and blew away on the wind.
And then—it stopped.
For a moment longer, the other dragons still whined or moaned, but after a moment or two, their own plaints died away, leaving a strange and uncomfortable silence.
Slowly, he pulled himself together. Avatre stopped whimpering, stopped trying to curl herself around him. He raised his head, she raised hers. Then she nosed his wet cheek, and made a tentative, sad little echo of her hunger call.
“I know,” he said, and patted her jaw. “I know, my love.”
He levered himself up out of the sand, stiffly; he rubbed the tear stains from his cheeks with the back of one hand, the sand grating across the hot lines etched there by his weeping. Then he went to look for Avatre’s breakfast.
He roused Avatre’s dragon boy from his bewildered grief, and together they fetched Avatre’s meat. Then he sent the boy to bring food to the other dragonets of the wing, while he tended to Avatre himself.
She ate—not swiftly, not with her usual exuberance and appetite, but she ate. And when she was done, he apologized to her for leaving, and with dread in his heart, went to the bereft dragon’s pen.
And found Aket-ten there, feeding Re-eth-katen tiny bits of meat, as if she was a baby again, crooning to her. She looked up at him. Her eyes were swollen and red, her cheeks tear-streaked, and yet somehow she had battled through her own bereavement to come to soothe and comfort the little dragon. Where she had gotten the strength, he could not even guess.
“As soon as she can move, I’m taking her to the empty pen at the end,” she said, in a voice that brooked no argument. “And then I’m moving my things there. She needs me.”
She glared defiance at him, but he was not about to argue with her. Not in this mood. He just nodded, and backed his way out. At this point, he didn’t care what she did, as long as she got that terrible wailing to stop, and kept the dragonet from starving herself to death. Another rider could be found eventually, and then he would argue that it was not appropriate for a young lady to be housed among so many young men.
Later. Not now.
Besides, somehow he had to get the others going, to establish a semblance of normality. More than ever, they had to get on their feet, get going, get back to business, and prove themselves. The Magi would be watching them now, sure that Toreth had cultivated a hotbed of dissent here, and waiting for the chance to make them fail. Therefore, they had to succeed, and yet at the same time, they had to deceive the Magi into thinking that they were insignificant, harmless. Toreth would have wanted that.
Throughout the sixty days of mourning, as the prince’s body was prepared for burial with all the care due a Prince and Heir, that phrase kept coming up among the boys that were left. Spoken, or unspoken, it was always there. Toreth would have wanted this.
The wing got back into the air, back into practice, pushing themselves and their dragons as never before, because Toreth would have wanted that. Heklatis worked feverishly, making their own personal amulets into magic sinks, imbued with every sort of protection that his imagination and the powers of his own mind and body could muster, because Toreth would have wanted his wingmates protected against the evil that the Magi could summon. Aket-ten devoted herself to the welfare of the dragon that she renamed “Re-eth-ke”—“the shining sun-spirit”—because Toreth would not have wanted his dragon to pine herself to death. And within twenty days, Aket-ten was garbed in a kilt and a breast wrap, flying that dragon, first in simple exercise, then in support of the training games, then in the training games and combat practice again. She was not much good at the targeting, except with the sling, but no one could outfly her. And somehow, Lord Khumun never brought forth another boy for Re-eth-ke, and it never seemed terribly urgent to Kiron that he find a substitute—
Truth to tell, he didn’t think he could bear to look at Re-eth-ke and see another boy in her saddle. Seeing Aket-ten there didn’t hurt; in a way, it was only right that after nursing the dragon back from its depression, she have the same freedom of the skies as the rest of them. He could see it in her face—when she was on the ground, there were anxiety lines there, the haunting flicker of fear that never left her, and the constant nag of worry that at any moment, the Magi might come for her. Up in the sky, all that left her. How could he take that from her? There might have been problems with a young woman in the midst of so many young men, but she never acted like a young “woman.” She might have flirted mildly with them before—she did nothing of the sort now. She acted like one of the wing, with the same earnest determination as any of them, and a complete lack of anything that could be considered flirtation.