Alta

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—