Alta

It didn’t take more than a moment for Kiron to figure out what was going on. So, the Lord Ya-Tiren had taken his advice! That was extremely satisfying.

But either the lord learned something—or he discovered that the Magi were going to be impossible to refuse. That was not so satisfying.

Orest looked torn between wanting to run back home to find out what was wrong, and staying with his egg. Kiron knew what the truth was—but it seemed that Orest hadn’t been taken into his father’s confidence.

Do I tell him, or not? Kiron weighed the decision in his mind. No. No, I don’t think I had better. If Orest’s father hadn’t chosen to tell his son what was really afoot, it was not Kiron’s place to enlighten him. Though perhaps the problem was that Lord Ya-Tiren had taken thought for his son’s chattering and loose tongue. There was no telling who among Orest’s friends, including the other boys here, might talk to someone that they shouldn’t.

“Hmm.” Kiron folded his arms over his chest and gave Orest a knowing look. “You know, I’ve heard that sometimes the female Fledglings have a lot of difficulty when they first become women.” He actually had heard that often enough around the temple—though possibly Orest hadn’t paid any attention to that sort of thing. He could be very single-minded, could Orest. Some might call him dense, but not Kiron; Orest could be absolutely brilliant when he chose to exercise his mind. The problem was convincing him of the need to do so. If Orest had a fault, it was that he concentrated only on what interested him and ignored or carelessly forgot everything else.

“What do you—” Orest began, then, to Kiron’s great amusement, flushed a deep and painful-looking scarlet. “Oh. Ah. Yes, that might be it. I’ve—ah—heard the same thing—”

Well. Maybe he does pay attention once in a while.

“But of course your father wouldn’t put it that baldly,” Kiron continued, as bland as cream.

“Of course he wouldn’t. And that must be it.” Embarrassed though he might be, Orest must have been grateful for the explanation, for he seized on it with evident relief. “I hope she feels better, but if anyone can make her feel well, it will be Aunt Re. She’s almost a Healer, she knows so much, and Aket-ten loves the farm.”

Orest returned to the vigil over his egg with the air of someone who has had a great deal of concern lifted from him. Kiron, for his part, went to check on Avatre (who was not at all interested in stirring from her warm sand, so that she looked like a heap of rubies half-buried in it), and then went for a walk in the rain.

After that first torrential downpour, the rains were no heavier here than any ordinary rainy season—but rumor said that things were otherwise in the kingdom of the enemy. With exquisite timing, the Magi had—so it was claimed—arranged for terrible storms to lash the Tian countryside coinciding with the highest point of the Flood coming down Great Mother River from the lands above the Cataracts. The result—supposedly—was going to be a flood of epic proportions. Not only farmlands would be flooded, but whole villages, towns, even parts of the great cities that were too low to escape.

If this was true, Kiron felt unexpectedly sorry for the Tian farmers and villagers. The mud brick used for their homes could not stand against rising waters; people would return after the waters had receded only to find that their houses had melted away in the flood. This was going to cause a lot of hardship and it wouldn’t be to the people who were waging this war, it would be to the poor farmers and craftsmen who just wanted to get on quietly with their lives and didn’t give a toss about where the border was. In fact, it would impact the poor serfs on captured Altan land the most—their Tian overlords could escape the flooding, but they would have nowhere to go.

It seemed a very unfair way to wage a war, when the people who were responsible for it were not the people paying the price.

And he knew very well what others would say about that—it was too bad for all those farmers and serfs, but that was the way that war went. And maybe it was, but it still seemed very unfair to him.

It had seemed a fine thing when the Jousters of Tia were grounded by storms that hadn’t affected anyone else so much—but this war on those who weren’t even part of the fighting was just—wrong.

In fact, everything he had learned about the Magi in the last three days had that same faint aura of wrongness about it.

Not that he had been able to learn much.