The distraction was already well in hand. Heklatis knew the formulation of some vile concoction called “Akkadian Fire,” a substance that stuck to anything it splashed on and burned and couldn’t be put out with water. He was making pots of the evil stuff; they would all come in with a load of pots and a brazier apiece, drop in coals, and drop the pots. Half of them would unload their burdens on the men besieging the Healers, but the other half would unload over the Tower of Wisdom, the Magi’s stronghold. When they found their home burning down around their ears, Kiron doubted very much that any of them would think about the Healers.
That was the hope anyway.
As for the besiegers, this Akkadian Fire stuck to flesh as well as wood and stone, and the higher the Jousters were, the more it would splash about when it hit. A nasty trick . . . but anyone who had stood by while the Temple of the Twins and those left inside it burned, deserved whatever he got, to Kiron’s way of thinking.
The Healers likely would not agree, but that was why Lord Khumun wasn’t going to
tell
them what the distraction was going to be.
Well,
some
of the Healers wouldn’t agree . . . Heklatis, after all, was a Healer, and he was the one who would be making up those fire pots.
“Don’t take any risks,” he told Menet-ka and Aket-ten, for the hundredth time. “Don’t let yourselves be seen. Just drop your messages and get out of there. The best revenge we can have is to get the Healers out underneath their noses, like we got ourselves and the Winged Ones out.”
They both nodded, Menet-ka earnestly, Aket-ten with impatience and rebellion in her eyes. He saw it, and it made him sick with dread, but what could he do? He had given his word, and she already resented that she’d been forced to prove she had the right to a place among the Jousters and an equal share in the danger they all faced. All he could do was to urge the utmost caution.
“This is probably even part of an elaborate trap,” he went on, knowing he was grasping at straws, but hoping against hope that something would get through to her. “You know how much the Magi hated the Jousters, and that was before we pulled the Winged Ones out under their noses. Now, they must really loathe us, and they would probably do anything to capture any of us.”
Unfortunately, Menet-ka chose to take this as evidence that Kiron was letting his concerns and fears get the better of him. “I doubt it’s gone that far,” the Jouster said with a weak laugh. “Oh, I’m sure you’re right about the Magi hating us, but they have no reason to think we would come to the rescue of the Healers.”
Kiron didn’t agree with that in the least, but there was no point in arguing. “Just remember what they did to the Winged Ones,” he repeated, and stepped back.
Aket-ten was only waiting for that, it seemed, because she was in the air and flying toward Alta the moment he was clear of Re-eth-ke’s wings. Menet-ka gave him a sympathetic look, and then sent Bethlan into the sky after her. And all he could do was to watch after them.
“She feels as if she
has
to do this, Kiron,” said Nofret quietly in his ear. “She feels guilty that she didn’t manage to save all of the Winged Ones; she thinks if she’d just been brave enough, or fast enough, or—something, the gods only know what—she’d have been able to get them all out. You can’t argue with that sort of guilt; it doesn’t answer to logic.”
“Well, if she wants me to treat her as if she’s a logical person, she ought to behave like one,” he replied, irritation momentarily overcoming his feeling of sick dread.
Nofret gave him a crooked smile, and patted his arm. “This is logical,” she pointed out. “No one is going to take her seriously if she doesn’t do everything one of the boys is doing.”
And what, after all, could he say? The Far-sighted Priestesses saw nothing—well, they actually could not see anything anyway, for the Magi had now effectively blocked their ability to See inside the Seventh Ring. But they had no intuitions of anything going wrong. Kaleth saw nothing, and the gods had not spoken through him to warn them. By all logic, he was overreacting, being overprotective of Aket-ten.
And yet, he was certain, so completely certain down deep in his soul that this was going to end in disaster that he avoided everyone else for the rest of the evening, and all but hid in Avatre’s pen. She seemed to be just as uneasy as he was—
But that could just be because she’s picking up my unhappiness,
he reminded himself, and tried to soothe her even if he could not himself be soothed.
And he resolved not to sleep. They were supposed to return before dawn, and he was going to be awake—
Despite his best efforts, he dozed off, sitting in Avatre’s sand, some time after the middle of the night. And it was a cry of wordless anguish coming from above that woke him.
It woke him out of nightmare into nightmare. And he knew. He knew, without being told, what that haunting cry on the wind meant. The nameless dread he had been laboring under turned to the certainty of disaster, and as he struggled to clear the fog of sleep from his eyes and stagger upright, he felt, not an anguish matching the wails now coming from the landing field, but a kind of numbness.
It was as if someone had just cut off his arm, and he hadn’t yet felt it. It was going to hurt; he
knew
it was going to hurt. But at the moment, he could only stare at the bleeding stump in a mingling of despair and disbelief. . . .
Except that instead of a bleeding stump of a limb, he knew that it was Aket-ten who had been amputated out of his life. He knew when he
felt
what had happened, it would be worse than any physical wound.
With leaden feet, he forced himself to go to Bethlan’s pen. There, they were all gathered, all those who were still awake and eager to hear how the message drop had gone. And he did not say a word, could not manage a single syllable, as he listened to Menet-ka stammer out the tale, while someone else unsaddled Bethlan. Both of them looked terrible. Menet-ka must have pushed Bethlan to new speeds to get here as quickly as he had.
“There was fog,” he said, exhaustion dulling his eyes and blurring his voice, as he leaned heavily against the wall. “We hadn’t expected fog. We couldn’t tell where we were. Except that we could see a ring of torches and bonfires, and
I
figured that was where the soldiers that the Magi had set to watch had put up a line of guards. I thought we should just drop our messages in the center of all of that and hope that some of them landed in courtyards instead of on the roof. But she wouldn’t hear of it, and before I could say or do anything, she took Re-eth-ke down. And that was when the fog just—cleared away. It practically melted out of sight; she wasn’t more than halfway down when it was all gone, and by then, it was too late to pull up.”
“It was magic, then?” Gan managed, his eyes gone round and horrified.
“A trap,” said Ari flatly, and closed his eyes. “Curse it all, Kiron was right. At least half of this business with going after the Healers was a trap meant to take Jousters. They set a trap for you, Menet-ka. They knew we’d send Jousters if they did to another group what they’d done to the Winged Ones, at least to scout, and they set it all up as a trap and used the Healers as bait.”
I was right,
he thought dully, with no sense of triumph. He had never wished to have been wrong more.
“They used war javelins and throwing sticks, they didn’t use bows and arrows,” Menet-ka said trying to control the quaver in his voice. “And they weren’t wasting time trying to hit the rider
or
me; they aimed for Re-eth-ke.”
“They hit her?” Orest gulped, and Kiron choked back a sob.
Menet-ka nodded miserably. “I couldn’t see how many hit or where; enough anyway, that she just—just crumpled her wings and fell out of the sky. They were both screaming and screaming—it was horrible, hearing them scream like that.”
He could see it; in his mind’s eye, he could see it. The javelins filling the air, the dragon folding up in pain. He could almost hear Aket-ten’s scream of fear and anguish. . . .
“She hit the ground with Aket-ten still in the saddle, and she absorbed most of the impact,” Menet-ka continued, unconsciously pulling at his own hair with his right hand. “But I knew she hadn’t been
that
high, just skimming the rooftops—I pulled Bethlan around, and I saw Aket-ten moving, and I tried to get down to her—”
What?
After all that, he expected to hear that she’d broken her neck in the fall!
She was alive—but she was also a Winged One.
He felt himself shuddering.
By now she might be wishing she’d died in the fall.
“You mean Aket-ten’s alive!” Gan shouted incredulously. “She’s all right! We can go back, we can rescue her!”
But Menet-ka shook his head, bleakly, and voiced the same thoughts that were running through Kiron’s head. “The soldiers were just all over her before I could even get Bethlan’s head around. They’ve got her, Gan—the
Magi
have her. And you know what they almost did to her before! The soldiers spotted me and started shooting, and I couldn’t hold Bethlan; she was scared, scared by seeing Re-eth-ke drop out of the sky and hearing both Re-eth-ke and Aket-ten screaming, scared of the arrows, I couldn’t hold her—” Kiron heard the emotion, the thought behind the words.
I failed her.
I should tell him it’s not his fault—
But he couldn’t. He couldn’t bring himself to tell Menet-ka what he himself did not feel. It
was
Menet-ka’s fault, and his. He should have trusted the presentiment of disaster. Menet-ka should have kept her from going down into the fog; should have insisted on turning back the moment they saw the fog.
Menet-ka looked up, past the others, and saw him. The others followed Menet-ka’s gaze, and an echoing silence fell, one those silences in which, no matter how it is broken, it just sounds wroing.
He stared at them, stared at their stricken expressions, at the guilt in Menet-ka’s eyes, at the pain in Ari’s face. Stared, and finally, because there was nothing he could say to any of them that would not simply have brought more pain, he turned away.
He stumbled blindly back to Avatre’s pen, falling into walls and bruising his shoulders, as his eyes burned and he held back his tears by main force of will. He couldn’t weep until he got some privacy. But once he was back in Avatre’s pen, he threw himself down onto the sand next to her, and howled his grief to the stars.
They left him alone. Not even Heklatis came near him. And that suited him just fine, because he didn’t want their pain, he wanted only his own; he didn’t want their apologies, he wanted to nurse his anger against everyone who hadn’t listened to him and had encouraged her in this madness. But even the anger wasn’t enough to overcome his own guilt or his anguish, and he wept into Avatre’s neck until he had no more tears to weep. He pillowed his face against her cheek, moaning like a dying animal under his breath, clinging to Avatre’s neck as the only place of safety in the world, as the sun rose, and burned its way across the heavens, and sank again. Someone brought Avatre food; he wasn’t sure who. They had to bring the meat right into her sand pit, for she wouldn’t come out to them.
In fact, Avatre refused to leave him, even long enough to eat. So long as he was clinging to her neck, she showed no signs of budging. So whoever fed her brought her food to her, and she ate it with one eye on Kiron, her tail coiled protectively around him.
Which was how Kaleth found him, at some point before sunset.
He heard the footsteps and looked up dully. “What?” he asked, not really caring to hear the answer, and hoping that Kaleth would respond to the rudeness by going away.
But Kaleth didn’t go away. Instead, he squatted down in the sand next to both of them.
“Don’t give up. She’s alive, and she’s not even hurt,” he said. “We’ve been able to see that much. They’re saving her for something—”
“They’ve killed her dragon,” Kiron interrupted, harshly. “They shot Re-eth-ke right out from under her. They don’t
have
to do anything to her to destroy her now! Don’t you understand that?”
Kaleth sat back on his heels, and watched him measuringly. “We aren’t even seeing a fraction of what is going on,” he replied, with an urgency that penetrated even Kiron’s grief. “Listen to me—they won’t hurt her, not right now. They’re keeping her for some purpose—and that gives us a chance; we can get her away. She’s tough. She knows we won’t give up on her, and she knows we’ll do anything we can think of to rescue her. She’ll stay strong as long as there’s any chance at all. And we will find a way—”
His heart leaped, and he seized Kaleth’s shoulders and shook him. “You’ve Seen it?” he gasped, hope making him choke on his own words. “You’ve Seen us rescuing her?”
And his heart plummeted again, as Kaleth shook his head. “Nothing so sure—nothing so definite,” he admitted. “But—”
“Then stop toying with me!” He shoved Kaleth away. “Don’t give me hope and snatch it away again!”
“Now
listen
to me, damn you!” Kaleth burst out, grabbing
his
shoulders and forcing him to look into Kaleth’s eyes. “In all of the futures I’ve seen that end in Sanctuary prospering,
Aket-ten is there!
” He gave Kiron a little shake. “Why would I lie to you? That was why I wasn’t concerned, why I thought, since she felt so resentful about being protected, I should just encourage you to let her do this thing!” He shook Kiron again hard, twice. “I cannot See the way to those futures, but I have
Seen
it, and I know that once we have all the facts, what is happening will make sense and we will find a way to rescue her!”