get away from there fast enough. Soon they vanished into the mist again, and Kiron rubbed his head ruefully.
“Now I wish I hadn’t given back that duck,” he said wistfully. “It would have tasted fine for my breakfast.”
Then he remembered the fishing line in his gear; unused since it had been given to him (or rather, sent to become part of his grave goods!), it occurred to him that it was going to take Avatre some time to wake up properly, eat, and warm herself up enough to fly, and while she was doing so, he might just as well try his luck. He hadn’t had fish since the last Tian festival.
His luck, apparently, was in. With a bit of bread left over from his supper, he soon had several fish baking in the ashes of his fire, and both he and Avatre took off with full bellies that morning.
North and a little west; they followed the river while it meandered in that direction, lost it as he had expected, then picked up the Great Mother River’s second daughter shortly around noon. This was the branch known as the White Daughter, the middle of the three; for there were three, all told: Red, White, and Black, so named for the color of their water, tinted by the mud they carried. This time of year, the White Daughter was more of a pale green; she was shallow, shrunken within her banks, waiting for the rains to make her full again.
From the Red Daughter to the White, they flew over cultivated lands that were vastly better watered and more fertile looking than the corresponding properties in Tia, and between the fields was a lattice of irrigation ditches, some of them as wide as a cart and deeper than a man was tall. This fertility was no illusion, but Kiron knew it had come at a cost; every hand of farmland had been claimed from the swamp by someone, building the ditches to help drain the land, dredging up baskets of silt from the bottoms of the ditches and building fields, bringing in earth from the edge of the desert to do the same, or extending the reach of the river with a further network of irrigation ditches beyond the land that had been swamp.
He looked down on these fertile lands and their tenders, and it came to him that he had dared the bluff twice now. Twice he had passed himself off as an Altan Jouster, and twice he had succeeded; dared he try a third time? The nearer he drew to Alta City, the less likely it seemed that his ruse would pass muster, no matter what the Mouth said.
And there was that saying that his father used to use, “Third time pays for all,” that you might get away with something twice, but when you were caught the third time, the reckoning would be high.
Safer not to try again, perhaps.
And it seemed that his caution was appropriate when, as noon approached and he knew Avatre was getting hungry, he spotted the fresh carcass of a cow washed up on another of those rock islands. He knew it was fresh because it wasn’t at all bloated, and when he brought Avatre down on the island to investigate it, the gaping wound in its stomach told what it had died of.
That was a crocodile bite. Perhaps it had waded in too deep for a drink; perhaps it had been one of a herd that some farmer had sent across a ford. It could have been carried downstream by the beast that wounded it, and kicked free only to die and wash up here. For whatever reason it had gotten here, he was thankful; he let Avatre have her fill, then doze in the sun while he fished again, this time encasing the gutted fish in mud to bake in a fire until she had finished her nap. He ate one on the spot, and stowed the rest; when Avatre woke, they continued their journey.
He wished he had a map. He wished that he knew how far it was going to be before he reached Alta City. Going dragonback was infinitely faster than any other way to travel, but Alta was big; Tia was long, but it was narrow, with most of the population confined to either bank of the Great Mother River. Alta was wide; he had heard that if a man tried to walk it from the Eastern Desert to the