of woolen robes with the skirts cut and bound around their legs. At least they were drying out quickly.
Avatre seemed unhampered by the cold. Up she went, with Kiron consistently giving her the signal that she should go west. And she tried, with the strong winds up here carrying them farther south all the time as she tacked against them. And she kept looking, craning her neck around, searching—he had the feeling she knew what he was asking of her.
When they planned this last night, he had wondered if she would understand what she needed to do without Aket-ten being able to give her clear directions. The “up” part was easy, but she had not flown on a long flight since they had arrived in Alta; would she understand that they needed to take one now?
Her bright eyes darted this way and that as she continued to climb, continued to fight the south-flowing winds—and then, just as he had seen her sense the clear air above them, he saw her find something else.
It was nothing that he could see, but she did, and she redoubled her efforts, driving strongly upward toward a place in the sky that seemed no different to him than any other place in the sky—
Until she was in the middle of it.
And then—ah, then she spread her wings wide and suddenly they were shooting westward, in the middle of a current that took them at right angles to the flow of the clouds underneath them. This time, with something to compare their speed to, it was clear that they were flying at a dizzying pace, both the highest and the fastest that he had ever flown before.
He glanced around, and caught a glimpse of Aket-ten right behind him. That was all he needed to know; that, and the position of the sun. When it was at its zenith, they would have to go down, no matter where they were, because at that point, this wind would die for a while, and then reverse itself.
They hoped that this would be somewhere that Kaleth was waiting for them, but Kiron did not believe in counting on hope alone, no more than Nofret and Marit did. The boys had together scraped up enough ordinary currency in bronze and silver to get a cart and donkey. He and Aket-ten should have enough time to find a farm, buy a cart and donkey, and send the young women out to the desert’s edge, where they could sell the cart and donkey and have enough money to provision themselves while they took some of their jewels apart and pounded things like rings and delicate ornaments into unrecognizable bits of silver, electrum, and gold. Then, if Kaleth had still not put in an appearance, they could go to one of the places at the desert’s edge where the Bedu came to trade and buy their way into one of the encampments and wait there.
Kiron never counted on anything. Especially not luck.
But before the sun reached the appointed spot, the clouds began to thin in front of them. Soon there were gaps below where Kiron could see the green of the farmlands. And then, when he looked ahead, he realized that it was not the white of more clouds that formed the horizon, but the white sands of the desert—
And the farms beneath turned to scrub, the scrub to dry-scape plants, and then, just as the wind dropped away to nothing and Avatre went into a long, slow glide downward, the sparse desert-edge plants turned to true desert.
This was the moment that he realized just how high they were.
His passenger realized it at the same moment that he did; she shrieked in his ear, startling Avatre into a side-slip, and buried her face in his shoulder.
He didn’t blame her.
Their woolens had kept them warm, but it had been a bit hard to get his breath. Now he knew why.
Suddenly Re-eth-ke folded her wings and went into a dive; taken by complete surprise, he only had the wit to direct Avatre to follow her. And follow she did.
It was not the sort of heart-thumping, near-vertical stoop that he and Aket-ten had endured on their first such flight, but it was steep enough, and he heard his passenger’s muffled wails of pure terror against his shoulder. Re-eth-ke evidently saw something that he couldn’t, for she had her eyes fixed on some point in the blank expanse of desert below. This was not so much a dive