Alta

Then it stopped. The motion, anyway, if not the pain.

He gasped for a breath that didn’t have water in it; agony burned across his chest. Thought he heard something like a curse.

The wire of pain around his chest snapped, and he could breathe again, and he gasped in one huge, blessed breath of air.

Felt someone tugging at his arms, his poor, wrenched arms. “Get up!” said the high voice urgently in his ear. “Please, get up!”

“Can’t,” he said thickly and tried to shake the water, hair, and mud out of his face. He opened his eyes; everything seemed blurred.

“Orest!” the high voice called. “He can’t get up! You have to help me!”

He tried to move his leaden legs then; found that they would work, a little, so that when a second person came splashing through the shallows, he was able to at least get his own feet under him. With one person on each side, they got him to the side of a boat, and he half-fell and was half-pushed, into it. Wind buffeted them all. Somehow he rolled over and saw a blur of scarlet above as the other two clambered in beside him.

“Avatre!” he called, and coughed. It hurt to call—hurt to breathe again, but he didn’t want her attacking—“Avatre! Follow!” he managed. “Follow!”

He fell into a fit of coughing again, and his vision grayed for a moment. Small hands pounded his back, until he coughed up some muddy water, which seemed to help a little, and the high voice said, “It’s all right. She’s following us.”

“And hanged if I know how he’s making her do that,” said a new voice, admiringly. “I’ve never seen any Jouster who could make his dragon do anything like he did. Who are you?”

“Kiron,” he managed, around pain-filled gasps. “Son of Kiron—”

“Never mind that. Never mind any of that,” the young girl’s voice said firmly. “You just rest. We’ll get you back, you and your dragon. Just rest. We’ll get you help and take you to where you belong.”

Where I belong! he thought wonderingly, around the pain. Where I belong—

And he closed his eyes, lying curled in the bottom of the boat, and let them take him wherever they were going to. Because wherever it was—it was going to be home, where he belonged, at long last.

THREE

HE must have hurt himself more than he’d thought—he’d thought his life had hardened him against any and all punishments, but apparently being dragged backward through a swamp, over submerged logs and sharp sedges and who knew what all else, was a little more than even he could handle. Something happened to him after he was hauled into that little boat, because he lost a significant slice of time. One moment, he was curled with his cheek against the reed bundles of the bottom of that boat, and the next—he wasn’t.

Probably he blacked out for a while; at least, that was the only conclusion his pain-fogged mind could come up with, because the next thing he knew, he was being picked up with surprising care by two enormous men, one at his head and the other at his knees, while the girl babbled and fussed at them. And all he could think was that Avatre would surely think he was being attacked.

“Wait!” he gasped, “My dragon will—”

“Here’s the Healer!” interrupted the boy’s voice, just as the two men set Kiron down carefully on a warm, rough surface that felt like stone. And it hurt anyway. His back screamed at him, until he rolled over on his side to get what was obviously lacerated skin off that rough stone.

Kiron blinked his eyes hard to clear them from the tears of pain; as he got them to focus, he saw he was lying on stone, on a little pier, in fact, and the mud-spattered girl and boy had been joined by two enormous men in plain rough-spun tunics, probably the ones who had gotten him out of the boat. Bending over him was a woman with her hair hanging loose; she was dressed in a flowing white linen gown with no jewels at all, and only a soft white belt at the waist. Avatre had already landed at the very end of the stone pier, and was eyeing the proceedings with anxiety. He tried to say something—to warn them that Avatre could be dangerous in this situation—

But then, to his astonishment, the girl walked fearlessly up to the dragon and stretched out her hand.

Avatre started back, eyes wide—then, cautiously, eased her head forward, sniffing suspiciously at the outstretched palm.

And the most astonishing thing of all happened; the moment that Avatre’s nose touched the girl’s hand, the dragon relaxed. Relaxed entirely, in fact, and went from a pose that warned she was ready to fight, to looking as if she was back in her own sand pit with only Kiron beside her.

And she sat, then stretched out at full length on the stone. She kept her eyes fixed on Kiron, but with no signs of concern at all, as if she knew that no one was going to hurt either of them.

“She’ll be all right now, Tef-talla,” the girl said, confidently laying her hand on Avatre’s shoulder and reaching up to scratch under her chin.