Alta

Kiron would have experienced a surge of betrayal and jealousy at that moment, except that was the exact moment that the Healer chose to place both hands on his chest, and he was far too busy thinking about how much it hurt—

And then, once again, he wasn’t thinking of anything at all.

When he came to himself a second time, he was lying in a bed. It was not the sort of hard, flat couch that the Tians used; this was more like the fabric frames on low legs that the tala fruit was dried on, but much stronger, of course. And instead of a hard neck rest, there was a soft pillow beneath his head. That, and the sultry breath of a breeze that moved over his face, full of the scent of greenery and water, told him that he was not in Tia, even before his mind caught up with his wakefulness and he remembered why he was lying on a bed.

In fact, this was the sort of bed he had used as a child, when his father Kiron was master of his own farmlands, and those farmlands had been in Alta, not Tia.

There was a linen sheet over him, which was a very good thing, since he quickly discovered that he’d been cleaned up, which was good, but also that he wasn’t wearing anything beneath that sheet, which could have been embarrassing.

Well, that wasn’t entirely true; his chest and presumably his back had been expertly bandaged, so he was “wearing” bandages. But when he opened his eyes, the first thing that he saw was that the girl he had rescued was in the same room with him, and he was glad that they’d given him something to cover his nakedness.

Then his second realization was that he wasn’t in a room, it was a courtyard, open to the sky, which was made necessary by the fact that—his third realization and a great relief—Avatre was also with him. She looked as pleased with herself as could be, and she’d been unharnessed, wiped down, and seemed too contented to be hungry, so someone must have fed her.

And besides the girl and Avatre, there were three men in this courtyard, all standing at his bedside, conversing with one another in low tones.

The first had one hand resting on the girl’s shoulder as she sat beside the head of Kiron’s cot; since the familial resemblance between them was strong, he quickly assumed that this was her father. If so, well—from the gold collar and armbands, the fine linen tunic, the belt of gold plaques, and the gold circlet around his close-cropped hair, he was wealthy at the least.

The second man was robed much like the woman-Healer had been, and there wasn’t much else to note about him, except that he had kind eyes. And the third—

Well, the third wore leather arm-bracers and a wide leather belt over his soft kilt, and carried a leather helmet that was enough like the ones that the Tian Jousters wore to make Kiron think that this must be an Altan Jouster. The first, in fact, that he had ever seen.

“Oh, good!” the girl said, seeing that his eyes were open. “He’s awake! Kiron, son of Kiron?”

“That,” Kiron croaked, finding his throat strangely raw, “would be me, yes.”

The Jouster looked as if he wanted to speak, but the man dressed as a Healer held up a hand. “One at a time, please, and I believe Lord Ya-tiren has precedence?”

The man with his hand on the girl’s shoulder coughed, and looked embarrassed. “I—ah—whatever we learn here, I wish to make it plain that for saving my daughter’s life, this young man has the protection of my house. That’s all.”

The Jouster looked pained. “Lord Ya-tiren, you surely do not think—”

“A strange, bedraggled youngster appears out of nowhere with a dragon that acts like his puppy; he saves my daughter from a river horse, and all that we know of him is that his few possessions appear to be Tian?” Lord Ya-tiren replied pettishly. “And then you appear before he’s even been brought to my house? Well, what is anyone to think? Except that I do not want you people hauling him off to be ‘questioned’ as if he was a spy or a—well, I don’t know what. But he’s surely no older than my son, and I doubt he’s a spy. The last that I heard, the Tians were hardly so desperate that they needed to send boys northward to spy for them!”

Kiron decided that he liked Lord Ya-tiren; the man might not be altogether certain of who and what he was, but was willing to protect him from less delicate ways of finding out than simply asking—

“I am—I was—born Altan, and made a Tian serf and served as a dragon boy among the Jousters of Tia,” Kiron interrupted, taking tiny breaths often, to keep his chest from moving too much. “I suppose you could say I stole Avatre from them, except that without me, she’d never have hatched at all. The rest is a long story.” He eyed the strangers; the Healer looked resigned, Lord Ya-tiren interested, the girl fascinated, and the Jouster skeptical, but willing to be convinced. “If you want to hear it—”

The Healer sighed. “Send for the chairs you wanted, my lord. I can see that my patient will be allowed no rest until this ‘long story’ is told.”