Kiron felt nausea in the back of his throat; he had endured the aftermath of one earthshake that had wrought terrible destruction in Alta City. He didn’t want to think about what this would do to a city already afraid and demoralized. “I would rather not have such an opportunity at that cost,” he replied.
But Kaleth shook his head. “It is none of our doing, or of the gods’,” he said firmly. “The Magi have already put all of this in motion, and it will happen whether we use the opportunity or not. They have chosen to besiege the Winged Ones, the people will come to protest, and they will use the Eye, triggering the shake.”
“Then we must make use of it, and take the bitter herb and make a medicine of it,” Ari said, standing up. “We have a plan. Let us put that into motion.”
Train your dragons to trust you to be their eyes in the darkness.
Easier said than done. And without Aket-ten, it would have been impossible.
First, the dragons did not want to be kept from their warm sands when the sun went down. They whined and complained and rebelled as much as if they had been asked to fly in the rain. If Aket-ten had not been able to tell them it was a needed thing—though she could not explain to them in ways they would understand why it was needed—it would not have been possible to keep them from their pens and well-earned sleep.
Second, they truly, passionately, fearfully did not want to fly once the sun was down, even when it was only dusk, and not true dark.
Because, according to Aket-ten, they could not see a quarter of what their humans could see once the brightest light was gone. As they lined up in the last light of the day, heads down and tails lashing, their apprehension was so thick Kiron could practically taste it.
“It is the opposite of cats,” she said, putting a comforting hand on the quivering shoulder of Re-eth-ke, whose objections to doing this unnatural thing were as strong as any other dragon’s, despite Aket-ten’s constant reassurances in her mind. “They may be able to see a mouse from the clouds by day, but they cannot see an elephant at fifty paces once the darkness comes.”
Kiron and Baken racked their brains to try and devise some training that would lead the dragons to trust in their riders, and in the end, it came down to breaking all of flying down to the simplest of parts.
First, and hardest—landing in the dark. If they could manage to give their beasts the confidence that they could do this, that they could trust their riders to be their eyes, everything else would follow.
They all began by taking their dragons up just as the sun set. Now, this was actually an advantage. The dragons could still see, and they were very anxious to be down again—
So, as soon as the sun-disk dropped completely below the horizon, they all allowed their dragons to descend. Slowly. Very, very slowly.
Which the dragons were all perfectly fine with—they were having trouble seeing, and were paying, as a consequence, exquisite attention to every tiny nuance of signal that their riders gave them.
Then Kiron made them take off again, as the dragon boys, now freed by the coming of dark from tending their dragonets, lit the fires they would use to land by.
This time, it was dusk, not sunset, and not all of them would rise. Kiron had figured as much; if they wouldn’t, he’d told the others not to force them; eventually, it would come. They might not be able to clearly see the rest of the wing taking off, but they could hear it, and instinct would urge them to do the same.
Avatre answered to his order; a measure of her trust in him was that she whined and whimpered but did not hesitate, though her wingbeats were heavy and reluctant. He put her to flying in a slow circle with the fires below at its center. When he peered through the dusk and counted, he found he had been joined in the air by Aket-ten and Re-eth-ke, Ari and Kashet, and Kalen and Se-atmen. Ari’s Kashet was still visibly blue, even in the dusk; Re-eth-ke, however, was hardly more than a shadow with silver edges. And brown-and-gold Se-atmen was merely warm shades of gray. That made something else occur to him; it was going to be difficult, if not impossible, to tell each other apart. They would have to have everything perfectly coordinated once darkness fell, and stick strictly to the plan.
But he could feel Avatre’s panic under his legs, in her trembling muscles and the way she darted her head around, trying to see the other dragons that she could hear. And he knew that she wouldn’t rise a third time tonight; she was terrified of a collision in the dark, and rightly so.
Of all of them, Kashet was probably the most panicked, because he was the most set in his ways, the least used to being asked to do the unusual. Only the love he had for Ari had driven him into the sky in the first place. “Ari!” he called into the growing darkness. “You down first!”
Kashet was a wind and a shadow below them, as he spiraled down toward the four fires, for those, at least, he could see. And he didn’t make a graceful landing—it was certainly the clumsiest he’d made since he learned to fly properly—but there were no sounds of disaster, and in the flickering firelight below, Kiron made out the dragon shadow scuttling out of the square, clearing it for the next pair.
“Kalen!” he called, but Se-atmen, having seen, however dimly, one dragon make a safe landing, was already on his way down.
“You first,” Aket-ten called to him. “Re-eth-ke will stay as long as I need her to once the sky isn’t crowded anymore.”
He didn’t intend to ask twice, for Avatre was straining her head toward the ground, whining anxiously, and he let her follow her instincts and the firelight, in a tight spiral down toward the light. But he could feel how much she trusted him and his eyes in the way she angled her flight to every shift in his weight, and the way she began her backwing instantly when he tugged on the reins. Her landing was much more graceful than Kashet’s had been, nearly as good as a daylight landing would have been. He jumped from her back and quickly led her out of the square of light, and none too soon, for not even Aket-ten could hold Re-eth-ke back when she knew she was going to be allowed to land.
He didn’t wait to watch it; Avatre was straining toward her pen, and he wanted her to have the reward of good work as immediately as possible. She followed his lead through the streets and corridors open to the sky that he had ordered left dark, with no torches or lanterns as were usually in place. The dragons had to learn to place all their trust in what their riders “told” them, and this was a good, safe way for them to continue the night’s lesson. Avatre knew her pen as soon as they stepped across the threshold, and with a cry, she waded out into the sand without waiting for him to unsaddle her.
And it just didn’t seem fair to make her get out again.
So he removed her equipment right where she stood, even though he hadn’t had to work so hard since the first time he’d unharnessed Kashet. Then he left her to work herself into her wallow, and she was asleep before he’d finished putting the equipment on its racks.
He joined the others by prearrangement in Lord Ya-tiren’s kitchen, where they were all enjoying well-earned jars of beer.