Aerie

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KIRON, Wingleader of First Wing of the Jousters of Sanctuary, woke from a dream that his lover Aket-ten was nuzzling his ear to find that his ear was being nuzzled, but not by Aket-ten.

He sat up with a yell, startling the half-grown kitten that had been trying to nurse on his earlobe into instant flight. He felt its sharp claws dig momentarily into his shoulder as it leaped away into the darkness, and though he had certainly felt worse pain in his life, he bit back a curse.

With a growl, he turned over on his pallet and tried to get back to sleep. Below him, channeled up through the stair cut into the living stone of his dwelling, he heard Avatre snoring gently, or at least, as gentle in snoring as a dragon ever got. He couldn’t actually see anything, because it was pitch-dark in this room. He wondered how the cat could see.

Avatre was below him, not just beyond the door of the little room he’d been calling “home” for the last several months, because ready or not, the Jousters had been forced to make the move to the desert city they had initially dubbed “Dragon Court” and now called Aerie. The city they called Sanctuary, the place they had all thought would serve for years, was filling up with people, and fast. Priests, acolytes, the army of servants and slaves required to tend to them—those had come from Alta and Tia alike. The press of priests and their followers alone had shoved the Jousters out of quarters they had only just gotten used to. And that didn’t even begin to deal with the visitors . . . all eager to see the first Voice of the Gods of both Alta and Tia ever. And the first Voice of the Gods, period, in a very, very long time.

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