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She stepped onto it; it began to move. As she shifted the path to form the pattern that led to Saphier,
elusive sounds, faces, drew urgently at her attention, demanding to be named. She pushed them away,
concentrating, intent on accurately shaping the whorls and crooks of time and distance so that the path
would end in Saphier and not in the middle of some sea. It was not until she had formed the final turn and
something vast began to shape itself beyond the dark, that she relinquished her attention to memory, and
the sounds, the faces, came suddenly clear.
A knock--. The Holder turned, and the bells began to ring. The door opened... The Gatekeeper, his
face hard, white, as it was when he swallowed fear whole and tried to hide it in some private place ...
The face beside him was so unexpected that for a moment she felt only amazement: dark-skinned,
pale-haired, eyes as dark as the first night of the world- It was Meguet s kin, her unlikely shadow, as
powerful and as powerless, standing under a roof that was not stars or light. And then she saw the
warning in his eyes.
She felt the blood startle out of her face. The darkness ebbed, revealing a quiet, shadowy hall, a house
at night, some time after, she guessed, the midnight bells had rung.
The firebird flew ahead of her toward a moving circle of light.
Ten
Meguet picked her way across a dragon s spine. It pushed itself in a sharp, uneven ridge of red stone
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out of dry, weathered earth; it was not high, but too long to walk around and almost too steep to climb.
Nothing grew on it. On the other side of it lay more of what she had already crossed: the Luxour with no
perceptible horizon, shimmering with heat or with air disturbed by the flicker of dragon wings.
She had left Rad s village at dawn, sitting beside a young, straw-haired man on his cart. He was going to
cut salt blocks, he had told her when she stopped him. There was a place he knew in the desert, a white
pool of salt She needed to get to Draken Saphier s court, she said. He looked surprised, but offered her
a ride as far as the first wall of stone.
I go due north, he said, to the dragon s backbone. Then I go west along that to the end, and there s
the salt pond. You ll want to keep going north. He eyed her askance as she climbed onto the cart seat;
an answer presented itself. You ll be a mage, too, then. We were all wondering. Only mages cross the
Luxour on foot.
How do others get across? she asked. He urged his donkeys forward.
They ride. Mostly they go around to the east, then follow the river. Others come in caravans, on carts,
well-supplied. Those who hunger after dragons. Most buy a heart and go home again. He ticked at the
donkeys; his voice was good-humored, unhurried. Some stay along the river, spend their lives looking
for crystal bones. A handful stay on the Luxour itself.
In the desert? she said, startled.
A half-dozen, maybe, I ve seen; there must be others. They find their places in the rocks, their
underground streams. They see their private dreams of dragons to live near a shape of stone, a hot
spring, an odd configuration of shadows at sunset and there they stay. They find me or they find the
gait, eventually. That s how I know them.
She looked at him, at the crook of his mouth, his eyes that expected no surprises. You don t believe in
the dragons.
He shook his head-, surprised-again. But I love the desert. It s enough for me, just the way it is,
without suppositions. Most born around here never leave. Or like Rad, they come back. He never stays
long, though. He believes in dragons, Rad. He s seen them since we were small, running barefoot into the
desert after lizards. Look, he d say, look. But I d never see. So I wasn t surprised when he left for
Draken Saphier s court. All mages go there. Is that where you were born?
No.
He waited, then flicked the reins idly. I thought maybe so, because you came with him and you re going
back there. But they say the mages come from all over Saphier, to Draken Saphier s court.
She opened her mouth to ask a question, closed it again. Mages, she thought, and wondered if they
were all as powerful as Nyx. She felt a familiar, terrible impatience, wanting to be there instead of here
with a desert to find her way across, at least until urgency loosed her powers, pleated time and desert to
take her where she was needed. Whether or not Rad Hex would search for her after he took the key
from Nyx, she had no idea. She could do nothing for Ro Holding, staying in that village at the edge of
nowhere. Nyx, she had reasoned starkly, would not sit still in Chrysom s tower wondering where
Meguet was. if she could find her way to Saphier. And if she came, she would not bother with a desert;
she would go straight to Draken Saphier....
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There, the young man beside her said. The dragon s backbone.
The sun had risen above the distant blue mountains, begun its arc across the sky. It peeled shadow away
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