Lilt touched down on the granite shelf with a dry scrape of her belly-skids, flaring both wings at the last second to kill her speed ten paces in front of the three linen bandages. Before Chaska had even unbuckled her knee-straps, Pip trotted out from the cliff wall and pressed its broad shell against Lilt’s left flank so the sandray could lean her tired wing-joint against something solid.
Ysabet walked over with a tin mug of hot pine-needle tea in her left hand and a strip of dried mutton tucked under her thumb. The shadow of the western tooth was just touching the outer edge of the shelf.
“Good landing,” Ysabet said, handing the mug up. “And right on the mark. What’s ahead?”
She did not add that she had been worried, or congratulate Chaska like a pupil who had passed a test. Chaska took a long swallow of the hot tea, felt the cold go out of her throat, and swung down from the saddle.
“No sign of Edris’s party on the south road yet,” Chaska said, unbuckling Lilt’s front cinch while Ysabet rolled up the three linen strips. “Because the south road doesn’t meet ours until above the gorge. And our side of the gorge has a twenty-foot hole in the suspension bridge, plus a full rookery of storm crows sitting on the chains.”
