They stopped on the sixth evening at the place they'd cached supplies—a low ridge of dark rock that rose from the waste floor like a fist, the only significant elevation for thirty miles in any direction. The cache teams had done their work well. Provisions were exactly where the map said, sealed against the heat and the dust, untouched.
Aragon came down with Elivira on the flat ground west of the ridge — she landed with the controlled enormity of something that had learned, over years, to be careful of the ground it chose. Three great wingbeats backpedaling, a settling of enormous hindquarters, and then the forelegs coming down, and then she was still, and the dust she'd raised drifted south on the evening wind.
