He, Nofret, and Aket-ten would be the first humans to witness the event, and it would solve a great mystery, for dragon teeth were hardly formed in a way that would let them be used like hammers or chisels, and no one had ever seen a dragon pick up anything in its foreclaws to use like a tool.
Coresan tilted her head to the side, listening intently to the baby within. Then she bent to the egg, and licked a spot on the top. Then she waited a moment, and with the tips of her very front fangs, began scraping at the same spot. Then she stopped, licked, waited, and scraped again. After the third time, Kiron realized that the shell where she had licked was flaking away.
“Something in her saliva must be eating at the shell!” he exclaimed. “Or making it more brittle!”
And now that all made perfect sense. He already knew that a dragon’s droppings would burn the skin of anyone foolish enough to touch them without gloves, so it stood to reason that there might be something caustic or acidic in the dragon’s saliva. No wonder they could gulp down bones without harm, and without the bone bits appearing fundamentally intact out the other end!
“I hope we aren’t traumatizing the little ones we’re helping to hatch with all the banging,” Nofret replied, her brows furrowing with sudden worry.
Aket-ten laughed. “What would be worse, the banging of the hammers, or that scrape-scrape-scrape?” she asked. “It certainly isn’t quieter. I don’t think we’re hurting anything.”
“They respond to the tapping,” Kiron assured her. “Aket-ten is right, I don’t think tapping or scraping makes any real difference; either sound tells the little one inside the egg where it needs to work to get out.”
As abruptly as she had begun, Coresan stopped, and let go of the egg. It balanced on its end for a moment, then rolled over on its side, and with a shudder, a roughly triangular piece popped off, and the very end of a snout shoved through the hole.
They were too far away to actually see more than that, and then only because the deep red snout was such a strong contrast to the mottled-cream-and-sand-colored egg, but Kiron remembered very well what that moment had been like for Avatre. After the first tremendous effort of cracking the shell, she had simply rested quietly within in it for a few moments, taking her first breaths and gathering her strength to finish the job. Her then-tiny nostrils had flared with each panting breath, and at that moment he had wanted to tear the shell apart to free her.
But he hadn’t, because hatching babies of any sort were in a state of transition. It was quite possible to harm them irrevocably by rushing things. Every farmer’s child knew that.
Coresan now came back to the egg, and began to lick it again, starting from the broken, and presumably weakened spot, and working her way back from that point. The egg and the baby inside it remained quiescent for a short time, then the rocking began again. Coresan confined herself to licking this time, occasionally stopping to make muttering noises at the baby. Whether these were meant to be reassurances or encouragement, Kiron couldn’t tell for sure.
But within a much shorter time than he remembered, the egg cracked open and lay in two halves on the sand, and the dragonet sprawled out inelegantly, a tangle of ungainly wings and limbs, panting with exhaustion.
Now Coresan began frantically licking the baby all over—to clean it? Certainly the dragonet was clean and dry in a much shorter time than Avatre had been under Kiron’s inexpert care. Her ministrations had the effect of moving it away from the shell, which she bat-ted out of the nest with her tail. She licked and nudged until the little one was in a much more comfortable-looking position, curled up with his wings tucked in around him, in the sun to soak up the heat.
Then, and only then, did she begin looking around—and then looked straight up at them.
And snorted.
It did not take having Aket-ten’s god-touched Gift of Silent Speech with animals to read Coresan’s look at that moment. It said, as clearly as could be, “What are you doing up there with my food, when I need it down here with my baby?”
And Nofret did not need any urging to scramble up into the saddle. Kiron had already decided that if Coresan showed willingness to permit Nofret close, it should be she, and not he, who delivered that first meal to mother and offspring. Coresan accepted all of them, but it was time for Nofret to attain a special level of trust, if she was going to be able to get near the babies. He and Avatre had practiced the concept of taking someone other than him on her back off within a reasonable distance; now, he waved at Avatre in the proper signal, pointed at Coresan, and called, “Take her down, girl!”
Nofret couldn’t control or guide Avatre yet, but she didn’t have to. As she clung to the saddle, Avatre did a “gentle” launch, leaping up and out with wings spread, rather than diving off the cliff to snap open her wings at the last possible moment. And with Coresan watching and fidgeting with impatience, she spiraled down to the ground near—but not too near—the nest.
The meat had been divided up into portions manageable by one slender woman; as Kiron and Aket-ten watched, with Aket-ten in Re-eth-ke’s saddle, ready to fly in and force Coresan off if the mother dragon turned aggressive, Nofret untied the first of the bundles and dragged it over to Coresan as the dragon rocked from side to side. Tail lashing with impatience, Coresan actually left the nest to come and take it from her before she had gotten halfway there!
Nofret had the presence of mind to drop the meat and back up a pace or three before Coresan reached her. But she showed no fear, and Coresan showed no aggression. There was a moment of eyes meeting, then both of them turned and retraced their steps, Nofret to get another load, Coresan to take the food to her weary infant.
Aket-ten merely nodded, but of course, she would have known if Coresan was feeling anything but hunger and impatience to get the food. Kiron, however, felt a burden of concern lift from his shoulders.
One less thing to worry about.
Now that he could relax, it was fascinating for Kiron to watch as Coresan tore off the tiniest of bits with her front teeth and offered them to the baby, who sniffed, opened his mouth—it was a “he” by the incipient “horns”—and gulped it down. Coresan continued feeding him, as Nofret returned with her second burden. The female dragon paid no attention to the human at all, as Nofret brought the meat right up to the edge of the nest and left it there, the nearest she had ever come to the eggs before this moment. It appeared that their plan was working; Nofret had risen to a new level of acceptance.
Then again, all of Coresan’s attention was on this, her first baby (or at least, the first one she knew of) and she had no time for anything else.
Nofret was at the edge with the last of the meat bundles when Coresan finally finished stuffing the youngster and looked up. Kiron held his breath again, but Coresan only blinked benevolently at her benefactor, and got slowly to her feet, stretching as she did so, then paced over to Nofret in a leisurely manner. Nofret stood her ground.
Kiron held his breath. Aket-ten looked entirely relaxed, but Coresan’s reputation back in Mefis had been that she was unpredictable.
“Unpredictable” was not what they needed right now.
Coresan looked back over her shoulder at her sleeping baby, then dropped her head, picked up a shoulder of beef, and took it back to the little one, where she proceeded to feed herself.
Only then did Nofret turn and go back to Avatre, climb into the saddle, and wait for Kiron’s whistled signal to tell Avatre to return.
It was only when Nofret got up onto the cliff with them that Kiron saw she was sweating and trembling, and any rebuke he had been planning on giving her about taking chances died on his tongue.
She slid out of Avatre’s saddle and her knees buckled; Kiron and Aket-ten both caught her and helped her to sit on the ground.
“I didn’t know she was going to do those things until she started toward me, and then it was too late,” Nofret said, shivering with reaction. “Coming to meet me was bad enough, but then stalking right over and taking the
meat practically from under my hand—I thought I was going to die right then and there! And once she started moving, I knew I didn’t dare back away, or I might become prey—”
“I’m glad you remembered that,” Kiron said, awkwardly patting her shoulder. “You did very well! And you were right to meet her eyes.”
“You did wonderfully!” Aket-ten exclaimed. “And we won’t tell Ari any details. You’ve done it, Nofret—she’s accepted you as a feeder, if not a nest tender. Yet.”
“Yet?” Kiron responded instantly, with astonishment. “You think Coresan is actually going to accept Nofret as a nest tender?”
“She’s already thinking about it,” said Aket-ten, with a nod toward the feeding dragon. “Or—well, not thinking about it, it’s just that she’s been on the nest herself for a long time without a break, and she’s starting to feel impatient. She wants to fly, she wants to stretch her wings, she wants to hunt for herself and the babies, and all of that is lying under the nest tending and getting stronger every time she looks at Nofret. So when the go feelings are stronger than the stay feelings, if Nofret is there, I think Coresan will just leave, as if Nofret was another female dragon or her mate.”
“Would that mean—” Nofret’s color was coming back. “—would I be able to get right in with the babies?”
“She just might push you in with them,” Kiron said thoughtfully. “It’s what she’d do with another dragon, Ari says. Younger siblings with no nest of their own, or older daughters are often used to tend the nests for mothers whose mates are inexperienced and don’t know to help tend the nest. It depends on how much like another dragon she thinks you are.”
“One step at a time!” Aket-ten interrupted. “It’s enough that Coresan is letting her bring the meat right up to the edge of the nest! And—oh, look!”
She pointed down at the nest, where another egg, this one slightly larger than the first, had begun the violent rocking that had signaled the beginning of real hatching for the first egg. Coresan abandoned her meal and, with a nudge to make sure her first offspring was properly positioned, went to aid the second.
“We’re going hunting,” Kiron told Aket-ten. “Unless you want to—”
“Oh, no, I’d much rather watch!” Aket-ten said, with undisguised enjoyment. “If Coresan finishes what Nofret brought her, I’ll fly her down with the next load myself.”
Satisfied that his partner had things well in hand, Kiron leaped into Avatre’s saddle, and gave her the signal to fly. Avatre was only too happy to oblige. He had the feeling she found all this baby tending and baby watching to be utterly boring and pointless.
“It’s all right, girl; this will be over before too long,” he called to her as they angled out over the desert in search of prey. “Then things—”
He stopped himself before he could finish that with
“—can go back to normal again” because it wasn’t likely that they ever would. Or could. And he wasn’t going to make a promise he would only have to break, especially not to Avatre, whether or not she understood it.
“—things will let us move Nofret and her new dragonet back to Sanctuary,” he said instead. Because at least that was a promise he had some likelihood of keeping.
THIRTEEN
THIS is driving me mad, you know,” Ari said, in a completely conversational tone, as he and Kiron stared down into Coresan’s ravine. Coresan was dozing on one side of the nest, Nofret was sitting on the other side, and the dragonets were tumbling all over each other in between them, in a clumsy, awkward tangle of wings and limbs. They looked like a moving pile of jewelry.
Kiron was getting very, very tired of hearing Ari fret over Nofret’s safety. Nofret herself wasn’t putting up with it, which was probably why Ari was fretting at Kiron instead of his Royal Wife. After a fortnight of this, Kiron was at the end of his patience, too. And, truth to tell, Kiron was rather jealous; there had been so much public pressure for the two of them to become an official couple that even if they had been indifferent to each other, they’d have probably been officially married by now.
As opposed to his own situation. He and Aket-ten were both considered too young for any serious commitments, and even if they had been older, well—they still had duties and responsibilities that didn’t leave a lot of room for anything but those duties and responsibilities.
There wasn’t any special public ceremony to make a couple man and wife, not even for two people who were functioning as rulers, even if they didn’t have thrones or crowns. But there was no doubt that Ari’s courtship of Nofret had succeeded, seeing as they were sharing a sleeping chamber . . . even if Kiron hadn’t already known they had privately gone before both Kaleth and the High Priest of Thet to make their union official.
And Kiron was jealous. But also apprehensive. It was one thing to want Aket-ten so badly his loins ached—but it was quite another to pair off like Ari and Nofret had. There were consequences to that, above and beyond the obvious, consequences he wasn’t at all sure he was ready to deal with. For instance, Lord Ya-tiren might decide that her husband ought to be trying to curb some of Aket-ten’s more outrageous escapades, and not her father. In fact, Lord Ya-tiren might even insist on some similar condition before he would bestow his approval on the match.
Kiron was quite certain such a thing was entirely beyond his abilities. Aket-ten was going to do exactly as she always had, and no one was going to be able to stop her once she made up her mind about it.
He was also not so secure in his position as wingleader that he thought he dared to tip the balance among them by turning an unofficial and private relationship into a public one. Aket-ten was part of the wing, after all, and if they were husband and wife, the others might reasonably expect there was favoritism going on.
And there were other consequences, too; and lots of them. Those were nothing more than the tip of what might be a very, very large rock under the sand dune. Consequences like—as Aket-ten had said herself—babies. Whatever mysterious means there were that women in Alta and Tia used to regulate such a thing, they evidently weren’t available here in Sanctuary yet, if the rash of big bellies among Lord Ya-tiren’s household and the Tian priestesses was anything to go by.
Still—on the other hand—there was a wing full of handsome young men that Aket-ten flew with every day. True, Lord Ya-tiren had given his consent, but all of them were better matches for her than a former serf who had never been anything more than a simple farmer ’s son. Granted, the nobles weren’t lords of anything right now, but they had the blood and—
And he could make himself crazy with thoughts like that in a very short time.
So between one thing and another, he was coming to the end of his patience with Ari’s fretting.
“Nofret says she’s fine. Aket-ten says Coresan has accepted her as another dragon,” he snapped. “There is never a time when someone with a dragon isn’t in the air around here to make sure nothing can get at her or Coresan—not that I think anything could show up here that Coresan couldn’t or wouldn’t handle on her own. Enough, Ari, she knows what she’s doing, we know what we’re doing, so give us all a little credit for caution and good sense, will you?”
Ari looked taken aback by Kiron’s tone. “I just—worry,” he said.
“Well, it’s stupid to worry for no reason.” Kiron set his chin. “If you have to worry, worry about something we’ve got reasons to worry about. There’s plenty of those.”
Ari said nothing, but he had the grace to look chastised. And he did stop fretting, at least for the rest of that afternoon, which proceeded as it always did. They hunted, going out in turn, while Aket-ten went back to Sanctuary and brought back sacrificed animals—sheep, today; it was Hamun’s turn to be sacrificed to, and in the interest of encouraging harmony, the priests of both Alta and Tia presided over and attended the sacrifices for both sets of gods.
In the interest of harmony. . . .
Kaleth had some ideas on that score. “If both sets of priests p
reside now, well, it won’t be long before they’re agreeing on a fixed set of rites, and the two sets of gods merge into one.” It certainly seemed to be working.
If only other problems could be solved so easily.
As the sun-disk neared the horizon, Ari collected Nofret—Kashet was still the biggest, strongest dragon in the wing, and it was much easier for him to carry double. Maybe snapping at Ari had done some good; at least outwardly he didn’t act as anxious when he got Nofret, and she seemed more relaxed as they all headed back home, flying high to get the advantage of the cooler air.
Odd, though, how quickly he, at least, had gotten used to the desert. The heat just didn’t seem to bother him as much anymore.
He had no idea how prophetic those words about “worrying over things we have reason to worry about” would be.
Because as they arrived back at Sanctuary and started dropping down toward the buildings, they could see that the place was like an overturned beehive, with people milling about and forming little knots of tense conversation. One of Lord Khumun’s men was waiting for them as they approached their pens, standing on top of the dividing wall, waving frantically at them.
That’s not good. . . .
“Council chamber,” was all he shouted up at them, eyes shielded against the wind of the dragon’s wingbeats as it kicked up sand. “It’s an emergency!”
“You go!” Aket-ten called over to him and Ari and Nofret. “Land there, and send the dragons back! I’ll take care of them and rejoin you when I’m done!”
Kiron didn’t have to be told twice; he signaled to Avatre to abort her landing; with a grunt of effort, she rowed for height, and after a moment of confusion and hesitation as he resolved the conflict between habit and Ari’s new direction, Kashet followed her.
They landed in the street outside the council chamber—the building now serving only the dual purpose of being the place for meetings and Kaleth and Marit’s home, rather than as a full temple as well. Ari and Nofret were out of the saddle and on the ground as soon as the dragons furled their wings, and running through the doorway before Kiron had even thrown his leg over Avatre’s back. He slid down her shoulder, then turned and slapped Avatre on the foreleg, and called “Home!” and she shoved off from the ground without hesitation. He felt a momentary burst of pride at that; it had taken a long time to train her to follow an order without him on her back, but it was more than worth the effort at times like this one. Kashet, however, looked momentarily confused.
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