As she continued to press westward, the setting sun seemed torn in half along its lower edge, a jagged line of black cutting across it before it reached the horizon.
Those were the mountains. Not long now …
Beyond the desert which the elvenkind would not cross, beyond the territories managed only for game, lay the Lairs themselves, nestled into valleys in the mountains. Home had never looked so inviting; and not even the halfblood child swinging from her claw had much importance.
In fact, Alara longed for her own place, her own cave, so much that she completely forgot she had never completed her meditations.
Alara circled over the Lair for a moment, waiting for the sentry on duty to acknowledge her before setting down. Old habits died hard; perhaps it was no longer necessary for dragons to worry about who and what came winging in over their Lairs, but sentries were still assigned, and no dragon would ever land without being acknowledged by the sentry. Weary as she was, Alara was not weary enough to violate that protocol.
:Who flies?: came the ritual question.
:Alamarana,: she replied, just as formally. :Have I landing right?:
:Landing and Kin-right, by Fire and Rain. Welcome home, Elder Sister!:
She didn’t recognize the ‘tone’ of the voice; probably because she was so tired. Must be one of the youngsters, she thought. She hovered for a moment over the cluster of ‘buildings’ set into the sides of the valley, orienting herself. Below her the buildings, of every possible form and style, were hardly more than darker shapes against the pale, weathered rock. There were no lights, which would have sorely puzzled any elf or human who approached, even more than the wildly disparate buildings themselves.
Alara finally realized why she couldn’t see; she’d been so tired she hadn’t bothered to shift her eyes from day-sight to night-sight. Cursing herself for stupidity, she made the tiny adjustment, and suddenly the valley took on a crystalline clarity.
And there was her home; or rather, the building that marked the entrance to her home. Some dragons actually preferred surface dwellings and tended to spend a great deal of time in forms other than draconic. The huge, manorlike constructions were theirs, though they were situated without regard to surface access or water supply. There was, in fact, one enormous castle built right into the side of one of the cliffs, close enough to touch as Alara glided past.
It was new. Alara wondered who had built that monstrosity; it looked like something a newly rich overseer would build.
Other dragons preferred caves, but not the deep caves of Home; they chose shallow caves high on the side of the mountain, where they could sunbathe on ledges all day if they chose. As she winged past one of these, she saw eyes shining at her out of the darkness. Three sets of eyes, all quite close together.
So Ferilanora had managed to coax her brood up the cliff at last. Alara had begun to think she would never get them out of the valley.
And some of the Kin, like Alara, felt most comfortable in extensive underground lairs, the kind of places the Kin used at Home. They felt more comfortable and secure with solid rock overhead, a myriad of hiding places, and multiple exits. This community of the Kin was blessed with a valley suitable for all three preferences.
Those that preferred caves or caverns tended to construct at least a semblance of a building to mark the entrance to their homes and protect it from storms. Alara’s was a copy in stone of V’Sharn Jaems Lord Kelum’s pleasure gazebo in his rock garden. She saw it once during a kind of open-house party, and had found it charming.
She couldn’t say the same for him, however.
The result was a hodgepodge of every type, style and size of building imaginable. Pleasure gazebos perched atop knolls or nestled into the sides of cliffs. Manors and fanciful castles huddled at the bottom of the valley like surly hens, or were balanced on the tips of peaks or on cliff ledges. Temples to gods long gone huddled cheek-by-jowl with human-designed pyramids and brothels.
It looked rather as if some tremendous windstorm had swept through a half dozen cities and deposited the remains here.
She circled the valley slowly, gently losing altitude. The child in her claws had been quite silent all through the journey, and if Alara had not felt strange little thoughts coming from its mind, she would have thought it asleep or dead.
Those thoughts – or rather, thought-forms; they were in nowise clear enough to be considered thoughts – were quite strong. Stronger, in fact, than a newborn of the Kin.
If this was any indication of how strong it was likely to be when it got older, she was not surprised the halfbreeds gave the elves such trouble.
Below her, she saw the rest of her Kin emerging from their lairs. From above, they looked very odd indeed, especially by night-sight, which lacked all color. Without the color patterns to tell her who they were, and shrouded in their dark wings, they made a very odd effect against the stone.
One, however, she recognized at once. Her son Kemanorel bounced in place, unable to restrain his excitement.
:Be careful when I land, dearest,: she said to him, as soon as she was low enough that she knew she was within his limited range. :I have a – a kind of new pet, I think. A baby one. I am going to need your help with it; it’s lost its mother.:
Keman’s reply was clouded by bursts of glee; if she’d been on the ground, she knew she’d have heard him squealing. Beside him was another dragon she recognized by the sheer size and the silver glitter of his scales in the moonlight: Father Dragon. She watched him drape a taloned claw over Keman’s back, as the youngster threatened to leap into the air with anticipation.
The little one looked up at Father Dragon, and even at this distance Alara felt waves of calm coming from the chief shaman.
Most especially she was glad to be back with Keman. Even if he did drive her to distraction occasionally, she thought indulgently; and then she was on the long, difficult approach to landing. Difficult, because she was carrying something, because she was heavy and unwieldy with her own child-to-be, and because this was not the open land of the desert. Her long glide was interrupted by quick wing-beats to give her little lifts over projections, and twists and turns of wings and body to avoid rock formations.
With weary pride, she fanned her wings as she approached the waiting group of curious Kin, and dropped down gracefully into a three-clawed landing.
She placed her burden carefully on the ground, and for the first time since the child had been born, it uttered a cry, a pitiful little mew.
‘Fire and Rain!’ exclaimed one of the others. ‘What in blazes is that?’
Within the time it had taken Alara to land, what had been a peaceful homecoming had turned into a spreading altercation.
Never mind that she had just spent the better part of a moon away from home. Never mind that she was the shaman of this Lair, and presumably entitled to a modicum of respect. None of that mattered once the Kin caught sight of the halfblood baby. The other dragons surrounded her, their presence, though nowhere near as threatening to a flighted creature as one held to the ground, was intimidating enough. In the thin moon- and starlight their colors were muted, even to her night-sight, but she identified them easily enough. She had never felt her youth so acutely before, surrounded as she was by those who were technically her Elders, and she drew herself up to her full height, determined not to show herself intimidated.
‘Whatever possessed you to bring that home?’ one complained loudly, his tail twitching and stirring up the dust behind him. ‘It’s bad enough that it’s uglier than an unfledged bird, but it’s not only ugly, it’s dirty and noisy. It’ll need constant cleaning, and it doesn’t have the decency to keep quiet, ever.’ His tail twitched harder. ‘Your lair is right next to mine. I don’t want that thing wailing because it’s got a problem in the middle of the night, and waking me up!’
‘Not to mention the fact that you won’t be able to get anything sensible or useful out of it for years,’ said another, raising her head contemptuously. ‘It will need special food, special care, and be a waste of time you could spend better attending to your studies and duties. We’ve done without our shaman long enough.’
‘And don’t expect any of us to help, either.’ That was a voice Alara recognized; Yshanerenal was as sour in nature as an unripe medlar, and carried grudges for decades. ‘You brought the thing home, you can take care of it. And if it makes a nuisance of itself, we’ll expect you to deal with it or put the thing down.’ He hunched his head down between his shoulders and raised his wings belligerently.
‘It’s not a thing,’ Alara protested, facing the opposition and giving no clue that she felt challenged. She raised her own wings, and her spinal crest. ‘It’s a child, and not a great deal different from our children.’
‘Maybe not from yours, dear,’ young Loriealane purred sweetly, looking down her long, elegant snout at the shorter shaman. ‘But the rest of us come from better stock than that.’
One of Lori’s older sibs smacked the side of Lori’s head with his wing before Alara could react to that insult. ‘Watch your tongue, you flightless lizard,’ Haemaena growled, as Lori mantled and hissed at him in anger. He batted her a second time to make her cool down. ‘Or are you trying to prove you don’t deserve Kin-right? If the shaman wants a pet, even a weird pet, that’s no reason to insult her lines.’ The tone of his voice conveyed as much that he felt a superior cynicism as a wish to conciliate the shaman. In a way that was just as cutting as Lori’s outright insult. Alara bristled a little more, but his spinal crest lay flat, and his ears were angled forward; he wasn’t trying to insult her, he simply didn’t think she and the child were worth getting into an argument over. His next words proved that, sounding positively patronizing. ‘After all, she’s breeding, and breeding females should be granted their little whims.’
Alara restrained herself from smacking him – with great difficulty. After all, he was on her side. Sort of.
Immediately behind Lori stood Keman; behind him, a protective claw on the youngster’s shoulder, was Father Dragon. Keman was the only child in the gathering, and looked from one adult to another as the taunts and acidic comments flew, puzzlement written in every tense little muscle. Alara spared a moment of pity for him, and repressed the urge to send him back to the lair until this was all over.
The child had to learn someday that the Kin were by no means of a uniform opinion on many subjects. And he had to learn just how cynical and coldly callous most of the older dragons were, and how indifferent to the troubles of any creature outside the Kin.
They were just like elven lords in that, she thought angrily, turning more and more stubborn with every negative comment, every aggrieved complaint. They didn’t care about anything or anyone else, and any other race was somehow inferior to them. Even though the Kin had been driven out of Home, they had no feeling for creatures who suffered the slavery they had escaped. The universe revolved around the Kin, and they wouldn’t see it any other way.
There was a larger issue here than simply the adoption of a strange pet, and every one of the dragons knew it, though none of them voiced it. Alara had breached the walls of secrecy, to bring in a member of another race to a Lair of the Kin. A child, a baby, helpless and wildly unlikely to be a danger to them – but still, there it was. She had bent the unwritten Law, if not broken it. Shamans were permitted that license, but she might have gone beyond the bounds of what even a shaman might do. Were they to uphold the letter of the Law, or the spirit? Most of the Kin would say, ‘the spirit,’ but most of the Kin were not faced with a halfblood child in their very midst.
That was what lay behind every taunt: the uneasy feeling that Alara had gone too far, and that no matter what her motive was, she had to be made to realize that she was in the wrong. That self-centered blindness was what had driven Alara from annoyance to anger, with an admixture of plain, simple stubbornness.
She felt that it had become a moral question. A child was a child, no matter that the child was a halfblood two-legger. It was a child of intelligent beings, completely deserving of protection and of shelter, precisely because it could not protect itself.
While the altercation continued, and the words grew fewer but more heated, Father Dragon simply watched, silently, restraining Keman whenever he looked ready to leap to his mother’s defense. He loomed against the star-spangled sky, the darkest of all the dragons, like a great thunderhead that promised storms to come, yet inexplicably held off.
Alara slowly became aware of his silence, and it occurred to her that he was watching all of them, but seemed to be keeping an especially careful eye on Alara herself. That close regard made her feel uneasy; it made her feel as if she were being judged or tested in some way.
He might truly be watching, testing her, simply because she was a shaman, and as chief of the shamans, Father Dragon was making careful note of her actions.
It might – and it might mean something else. Father Dragon had always, so far as Alara knew, been vitally interested in the actions of the elves and their human slaves. He had, at times, been a lonely voice advocating intervention in the humans’ condition. There had been many times in the past when he had urged more action than simple observation, when he had encouraged the Kin to go far beyond the kind of tricks and sabotage that Alara played among the elven lords.
