It might mean a great deal –
And it might mean nothing at all. Alara knew that if she was contrary and difficult to predict, Father Dragon was doubly so. He might simply be enjoying her discomfiture. He was undoubtedly enjoying the stir she was making. Draconic mischief-making was not limited to races outside their own.
And Father Dragon was well known for playing pranks on his own kind.
Alara dismissed the whole puzzle. If Father Dragon wasn’t going to intervene, it didn’t matter. She could fight this battle on her own, and win.
‘I am going to keep the child,’ she said challengingly, planting her feet and raising head and wings, bringing up ears and spinal crest, and looking them all in the eyes in turn. ‘It will make a good playmate for Keman. He will be able to learn how to mimic the two-legs, human and elven, more effectively with an example beside him. And who knows what we shall learn from having a specimen to study from infancy! I learned more from the mind of her mother than any of you would believe.’
That caused a stir; heads turned, and crests were raised or lowered according to how the owner felt. ‘It’s an animal,’ Oronaera hissed, mantling a little. ‘I’ve no objection to keeping the thing as a pet, but raising it alongside our own young ones? Outrageous! As well bring in great apes and delphins!’
Alara mantled back at him, narrowed her eyes, and imparted a dangerous edge to her tone. ‘Perhaps that would be no bad idea!’ she snapped, her claws digging great furrows in the hard-packed dirt. ‘Perhaps then you who never leave the Lair except to feed and sun yourselves would learn the difference between animals and those who are your equals in mind – and certainly far more interesting!’
‘Equals? These animals?’ Lori snorted. Before Alara could stop her, she reached out and picked up the baby by one ankle. It wailed in distress and she wrinkled her nostrils disdainfully. ‘Shaman, you have lost your wits, what few you had. This is nothing more than a food beast, and you know it. I’ve heard that these young ones make good soup –’
And there it ended, for Alara did the unthinkable, goaded past anger into an act of aggression against another dragon. Lori was not prepared, for Alara had never fought back when stressed, even as a child. It was, in fact, something no one would ever have dreamt her capable of, despite her demonstrated bravery in the Thunder Dance.
She reared on her hind legs, her tail lashing wildly, which had the effect of clearing the others from behind her as they leapt to avoid it. Her right foreclaw shot out, caught at Lori’s shoulder before the other dragon could dodge out of the way and squeezed, hard. Her talons dug into the softer skin around the joint, until Lori squealed and started to let go of the child.
‘Gently,’ Alara growled from between her clenched teeth. ‘On the ground. Don’t bruise her, or by Fire and Rain, you’ll regret every mark on her skin, for I’ll duplicate them on yours, if I have to strip away the scales to do so!’
Lori lowered the child to the dirt; it stopped crying the moment it felt a firm surface beneath it. Alara released Lori, who lowered her ears and spinal crest in submission and backed away. Several of the others backed away as well, some as submissively as Lori.
She stood over the child and glared at the rest of the Kin. ‘I’m keeping it,’ she said firmly. ‘I’m raising it with Keman. It is a child of intelligent creatures, and it needs someone to protect and care for it.’ She glared around the circle, at the lowered snouts and downcast eyes. ‘It will be of no danger to us. It can’t betray us, for it will never know its own folk, unless we see fit to introduce it to them. And by then, if we have treated it well, it will be more dragon than human. I have broken no Law here, and you well know it.’
Father Dragon, who until this moment had not stirred, raised his head. ‘You should keep and raise the child, Alara,’ he said, his deep voice like the rumble of thunder in the far distance. ‘It has great hamenleai. Interesting things will befall around it, and because of it.’
Alara’s eyes widened in startlement. It was not often that any shaman could attribute hamenleai, the potential to make changes in the world, to a specific being or action. Alara had done so once in all the time she had been a shaman. And for Father Dragon to say that the child had great hamenleai was extraordinary – Father Dragon had never once been wrong that Alara had ever heard. Her own decision had just been vindicated for not only the Kin of this Lair, but all of the Kin everywhere.
She stretched her wings out to their fullest, her eyes shining with triumph.
And at that moment, a ripple of contraction surged across her belly, and she gasped and doubled over as she felt the first pain of labor.
Chapter 5 (#ulink_accf5943-e27c-5ea2-9565-3733fa8ea2de)
Keman watched his mother defend the human cub with bewilderment. Not that he couldn’t see why she was defending it, it was that he couldn’t see why the others were so determined to oppose her. Their ears were back, their spinal crests up or aggressively flattened, their tails twitched, and all their muscles were tensed.
What’s wrong? he wanted to ask Father Dragon. It’s only a baby, just a cub. It can’t hurt anyone, certainly not one of the Kin! Why don’t they want Mother to keep it?
But the others were sometimes cruel, too – like Lori, who kept threatening to take Keman’s pet two-horns for a snack rather than fly off to hunt one. Perhaps that was why they were being so mean.
But his mother was standing up to them, all of them; she wasn’t going to back down without a real fight. And right when he almost flew out from under Father Dragon’s wing to stand by her, Father Dragon laid a restraining claw on his shoulder.
So he stood by, and fretted, until Lori tried to take the human cub to eat. He nearly jumped on Lori’s tail right then; he had his claws all set to snatch at it, and his teeth all set to bite her. And that was when Keman’s gentle, tiny mother somehow grew to three times her normal size and forced Lori to submit to her. She caught Lori’s shoulder, right where the scales were really small and didn’t protect much, and squeezed hard, like the young buck-dragons did playing dominance games. She caught Lori by surprise, and she hurt Lori – and Lori could never tolerate being hurt. She had once made an incredible fuss over the removal of a bone-splinter from her foot. Lori backed down, and the rest followed her lead.
The threat was over then, and Keman relaxed. He paid no more attention to the doings of the adults; the human cub had all of his attention.
It was really kind of cute, he thought, watching it as it squirmed in the dust, moving arms and legs feebly. He wondered how old it was. Mother had said she wanted him to help take care of it – if it was like the two-horns, it probably needed milk, and she didn’t know how to get the two-horns to take different babies from their own. But he did.
Keman had been bringing home ‘pets’ ever since he was old enough to go out beyond the village alone. Some of his pets had proven useful – the family of spotted cats, for instance, that had taken up residence in their lair and cleaned out all the vermin. Or the myriad lizards, who had taken care of the insects that had been too small to interest the cats. He had gained a certain amount of notoriety among the Kin; some of them even brought animals back from their hunting expeditions for his little ‘zoo’. Father Dragon, for one; he’d brought in the rare one-horn doe, as big as a horse, that looked like a cross between a two-horn and a big plains three-horn, except its cloven hooves were closer to being claws. It had been pregnant, and had dropped triplet fawns. All were as foul-tempered as their mother, and permitted no one near except Keman. He used them to guard the rest of his foundlings. Even Lori avoided the one-horns, which were as aggressive and mean-spirited as two-horns were sweet and gentle.
But this was the first time anyone had brought Keman anything so newborn and feeble. This human cub would be interesting to tend.
She’d do all right with the two-horns, he decided. If there were loupers nursing, that would have been better, because she was kind of soft – but if he put her with Hoppy, the three-legged two-horn, Keman didn’t think she’d get stepped on.
Just about that time, his mother made a gasping sound. Alarmed, Keman looked up and saw her folding around herself.
Keman had seen his pets give birth a half a hundred times, and it was no mystery to him what was happening. But the others backed away, and some of the older females popped out of their lairs and surrounded Alara, glaring at Father Dragon and Keman as if they didn’t belong there.
Everyone ignored the human cub lying quietly in the dust, as if she didn’t exist. No one would ever have guessed she had been the object of so much contention a few moments earlier.
Keman crept closer to the tiny, fragile-looking creature, wondering what he should do about it. Mother had said she wanted Keman to help her take care of it, but it was really hers, wasn’t it? Should he just take it, or should he wait for her to say something?
He paused, paralyzed by indecision. He knew she might be until dawn or later in giving birth to his new sib. But if he waited, the cub could be dead. It had to be hungry by now –
As if in answer to that unspoken question, the little thing mewed and turned its head blindly. Keman put a knuckle – which seemed enormous, compared to its head – to its mouth and it sucked fruitlessly, then cried.
If he didn’t take care of it, it was going to die, he decided, then looked to Father Dragon for help.
‘If you know what needs to be done, Keman, you must do it,’ Father Dragon rumbled. ‘Especially if you know it is the right thing to do.’
For one moment longer, Keman hesitated. What if Lori found out he took the cub? She backed down from Alara, but she wouldn’t pay any attention to him. And if she ate the cub – he wouldn’t be able to stop her.
But if nobody knew he had the cub until after Alara was better – and if he put the one-horns in the same pen as Hoppy –
That’s what he’d do. Not even Lori wanted to get past four one-horns.
Once he’d made the decision, he didn’t hesitate. Although he couldn’t shift shape yet to something that could carry the little one in its arms, his foreclaws were certainly large enough for him to carry the cub in one with room to spare.
Provided he could avoid nicking her with one of his talons. He hadn’t the least notion how to medicate her if he scratched her, and if he hurt her, she’d have to wait for his mother’s recovery to be tended.
He’d just be really careful. He had handled babies before.
He put his right foreclaw over the cub, like a cage, and slowly worked the talons under her, a little at a time, trying to dig through the dirt under her rather than actually touch her. When all five talons met, and there was about enough space between each of his fingers to insert a human hand, he raised his arm, slowly.
The cub lay cradled securely in a basket of talons, without so much as a scratch on her.
Keman breathed a sigh of relief, and headed towards the lair, limping on three legs. He looked back once, to see if Father Dragon was going to come with him, but the shaman had silently vanished while he’d been trying to pick the cub up. And the others had long since taken his mother away.
Well, that was all right. Keman knew exactly what he needed to do now, and he figured he’d be able to take care of it without any help from the adults.
The menagerie lived just inside one of the lair’s many exits, with the paddocks for the larger grazing animals located right outside. Keman was very tired by the time he made his way through the living caverns to the exit tunnel; he hadn’t realized that hobbling along on three legs was going to be so hard. He hadn’t noticed before that there were so many uneven places to scramble over; so many protrusions of rock to get around. It was one thing to blithely hop over them with all your legs intact; it was quite another proposition carrying something you didn’t dare drop. And his foreclaw was beginning to cramp.
He wished profoundly that he was old enough to shift shape, or use some of the draconic magics. His mother could melt rock when she bothered to think about it. If he’d been able to work magic, he could have had his path cleared by now.
It was a very weary little dragon that clambered clumsily out over the rocks into the paddock area. The two-horns, gentle and unable to defend themselves, had the paddock nearest the cave mouth, with a little shelter he’d made of rocks piled together and a fence of more rocks ringing the paddock. He was entirely glad to put the baby down in the straw beside Hoppy, who was nursing her own kid, lying down on her side. Hoppy was a very gentle two-horn, even for her mild breed, and Keman had fostered many orphans on her before this.
He flexed his claw with relief. It had felt for a moment like he was never going to get it uncramped! He checked the cub; it seemed perfectly all right, cushioned with straw, and Hoppy was apparently ignoring it.
