Just deserts, in Vetch's mind. No dragon, no beast, could ever be successfully starved into submission.
Whether it was due to a full belly and a building layer of fat, due to the tola, due to kind treatment, or all three, Coresan confined her displays of temper to the most minor of outbursts with Vetch, snorts, hisses and head- tossing, spending most of her time lounging in the heat. Even those displays of pique were halfhearted, as if she was saying, Yes, you see, I am a princess, and you are beneath me, and will render me my due or feel my wrath. See? I can punish you with my display. Now, you will fetch me some of those lambs or I will make you rue it by hissing at you again. She was, in fact, turning into a creature that reminded him more of a spoiled, wealthy girl chit than a carnivorous monster.
Yes, tending her was a great deal of work, work he could not have done without a slave assigned to take over his other chores. Actually, his chores had been divided, with a slave cleaning Ari's quarters, and the chores in leather workshop and armory being taken up by the other dragon boys. It was more work than Kashet caused; Coresan was difficult to move about the compound, and required extra effort when he fed her and especially when he groomed her.
Nevertheless, she did not cause him as much work as Sobek had been put to, and Vetch was convinced it had all been because of how he had handled her. It was easier to pause at the doorway and throw the impatient dragon chunks of meat until the edge was off her hunger than try and fight past her to put the barrow next to her. It was easier to chain her in the grooming pen and wait out her head-tossing and fidgeting than to fight to chain her even shorter. It was easier in general to work around her than to fight her, and when she didn't get a fight, she lost interest in fighting. All perfectly logical, really.
Every morning Haraket asked if there were eggs yet. Every morning, Vetch answered in the negative, truthfully. Then, slightly more than a week after the mating, the first egg appeared; Coresan had laid it some time in the night.
He hadn't yet given up hope, but he'd begun to wonder if, perhaps, 'everyone' was wrong, and a dragon wouldn't lay unless she'd mated more than once. But it had become habit to scan the sands of the wallow for any sign of an egg, paying close attention to parts of the pit that Coresan had been digging in the night before.
The egg, that precious egg, was indeed in a corner of the sand pit she had been paying special attention to last night, and if he had not been looking for it, he might not have seen it, for only the barest top curve showed above the sand. He didn't go near it, much as he wanted to; he fed her first, wanting to get some tala into her before he made any attempt to investigate it.
When she was sated, she returned to her wallow. He walked around the pit cautiously, and with one eye always on her, in case she decided to take exception to his interest. But Coresan didn't seem to notice him, or that he was interested in her egg; she was buried in sand, dozing, when he finally crouched down next to the object of his desire, and brushed the sand away from the top.
The egg was exactly the same color as the sand, and the shell even had a similar texture to sandstone; it was very hard, like an enormously thick bird's egg, rather than leathery like a snake egg. He could get his arms around it easily enough, he thought; the question was, how much did it weigh? He uncovered it further, and slid his hand underneath it. He hefted it experimentally, with one hand steadying it and one under the shell, though he didn't try to lift it completely out of the sand that cradled it. It was as warm as the sand, and weighed about the same as a five-year-old child. Coresan didn't seem to mind that he handled it, perhaps because she wasn't yet brooding.
Or perhaps it was only because this was her very first egg. With barnyard fowl, first-time mothers weren't always very motherly.
He covered it back up again, quickly; he didn't want to chance it getting cold. And now the reality of it came home to him in a rush.
An egg! Coresan had laid his egg! His hands shook, and his insides felt as if he'd eaten live fish. He could hardly contain his excitement. An egg! Here it was, what he'd been waiting for—
He forced himself to calm down; he tried to look normal, although he felt anything but normal. The first person he had to get past was Haraket, when he arrived to get Coresan's morning feed. Sure enough, the Overseer was there, making sure the tala got properly measured out, that boys were getting enough meat for their charges. Haraket asked him about eggs when he dipped the scoop into the powdered tala to shake it over Coresan's rations, and he just shook his head, trying to keep from looking the Overseer in the eye. Haraket took that as 'there is no egg yet' and didn't ask anything further, much to his relief. He didn't want to lie to Haraket, not if he could help it. The gods didn't like false-hood, and he needed the gods on his side in this. He also wasn't entirely sure that he could lie to Haraket. He wasn't good at lying, and the Overseer was uncannily good at knowing when someone was lying to him.
But the egg was on his mind all day as he divided his time between his two charges. He had a choice of several courses of action now, but he would have to decide what he was going to do soon. He had to get his egg before someone else decided to check Coresan's pen on the theory that Vetch wouldn't necessarily know what he was looking for, or that Coresan would have buried the eggs and not allowed Vetch to see them.
When it all came down to it, he was just a dragon boy and not even Haraket knew how much Ari had taught him about the great beasts. It was a logical supposition to presume that he wouldn't know what to look for; until last dry season, he'd never even seen a dragon that wasn't high in the sky. It wasn't likely that Ari would have told anyone how much the Jouster had been teaching Vetch about dragons. Why should he? It would make no difference to anyone, and was no one else's business.
They probably figured that the reason that he'd gotten Coresan to behave had more to do with being a farmer's son and knowing in general how to handle beasts than it had to do with his newly-won knowledge of the great creatures.
