else before he whisked the barrow out of Kas-het's pen through the cold rain, and into the one next door.
And found himself looking at a limp and exhausted scarlet dragonet, sprawled on the sand, limbs and damp wings going in all directions in an awkward mirror of Kashet's pose. The damp wings were half under the poor thing, and at his entrance, the dragonet looked up at him and meeped pathetically. It could barely raise its rounded, big- eyed head on its long neck; the bronzy-gold and scarlet head wavered back and forth like a heavy flower on a slender stalk, the huge old-bronze eyes barely open, as if the lids were too heavy to lift. To either side, the halves of the egg lay, red-veined on the inside, with a membrane still clinging to them.
Vetch parked the barrow under the awning and floundered out into the sand to the dragonet's side. It was bigger than he was, and heavier—twice his size and weighing about as much as a young child, he thought, though it was hard to tell for certain. It was going to get a lot bigger before it was finished growing, though. He dug a trench in the hot sand and helped it to slide in, tucking the clumsy, weak limbs into comfortable positions, and spreading the wings out to dry on the surface.
It sighed, as it lowered its head down onto its foreclaws; already the anxiety it had shown when it realized that it was alone was ebbing. It was going to be a crimson red, like both its parents, but unlike Coresan, the extremities were going to be some shade of gold or bronze; until it got a little older, its delicate skin was going to tear and bruise easily if he wasn't careful with it. Right now, the skin was as delicate as his own—more so, in places—and soft as the thinnest lambskin. He petted the dragonet's head and neck for a moment, marveling at the softness of the skin. Then he left the dragonet to bask in the heat and rest from the effort of hatching, heaped a bucket with the chopped meat, and returned to its side.
It opened its eyes when he returned to it, and its nostrils twitched as it caught the scent of the meat. Its head wavered up; the poor thing looked so weak! But the mouth opened, and the thin hiss that emerged was anything but weak, and had a great deal of demand in it. The mouth gaped wide. It had a formidable set of teeth already, no surprise in such a carnivore. Open-mouthed, it hissed again, and whined at him, red tongue flicking out in entreaty.
He laughed. 'All right, baby—don't be impatient!' he whispered, and dropped a piece the size of his palm in the open mouth.
He'd worried about whether the dragonet would be difficult to feed—in the next several minutes, he knew that this, at least, was not going to be a problem. The little one snapped its jaws shut on the meat and swallowed; he watched the lump going down its throat with remarkable speed. Then the jaws opened up again.
They quickly fell into a rhythm. The baby gaped, he dropped meat and bone in, the jaws snapped shut and the throat worked, and the mouth gaped. It was so easy to feed the little one that literally anyone could have done it. In fact, before it was sated, it had eaten nearly its own weight in meat! It ate until its belly was round, the skin tight, and Vetch could not imagine how it could cram another morsel in.
That was when it stopped; it closed its mouth and looked at him, really looked at him for the first time since it had hatched. The big, dark eyes seemed all pupil—he could see that they weren't, though, that the ins was simply so dark a color that it was nearly black, but the huge, dark eyes seemed to draw him in and hold him. He couldn't look away, and didn't want to, for those eyes seemed to him to be the most wonderful things he had ever gazed into. And then it sighed, laid its head in his lap with complete and utter trust, and closed its eyes and went immediately to sleep, without a care or a worry in the world.
He was here, and he was now the center of the dragonet's world. So long as he was here, there could be nothing wrong.
He thought his heart was going to melt. A pent-up flood of emotion threatened to overwhelm him; he squeezed his eyes shut to keep from crying, and just whispered tender nonsense into the ruby and bronze shells that were the dragonet's ears, while he stroked the soft skin of the head and neck with a hand that shook.
But he couldn't hold the tears back for very long; finally they started, and he wept silently, anger and grief that he had held in for so very long, mingling together with joy and relief in those tears, and nothing left to hold them back.
How long he cried, he couldn't have told. He cried until his eyes were sore, his nose clogged, his belly sore from sobbing. He cried until his throat was raw and scratchy, crying for all he'd lost, and all he could lose now, crying that his mother and father weren't here to see him, in his first moment of triumph since the Tians came.
It couldn't have been long, or he'd have heard Kashet hissing for his supper. Certainly it wasn't as long as it felt.
But finally, even he ran out of tears. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand, careful not to get sand in them, and sniffed.
He felt odd. Felt as if he had cried something out of himself, and now there was just a hollow where it had been.
'Can you see me, father?' he whispered into the rain, into the vast space between himself and the Summer Country. 'Can you see what I've done? Isn't this baby a beauty, the most wonderful thing you've ever seen?'
The dragonet stirred a little in sleep, and hissed softly.
Carefully, so as not to wake it, he began to stroke the head and ears, and as he petted the delicate skin of the brows, he knew that his dragonet was a female, for it did not have the bumps beneath the skin that would eventually form into a pair of skin-covered 'horns' that marked the males.
