Sanctuary

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