Sanctuary

Coresan’s getting restless. Are they like cats, where they move their nest periodically?”

“Not so far as I know,” he said truthfully. “I wish I could tell you more, but all I know is how the hand-raised ones act.”

“Well, I’m afraid she’s trying to move the nest, and if the little ones follow her, we might never find them again,” she fretted.

As they swooped in to land, it looked as if Nofret’s fears might be well-founded. Coresan was pacing, fanning her wings, then pacing again, peering up at the sky whenever she snapped her wings open. The babies were imitating her, and they usually were not awake at this hour.

Aket-ten landed Re-eth-ke beside Avatre on the canyon floor, as Nofret hurried over to Coresan and the dragonets with the first lot of meat. Coresan took it—

Then, uncharacteristically, began to eat it herself, leaving it to Nofret to feed the little ones.

Aket-ten watched them with her eyes narrowed and a speculative look on her face.

“What?” Kiron demanded.

“I don’t—know,” she said slowly. “There is something very odd going on.” She continued to stare. “I’m trying to encourage the little ones to stay with Nofret if Coresan flies.”

Coresan finished her first portion, and looked straight at Kiron, rather than Nofret. And snorted, in that old imperious fashion he had come to know. He didn’t need Aket-ten’s interpretation to take down another portion of meat and drag it over to her. She seized it, and began tearing chunks off of it, one eye on him, and one on the sky.

It took a third and a fourth to satisfy her, and not once in all that time did she feed any of her babies, not even when they came to her, nudged her portion, and begged pitiably. After a while, the beggar would go right back to Nofret, who was infinitely more reliable, if rather too slow. . . .

Then, when the fourth helping was a memory, Coresan stood up, raised her head and stared at Nofret for a very long moment, as if measuring her for something.

Nofret stopped feeding the dragonets, feeling the eyes of their mother on her, and turned.

She swallowed hard—and visibly. Coresan had Nofret fixed in an unwinking gaze, and Kiron didn’t blame Nofret for a sudden surge of unease. He started to loosen his knife in its sheath, but Aket-ten stopped him with a gesture.

“It’s not what you think,” she whispered.

Just then, Nofret began to slowly back away from the dragonets. It wasn’t the first time that Coresan had leveled a challenging stare at her, and always, once Nofret began to move away from them, Coresan stopped challenging.

Not this time.

This time, Coresan took the two enormous strides needed to reach Nofret, bent her head down before anyone could react, and shoved Nofret in the gut with her nose, tumbling her back into the midst of the dragonet pack.

And then she turned, spread her wings wide, and with a few lumbering steps threw herself into the air. Within moments, she was a dot in the sky. In another, she was gone.

“She’s gone!” Aket-ten said with astonishment.

Kiron shrugged. “Off to hunt, I suppose,” he said. This wasn’t the first time she’d gone off to do so; the only real difference was that this time she had very graphically put Nofret in charge of the babies.

“No, I mean she’s gone,” said Aket-ten. “She’s gone for good! I felt what she meant in my mind. She left Nofret in charge, and now she’s gone for good and she’s not coming back!”

Nofret hauled herself to her feet, pulling on dragonet necks and shoulders to get there. “She might have been a bit more polite about it!” she said indignantly. And then, as Kiron stared at her, she blinked. “What do you mean, she’s gone for good and left me in charge?”

It took a while for the implications of that to sink in, but when they finally did, Kiron found himself at a loss for words.

“Oh,” was all he could manage. “Ah—how are we going to get them back to Sanctuary?”

In the end, there was no good way to get them back to Sanctuary. They weren’t fledged yet; they couldn’t fly on their own. They certainly couldn’t walk. You couldn’t tie them to a camel. They were too big for even Kashet to carry, and at any rate, no one wanted to terrify them by bundling them into a carry net to be flown back. So the only answer was for Nofret to spend the night with them.

Perhaps more than one night with them, but he wasn’t going to suggest that just now.

Ari was not happy about that, but what could he do? They accepted Re-eth-ke and Re-eth-ke was willing to curl up with them, though they were wary about Avatre, so Aket-ten stayed with her, which Kiron was no happier about than Ari was.

But in the morning, three of the dragon boys who had not gotten an egg were flown in by himself, Ari, and Gan, to join Nofret in her baby tending.

A night without their mother had made them a lot more accepting, and having someone willing to feed them without having to take turns competing with a sibling cemented the acceptance of these strangers. They were not shy at all after about midmorning, and at least that meant that Nofret did not have to spend another night with them; the boys could do that, taking it in turns to play night guard.

By the next day, an additional night guard of actual former soldiers from Tia had managed to make the journey over the sands by camel. And at that point, there seemed no reason why this batch of dragonets needed to leave.

And, since no one else seemed inclined to bring it up, Kiron did, in council.

He waxed a great deal more eloquent on the subject than he had expected to be. No reason why some of those strange cliff dwellings couldn’t be made habitable either. Granted, no one had mentioned that the abandoned city should be inhabited again right now, but if Sanctuary was going to be the city of priests, then the new city would have to be made ready for everyone else at some point. Why not now? The repairs and improvements could be made gradually, if they began now. Wouldn’t it be better to have them underway, if an emergency came up?

“After all, if Sanctuary is attacked, we’re going to need somewhere more defensible to send the children to,” Kiron pointed out, as Kaleth hid a smile. Ari threw up his hands.

“You won’t rest until you’ve got your dragon city, will you?” he said crossly. “All right. Have it your way. But when The-on fledges, Nofret is bringing her back here.”

The-on did fledge shortly thereafter, and Nofret did lead her back to Sanctuary, riding behind Kiron while The-on lumbered clumsily along behind, whining piteously and looking absolutely exhausted when they all came in to land. But the other three dragonets and their putative riders stayed—and so did the guards. And, too, some of the Altans who found the desert too dry elected to try the new city, and found it to their liking. As more refugees arrived, some stayed at Sanctuary, but some moved on to Dragon Court (as the new city was dubbed), finding that Sanctuary was just a little too full of Winged Ones and priests and priestly magic to be altogether comfortable for ordinary mortals. When all of the new dragons were fledged, all (except The-on) moved to Dragon Court for their initial training; there was more room there, for one thing, and Baken was perfectly capable of taking them up to the point where they needed to form wings.

And at that point, Kalen and Pe-atep moved there as well, wingleaders of the new Black and Yellow Wings, to take over the training from Baken. Kiron actually felt a little relief at that; there was something about having all of the dragons quartered in one place that made him nervous. Having them divided like this meant a greater margin of safety for them all. They met for joint training in the air over the desert, halfway between the two strongholds. Day by day, the dragonets grew into their size and strength and coordination.

Day by day, the older dragons grew in skill. There were new maneuvers to learn; now that they no longer needed to evade other Jousters, their strategy must be directed against men on the ground, and as they were few and vulnerable, they must choose their targets carefully. . . .

And that was how matters stood, the day that another messenger came from Alta, bloody and battered, with word that the Magi had finally stepped over the boundary of sanity.

They had decided that yet another group required being brought to heel.

This time, it was the Healers that they had put under siege.