Elvenbane

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 his 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.

That was fine; that was exactly as he expected. He got up, and started back towards the exit, and the little side cave where he stored the supplies he needed to care for his animals. First he needed the mint-oil and a rag, then he would take Hoppy's kid away from her. He would rub all three of them with mint, and Hoppy wouldn't know which baby was really hers, so with luck she would nurse both of them.

It had worked before. Keman figured it should work this time, too, even though this cub was a great deal more helpless than the orphans he'd usually given Hoppy to nurse, and certainly wasn't shaped anything like a two-horn.

The cub gave a cry, and this time the hunger in it was unmistakable. Keman turned, suddenly apprehensive and unsure what Hoppy would do; the cub's cry was so unlike the bleating of her own young.

Hoppy stared at the cub, startled, her ears up. Keman took a single step, ready to put his foreclaw between the cub and the two-horn if she showed signs of aggression.

But Hoppy stretched out her nose and nuzzled the cub curiously...then, before Keman could move, she rolled the infant toward her while the baby continued to wail in hunger. Alarmed, and afraid of what this rough-and-tumble treatment might have done to the cub, Keman bounded over in a single leap.

Only to discover that the cub was nursing contentedly beside Hoppy's own kid, just as if they all had known exactly what to do.

Keman lured the last of the one-horns into Hoppy's paddock with a sweet-root, taking care to stay clear of those long, wicked claw-hooves. The one-horns tolerated him, as they tolerated the members of their little herd. They extended him no affection, and no kind of license. They regarded Hoppy and her brood with resigned disdain for a moment, then settled down to guard her.

Keman they ignored, but he was used to that. He padded wearily back to the lair, hoping to find his mother reinstalled, but found the cavern as echoingly empty as before.

It wasn't a very large lair as these things went; it was, in fact, part of a chain of limestone caves that extended under the mountain on this side of the valley. The caves were no longer connected; each dragon wanting an underground lair had laid claim to a certain number of caverns and dug his or her own entrance, then sealed his or her section off from the rest.

There had been numerous limestone projections, formations made over centuries by water dripping from above. Alara had arbitrarily cleared some of these away; others she had simply left because she liked the look of them. Smoothly polished by the endless drops of water that made them, they shone softly in the dim light. In the main cavern the ceiling was high enough that Alara could fly quite easily, and she had cleared and flattened most of the floor under the main dome. A few projections remained; the most impressive stood in the center, directly under the highest point of the dome. It was a large stalactite, still growing, that would meet its partnering stalagmite in a few centuries. The lower half of the pair looked strangely like a stylized sculpture of a tree-covered mountain, and Keman and his mother both found it fascinating to stare at. It stood in a reflecting pool that surrounded it totally, so clear Keman could see the bottom, deeper than he was tall.

Cold-glowing globes of glass, that his mother made and set mage-fire within, illuminated whatever portion of the lair she wished to see. The 'tree-mountain' and the pool surrounding it were always lit with a soft blue, and Keman's sleeping-cave as well as his mother's shone with a muted green. Currently that was all, for Alara had not been home in a month, and the rest of the lair seemed terribly dark and not particularly friendly. From time to time the silence was broken by dripping water or the scuttlings of Keman's lizard pets, but that was all.

He tried to get to sleep, curled up within his egg-shaped cave, in his nest of sand and the gems of his own tiny hoard. It was a fairly useless attempt. He kept starting awake at the slightest noise, and then spent a dreadfully long time listening wide-eyed to the noises out in the dark.

Finally he just gave up. He couldn't just lie there anymore. Maybe he could do something.

As he trotted out to his menagerie, he saw that the sun was just rising.

Well, he'd have had to get up to feed them all anyway, he thought with a sigh. So he might as well take care