As he looked back over his shoulder, he saw Aket-ten doing the same—and the nesting female devouring the gift as if she hadn’t seen food in a week. Which she probably hadn’t, actually. She wasn’t wasting a scrap; she might be eating quickly, but she was eating neatly.
He sent Avatre up to land on the cliff above the nesting female, and a moment later, Aket-ten landed beside him. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” she called, as Re-eth-ke backwinged to land.
“If you’re thinking we need to keep feeding her, yes,” he said, watching the wild dragon make short work of the first quarter, and leap on the second, with one eye on them and the other on her food. “Mothering instincts like that need to be fostered, not allowed to die out. But I’m wondering. Because that dragon looks—familiar—”
“Wondering what?” she asked, sliding out of Re-eth-ke’s saddle, and coming over to stand at his knee, still watching the wild dragon eat.
“I’m wondering if she isn’t Coresan,” he said slowly, peering at her and trying to match up what he saw with a memory. “Avatre’s mother. . . .”
TEN
SO I think it’s Coresan,” Kiron finished. “And—look at her! She doesn’t even react to us being here now!”
They both took a look down into the floor of the ravine, where the dragon was giving her entire attention to the food and not even looking up at them.
“I think she can hear my voice from here, and I’m sure she recognizes me, or she’d be watching us,” Kiron continued, thinking aloud. “She’s the only wild-caught dragon in either Alta or Tia that spent a significant amount of time on half-rations of tala while also being tended by humans. And I was the human who made sure she was properly fed and tended during that period. I think she knows exactly who I am, I think she pairs good things with me, and I think she might trust me, at least at a distance.”
“It would be awfully good if we could get one of her eggs,” Aket-ten said, wistfully, gazing down at the dragon with one hand shading her eyes. “But I know we’d never get her away, given how she’s protecting them. But she’s such a good mother and Avatre is magnificent—”
Kiron sucked on his lower lip. “But if we bring the food in a little closer to her each day, we might be able to get her to let us close enough that the dragonets take humans for granted. If they see us feeding her, when they fledge, they might come to us for food.”
“Maybe—closer,” Aket-ten mused. “If I can get close enough to her to talk to her, she might let us quite near, and when I can talk to the dragonets, I can make sure they know humans are all right. Especially if I get a chance to touch them. That won’t happen right away, but—but given time, if she starts leaving them to hunt, I think I can get right to them.”
He looked at her askance, trying not to let her see how horrified that idea made him. It was one thing to approach a tala-drugged wild-caught dragon in a pen. It was quite another to approach an undrugged dragon tending eggs or youngsters. “Are you sure it’s worth even trying?” he asked cautiously. Cautiously, because he knew exactly how Aket-ten would react to being told she shouldn’t do this.
Poorly.
“Oh, this is probably one of the least-clever things I’ve ever considered doing,” she admitted cheerfully. “But it’s still something I think I can do and, more importantly, get away with.”
Re-eth-ke snorted anxiously, and Aket-ten patted her shoulder. “I feel the same as Re-eth-ke does about you getting close to Coresan,” Kiron admitted. “I’d rather you didn’t try at all. I didn’t actually think about trying to get as close to Coresan as I did when she was in the pens.”
Aket-ten shrugged, and then put her hand on his bare knee, and the touch made him feel very—odd. Good! Oh, yes. But—odd. Like all his skin was doubly alive. Aket-ten seemed oblivious to the effect she had on him. “That’s all I’m going to do, really. I don’t have to get close enough to touch her to talk to her.”
He looked down at her. “I don’t like it. But I won’t tell you not to. You’re the Winged One. The gods might not speak to you as directly as they do to Kaleth, but maybe they’re the ones saying you should do this.” He laughed ruefully. “And to think I was planning to have you all to myself for part of the afternoon! Trust a dragon to interfere with that!”
She blinked at him, then, unexpectedly, blushed. “I like you, Kiron,” she said, quite out of nowhere. And that would have been fantastic, except it was the sort of statement that was usually followed by “as a friend” or “you’re my best friend” with the implication it shouldn’t go any further.
He felt his heart sinking. “But?”
Then she shook her head, blushing harder, and his heart rose again. “No buts. I like you—rather a lot. I’d rather spend time with you than anyone else I know. And it’s not because you keep making a habit of rescuing me either.”
His heart rose further, and he tried desperately to think of something clever to say. Unfortunately, he couldn’t manage to come up with anything. Awkwardly, he put his hand over hers. “I just—think you should stay you,” he said, and cursed his thick tongue for not managing anything more eloquent.
“Well, that’s good, because it would be very difficult being someone else!” she laughed, her eyes twinkling. But he got the feeling she understood what he was trying to say. That he didn’t want her to change, didn’t want her to stop taking risks just because he was terrified she’d be hurt. Maybe someone else wouldn’t have felt the same, but he had been a serf, and he knew what it felt like to have chains, visible or invisible, binding you. He wouldn’t do that to anyone else, but especially not her.
And she didn’t say, as he half-expected her to, “Well, we should be getting back.” Instead, she stood there at his knee while they both watched Coresan finish the meal they’d brought her and settle herself around her precious eggs, then fall asleep.
“Do you think she’s starting to trust us already?” Aket-ten asked.
“Maybe. I don’t know.” He sighed. “We need to get back.”
“Yes, we do.” But she sounded reluctant. Nevertheless, she mounted Re-eth-ke and looked to him for direction. He gave it, sending Avatre up with powerful wingbeats, rather than letting her take her preferred path of diving down into the ravine and then trading speed for height at the last minute. He guided her away from Coresan’s valley at an angle. Re-eth-ke followed; Coresan did not even raise her head to watch them, which made him think that Aket-ten might be right, she might have already decided they weren’t going to hurt her or interfere with her or her eggs.
They caught good thermals all the way back, which speeded up their return journey considerably. Most of the wing was waiting for them at the pens; for a moment he was afraid, as Avatre spiraled in to land, that something had gone wrong. But as they got nearer the ground, their expressions, of varying degrees of mischief, made him think otherwise. No, they were there to tease him—or tease both of them.
Not if I give them something to distract them first.
“Ari!” he called, as soon as Avatre folded her wings.
“Coresan is nesting in the New City, and she recognized me!”
All right, maybe saying that it was Coresan and that she recognized him was an exaggeration, but it got their attention, even though no one but Ari could know who, or what, Coresan was.