With every piece of meat Nofret brought, Coresan allowed her to get closer. And when she had finished, and was ready to curl around her eggs for a nap, Coresan actually allowed Nofret to put a hand under her chin for a brief moment.
When Nofret turned back to them, she was practically afire with excitement, and Kiron hid a smile. When he thought about how aloof she had been back in Alta, scarcely noticing the dragonets, and compared how she had been then to what she was like now, it was clear that being around Kashet and Ari had caused a fundamental change in her attitude.
“This is amazing!” she exclaimed in a whisper, as Coresan sighed and slipped into the deep breathing of slumber. “I’ve watched Ari feed Kashet, of course, and even helped myself, but this is a wild dragon! And she’s letting me touch her!”
“You don’t have to whisper around her, in fact, it’s better not to,” Aket-ten said in a conversational tone. “When you try to be quiet, you tell her that something’s sneaking around, and she’ll wake up.”
“Well, she’s not exactly a wild dragon, but she’s as close as we’re going to get,” Kiron acknowledged. “She was born wild, and she remembers being trapped, which is likely to make her even warier of humans than a fully wild dragon. So, are you determined to stay here until we go on the afternoon hunt?”
Nofret nodded firmly. “I brought my sling,” she said. “I might be able to kill some desert-hares or pigeons that I can give her as tidbits, and if not, I can at least practice my aim. I know this is going to be hard—”
“Mostly, it’s going to be boring,” Aket-ten advised. “She’s sleeping a lot, since we’ve been feeding her. That’s just as well, since she doesn’t dare leave the eggs until they hatch.”
Nofret shrugged. “It can’t be any worse than some meetings,” she replied. “It certainly will be more entertaining than standing attendant to the Great Queens. Much though I would have enjoyed doing so, I wasn’t allowed to hurl stones at anything while I was a lady-in-waiting.”
Aket-ten grinned, and Kiron had to chuckle. “Then here’s your waterskin—if you need to refill it, the cistern is over there, inside that building with the latas columns—” He pointed at one of the false fronts carved into the wall of the ravine across from them, and Nofret nodded. “If you see wild dragons, either stay close to Coresan, or go inside a building with doors too small for them to get through.”
“Should I give her a sand bath?” Nofret asked anxiously.
Aket-ten shook her head. “Not yet. She’ll tell you when she’s ready for you to touch her. She doesn’t wallow in caresses like Re-eth-ke does, but she does like being scratched under the jaw, and when she solicits you to do that, she’ll be ready to take a sand buffing from you.”
“We’ll be back in the afternoon,” Kiron said, and tried not to feel too anxious. Nofret was no wilting latas; she had hunted river horse and crocodile, and even lions. She had been living in extremely primitive conditions in Sanctuary long before the rest of them arrived. Still—when Ari found out—
“I think we ought to do some hunting for the city,” he said aloud. “As long as you don’t have anything else to do, Aket-ten.”
She raised an eyebrow at him but didn’t object. And this way they could do flyovers to make sure Nofret was all right——and avoid Ari—
“We could bring Nofret smaller game that way,” Aket-ten agreed. “That’s more how a mate would feed Coresan anyway.”
So that was exactly what they did; they went back to Sanctuary just long enough to leave a message as to their intentions, then flew out again. Hunting in tandem, they managed to bring down several of the smaller gazelles over the course of the morning and afternoon, more than enough to not only keep Coresan fed, but to bring back to Sanctuary, where they would certainly be put to good use. Every time they did a flyover, it looked as if Nofret was getting on quite well. She was erring on the side of caution, staying out of what Kiron calculated was Coresan’s threat-perimeter, but staying well within sight. And Coresan must have been eating, because most of the time when they did a flyover, she was asleep with a distinct bulge in her lean middle.
Finally, in the late afternoon, he and Aket-ten made their own hunts and kills, took up what was left over, and brought it along when they came to pick up Nofret. She was in very good spirits, and Coresan had lost some of that wary watchfulness. This was definitely another good sign.
Which was just as well, because as Kiron knew, when they finally returned—they would all have some explaining to do to Ari . . . and that was something he was not at all looking forward to.
Nofret gave Coresan one last feeding and climbed up behind Kiron. As Coresan watched with interest, but no alarm, they headed home.
ELEVEN
ARI was waiting for them. As they banked in at a steep angle necessitated by the stiff breeze over Sanctuary, it was easy to spot the lone figure waiting in Avatre’s pen, and just as easy to recognize it as Ari. He was the only one likely to be wearing a Tian-style kilt rather than an Altan-style tunic who was also likely to be waiting for them.
This was not good. At least, not as far as Kiron was concerned. Glancing over at his partner in this particular escapade as she sideslipped toward Re-eth-ke’s pen, it looked to him as if Aket-ten didn’t think she needed to worry——well, she probably didn’t. Ari wouldn’t blame her, he’d blame Kiron.
Fortunately, Ari was the only one waiting in the pen. It would have been painful to be verbally flayed in the presence of the rest of the wing, even if he didn’t deserve it. After all, Ari had, in theory, agreed to this. And it wasn’t as if Nofret wasn’t her own woman, and perfectly capable of making up her own mind about what she wanted to do and how she wanted to do it. But Ari would still blame him.
As Avatre lined herself up on her target, Aket-ten and Re-eth-ke touched down inside her own pen, and Avatre backwinged, preparing to drop down onto the sand. Kiron braced himself for the assault.
And it came as soon as Avatre furled her wings. “Kiron!” Ari called, his chin set. “I—”
“You’ll take up your grievance with me, not Kiron, Royal Husband,” Nofret said, swinging her leg over and sliding down Avatre’s back. She staggered a little as she landed, then made her way around the walkway to confront her betrothed, arms crossed over her chest in a way that should have warned Ari that no matter what he thought, he was going to lose this particular argument. “I am the one who organized this expedition to be introduced to Coresan. Not Kiron. I have the right to command him. There was no danger, as Aket-ten introduced me, and Coresan accepted me within the time of her first morning feeding.”
Ari’s mouth opened and closed, without anything coming out. Kiron decided that he would just pretend nothing was happening, and untie the hide full of leftovers that Coresan hadn’t eaten. Nofret continued to stare at Ari with her arms crossed, her chin held high, her black eyes narrowed. She looked uncommonly like one of the statues of the Great Tian Kings, lacking only the crook and flail in her hands to finish the appearance. Ari could hardly have missed the resemblance.
For his part, Kiron was wondering which was going to be extended this time—the crook—or the flail.
After a moment she softened. So, it would be the crook. “Ari, I must do this. I don’t know why, but something within me says that I need to share the parenting with Coresan, that the work has to be done by me, personally. Perhaps it is nothing more than my need to prove that I am as worthy of a dragon as any of you who raised your own from the egg; I don’t know. I only know that it is important, and that I can’t take an egg from someone who already has one, or has one promised to him. So don’t place any blame on Kiron. If he and Aket-ten had not agreed to help me, I would have found another way to go out there. And they kept very careful track of me the entire time.”