Nofret froze, not daring to touch; Aket-ten and Kiron tensed, Kiron signaling Avatre to be ready to dive in to the rescue if need be. Coresan raised her head, gave Nofret a penetrating look, and dropped her head back down to her own foreclaws, closing her eyes.
After that, Coresan allowed Nofret to touch, clean, and play with all four babies, and even to feed them. In fact, the older and more clamorous the babies got, the more she seemed to welcome the help. Aket-ten reported that Coresan was coming to think of Nofret as another dragon; a very peculiarly shaped, tragically dwarfed, and inadequately scaled dragon, but a dragon, nevertheless.
Even Ari began to relax when he saw how Coresan acted around Nofret. The peculiar thing was, even as Coresan acted as if Nofret was a dragon, she continued to make threat postures whenever any other humans ventured too near. Aket-ten couldn’t explain it.
“Nofret is a dragon, and we aren’t, not in Coresan’s mind,” was all she could say. “Maybe it’s because we always dropped food from a height, and Nofret was the first to bring it to her on the ground. Maybe it’s because Nofret doesn’t look like a Jouster.”
“Then if Coresan lays again and we can find her and the clutch, we have to replicate everything we did this time,” he said firmly. Aket-ten nodded.
There was no change in either the situation in Alta or in Tia, and Kiron was content to leave all such weighty matters in the minds and hands of those his senior in experience and wisdom. Often enough, as he lay staring into the dark at night, he thought of the uncertain future and he felt, with Orest, that he would rather, far rather, not think of it at all. That he would rather be told what to do.
But that was the path that had led here in the first place—people giving over thinking to others, and doing what they were told, believing what they were told to believe, even when it went against their own good sense and all reason.
Still, he was glad enough to have something else to occupy his mind, however temporarily.
As the days passed, the babies began to exercise their wings, pumping them vigorously and making little hops into the air. Those back in Sanctuary were learning to bear saddle and rider, and exercising against weight. Coresan’s offspring, however, were not to be meddled with. They would be fledging soon—
“—and I have no idea how we’re going to get The-on to follow me,” Nofret said, as Kiron and Avatre flew her out to Coresan’s nest the morning after the first of the Sanctuary dragonets had made his First Flight. “I know 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.