Elvenbane (12 page)

It looked rather as if some tremendous windstorm had swept through a half dozen cities and deposited the remains here.

She circled the valley slowly, gently losing altitude. The child in her claws had been quite silent all through the journey, and if Alara had not felt strange little thoughts coming from its mind, she would have thought it asleep or dead.

Those thoughts—or rather, thought-forms; they were in nowise clear enough to be considered thoughts—were quite strong. Stronger, in fact, than a newborn of the Kin.

If this was any indication of how strong it was likely to be when it got older, she was not surprised the halfbreeds gave the elves such trouble.

Below her, she saw the rest of her Kin emerging from their lairs. From above, they looked very odd indeed, especially by night-sight, which lacked all color. Without the color patterns to tell her who they were, and shrouded in their dark wings, they made a very odd effect against the stone.

One, however, she recognized at once. Her son Kemanorel bounced in place, unable to restrain his excitement.

:Be careful when I land, dearest
,: she said to him, as soon as she was low enough that she knew she was within his limited range.
I have a
—
a kind of new pet, I think. A baby one. I am going to need your help with it; it’s lost its mother
.:

Keman’s reply was clouded by bursts of glee; if she’d been on the ground, she knew she’d have heard him squealing. Beside him was another dragon she recognized by the sheer size and the silver glitter of his scales in the moonlight: Father Dragon. She watched him drape a taloned claw over Keman’s back, as the youngster threatened to leap into the air with anticipation.

The little one looked up at Father Dragon, and even at this distance Alara felt waves of calm coming from the chief shaman.

Most especially she was glad to be back with Keman. Even if he did drive her to distraction occasionally, she thought indulgently; and then she was on the long, difficult approach to landing. Difficult, because she was carrying something, because she was heavy and unwieldy with her own child-to-be, and because this was
not
the open land of the desert. Her long glide was interrupted by quick wing-beats to give her little lifts over projections, and twists and turns of wings and body to avoid rock formations.

With weary pride, she fanned her wings as she approached the waiting group of curious Kin, and dropped down gracefully into a three-clawed landing.

She placed her burden carefully on the ground, and for the first time since the child had been born, it uttered a cry, a pitiful little mew.

“Fire and Rain!” exclaimed one of the others. “What in blazes is
that?

Within the time it had taken Alara to land, what had been a peaceful homecoming had turned into a spreading altercation.

Never mind that she had just spent the better part of a moon away from home. Never mind that she was the shaman of this Lair, and presumably entitled to a modicum of respect. None of that mattered once the Kin caught sight of the halfblood baby. The other dragons surrounded her, their presence, though nowhere near as threatening to a flighted creature as one held to the ground, was intimidating enough. In the thin moon- and starlight their colors were muted, even to her night-sight, but she identified them easily enough. She had never felt her youth so acutely before, surrounded as she was by those who were technically her Elders, and she drew herself up to her full height, determined not to show herself intimidated.

“Whatever possessed you to bring
that
home?” one complained loudly, his tail twitching and stirring up the dust behind him. “It’s bad enough that it’s uglier than an unfledged bird, but it’s not only ugly, it’s dirty and
noisy
. It’ll need constant cleaning, and it doesn’t have the decency to keep quiet, ever.” His tail twitched harder. “Your lair is right next to mine. I don’t want that thing wailing because it’s got a problem in the middle of the night, and waking me up!”

“Not to mention the fact that you won’t be able to get anything sensible or useful out of it for years,” said another, raising her head contemptuously. “It will need special food, special care, and be a waste of time you could spend better attending to your studies and duties. We’ve done without our shaman long enough.”

“And don’t expect any of us to help, either.” That was a voice Alara recognized; Yshanerenal was as sour in nature as an unripe medlar, and carried grudges for decades. “You brought the thing home,
you
can take care of it. And if it makes a nuisance of itself, we’ll expect you to deal with it or put the thing down.” He hunched his head down between his shoulders and raised his wings belligerently.

“It’s not a
thing
,” Alara protested, facing the opposition and giving no clue that she felt challenged. She raised her own wings, and her spinal crest. “It’s a child, and not a great deal different from our children.”

“Maybe not from
yours
, dear,” young Loriealane purred sweetly, looking down her long, elegant snout at the shorter shaman. “But the rest of us come from better stock than that.”

One of Lori’s older sibs smacked the side of Lori’s head with his wing before Alara could react to that insult. “Watch your tongue, you flightless lizard,” Haemaena growled, as Lori mantled and hissed at him in anger. He batted her a second time to make her cool down. “Or are you trying to prove you don’t deserve Kin-right? If the shaman wants a pet, even a weird pet, that’s no reason to insult her lines.” The tone of his voice conveyed as much that he felt a superior cynicism as a wish to conciliate the shaman. In a way that was just as cutting as Lori’s outright insult. Alara bristled a little more, but
his
spinal crest lay flat, and his ears were angled forward; he wasn’t trying to insult her, he simply didn’t think she and the child were worth getting into an argument over. His next words proved that, sounding positively patronizing. “After all, she’s breeding, and breeding females should be granted their little whims.”

Alara restrained herself from smacking
him
—with great difficulty. After all, he was on her side. Sort of.

Immediately behind Lori stood Keman; behind him, a protective claw on the youngster’s shoulder, was Father Dragon. Keman was the only child in the gathering, and looked from one adult to another as the taunts and acidic comments flew, puzzlement written in every tense little muscle. Alara spared a moment of pity for him, and repressed the urge to send him back to the lair until this was all over.

The child had to learn someday that the Kin were by no means of a uniform opinion on many subjects. And he had to learn just how cynical and coldly callous most of the older dragons were, and how indifferent to the troubles of any creature outside-the Kin.

They were just like the elven lords in that, she thought angrily, turning more and more stubborn with every negative comment, every aggrieved complaint. They didn’t care about anything or anyone else, and any other race was somehow inferior to them. Even though the Kin had been driven out of Home, they had no feeling for creatures who suffered the slavery they had escaped. The universe revolved around the Kin, and they wouldn’t see it any other way.

There was a larger issue here than simply the adoption of a strange pet, and every one of the dragons knew it, though none of them voiced it. Alara had breached the walls of secrecy, to bring in a member of another race to a Lair of the Kin. A child, a baby, helpless and wildly unlikely to be a danger to them—but still, there it was. She had bent the unwritten Law, if not broken it. Shamans were permitted that license, but she might have gone beyond the bounds of what even a shaman might do. Were they to uphold the letter of the Law, or the spirit? Most of the Kin would say, “the spirit,” but most of the Kin were not faced with a halfblood child in their very midst.

That was what lay behind every taunt: the uneasy feeling that Alara had gone too far, and that no matter what her motive was, she had to be made to realize that she was in the wrong. That self-centered blindness was what had driven Alara from annoyance to anger, with an admixture of plain, simple stubbornness.

She
felt that it had become a moral question. A child was a child, no matter that the child was a halfblood two-legger. It was a child of intelligent beings, completely deserving of protection and of shelter, precisely
because
it could not protect itself.

While the altercation continued, and the words grew fewer but more heated, Father Dragon simply watched, silently, restraining Keman whenever he looked ready to leap to his mother’s defense. He loomed against the star-spangled sky, the darkest of all the dragons, like a great thunderhead that promised storms to come, yet inexplicably held off.

Alara slowly became aware of his silence, and it occurred to her that he was watching all of them, but seemed to be keeping an especially careful eye on Alara herself. That close regard made her feel uneasy; it made her feel as if she were being judged or tested in some way.

He might truly be watching, testing her, simply because she was a shaman, and as chief of the shamans, Father Dragon was making careful note of her actions.

It might—and it might mean something else. Father Dragon had always, so far as Alara knew, been vitally interested in the actions of the elves and their human slaves. He had, at times, been a lonely voice advocating intervention in the humans’ condition. There had been many times in the past when he had urged more action than simple observation, when he had encouraged the Kin to go far beyond the kind of tricks and sabotage that Alara played among the elven lords.

It might mean a great deal—

And it might mean nothing at all. Alara knew that if she was contrary and difficult to predict, Father Dragon was doubly so. He might simply be enjoying her discomfiture. He was undoubtedly enjoying the stir she was making. Draconic mischief-making was not limited to races outside their own.

And Father Dragon was well known for playing pranks on his own kind.

Alara dismissed the whole puzzle. If Father Dragon wasn’t going to intervene, it didn’t matter. She could fight this battle on her own, and win.

“I am going to keep the child,” she said challengingly, planting her feet and raising head and wings, bringing up ears and spinal crest, and looking them all in the eyes in turn. “It will make a good playmate for Keman. He will be able to learn how to mimic the two-legs, human and elven, more effectively with an example beside him. And who knows what we shall learn from having a specimen to study from infancy! I learned more from the mind of her mother than any of you would believe.”

That caused a stir; heads turned, and crests were raised or lowered according to how the owner felt. “It’s an animal,” Oronaera hissed, mantling a little. “I’ve no objection to keeping the thing as a pet, but raising it alongside our own young ones? Outrageous! As well bring in great apes and delphins!”

Alara mantled back at him, narrowed her eyes, and imparted a dangerous edge to her tone. “Perhaps that would be no bad idea!” she snapped, her claws digging great furrows in the hard-packed dirt. “Perhaps then you who never leave the Lair except to feed and sun yourselves would learn the difference between animals and those who are your equals in mind—and certainly far more interesting!”

“Equals? These animals?” Lori snorted. Before Alara could stop her, she reached out and picked up the baby by one ankle. It wailed in distress and she wrinkled her nostrils disdainfully. “Shaman, you have lost your wits, what few you had. This is nothing more than a food beast, and you know it. I’ve heard that these young ones make good soup—”

And there it ended, for Alara did the unthinkable, goaded past anger into an act of aggression against another dragon. Lori was not prepared, for Alara had never fought back when stressed, even as a child. It was, in fact, something no one would ever have dreamt her capable of, despite her demonstrated bravery in the Thunder Dance.

She reared on her hind legs, her tail lashing wildly, which had the effect of clearing the others from behind her as they leapt to avoid it. Her right foreclaw shot out, caught at Lori’s shoulder before the other dragon could dodge out of the way and squeezed, hard. Her talons dug into the softer skin around the joint, until Lori squealed and started to let go of the child.

“Gently,” Alara growled from between clenched teeth. “On the ground. Don’t bruise her, or by Fire and Rain, you’ll regret every mark on her skin, for I’ll duplicate them on yours, if
I
have to strip away the scales to do so!”

Lori lowered the child to the dirt; it stopped crying the moment it felt a firm surface beneath it Alara released Lori, who lowered her ears and spinal crest in submission and backed away. Several of the others backed away as well, some as submissively as Lori.

She stood over the child and glared at the rest of the Kin. “I’m keeping it,” she said firmly. “I’m raising it with Keman. It is a child of intelligent creatures, and it needs someone to protect and care for it.” She glared around the circle, at the lowered snouts and downcast eyes. “It will be of no danger to us. It can’t betray us, for it will never know its own folk, unless we see fit to introduce it to them. And by then, if we have treated it well, it will be more dragon than human. I have broken no Law here, and you well know it.”

Father Dragon, who until this moment had not stirred, raised his head. “You should keep and raise the child, Alara,” he said, his deep voice like the rumble of thunder in the far distance. “It has great
hamenleai
. Interesting things will befall around it, and because of it.”

Alara’s eyes widened in startlement. It was not often that any shaman could attribute
hamenleai
, the potential to make changes in the world, to a specific being or action. Alara had done so once in all the time she had been a shaman. And for Father Dragon to say that the child had
great hamenleai
was extraordinary—Father Dragon had never once been wrong that Alara had ever heard. Her own decision had just been vindicated for not only the Kin of this Lair, but all of the Kin everywhere.