Mercedes Lackey - Sanctuary

Bethlan and Khaleph stuck their indigo and green noses over the wall to Avatre’s pen and whined; they were hungry and wanted to go out to hunt. Since it didn’t look as though there was going to be any more excitement, the rest of the wing went off to saddle their dragons to take them out to hunt the last meal of the day.

The rest of the wing—except Ari, who turned on Kiron.

“Why did you kick me?” he demanded, with a face full of wrath.

“I was saving you from doing something stupid,” Kiron retorted. “Didn’t you pay any attention to Nofret’s expression? One word about forbidding her to do anything, and you’d be arguing about it for moons. That’s assuming she even talked to you at all after being told you were forbidding her to try! Ari, she was the Queen-in-waiting! She’s not used to being told she’s forbidden to do something that’s perfectly reasonable.”

She’s not asking to do anything worse than Aket-ten is planning on doing. And you thought that was an excellent idea!

“Reasonable?” Ari yelped. “She wants to spend time with a wild dragon! What’s reasonable about that?”

“Aket-ten is going to do the same thing, and you were all for that. And Nofret not only wants a dragon of her own, I think she needs one,” Kiron replied. “The eggs we’ve got have already been spoken for—and besides, I don’t think that she’s up to the challenge of raising one from the egg; she doesn’t have the time, for one thing. I don’t think her idea of the partnership is the kind of tight bond that the rest of us have with our dragons. I think she’s looking for something of the kind you’d get from a tame cheetah or a lion. She’s a very—” he groped for a word, “— self-contained person. Marit is the more dependent of the twins. Nofret never wanted pet dogs, for instance, but she loves cats. I think that doing the double-rearing, if it can be done, will give us a much more independent-minded dragonet.”

Ari looked off in the direction Nofret had taken. “You kicked me because if I’d said that I forbade her to do this, she’d never have forgiven me, and I would have undone all the courting I’ve done with her.”

Kiron coughed. “I don’t know about never. . . . ”

He left the sentence hanging in the air, though, because he did want Ari to think about it, and think about it hard.

Ari looked away from him for a moment, and cursed. “This is why I never wanted to have anything to do with noblewomen!” he said under his breath. “With a paid flower, you know where you are—”

Now Kiron was right out of his depth. All he could do was shrug. Ari looked over at him, and his expression turned wry. “As if you’d know anything more about women than I do.”

“I know they don’t like to be treated as if you have a right to order them about,” Kiron said carefully. “No more than you do!”

Ari sighed, and closed his eyes for a moment, then shook his head. “At least you kept me from a mistake that was likely to cause trouble. Kashet is probably starving; I’d better get into the air.”

Kiron snorted, and turned his attention back to making Avatre comfortable. She hadn’t had a sand scrub today, and when she saw him getting out the buffing cloths and the oil, she was nearly beside herself with happiness. Making her happy soothed his nerves, and his nerves definitely needed soothing. He was out of his depth. . . .

What am I doing? I’m the son of a farmer, I used to be a serf—

“Can I help?” asked Nofret from the doorway. “If I’m going to have a dragon, I need to learn how to care for them.”

And this is a daughter of the Royal Lines and the nearest thing we have to a queen. And I’m going to be taking her to a wild dragon and somehow making it possible for her to bond with a dragonet. And Ari, who was my master and is her betrothed and is going to be our King, just asked me for advice on how he should treat her. Haras help me, is she going to ask me for the same? And I don’t even know what to say to Aket-ten. This is insane.

He nodded, and she made her way along the walkway to stand beside him. He showed her how to use the sand to buff Avatre’s scales, how to gently scrub away flaking skin, and how to oil the exposed skin afterward. “I hope you don’t think I want a dragon for the—the look of prestige,” Nofret said, after they had worked together for a while. “It’s not just that; it isn’t even most of the reason. I didn’t really see that much of Toreth to understand what having a tame dragon was like. I’ve spent so much time in Ari and Kashet’s company that I couldn’t help but see how he has such an amazing bond with Kashet, and—and I wanted my own dragon, when I saw how close they were. Mind, I do think that to be taken as seriously, and as his equal, I must appear in every way to be his equal—”

Kiron nodded. “From what I know of the Tians, I think you are right. They have no Great Queen—only the Great Royal Wife, which is not at all the same.”

“So I need a dragon.” She carefully buffed a patch of dull scales. “But now that I’ve gotten used to flying, and I’ve seen Ari and Kashet just being together—Kiron, I am just as eaten with dragon envy as any of those boys out there with their eggs in the hatching pen, and if I could spare the time to tend an egg, I would go looking for one myself! Mind, if this works, I hope my dragon has a slightly different personality. Kashet is more like a dog, and I think I would get along better with a dragon like Re-eth-ke, who is more like a cat.”

Kiron had to laugh at that. “Aket-ten said the same thing. My father used to tell my mother that women liked cats better than dogs, because they recognize that they are like cats themselves!”

Nofret laughed herself, making Avatre crane her neck around to look at her. “There’s some truth to that,” she admitted. “I don’t like slavish dependence. Do you think that I’m mad for wanting a dragon, too?”

“I don’t think anyone is mad for wanting a dragon.” They were just about finished with Avatre, and when Kiron stepped back, the scarlet dragon picked her way daintily to the center of her pit, then spread herself out luxuriantly over the top of the hot sand to bask.

“You’re frightening Ari, though,” he continued, picking up the cloths and oil flask. “It will be dangerous. Not as much for you as for Aket-ten, but Coresan won’t be drugged, and her reactions will be sharp. I honestly don’t know what her behavior is going to be like, or even if it will be consistent from day to day.”

Nofret spread her hands wide. “Shouldn’t we be able to learn that by watching her while we approach her?” she asked, reasonably. “I promise, if she looks as if she’s going to be dangerous, I’ll give up the idea. It’s going to take enough time as it is. But I do have my reasons, and a great many of them, and I think they’re all good ones.”

He looked at her soberly, wondering if she really understood what she was letting herself in for. How much the bond with her dragon would affect her.

Then he decided that it didn’t matter whether she understood now. When it happened, she would. And when it happened, well, she wouldn’t regret whatever sacrifices she had to make.

“She’s beautiful, ” Nofret said, in tones of awe.

“She’s a bit scrawny still,” Aket-ten countered. “but she’s rounding out again.”

It had taken less time than Kiron had thought to get Coresan—and there was no doubt now, it was Coresan—to allow both Kiron and Aket-ten quite close, and on foot, on the ground. Her hunger, combined with her need to stay with her eggs, and her recognition of the dragon boy who had tended her so well (despite how much he had changed), made her much more cooperative than Kiron had expected. Her behavior was nothing near as erratic as it had been when she had been drugged either. Before too terribly long, Coresan was stretching out her neck and gazing longingly at the bucket of sand and the buffing cloths and oil Kiron had brought with him. By the time they were thinking about bringing Nofret along, she let him give her a sand bath; by the day after that, it was Aket-ten doing the honors, and of course, once Aket-ten could touch the dragon, things became much simpler. At first Coresan reacted to Aket-ten’s power with startlement—and it must have been odd for her, having that contact inside her mind. It took her most of a day to get used to it and calm down. But once she accepted it, and knew that not only could she communicate with Aket-ten, but Aket-ten could “talk” to her in the same way, she seemed to realize this was an excellent state of affairs.