LITMIR.BIZ

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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 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 her 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

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