apprehensive and unsure what Hoppy would do; the cub’s cry was so unlike the bleating of her own young.
Hoppy stared at the cub, startled, her ears up. Keman took a single step, ready to put his foreclaw between the cub and the two-horn if she showed signs of aggression.
But Hoppy stretched out her nose and nuzzled the cub curiously – then, before Keman could move, she rolled the infant toward her while the baby continued to wail in hunger. Alarmed, and afraid of what this rough-and-tumble treatment might have done to the cub, Keman bounded over in a single leap.
Only to discover that the cub was nursing contentedly beside Hoppy’s own kid, just as if they all had known exactly what to do.
Keman lured the last of the one-horns into Hoppy’s paddock with a sweet-root, taking care to stay clear of those long, wicked claw-hooves. The one-horns tolerated him, as they tolerated the members of their little herd. They extended him no affection, and no kind of license. They regarded Hoppy and her brood with resigned disdain for a moment, then settled down to guard her.
Keman they ignored, but he was used to that. He padded wearily back to the lair, hoping to find his mother reinstalled, but found the cavern as echoingly empty as before.
It wasn’t a very large lair as these things went; it was, in fact, part of a chain of limestone caves that extended under the mountain on this side of the valley. The caves were no longer connected; each dragon wanting an underground lair had laid claim to a certain number of caverns and dug his or her own entrance, then sealed his or her section off from the rest.
There had been numerous limestone projections, formations made over the centuries by water dripping from above. Alara had arbitrarily cleared some of these away; others she had simply left because she liked the look of them. Smoothly polished by the endless drops of water that made them, they shone softly in the dim light. In the main cavern the ceiling was high enough that Alara could fly quite easily, and she had cleared and flattened most of the floor under the main dome. A few projections remained; the most impressive stood in the center, directly under the highest point of the dome. It was a large stalagtite, still growing, that would meet its partnering stalagmite in a few centuries. The lower half of the pair looked strangely like a stylized sculpture of a tree-covered mountain, and Keman and his mother both found it fascinating to stare at. It stood in a reflecting pool that surrounded it totally, so clear that Keman could see the bottom, deeper than he was tall.
Cold-glowing globes of glass, that his mother made and set mage-fire within, illuminated whatever portion of the lair she wished to see. The ‘tree-mountain’ and the pool surrounding it were always lit with a soft blue, and Keman’s sleeping-cave as well as his mother’s shone with a muted green. Currently that was all, for Alara had not been home in a month, and the rest of the lair seemed terribly dark and not particularly friendly. From time to time the silence was broken by dripping water or the scuttlings of Keman’s lizard pets, but that was all.
He tried to get to sleep, curled up within his egg-shaped cave, in his nest of sand and the gems of his own tiny hoard. It was a fairly useless attempt. He kept starting awake at the slightest noise, and then spent a dreadfully long time listening wide-eyed to the noises out in the dark.
Finally he just gave up. He couldn’t just lie there anymore. Maybe he could do something.
As he trotted out to his menagerie, he saw that the sun was just rising.
Well, he’d have had to get up to feed them all anyway, he thought with a sigh. So he might as well take care of that right now.
Most of the grazers could be turned out into the big field he’d fenced off, but not Hoppy and the one-horns, not if he was going to keep the human cub fed and secret. So that meant laboriously tearing up grass, piling it all up on a hide he’d rigged, and pulling the lot to the paddock. Several times. Grazers, he had learned to his sorrow, ate a great deal. The sun was well up by the time he’d completed that job, and he was hungry and thirsty.
The predators among his menagerie were actually easier to deal with. He simply went out to hunt his own breakfast and brought back an extra kill for them. Sometimes it bothered him, pouncing on a fat two-horn and thinking that this same animal might easily have been one of his pets – sometimes he even had trouble at first nerving himself up to a kill. But then the herd would run, and instinct would take over, and before he knew it he had a mouthful of sweet, tender flesh.
Sometimes instinct was awfully hard to fight. The mere sight of a herd-beast running away was enough to set Keman’s tail twitching with anticipation and make him ready to pounce on anything else that moved.
Right now he was getting hungry enough that even gentle Hoppy was starting to look edible.
Better go hunt something. He climbed to the top of a rock, spread his wings and lurched into the air clumsily; while he was old enough to fly, he wasn’t terribly good at it yet. At least not at the takeoffs and landings. He tried to do those in private, where no one would laugh if he fell over on his nose.
As he flapped as hard as he could to gain altitude, his hunger grew. He decided to hunt the herds of wild horses today, feeling very sensitive about two-horns at the moment. He found some rising air at the mouth of his canyon and caught it, letting it take him out through the little twisting cuts and arroyos leading up to the Lair. Most of the adults didn’t bother to hunt this close to home, and sometimes he had been able to find good hunting in here. Occasionally the good watering spots would lure little family herds of grazers in, despite the nearness of the huge, ever-hungry dragons.
Luck was with him; he surprised a herd of sturdy, dun-colored mares up a dead-end canyon with a tiny spring at the end of it. He spotted one without a foal at her side, nerved himself, and dove.
She was too confused to do anything but stand; he hit her full-on, talons digging into her back as he landed heavily right on top of her. He felt her neck and back snap as she went down beneath him without a struggle.
A clean kill. He felt enormously proud of himself. And a horse was a much larger beast than he usually took, too.
As the rest of the herd pounded away in panic, he feasted contentedly. He’d never bothered with the wild horses as members of his menagerie; they were just too stupid, too nervy, and too intractable for him to care about. Father Dragon said that the elves had somehow managed to get three-horns to breed with horses, and that was how they got one-horns. If that was true, it looked to him as if all the worst traits of both species had come out of the cross. One-horns were as stubborn as horses, as aggressive as three-horns, and meaner than both. Keman had the feeling that they liked killing things. It figured that elves would breed something like that.
Keman decided that from now on he’d eat three-horns and horses exclusively. Most of the other dragons didn’t care for horse, anyway, which left a lot more for him to hunt. So what if the meat was tough and a little gamey? At least his conscience wouldn’t be bothering him, and he wouldn’t be seeing Hoppy’s eyes looking at him reproachfully every time he came back from a hunt. Maybe it was imagination, but it always seemed to him that she knew when he’d been eating two-horn.
The mare was more than he could eat; more than enough to take back to feed the rest of his zoo. But, carrying that much extra weight, he’d have to get some altitude before he could take off.
This was turning out to be a lot of work and he grumbled to himself. He wished they’d all just learn to feed themselves.
He climbed the side of the valley, clinging to the rocks as he hauled the carcass up after himself. It was pretty battered by the time he got it up to a ledge, and he was winded.
Oh
