KEMAN BRISTLED WITH resentment and stared at Keoke until the Elder dropped his eyes. Keoke’s crest was already flat, and Keman didn’t intend to give in to him one tiny bit, no matter how hopeless his cause. If he could make Keoke and his mother feel horribly guilty, he would. “Rovy tried to hurt me real bad, and you know it,” the youngster said angrily, his voice full of undisguised contempt. “He’s been hurting everybody younger or smaller than him and you know that , too. And you let him. Then, when Shana gave him what was coming to him, you punish her and let him get away without even getting yelled at! Is that fair?”
“Lashana was not of the Kin, Keman,” the Elder said, looking steadfastly over Keman’s shoulder. Keman figured it was to avoid looking into his eyes.
I hope you feel rotten, he thought angrily at the elder dragon. I hope you feel awful. I hope you have nightmares about Shana for the rest of your life .
“But I am , and she was just defending me!” he insisted. “If she’d been one of my loupers and she’d bitten Rovy when he was hurting me, would you have punished her?”
“It’s different,” Keoke said lamely. “You’re too young to understand, Keman, but it’s different—”
“Why?” Keman interrupted. “Because she’s a two-legger? Why should it be different? Mother raised her like one of us, with the same code of honor, and she lived up to it and Rovy didn’t! It’s not fair, and you know it!”
“Keman!” his mother said sharply, with enough force that he turned away from Keoke to look at her. “You’re still young, and Keoke is an Elder. This situation is very complicated. There is more at stake here than just Shana’s welfare.”
That was what she said aloud, but she added, mind-to-mind, :If you keep up this insolence, I’m going to have to do something neither of us will appreciate. I can’t explain it all to you now. Someday you’ll understand .:
Keman ducked his head between his aching shoulder blades, his spinal crest flat in submission, but muttered rebelliously, “It’s not fair. You know it’s not fair. And nothing you can say is going to make it fair.”
The adults exchanged a glance that he had no trouble reading. Exasperation, shared guilt, impatience, “well-you-know-children-he’ll-learn-better.” He slunk away, back to his cavelet, his stomach churning with anger.
Right now all he wanted was Rovy’s throat in his claws. Rovy was ultimately the one responsible for this, him and his stupid mother. It wasn’t fair. They should never have done that to Shana. She didn’t know anything about the two-leggers; Mother had never told her. All she knew was the language and the writing. And now they’d thrown her out there and she was going to get hurt. Keman was positive of that.
He wanted to claw something, bite something, scream his rage from the top of the mountains. He’d already staged one temper-tantrum when he had asked where Shana was and his mother had had to tell him what had happened to her. That had gotten him nowhere. He’d thought he could get some justice if he forced one of the Elders to see what had been done to him. So he’d insisted on seeing Keoke as soon as he could stand without hurting too much, and this was all the result he’d gotten out of that interview.
He’d intended to show Keoke how wrong he’d been, how Shana had been the hero, and Rovy the villain. Then when Keoke capitulated he would demand that the Elder go find Shana and bring her back. He never got any farther than insisting on how unfair it all had been. Keoke refused to admit that his decision had been in error, on the grounds that Shana was not of the Kin. “Unfair” simply didn’t apply to her , nor did honor or the Law, and that was the end of it.
He wasn’t going to get anywhere with his mother, either, that much was certain. She backed Keoke; he didn’t know why, but it was plain she had no intention of helping him or Shana.
So if anyone was going to save Shana, it was going to have to be him, all alone.
Do what you think is right, had been Father Dragon’s first advice to him about Shana. Well, he knew what was right. If she was going to get thrown off in the desert somewhere, it was only right that he share her exile. After all, she was there because of him.
Except that right now he couldn’t fly… which was going to make some serious problems with mobility.
He could fix that problem, he thought angrily, hugging his own little secret to himself. And Mother didn’t know he could. She thought he was going to be lying around in bed for at least a week.
He eased himself down into his bed, seething with defiance. I’ll show her. I’ll show them all .
He arranged his aching limbs carefully, and put himself into the shape-shifting meditation. A common place enough state of mind; he practiced it several times each day. Except that this time he wasn’t going to shift anything, he was going to fix it.
Of all the forms he knew, he was most familiar with his own body, naturally enough. He had to be; he had to know what he was shifting out of in order to know what to change. Like all dragons proficient in shape-shifting, he knew exactly how each muscle should look, work, and feel. So in order to heal the damage Rovy had done to him, it was only a matter of taking the damaged muscles and shifting them until they were whole again.
Only…
He had figured this out when he realized that the most proficient dragons never stayed injured for very long. He’d had no idea the actual practice would hurt so much. After all, shape-changing didn’t hurt at all.
Within heartbeats his shoulder muscles burned as if he’d poured molten rock on them; his wing muscles twitched wildly and sent stabs of lightninglike pain down his back each time they did. He quit immediately, and tried to figure out what he was doing wrong.
Nothing, he realized finally. He wasn’t doing anything wrong. He was just making real changes to things, making himself heal faster. And everything hurt because all the nerves were alive, and hurting the way they would if he was healing, only faster.
He started again, hoping it would be better.
It wasn’t.
At least a dozen times he was ready to give up, and let nature heal his injuries in its own time—but each time he did, he saw Shana, bravely standing up to Rovy and telling him off, while the bully ducked and screamed as her rocks hit him.
Shame overcame him; she was somewhere out in the desert, with no shelter, and no water, and no friends to help her. This was nothing. And if he didn’t get himself in flying condition soon, she might die.
He went right back to his healing.
Suddenly, after what seemed like days, the pain stopped.
His eyes flew open, and he flexed his arms and wings wonderingly. They worked perfectly; no pain, and not even a trace of stiffness. He couldn’t see his own back, but the skin wasn’t pulling as if it had been scarred. He had succeeded in healing himself—and no one in the entire Lair knew that he was whole and flightworthy again.
And they weren’t going to find out until it was too late.
He climbed out of his bed and stole into the cavern itself, waiting, watching and listening. When he heard and saw nothing, he searched the lair, quietly stealing along the pathways of the cavern with his belly scraping the stone, hiding in shadows whenever he thought he detected a sound that wasn’t the steady drip of water. But though he checked every possible corner of the lair, there was no sign of Alara. All he found was Myre, curled up in her bed, sleeping so soundly that an avalanche wouldn’t have made her stir.
Good. Everything was clear.
He slipped to the back entrance, pausing only to free all of his pets, even the one-horns.
He wasn’t exactly sorry to see them go; lately only Shana could get near them. They seemed even to like her—as much as one-horns ever liked anyone. Keman they charged whenever he neared the paddock, bashing their stupid heads against the stone of the enclosure. And they never learned not to.
The two-horns were harder to free; gentle as they were, he’d enjoyed their quiet company and the antics of their young. Poor old Hoppy had long since suckled her last kid, but her descendants followed their fierce cousins happily enough out to the free pastures beyond the Lair.
The loupers were equally pleased to head into the hills; they’d never gotten used to confinement, and Keman had been contemplating freeing them for some time. Maybe it was all for the best that he was forced into it now.
The only animal Keman didn’t free immediately was the otter. Instead, he lured the playful beast to him, and caught it in a net when it came within reach. It meeped reproachfully at him from the net, after struggling unsuccessfully to free itself. He wished he could tell it that he was taking it to the river on his way out on Shana’s trail, but he had no way to reach its mind. He could only hope it would do well once it found it was free again.
Then he launched himself heavily into the air, net and all, heading outward from the Lair, the otter dangling from his foreclaws as he took to the night sky.
At least he’d gotten that much out of Keoke, he told himself, as he settled down at the place—he hoped—the Elder had released his foster sister, sometime just before dawn. Five rocks, one of them tall, with a kestrel nesting in a hollow near the top, and sajus all around. Keoke had given him that much detail in the hopes it would make him feel better about Shana—the Elder had assumed that the presence of that much sajus and the nesting kestrel meant that there was water Shana could find and get at relatively close to the surface.
It was just too bad that for Shana that wasn’t true. Sajus had deep roots that could reach down ten, even twenty dragon-lengths to get at water, and kestrels got all the water they needed from their prey. All the cluster of bushes meant was that there was water there. Somewhere. Not near enough to the surface to help Shana, and it was too early in the fall for dew to be collecting on the rock at dawn.
He couldn’t look for her on the wing; she might be hiding, sleeping, or even unconscious under a bush somewhere. She might change direction at any time. And this was close to the caravan routes; he dared not be seen.
He needed a shape. A good tracker with a keen nose, and something that would be safe out here.
Keman sat for a moment and thought about the shapes he was familiar with. His best bet was a louper—they could smell footprints on the wind. But they were also small, and tended to travel in packs for protection. It was still hard for him to shift into anything as small as a louper, and he needed something that could protect itself.
A one-horn, he decided reluctantly. He knew they were good trackers; they’d follow something for weeks before they’d give up chasing it. He would just have to modify it, so he wasn’t stuck with its bad temper, its instincts, and its brainless head. That was going to take time—
But nothing messed with a one-horn. Not even another one-horn. They could eat just about anything, even sajus. And they were almost as good as kestrels about getting water from what they ate.
There was another advantage: If Shana saw him, she wouldn’t be afraid of him. He wasn’t anywhere near as good as she was at mind-to-mind speech; she would be able to talk to him, but he would not be able to tell her that he was in animal form until she was close enough to touch. But she had come as close to taming the one-horns as had anyone he’d ever heard of, and she might see a one-horn as transportation and protection.
Now he was glad he’d stopped after releasing the otter, to kill and eat two unfortunate antelope. He was already tired when he began the long flight, and shifting both shape and size was going to take a lot of energy.
He locked his joints so that he wouldn’t fall over, closed his eyes, and began the patterns of his meditation.
Once he was deeply inside those patterns, he slowly shifted most of his bulk Out, leaving just enough mass to make a really big one-horn.
Then he set the form he wanted to mimic in his mind, and began copying it from the skin out.
He felt his muscles flowing reluctantly, taking the shape that he set them; felt bones lengthening and assuming a new configuration. Felt his spinal crest soften, his tail shrink and sprout hair—and finally felt the pearly horn sprout from the middle of his forehead, stabbing at the sky aggressively.
He cracked one eye to look down at himself, and saw a smooth-haired, silky green leg.
That wouldn’t do at all. He concentrated a little more, and watched the leg darken to black. And the heat of the sun hit him hard enough to flatten him, if he hadn’t had his legs locked.
Possibly not the best color choice in a desert.
He reversed the process, and watched the skin and hair bleach to a pure, unblemished white.
Already he felt much cooler. Satisfied, he opened his eyes completely, and lifted his nose to sniff the faint breeze.
There was no doubt of it; Shana had been here. He remembered her scent from taking three-horn form; the odd mix of dragon-musk (from her tunic) and two-legger scent was unmistakable. Even if there had been another two-legger somewhere around here—however unlikely that was—they wouldn’t have had the scent of dragon on them as well.
Keman put his nose close to the ground and circled around the rock formation. He picked up Shana’s trail immediately; found where she had wriggled into the cluster of brush to spend the heat of the day, and where she had come out. There were still tracks she had made, reduced to vague depressions in the sand, but forming a clear line off to the east now that he knew what they were.
He shook his head and mane, put nose to the ground, and followed.
He was doing just fine when the sandstorm hit, just about midmorning.
Fortunately his one-horn instincts, however buried, were still keen enough to warn him in plenty of time to take cover. He was Following Shana’s trail with the total, concentrated single-mindedness that tracking in the desert required, when a sudden chill made him toss his head and look up, his eyes widening.
A dark brown cloud that rose in a wall from earth to the sky reached for the sun ahead of him and grew taller even as he watched. In next to no time, it had blotted out the sun completely, and his keen ears picked up a roaring sound in the distance.
Sandstorm! He’d never lived through one, he’d never even seen one except from far away and above.
There was only one thing to do—take shelter, and quickly; it was too late to try to avoid it.
He remembered a cluster of boulders along his backtrail, a semicircle of rock that should protect him from the worst of the wind and punishing, wind-borne sand. And there was something else that he could do to weather this that no real one-horn could manage; he could alter his shape to take the storm. He couldn’t change into a rock yet, only living things, but he could change his nose to create membranes he could breathe through; toughen his skin, even put scales back on it.
But first, he had to reach a relatively safe haven.
He whirled on his hind legs, leapt into motion, and galloped at full speed back towards the remembered boulders, his wide, cleft hoof-claws churning up the sand in his wake, his mane and tail flying, his ears laid back. He cast a glance over his shoulder; behind him the wall of brown had grown taller. The storm was gaining on him.
His legs pumped harder. He altered his hooves as he ran, until they were flat, twin-toed, splayed pads that hit the sand and gave him purchase without sinking into it. He looked back again. The storm seemed no closer, but the roaring of the wind was definitely louder.
Wings would do him no good at all at this point, and the delay might even kill him if he stopped long enough to sprout them. He could pop back into his draconic form, but that, too, would cost him time. And he didn’t think he could fly any faster than he was running; draconic form was not particularly fast except in a dive.
There were other reasons; things he’d been warned about. If he flew he could get caught in an updraft—and get torn to bits. And the sand would wear his wing-membranes away to nothing in no time.
He looked ahead, desperate to see something besides brush that would do nothing to protect him.
The rocks! He spotted them, only a few dragon-lengths away. He put on a burst of speed he didn’t know he had in reserve, scrambled around to the entrance and dove into their shelter, lying down with his head between his knees.
Faster than he had ever thought was possible, he altered the one-horn form; changing the soft skin for his own scales, growing a special membrane over his nostrils and ears to keep the sand from clogging them, weaving his mane into a canopy of tough, scaled skin and spreading it over his head, shrinking the horn so that it was just holding the membrane away from his face. He put his head into a cranny between two boulders, and did his best to seal that skin down against the rock. He had only enough time left to wonder if all he had ,done would protect him. Then the storm hit.
He’d only heard about the force of a sandstorm before this. Despite the relative shelter of the rocks, he quickly decided that it was a good thing he’d exchanged hair for scales. The sand abraded his hide with a force he felt even through the copy of his own draconic skin.
He should recommend sandstorms for the Kin who were going crazy with itching when they shed, he thought wryly. One morning, and it would all be over with.
He also decided that it was a very good thing he had not taken a full draconic form; the little skin frill that was protecting his face was taking a bad enough beating; his wing-membranes would, indeed, have been shredded in next to no time.
He thought suddenly of Shana; thought of her being caught in this thing, with no protection other than her wits and a short, dragon-hide tunic. He could all-too-easily imagine the wind and sand abrading her delicate skin away.
The thought made him want to leap to his feet and charge into the tempest looking for her, and only his own good sense kept him from doing so.
He had to keep telling himself over and over that if he ran out of his shelter, he wouldn’t be able to help her, and he might well get himself hurt or even killed. She was somewhere ahead of him; if the sandstorm had caught her, it had done so already, for it had come out of the east where she had been heading. She had either survived it intact, survived it hurt, or not survived at all. And no matter what the outcome, it had already happened.
None of that was any comfort as he waited out the fury of the storm.
The storm passed as quickly as it had descended, and Keman was up and out of his shelter while sand still blew around his circle of rocks.
He looked around and felt his heart plummet in despair, the storm had scoured away every trace of Shana’s trail, and when he sniffed the breeze, he scented nothing but the sharp tang of bruised sajus, dust, and the ever-present odor of heated sand. Fire and Rain — how am I ever going to find hernow? I’m never going to be able to pick up her trail ! His spirits sank, and he wanted to lie right down and weep.
He couldn’t give up. He couldn’t. He was all she had. He forced himself to change back to pure one-horn form. He sniffed the air, trying to catch a hint of Shana’s scent and having no luck whatsoever.
All right, he told himself, as his throat closed and his stomach knotted, I have to think this out . He knew she was going east. If she was still alive, that was probably where she was still heading. What he had to do was quarter the possible trail, with this as his starting point. He could do it, he could find her, he just had to work a little harder.
The midday sun glared down pitilessly on him and on the empty desert, now quite featureless except for the clumps of brush. Even the birds were gone. Never had landscape seemed quite so empty of life.
He gritted his teeth with determination, resolving not to give in to despair, and trudged forward under the white heat of the sun.
Using peculiar rocks and his own innate sense of direction he zigzagged across the desert, nose in the air, testing every breath for a hint of Shana’s scent. Even when he felt dizzy from the heat, when the white sand wavered and rippled in his vision, he kept going. By midafternoon another problem began to torture him: hunger. He’d used up a great deal of energy in shape-shifting, and the strain had taken its toll. But there was nothing except sajus, and dry sajus at that. He snatched mouthfuls of it as he passed, but it did little to ease his hunger and nothing to ease his thirst.
By sunset he was half-mad with hunger and thirst combined. That was when he encountered one other large living creature: a real one-horn, a young one.
By then, he was so ravenous with hunger he was ready to pounce on anything that looked appetizing. The one-horn looked more than appetizing—it aroused an instinct in him that no amount of reason could overcome.
Kill!
The one-horn seemed to sense his mood, and broke into a run as it sighted him.
That was enough for him. He reverted back into draconic form and launched himself high into the sky, gaining altitude, then descending on the hapless one-horn in the kind of deadly dive dragons and accipiter hawks had in common. And like the accipiters, when the one-horn took shelter in a clump of brush, Keman went right in after it, hunger making him blind to everything but his quarry, even to the possibility of damage to his wings. He screamed with rage as it paused and turned at bay, his sight red-hazed, his hunger all-encompassing.
It turned, squealed, and struck back at him with its horn; a single, blow, light and glancing, but it was enough to madden Keman past all reason. He screamed, lunged, and seized the beast with talons and teeth, breaking its neck with a single jerk of his head, then tearing out its throat for good measure.
He ripped the limp body of the one-horn limb from limb in his rage, bolting great chunks of bleeding flesh, devouring the creature down to the bare bones in the few moments it took the sun to set. He’d never felt this way before, this unreasoning anger, this blood-lust; it took him with a wild intoxication that had his heart pumping, his wings mantling, and his spinal crest bristling long after the one-horn was a pile of gnawed bones. He couldn’t even think in coherent thoughts; he was all feeling, and that feeling was all anger.
A louper howled in the far distance. He raised his head from what was left of the beast, mantling his wings at the rising moon. It took him a moment to realize that the moon was no enemy, and not out to steal his kill. Only then did he finally come to his senses and remember what had brought him out here in the first place.
For one moment longer, Shana no longer seemed important. What was important was the wild wind under the moon, the taste of fresh blood in his mouth, the freedom to go and do whatever he pleased…
Then he shook his head, his mood changing as quickly as the desert sky at sunset, appalled at himself. What’s wrong with me? What am I thinking of? Have I gone mad ?
He coughed, and shook his head again. He felt very strange, light-headed, dizzy, as if he’d been someone or something else for a moment. He’d never suspected he could feel emotions like that—
Like some throwback. Like Rovy?
No, he didn’t think so. He simply had gone rather feral, and only for a moment. Hunger had driven him, not a bad streak. Not like Rovy; Rovy was vicious, cruel.
He took a very deep breath to steady himself. I’m all right. I was just — hungry. Now he knew better than to leave feeding too long. I’ll never do that again. Never, never, never. I swear it . He collected himself, his thoughts, stepped away from the pile of gnawed bones and refused to look back at them. He had to get back to the trail. Shana was alone out there, somewhere, maybe hurt, and he had to find her.
He moved off a little, composed and centered himself, and reached for the power to shift. He made the transformation back to one-horn, finding it much easier the second time, and returned to his search.
Night was easier to take; his night-vision was good, and he was no longer tormented by heat, thirst, and hunger. Several times he thought he found the trail, only to lose the scent again, but the fact that he caught a scent at all gave him hope.
At just about dawn he scented water—and Shana.
And nearly a hundred other creatures, two-leggers and animals combined, somewhere over the crest of the hill he was climbing.
Fire and Rain! What—
He thought quickly. He knew he must be near caravan trails, which meant two-leggers.
He couldn’t be seen.
But had they found Shana? Or were they just nearby?
He topped the rise, moving silently and cautiously, and found he was looking down on a ruin surrounding a stone-rimmed pool of perfectly clear, blue water. Approaching from the opposite direction was a caravan of two-leggers; merchants, from the look of the laden beasts. And from the dust-covered condition of men and beasts both, they had been caught in the same sandstorm that had delayed him. Somehow, by luck or knowledge, they had found the oasis—but only the worst of luck could have brought them here at this moment in time.
He took to cover, turning his coat a mottled sandy-brown—just as he saw a distant figure that could only be Shana crawl out of one of the ruins and await the approach of the strangers.
Something woke Shana out of a sound, exhausted sleep. She blinked, hearing unfamiliar noises, a babble of voices and the calls of strange beasts.
She felt ill, weak with hunger, and put her hand to her head as she sat up, to stop its spinning. It had been so long since she had last eaten—was she dreaming this, or was it real?
The noise continued; neared. She closed her eyes until her head steadied, then crawled forward a little and looked cautiously out of her little shelter. But when she peered out from beneath the overhanging shelf of wind-worn rock, the first thing she saw was a great copper-colored dragon on the wing, shining in the rising sun.
She panicked immediately. There was only one thing she could think of. Had they decided to follow her? Had Lori decided to risk the censure of the Kin for disobeying the Elders, and kill her?
Fear threaded her spine, and she stared at the dragon with the same fascination as a mouse staring at a hawk. His great wings rippled and snapped in the rising wind. In fact, his whole body rippled as he hovered above the sand—
She came out of her fearful trance. That — doesn’t lookor sound right —
She blinked again, and rubbed her eyes—and only then did the “dragon” resolve itself into nothing more than an image wrought in some coppery substance on a piece of sky-blue cloth fastened to a stick and flapping in the wind.
Her fear dissolved, leaving her weak-kneed and disoriented. She started to sink back into her hiding place, no longer caring what the noise was all about. But the painted dragon seemed to call to her in a peculiar fashion that she didn’t understand.
She crawled out from beneath the shelter of her rocks to stare at it in dazed fascination. The stick was attached somehow to a contraption that was in turn strapped onto the back of an animal Shana had never seen before; it had long, gangly legs, flat feet like huge water-worn stones, a lumpy body, and a long neck surmounted by the ugliest head Shana had ever seen. The whole of it was covered in warty gray skin, exactly like a flat-toad. Where did these things come from? And why would anyone put a picture of a dragon on a piece of cloth? Unless—it was another Lair of the Kin. Foster Mother had told her that some of the other Lairs had different customs.
There were more of the beasts behind the first, and half of them were being ridden by—
By—She shook her head, trying to make her mind work. They can’t be two-leggers . She was the only two-legger around, anywhere. They must be dragons in two-legger form. But why?
Shana blinked and rubbed her temples; she tried to see the dragon-shadows, but she was so dazed that she wasn’t sure what she was seeing. She tried again; and this time she thought she saw a flicker of shadow, a strange, fuzzy halo around each of them that could have been dragon-shaped.
So they were dragons. But why here, and why like this?
Why are they doing this? Is this a game? she wondered confusedly, as she braced herself against the rock with one hand. They must have come from some other Lair, she didn’t recognize any of them. That thing—could it be a picture of their Elder? There weren’t any Elder copper dragons in her Lair. That must be it; they must come from another Lair. Were they undertaking a test of some kind? Or something like the Thunder Dance—or maybe it was a lesson…
Just then, as she stood there, her head beginning to float a little from hunger, one of them spotted her, pointed, and shouted something. To her amazement she recognized one of the “other” languages Alara had been teaching them; one that Shana had been able to learn fairly quickly.
The others turned to stare at her, their multicolored clothing billowing around them. The first one handed the ropes of his beast to one of them, and came striding across the sand to her. She stayed where she was, partly because she was feeling too dizzy to move, and partly because she was trying to figure out which one of them was the teacher.
I don’t see anyone old enough to be a teacher , she thought, vaguely puzzled. Unless the teacher is very young . It might be one of the ones just watching, though. If it was a lesson, it might be a lesson in staying in form. Two-legger form was awfully hard for Keman to keep…
“Child—girl,” said the stranger, as soon as he came close enough that he didn’t have to shout. “Who are you? What are you doing here?”
He tucked the ends of a head-covering into a band that held it in place. She looked at him and considered her reply, her stomach now in knots, which made it very hard to think. If she told them that Keoke had thrown her out of the Lair, they might leave her here. But if they thought she was lost, they might take her with them, and they would probably feed her. She could run away before they got a chance to ask her to shift back.
“My name is Shana,” she said, pronouncing the words carefully. “I—I think I’m lost. I’ve been lost a long time—I’m awfully hungry, please. Could you give me something to eat?”
The stranger looked at her with the oddest expression on his face, then laughed, although she hadn’t said anything that was particularly funny. She stared at him, puzzled, rubbing her temple. Her head was starting to ache along with her stomach, and her eyes kept fogging and unfocusing. Right now, she could see dragon-shapes behind a cactus.
“Lost!” He turned to the others behind him, shouting, “She says she’s lost! Can you believe it? The child is out here in the middle of nothing, and says she’s lost!”
They, too, roared with laughter. Shana felt as if she were being left out of something, and wondered sullenly what on earth she had said that struck them as so very hilarious. But then, the Kin had always had an odd sense of humor.
Then she remembered one of the stranger pastimes of the Kin, a pastime neither Myre nor Keman had been old enough to join—the games they would play, half story, half puzzle, with each participant taking a part. Much of the challenge lay with the individuals making chance encounters work as best he could with the ongoing story. Those who extemporized the best and most creatively won; those who were thrown off by deviations in the story lost.
They did act as if they were working some kind of puzzle, or in a drama-game. That had to be the answer; they were acting something out, and she had given them some kind of clue. She’d better play along and work herself into their story. Once she’d done that, they’d take her with them, and once she was where she could fend for herself, she’d slip off.
“So, lost child, who are your people, eh?” the stranger asked, putting his arm around her shoulders in a friendly fashion, and drawing her back towards the rest of the group. Shana went with him readily enough; so long as he was disposed to be friendly, she was content.
“The Kin, of course,” she said reasonably. “Please, I’m awfully hungry—”
In fact, she began to feel as if she were likely to faint at any moment. But the others looked at her in a very strange way when she said that, as if she had spoken nonsense. She intercepted those wary looks, and frowned as she tried to fathom their meaning.
Maybe she wasn’t supposed to mention the Kin. Or maybe this other Lair didn’t call them the Kin. “You know, the Family.” She pointed at the cloth dragon, and instantly the others were all smiles again.
She sighed with relief. I said the right thing —
“Well, if you have lost the Family, child, we must certainly help you,” said the smiling man. “You say you are hungry? Come, we will feed you. And”—he got an odd, acquisitive expression—”where did you find this garment you wear?”
“Garment?” she asked, confused again. “My tunic? I made it. I got the—”
Now she was stymied, for she had no notion how to explain “shed skin” in this other tongue. “I—found the—bits and I made it,” she finished lamely, looking down at her feet, and hoping she had not failed a test that would make them abandon her as quickly as they had adopted her. The games could be like that; she’d watched enough of them to know.
“Here, child, eat—” Something dry and brown and shaped like a stone was thrust into her hands. She looked at it doubtfully before taking a tentative bite.
To her surprise, the thing had a tough but tasty outside, and an even tastier middle. She devoured it with enthusiasm, drank the metallic-tasting water they gave her, and smiled shyly at her new friends from under her lashes. They crowded around her, moving carefully, as if she were some kind of wild animal that they thought they might frighten.
“Shana, your name is?” said the man who had befriended her first. She nodded, and he moved closer to her, looking at her tunic, but not touching it. “Shana, this thing you wear—would you have this instead?”
He held up a longer tunic than hers, of a beautiful crimson and of material like the cloth dragon. It looked exactly like the ones the rest of them wore; all one piece and one color, not patched, cast-off skin as hers was. She wanted it, wanted it nearly as much as she had wanted the jeweled band, and could hardly believe that he wanted hers in exchange. It did not seem an equal exchange to her.
Maybe he was just being kind, giving her this as a trade so she didn’t feel badly about taking the new one. That must be it. Or else she had to dress like them to play in this game; that could be it, too. Well, she didn’t care, so long as they would give her that new tunic.
“Please?” she said, and the man laughed and handed it to her. She started to strip off her old tunic, and he suddenly grew alarmed, and stopped her.
“There—” he said, pointing to a building made of cloth. While she had been eating, some of the others had put it up, all in the blink of an eye. “Go there, take off the old garment, put on the new.”
She looked at him with her mouth open in surprise, but he was insistent. She obeyed, but wondered what kind of game they could possibly be playing. It certainly seemed very odd…
But as she slipped out of the old tunic and into the new, the silk-wrapped bundle of the jeweled band thudded against her breastbone, and she was suddenly very glad that they were playing such an odd game. If they see this, they’ll want it. I can’t let them see it. If they do, they’ll take it for their own hoards, just like the others took away the gems Keman gave me …
She hastily put on the new tunic, and hid her bundle beneath the high collar, making sure that it didn’t show.
That should do. She left the cloth building, and handed her old tunic to the waiting stranger, who took it with every evidence of delight.
“Are you not weary?” he asked, very solicitously. She started to say that she was fine, then caught herself in a yawn.
It must be the food. She was sleepy. She yawned again, and the man chuckled.
“Go inside, in the shade. Sleep. It is very comfortable inside.” He motioned .to her to go back inside the cloth thing.
“But—” She felt she had to give at least a token objection. “Shouldn’t I be—doing something?”
“No, child,” he said, and smiled. “You have been lost, and now you are with friends again. Of course you are tired. You must sleep as long as you need to.”
He pushed her gently in the direction of the cloth building, and she obeyed his direction without another objection.
She looked around once she was inside, something she hadn’t bothered to do before. There was a kind of nest of fabric to curl up in; it looked even more comfortable than the one she had made in Alara’s lair.
She flopped down into it, and discovered that several of the pieces of cloth were stuffed with something soft and incredibly cushiony, and that there was more of the same stuff inside a bigger, flatter piece of cloth under all the fabric. It felt wonderful, and she sprawled at her ease, for once in her life finding herself in a position where there was nothing digging into her, and nothing hard and unyielding to have to cope with.
Once lying down, she discovered she couldn’t keep her eyes open. She tried, but her lids kept drifting down, and she kept dozing off. Not that it mattered now. She was among friends, the stranger had said so. She would be fed and taken care of.
No matter what kind of strange game they were playing.
She let her eyes close, and sleep take her.