And now that all made perfect sense. He already knew that a dragon’s droppings would burn the skin of anyone foolish enough to touch them without gloves, so it stood to reason that there might be something caustic or acidic in the dragon’s saliva. No wonder they could gulp down bones without harm, and without the bone bits appearing fundamentally intact out the other end!

“I hope we aren’t traumatizing the little ones we’re helping to hatch with all the banging,” Nofret replied, her brows furrowing with sudden worry.

Aket-ten laughed. “What would be worse, the banging of the hammers, or that scrape-scrape-scrape?” she asked. “It certainly isn’t quieter. I don’t think we’re hurting anything.”

“They respond to the tapping,” Kiron assured her. “Aket-ten is right, I don’t think tapping or scraping makes any real difference; either sound tells the little one inside the egg where it needs to work to get out.”

As abruptly as she had begun, Coresan stopped, and let go of the egg. It balanced on its end for a moment, then rolled over on its side, and with a shudder, a roughly triangular piece popped off, and the very end of a snout shoved through the hole.

They were too far away to actually see more than that, and then only because the deep red snout was such a strong contrast to the mottled-cream-and-sand-colored egg, but Kiron remembered very well what that moment had been like for Avatre. After the first tremendous effort of cracking the shell, she had simply rested quietly within in it for a few moments, taking her first breaths and gathering her strength to finish the job. Her then-tiny nostrils had flared with each panting breath, and at that moment he had wanted to tear the shell apart to free her.

But he hadn’t, because hatching babies of any sort were in a state of transition. It was quite possible to harm them irrevocably by rushing things. Every farmer’s child knew that.

Coresan now came back to the egg, and began to lick it again, starting from the broken, and presumably weakened spot, and working her way back from that point. The egg and the baby inside it remained quiescent for a short time, then the rocking began again. Coresan confined herself to licking this time, occasionally stopping to make muttering noises at the baby. Whether these were meant to be reassurances or encouragement, Kiron couldn’t tell for sure.

But within a much shorter time than he remembered, the egg cracked open and lay in two halves on the sand, and the dragonet sprawled out inelegantly, a tangle of ungainly wings and limbs, panting with exhaustion.