Then, when the fourth helping was a memory, Coresan stood up, raised her head and stared at Nofret for a very long moment, as if measuring her for something.

Nofret stopped feeding the dragonets, feeling the eyes of their mother on her, and turned.

She swallowed hard—and visibly. Coresan had Nofret fixed in an unwinking gaze, and Kiron didn’t blame Nofret for a sudden surge of unease. He started to loosen his knife in its sheath, but Aket-ten stopped him with a gesture.

“It’s not what you think,” she whispered.

Just then, Nofret began to slowly back away from the dragonets. It wasn’t the first time that Coresan had leveled a challenging stare at her, and always, once Nofret began to move away from them, Coresan stopped challenging.

Not this time.

This time, Coresan took the two enormous strides needed to reach Nofret, bent her head down before anyone could react, and shoved Nofret in the gut with her nose, tumbling her back into the midst of the dragonet pack.

And then she turned, spread her wings wide, and with a few lumbering steps threw herself into the air. Within moments, she was a dot in the sky. In another, she was gone.

“She’s gone!” Aket-ten said with astonishment.

Kiron shrugged. “Off to hunt, I suppose,” he said. This wasn’t the first time she’d gone off to do so; the only real difference was that this time she had very graphically put Nofret in charge of the babies.

“No, I mean she’s gone,” said Aket-ten. “She’s gone for good! I felt what she meant in my mind. She left Nofret in charge, and now she’s gone for good and she’s not coming back!”

Nofret hauled herself to her feet, pulling on dragonet necks and shoulders to get there. “She might have been a bit more polite about it!” she said indignantly. And then, as Kiron stared at her, she blinked. “What do you mean, she’s gone for good and left me in charge?”

It took a while for the implications of that to sink in, but when they finally did, Kiron found himself at a loss for words.

“Oh,” was all he could manage. “Ah—how are we going to get them back to Sanctuary?”

In the end, there was no good way to get them back to Sanctuary. They weren’t fledged yet; they couldn’t fly on their own. They certainly couldn’t walk. You couldn’t tie them to a camel. They were too big for even Kashet to carry, and at any rate, no one wanted to terrify them by bundling them into a carry net to be flown back. So the only answer was for Nofret to spend the night with them.

Perhaps more than one night with them, but he wasn’t going to suggest that just now.