The drake charged before Ysabet had finished deciding whether it had noticed her.
One moment a pale lump lay at the foot of a quarry wall. The next it crossed twenty paces of open chalk. Ashaun caught Ysabet’s coat with her right hand and pulled her behind a buttress. Something struck the stone hard enough to shake dust from the top.
The drake passed. It could not turn until it had slowed. Its long tail scored a white curve across the ground, and it stopped facing the wrong way.
Ysabet stayed still.
From the ridge Chaska gave one short whistle. Lilt had lifted her head, ready to launch. Ysabet raised her left palm and lowered it slowly. Wait.
The drake walked back toward the buttress. At walking speed it looked almost absurd: broad feet, a shallow head, wings reduced to stiff ridges along its flanks. Its nostrils opened and closed above a mouth full of blunt chalk-stained teeth.
It was not looking at Ysabet.
A round pebble lay in the place where she had been standing. Her boot had knocked it from the path. The drake nosed it, turned it twice, and carried it back beneath the quarry wall.
Ashaun let go of her coat.
“Twenty paces,” she said. “Straight.”
“You might have mentioned the straight part before I stepped out.”
“I learned it just now.”
Ysabet took a breath and let it out through her nose. Her old right fingers had closed against her palm. She eased them open with her left thumb.
They had left Pip with Suth on the upper shelf. The mouse’s box stood inside the shade of her cloak, with seed and a water lid. The elk grazed behind them. From below, its pale antler lamps looked like fruit someone had failed to harvest.
The quarry was full of the round stones.
Some stood in groups of three beneath overhangs. Others lay in shallow bowls scraped in the dust. At first Ysabet had thought the glittering heaps were discarded quartz. Then a small drake pushed its nose from between two stones, opening its mouth to the wind.
A ragged wheeze came out.
“What do you see?” Chaska called quietly.
“Nests,” Ysabet answered. “Don’t come down.”
She and Ashaun worked backward along the buttress. The adult did not follow once they moved away from the stones. It lifted one pebble from the outer row, carried it inward, and laid it beside the young animal. Its care was so precise that Ysabet felt a sudden, unreasonable shame at having mistaken the arrangement for waste.
Above the nests, old cutting holes ran in a row across the face. Hollow stakes still occupied several, their projecting ends green with weather. Once wind must have crossed them before descending through the saddle. Now the fresh notch drew it sideways.
Ysabet crawled behind a second buttress to see the lowest stake. The drake watched. She stopped. The small one wheezed again, pressed its jaw between two stones, and grew still.
Ashaun laid her stone-ended arm against the rock, bracing her weight. She leaned far enough to look into the nearest nest without exposing her right leg.
“Three young,” she said. “The little one is working hardest to breathe.”
“Dust?”
“Dust everywhere. I don’t know what is usual for them.”
Neither did Ysabet. She hated how often that was the proper answer.
They retreated without taking a stake. At the top Chaska showed them the lines she had drawn. Each charge had gone from a nest directly toward an intruder. She had marked where a retreating animal could turn and where the stone walls forced it to continue.
“We could use the wide shelf,” she said. “Launch from the west, come down behind that broken crane. There is space for Lilt to flatten her fins there.”
“And then?”
“Then I walk. She isn’t a ladder.”
Suth had unfolded a scrap of cloth over Pip. It stood beneath it like a table with too many legs, watching the quarry through a gap. The low wheezing had made its folds tremble. Ysabet crouched nearby.
The creature turned toward her, then toward the nests. Through the bond came the sensation of a narrow opening that would not widen. Her own breath caught in response.
“I hear it,” she said.
She touched her throat, then pointed to the quarry. Pip clicked once, very softly.
Ashaun sat on the edge of the shelf. “If we try this, we do it tomorrow. I can read their paths. I can’t keep hauling you sideways until sunset.”
Ysabet accepted that without argument.
They watched one more charge from safety. The adult went straight through a shallow pile of dust, threw its head up, and returned with white powder running from its nostrils. Beneath the overhang the young drake wheezed. The old wind holes made no sound at all.