Dragonhaven by Robin McKinley

working backwards from seeing dog-sized dragonlets for the first time, why the dragon whose pouch they fled for when they saw Old Pete for the first time had changed color for a few hours about a year ago. No one—no human, not even Old Pete—had ever seen just-born dragons—let alone kept one alive for thirty hours and counting. I was some kind of eco-naturalist hero. Except that what I’d done would also get me thrown in jail for the rest of my life if anyone found out about it…and get everyone who knew about it thrown in jail for the rest of their lives too. It might even shut down the Institute—or Smokehill itself. There were always a few people rumbling away about dragons being a danger to society, and writing to the money guys in Congress who kept Smokehill alive about child poverty and cures for cancer and other things more important (they think) than dragons.
    Smokehill is actually really precarious, although I know that’s kind of hard to get your brain around when you’re looking at several million acres of rock and dirt—and that fence. The Bonelands—the deserty part—are probably their own best defense, but developers would love to get their hands on the prettier bits of Smokehill, and the government would love to get their hands on the money developers would pay them, if they could find a good excuse to break their promises to us—and there might be gold here after all. And now I might have provided the excuse the government wanted. My not having made it back to Northcamp by nightfall would have been the last thing Billy was thinking about at that moment.
    It’s no wonder I kept talking to myself. I wasn’t keeping myself awake, I was drowning out thoughts like these.
    And that’s still leaving out the poacher. A dead human killed by a dragon.
    On the other hand there’d be no way that Billy would ever have told me to let something that had the possibility of living die without a struggle, and he wouldn’t care whether it was a dragon or a caterpillar, so that part of it was all right, as far as it went. But I had put everyone in deep deep trouble by what I’d done automatically—automatically as a result of having been Billy and the other Rangers’ willing slave from the age of two. What I’d done was exactly what every Ranger would have done. And they’d have done it automatically too. Hey, our Rangers bring back orphaned or injured gray squirrels. They’d bring back rats, if we had rats. Well, we do, but our Rattus are Rattus maculatus and R. perobscurus, and endangered.
    My point is, we save things. It’s what we do.
    I was drifting in and out of…semiconsciousness, let’s not call it sleep. When the dragonlet woke up again Billy watched very carefully while I fed it, and the next time it—and I—woke up Billy had the broth ready and some piece of something he’d cut off something to make a nipple, and his nipple worked, and that made things a lot easier. The rest of the night was better. I didn’t get a lot more sleep, but I didn’t have to think about anything else either—Billy did all that. He didn’t offer to touch the dragonlet, but he did everything else. By morning I probably had nearly half my brain available again, which was up on the 10 percent I’d had at midnight when Billy arrived.
    We made it back to Northcamp that day, don’t ask me how. I think Billy was beaming Strength Waves at me or something. If I could keep a baby dragon alive anything was possible, including Strength Waves. It took us all day, and Billy carried my pack as well as his own, and we stopped a lot, and every time I sat down (which I had to, to feed the dragonlet without worrying about dropping it), I thought I’d never get up again. But I did. Also standing up always made my headache worse ( bang bang bang ), and I kept trying to walk so as not to joggle my head, let alone the