“Too late for what?” Sunny asked.
“My soul.” He managed to turn his head a fraction toward her with an eerie creaking sound. His dark eyes were as still and unreadable as the underground cave lake. “The things I have done.”
“You mean like building the tunnels,” Sunny said, and now there was a definite flash of surprise all the way through his eyes. Then it faded, and his eyes narrowed as he examined her from horns to talons. It might have been scary once, his expression, except that the rest of him was so pathetic and sad. He could hardly even move. Sunny didn’t feel afraid of him at all.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“I’m —” Well, this felt awkward, just throwing it out there midconversation. But how else could she tell him? Was there an easy, not shocking way to break this kind of news? “OK. The truth is, I’m your daughter. Thorn is my mother. I only just found her, just — wow, just yesterday — no, two days ago — and she told me about you and —” Sunny talked on, not sure what to think of the expressions darting across Stonemover’s face: confusion, suspicion, hope, dismay, maybe anger? “And I wanted to meet you — I hope that’s — I hope you — well, I know it’s weird, because she never got a chance to tell you about me, so —”
“We had eggs?” he rasped.
“You had me,” Sunny said. “An egg, one dragonet. Just me.” She looked down at her talons. “Mother wanted to tell you. But she never got your note. She didn’t know you were here until she found it yesterday. She’s been looking everywhere for you.”
Her father sighed through his nose and closed his eyes. “I thought she’d given up on me.”
“She might have now,” Sunny said, trying to prompt more of a response. Why didn’t he care more? Why hadn’t he tried harder? She felt a wave of sympathy for her mother. “Why didn’t you go look for her?”
“I’m not the right dragon for Thorn,” he said. “Perhaps I never was.”
“She obviously thought you were,” Sunny pointed out. “She really worried about you.”
He sighed again. He sighs a lot, Sunny thought, wishing she could poke something into his nose to make him stop. “There’s nothing I can do. I did all the wrong things … a long, long time ago … and nothing can change that.”
Something suddenly scrabbled in the dark nearby and Sunny nearly leaped onto Stonemover’s back in terror.
But when she swung the torch around and then down, the light reflected off tiny little eyes and pointed ears and wet russet fur.
It was a fox, sauntering into their cave as bold as anything. Sunny realized it had come down another passageway, and she could feel the wind coming from that direction as well. The passage must lead to an exit out to the mountainside. The fox carried a dead squirrel in its jaws, and it gave Sunny a scornful look, as if it certainly didn’t expect her to dare pick a fight with someone as tough as him.
“Shoo,” Sunny said sternly. “Go find yourself another cave.”
“Oh, this is dinner,” Stonemover said. He hinged his jaw open, and to Sunny’s wonder, the fox trotted over and dropped the squirrel right into his mouth. It stepped back and gave Sunny another haughty look as Stonemover began to chew.
“Wow,” Sunny said. Are foxes intelligent, too, like scavengers? What if all animals are smarter than we think they are? Is there going to be any prey left that I won’t feel bad about eating? “How did you train it to do that?”
Stonemover waited until he’d swallowed, and then he said, “I didn’t. I enchanted him.”
Sunny frowned at the fox. “You mean with animus magic? That only works on things. Not animals.”
“Turns out it works on animals,” said Stonemover, “if you’re desperate and try hard enough.”
She folded her wings in and shivered. “That’s creepy.”
“Dinner doesn’t mind,” he replied, and it took her a moment to figure it out.
“You call the fox Dinner?” she said.
“Why not?” His shoulder moved an infinitesimal amount, the smallest of shrugs.
“Because that’s peculiar,” she said. “And really creepy for him, if he knew what you were saying.”
“I didn’t think about it,” he said. “I’ve never introduced him to anyone before. Anyway, I only enchanted him to bring me food every few days; he still has a fine ordinary life as a fox, I’m sure.”
As if in answer to this, Dinner shook himself vigorously, scattering water all over Sunny, and then trotted out of the cave again.
“I mean,” Stonemover concluded, “I had to do something, or I would have starved.”
“Hmm,” Sunny said. She didn’t like the thought of any dragon using magic to command a living thing. Would animus magic work on something bigger than a fox?