Yeah.

"This one will live." 

Nod nod. 

They don't stay long; there are two other babies at home, who they might have a much more limited time with. But Leelu does thank Ludei again and give him a large amount of money on the way out.

He's got a lot of practice at gratefully accepting donations from dragons.

And a few weeks after that, Laviwina shows up on his doorstep again, this time red-eyed with tears.

"You'll have to come in to get her, she can't go beyond the door."

"Understood. Thank you." She comes inside. She is trying very hard not to continue crying in front of him, and she's succeeding, but not so well he can't tell it's an effort.

The babies' room is airlocked; the second door won't open till the first closes. The window doesn't open. The place is fireproofed and there's a few older kids and one adult shren, a jade fellow, watching the swarm of babies, ranging from almost completely fine (hers, the tiniest, a moonstone) to - well, all the rest of them, screaming, crying, biting themselves, zonked out on potions -

The jade man flinches and goes back to discussing a picture book with a baby ruby; Ludei picks through the seething mass of baby shrens to collect Luci and hand her over.

Lavi cradles her. She--is horrified by the screaming babies, of course, but--she refuses to make that their problem. 

"Thank you," she says again, although he might have to read her lips to know that because she isn't going to raise her voice to be heard over the screaming. 

There weren't that many possible things she could be saying, so he can figure it out. "Of course. You're teleporting directly? Your home is registered as a shren location?"

"I will, yes. We built a house on the bottom of the world."

He blinks, and nods. "Ilen? What's there to know about Luci?"

"Oh, she's a sweetheart," says Ilen, who has not noticed that the ruby baby is clawing his arm. "She won't be the least bit of trouble. She likes the stuffed animals and the book about stars."

"Which book about stars?" so she can get a copy later. 

Ilen finds it under a twitching baby black shren and holds it up: Counting All The Stars.

"Thank you," she repeats again, and she teleports away. 

The two of them send the shren house money every month. Nowhere near as much as the initial lump sum, but reliable. 

They get anonymous-looking receipts from the Kep Trust which wouldn't raise eyebrows from any of their relatives who didn't go nosing around too hard.

Oh they don't speak to those relatives. Not that she's going to storm up to the shren house to say anything about it. 

Lavi is a witch; she sends the shren house a batch of any of the painkiller recipes she tries that seem like they help Luci, at all. 

They try stuff and report back!

She's not going to totally revolutionize the field in twenty years, or anything. But witchcraft is something she can do, and she can't just watch her daughter suffer and wail when she can do something. 

And Leelu--learns to hate. 

It's not as though she were an especially non-angry person before this. But with every scream, every sob of pain, every time the word shren digs its way into her brain as though it could ever mean more than the word daughter, her antipathy towards Draconic--towards the concept of dragonhood--deepens. What could possibly be siaddaki about dead babies? About abandoning your children? She encounters a woman who puts her nose in the air about the fact that Areelu brought her daughter home and only quick thinking on her wife's part in the form of literally teleporting Leelu away in time prevented her from being arrested for assault. 

She yearns, in the depths of her soul, to commit horrifying violence every time she says the word "shren" and a dragon reacts as though she was out of line. She doesn't. It wouldn't accomplish anything. But she wants. 

Eventually Luci learns to shift. Flying isn't everything it should be, for a white-group, but it makes the esu go away. Her temperament improves overnight, back to the sweet little girl Ilen told Laviwina about, so long ago. 

Lavi tells her daughter that story, eventually. 

Luci is twenty-nine when she mails Ilen a drawing she did, of her and what she imagines him to look like (at her level of drawing, the details are more or less irrelevant anyway) under a starry sky.