“I don’t know how to hunt,” Sedric admitted.

“That’s why I’ll be teaching you,” Carson explained. When he spoke, Sedric felt the words thrum through his chest.

“Sounds like work,” Sedric complained. “Messy, bloody work. What if I don’t want to learn it?”

“Oh, these lazy Bingtown boys,” Carson lamented. He lay back on the sun-warmed sand, pulling Sedric over with him. The hunter put one arm over his face to shade his eyes. His free hand found the hair on the back on Sedric’s head and his fingers twined gently through it. He sighed. “I guess I’ll just have to think of something else to teach you, then.”

Sedric sighed. He caught the hunter’s hand, brought it to his mouth, and kissed the palm of it. “I might be open to that,” he agreed.

THYMARA SAT ON the edge of the grassy sward, right where it met the riverbank. It was a peculiar sort of place. Behind her was gently sloping, open, dry meadow, carpeted in tall green grass. And then the meadow stopped suddenly, and there was a sudden drop in the land, and then the sandy, rocky edge of the river. She had never even imagined such a place before. It pleased her to be sitting on the edge of that meadow world, dangling her legs. The sun was warm on her skin, and it eased the deep ache in her back. She closed her eyes and turned her face up to the sunlight. Warmth. Light and warmth felt so good to her now. She knew that the light and warmth were accelerating her changes. She could feel it now, the way she had once felt her teeth growing in. A pleasant, achy pain. She rolled her shoulders and felt her folded wings rub against the shirt that confined them. Sylve had helped her cut and hem slits in her shirt back, but it still felt odd to have them exposed. For most of the time, she kept them covered. Everyone, she told herself, knew she had them. Sometimes it felt silly to cover them.

On the other hand, she thought, everyone knew she had breasts. She covered those, too. She smiled slightly at the comparison. The boys seemed as intrigued by either.

She heard the swish of the grasses against his legs a moment before he sat down beside her.

“So. What are you smiling about?”

“Nothing, really.” She opened her eyes and turned toward Tats. “What have you been up to?”

“Helping Davvie learn how to care for Kalo. That is one big dragon.”

“Does Fente mind your grooming Kalo?”

He smiled ruefully. “Not as much as Lecter does. Finally, I took him aside and told him plainly there was nothing to be jealous about. I was just helping Davvie with his dragon. I’m not interested in Davvie that way at all.”

She found herself smiling back at him. Things had become a bit easier between them of late. It felt almost to her as if they had gone back to being the friends they had been back in Trehaug. She studied him now, unabashedly considering how his scaling was progressing. “Fente is changing you fast,” she observed. The dragon had not echoed her green in him, but had chosen instead bronzes and blacks. His scaling was fine, almost undetectable. Fente had outlined Tats’s eyes in black and bronzed his skin. She was keeping his hair and brows as they were. Thymara found herself nodding in approval of her choice. It seemed to her that most of the other dragons were changing their keepers in their own images. Fente had chosen to keep Tats as he was, right down to giving color to the fading slave tattoos on his face.

“She says it’s the warmth of the sun here, and the light. How about you? Has Sintara continued to change you?”

“I continue to change,” she said simply. Despite their confrontation in the river that day, nothing had been resolved. Sometimes that seemed the most surprising thing of all. The other keepers never quarreled with their dragons. Their dragons seldom spoke harshly to them; they didn’t have to. The keepers knew they were harnessed with glamour and didn’t care. But she and Sintara were not like that. They spoke their minds to each other, and she found that didn’t displease her. After their last crisis, their relationship had resumed as it had been before. Thymara tended the dragon and brought her food when her hunting went well. She enjoyed Sintara’s beauty, just as she would have enjoyed living in a fine house, just as she had once enjoyed the art and music of her neighbors in the Cricket Cages. She didn’t confuse that beauty with Sintara herself.

“You’re quiet,” Tats spoke carefully.

“I’m thinking. That’s all.”

“You think a lot lately.”

“That’s true. I don’t think it’s a bad thing.”

“I didn’t mean that it was.”