Turning away from them all, she began stalking back to the forest and the thin shelter of the trees. She didn’t care. She didn’t care what Mercor had said nor that Fente had mocked her. There was none among them worth impressing. “Scarcely a proper battle at all,” she sneered quietly.

“Was a ‘proper battle’ what you were trying to provoke?” Her snippy little keeper, Thymara, was abruptly beside her, trotting to keep up. Her black hair hung in fuzzy, tattered braids, a few still adorned with wooden charms. Her roll down the hill had coated her ragged cloak with dead grass. Her feet were bound up in mismatched rags, the makeshift shoes soled with crudely tanned deerskin. She had grown thinner of late, and taller. The bones of her face stood out more. The wings that Sintara had gifted her with bounced lightly beneath her cloak as she jogged. Despite the rudeness of her first query, Thymara sounded concerned as she added, “Stop a moment. Crouch down. Let me see your neck where he bit you.”

“He didn’t draw blood.” Sintara could scarcely believe she was answering such an impudent demand from a mere human.

“I want to look at it. It looks as if several scales are loosened.”

“I did nothing to provoke that silly squabble.” Sintara halted abruptly and lowered her head so that Thymara could inspect her neck. She resented doing it, feeling that she had somehow given way to the human’s domineering manner. Anger simmered in her. Briefly she considered “accidentally” knocking Thymara off her feet with a swipe of her head. But as she felt the girl’s strong hands gently easing her misaligned neck scales back into smoothness, she relented. Her keeper and her clever hands had their uses.

“None of the scales are torn all the way free, though you may shed some of them sooner rather than later.”

Sintara sensed her keeper’s annoyance as she set her scales to rights. Despite Thymara’s frequent rudeness to Sintara, the dragon knew the girl took pride in her health and appearance. Any insult to Sintara rankled Thymara as well. And she would be aware of her dragon’s mood, too.

As she focused more on the girl, she knew that they shared more than annoyance. The frustration was there as well. “Males!” the girl exclaimed suddenly. “I suppose it takes no more to provoke a male dragon to stupidity than it does a human male.”

Sintara’s curiosity was stirred by the comment, though she would not let Thymara know that. She reviewed what she knew of Thymara’s most recent upsets and divined the source of her sour mood. “The decision is yours, not theirs. How foolishly you are behaving! Just mate with both of them. Or neither. Show them that you are a queen, not a cow to be bred at the bull’s rutting.”

“I chose neither,” Thymara told her, answering the question that the dragon hadn’t asked.

Her scales smoothed, Sintara lifted her head and resumed her trek to the forest’s edge. Thymara hurried to stay beside her, musing as she jogged. “I just want to let it alone, to leave things as they’ve always been. But neither of them seems willing to let that happen.” She shook her head, her braids flying with the motion. “Tats is my oldest friend. I knew him back in Trehaug, before we became dragon keepers. He’s part of my past, part of home. But when he pushes me to bed with him, I don’t know if it’s because he loves me or simply because I’ve refused him. I worry that if we become lovers and it doesn’t work out, I’ll lose him completely.”