“Sweet Sa have mercy!” Tats sighed. At his words, the dragon turned sharply toward them. Her eyes glittered with anger and spun scarlet. Blood dripped from her bared teeth.

“Your kill,” Tats assured her. “We’re leaving now.” He seized Thymara by the upper arm and pulled her back into the shelter of the forest.

She still gripped her bow. “My arrow! That was the best one I had. Did you see where it went?”

“No.” There was a world of denial in Tats’s single word. He hadn’t seen it fly and he wasn’t interested in finding it. He pulled her deeper into the forest and then started to circle the meadow. “Damn her!” he said quietly. “That was a lot of meat.”

“Can’t blame her,” Thymara pointed out. “She’s just doing what a dragon does.”

“I know. She’s just doing what a dragon does, and how I wish Fente would do it also.” He shook his head guiltily at his own words, as if shamed to find fault with his dragon. “But until she and Sintara get off the ground, we’re stuck with providing meat for them. So we’d best get hunting again. Ah. Here we are.”

He’d struck the game trail that had brought the big buck to the forest meadow. Reflexively, Thymara cast her gaze upward. But the trees here were not the immense giants that she was accustomed to. At home, she would have scaled a tree and then moved silently from limb to reaching limb, traveling unseen from tree to tree as she stalked the game trail. She would have hunted her prey from above. But half these trees were bare of leaves in the winter, offering no cover. Nor did the branches reach and intermingle with their neighbors as they did in her Rain Wild home. “We’ll have to hunt on foot, and quietly,” Tats answered her thoughts. “But first, we’ll have to get away from Heeby’s kill site. Even I can smell death.”

“Not to mention hear her,” Thymara answered. The dragon fed noisily, crunching bones and making sounds of pleasure with each tearing bite. As they both paused, she gave a sudden snarl, like a cat playing with dead prey; a large cracking sound followed it.

“Probably the antlers,” Tats said.

Thymara nodded. “I’ve never seen a deer that big. I’ve never seen any animal that big, except dragons.”

“Dragons aren’t animals,” he corrected her. He was leading and she was following. They trod lightly and spoke softly.

She chuckled quietly. “Then what are they?”

“Dragons. The same way that we aren’t animals. They think, they talk. If that’s what makes us not animals, then dragons are not animals, either.”

She was quiet for a time, mulling it over. She wasn’t sure she agreed. “Sounds like you’ve given this some thought.”

“I have.” He ducked low to go under an overhanging branch, and she copied him. “Ever since Fente and I bonded. By the third night, I was wondering, what was she? She wasn’t my pet, and she wasn’t like a wild monkey or a bird. Not like the tame monkeys that a few of the pickers used to go after high fruit. And I wasn’t her pet or her servant, even if I was doing a lot of things for her. Finding her food, picking vermin away from her eyes, cleaning her wings.”