Then an immense splash rocked the boat. Relpda’s head and shoulders shot up out of the matted debris to tower momentarily over the boat. Hunter food! she announced and bent her head. Sedric had never really seen the inside of a dragon’s maw before. She opened her jaws impossibly wide, and he could see inside, see the immense swallowing muscles at the sides of her throat, and the row of sharp teeth that curved inward. Her mouth came down over the hunter’s head and shoulders like a poacher popping a sack over a rabbit. He had one brief glimpse of Jess’s eyes so wide that the whites showed all around them. Then Relpda closed her jaws.

There was a sound, a sound between a shearing of bone and a crushing of meat. Relpda’s head rose, and she pointed her muzzle at the sky. Her head jerked twice as she swallowed.

Jess’s bloody hips and legs fell into the boat beside Sedric. He kicked at them in reflexive horror and the pelvis flopped over the side, followed by the legs. Relpda gave a squeal of protest and dived after them. The wave of her passage rocked the boat wildly. Blood and water mingled in the bottom of the boat, sloshing back and forth around the dropped hatchet.

Sedric leaned over the side of the boat, staring after them. “That didn’t happen,” he slurred. He lifted the back of his hand to his mouth and then took it away. Bloody. He turned his head and looked at the hatchet in the boat’s bilgewater. Blood streamed from it in tiny threads and mingled with the water. There was hair on it, too. Jess’s hair. “I killed him,” he said aloud. The words came strangely to his ears.

Delicious.

THE AFTERNOON PASSED without incident. Thymara and Tats didn’t talk much. She didn’t have much to say, and keeping up with her left Tats short of wind. She made sure of that.

The way her feelings about him vacillated bothered her more than her actual emotions. When she was around the others, it was easier to pretend that nothing had changed between them. Did that mean that perhaps nothing really had changed? Was she angry at him or not? And if she was, what was the reason? Sometimes, she could see that she had no real basis for her anger. There had been no mutual understanding between them. He had not broken any promise to her. Surely he was free to do as he pleased, just as she was. She could be dispassionate about it. He’d mated with Jerd. That was their business, not hers. And now that Jerd was with Greft, it had even less to do with her.