“It is something to you, something you may regret depending upon. What if he should decide he does not wish to be bound to you? What if he should decide to leave and return to his Bingtown?”

“He will not.” Relpda spoke with finality.

Sintara, disturbed, moved away. It was not the first time she had been forced to confront the idea that her memories were incomplete. She tried to focus her mind on the floating fragments of recall the talk had stirred in her. One of her ancestors had willingly and consciously created an Elderling. Could she recall how it was done?

Only in fragments. Blood had been involved, she knew that. Had there been more, the giving of a physical token? A scale? There was something back there, an elusive memory that swam at the very edges of her recall.

“Sintara.”

She had been thinking too deeply. She had not even noticed Mercor’s quiet approach. She tried to appear unsurprised as she turned to him. “What is it?”

“Are you aware of the changes your keeper is going through?”

She stared at him for a moment and then asked distantly, “Which keeper?”

He was unruffled. “The one who is what the humans would say ‘heavily touched by the Rain Wilds.’ Thymara.”

“I have not paid a great deal of attention to her changes, though she is more scaled than she was when we began our journey.”

“So her other changes are not deliberate? They are not gifts from you?”

What other changes? “She is scarcely worthy of any gifts from me. She is both arrogant and disobedient. She fails to praise me or to be grateful for my attentions. Why would I choose her for a gift?”

“It is a question I am asking of any dragon whose keeper seems to be undergoing obvious changes. Although Relpda has announced her intention, I would not have been surprised if others had quietly chosen such a path.”

“And have they?” She was suddenly curious.

“Only Relpda has offered a blood change to her keeper.”

She considered his words for a time, then said, as if merely confirming a thought rather than asking a question, “Of course, there are other paths to creating an Elderling.”

“Yes. They are more time-consuming and in most cases, less radical. They are no less dangerous if one is careless with the human.”

“She was careless, not I. When she removed the rasp snake from me, some of my blood spattered on her face. Perhaps in her mouth or eyes.”

Mercor was silent for a time. “She changes then, a blood change. If you do not guide it, it could be very dangerous for her.”

She turned away from him again. “It seems strange to me that a dragon should care about what is dangerous for a human.”