Except when they did. As once they had when they dealt with Elderlings. A memory unfolded in her mind. There had been agreements. Rules about the taking of cattle. Agreements about rolling in grain fields. Necessary rules that benefited all. Rules that even dragons had gathered together to create. The thought filled her with wonder. And nostalgia for better times.

She had secured a place at the edge of the warming platform and stubbornly refused to be budged from it all night. She had leaned against its comforting, healing warmth and felt the effects of it spread throughout her body. Heat and sunlight were important to dragons, as important as fresh meat and clean water. Since they had entered this tributary, her life had changed. Water was not some grainy, murky stew sucked out of a small hole in a riverbank. She could drink as much as she wished of the cool, sweet stuff. She could roll and bathe with no caution about her eyes and nostrils. She had felt her flesh fill out just with water.

And food. There was food in this river, small but plentiful, and it required some effort to catch it. It demanded a quick eye to pluck a fish from the water or a monkey from a low-hanging vine. But that was good, too, that satisfaction of winning the meat and gulping it down fresh and warm. This river of clean water was changing her.

But last night’s warmth had changed her most of all. Sintara had felt things happening to her body as the water heated it, mostly in her wings. There had been a spread of warmth and sensation, as if they were plants taking up moisture and standing upright after a time of wilting drought. She opened them now and rejoiced in how the sunlight touched and rebounded from their blueness. She could see now how her blood pumped more strongly through them. She flapped them, once, twice, thrice and with a lifting spirit felt how they raised her body out of the water. They would not lift her into the sky, not yet, but it now seemed possible that some day they might.

She did not want to leave the comforting warmth, but they had all agreed in their long night talk that when morning came, they would confront the keepers. What Greft had done was unacceptable. Kalo should have killed him, she thought again. If he had killed him and eaten him, it would not have come to this. That a human had dared come among them by night, by stealth, not to serve but to take blood and scales from them, as if they were cows to be milked or sheep to be shorn, demonstrated how deeply flawed the relationship had become. It was time to end it, once and for all.