“Why are you daring to ask for more than you’ve been given?” The dragon had gone from being bemused at what she had created to being angry again. Thymara thought that perhaps the truth slipped out when Sintara demanded, “Why do you think you should be able to fly when I cannot?”

“Perhaps because it would only make sense to me that any changes you made in me would be useful to me!”

“You will be pretty! And interesting to other dragons. And that is enough for any Elderling, let alone a human!”

“Perhaps ‘pretty’ wings are enough for you, but if I must bear their weight and the inconvenience of having something growing out of my backbone, perhaps they should be useful. I have never understood why you don’t even try to use your wings. I see the other dragons stretching and working theirs. I’ve seen the silver almost lift himself from the water with his, and he began with a much more ungainly body and smaller wings than yours! You don’t try! I groom your wings and keep them clean. They’ve grown larger and stronger and you could try, but you don’t. All you do is tell me how lovely they are. And lovely they may be, but have you never considered trying to use them for what they are intended?”

She could see the dragon’s fury build. She’d dared to criticize her, and Sintara could not tolerate even the implication that she was lazy or self-pitying or perhaps even just a bit…“Stupid.”

Thymara said the word aloud. She had no idea what prompted her to do it. Perhaps simply to show Sintara that she’d gone too far and that her keeper would no longer be terrorized by her. How dare she put wings on her back when she could not even master the ones that had grown naturally on her own?

The murmur of voices from the barge was growing louder. Thymara refused even to glance in that direction. She stood, her bunched shirt clutched over her breasts, and faced the furiously spinning eyes of her dragon. Sintara was magnificent in her wrath. She lifted her head and opened her jaws wide, displaying the brightly colored poison sacs in her throat. She opened her wings wide, a reflexive display of size that the dragons often used in an attempt to remind one another of their relative sizes and strengths, and they spread like magnificent stained-glass panels unfolding. For a moment, Thymara was dizzied by her glory and her glamour. She nearly fell to her knees before her dragon.