On the other hand, she thought, everyone knew she had breasts. She covered those, too. She smiled slightly at the comparison. The boys seemed as intrigued by either.

She heard the swish of the grasses against his legs a moment before he sat down beside her.

“So. What are you smiling about?”

“Nothing, really.” She opened her eyes and turned toward Tats. “What have you been up to?”

“Helping Davvie learn how to care for Kalo. That is one big dragon.”

“Does Fente mind your grooming Kalo?”

He smiled ruefully. “Not as much as Lecter does. Finally, I took him aside and told him plainly there was nothing to be jealous about. I was just helping Davvie with his dragon. I’m not interested in Davvie that way at all.”

She found herself smiling back at him. Things had become a bit easier between them of late. It felt almost to her as if they had gone back to being the friends they had been back in Trehaug. She studied him now, unabashedly considering how his scaling was progressing. “Fente is changing you fast,” she observed. The dragon had not echoed her green in him, but had chosen instead bronzes and blacks. His scaling was fine, almost undetectable. Fente had outlined Tats’s eyes in black and bronzed his skin. She was keeping his hair and brows as they were. Thymara found herself nodding in approval of her choice. It seemed to her that most of the other dragons were changing their keepers in their own images. Fente had chosen to keep Tats as he was, right down to giving color to the fading slave tattoos on his face.

“She says it’s the warmth of the sun here, and the light. How about you? Has Sintara continued to change you?”

“I continue to change,” she said simply. Despite their confrontation in the river that day, nothing had been resolved. Sometimes that seemed the most surprising thing of all. The other keepers never quarreled with their dragons. Their dragons seldom spoke harshly to them; they didn’t have to. The keepers knew they were harnessed with glamour and didn’t care. But she and Sintara were not like that. They spoke their minds to each other, and she found that didn’t displease her. After their last crisis, their relationship had resumed as it had been before. Thymara tended the dragon and brought her food when her hunting went well. She enjoyed Sintara’s beauty, just as she would have enjoyed living in a fine house, just as she had once enjoyed the art and music of her neighbors in the Cricket Cages. She didn’t confuse that beauty with Sintara herself.

“You’re quiet,” Tats spoke carefully.

“I’m thinking. That’s all.”

“You think a lot lately.”

“That’s true. I don’t think it’s a bad thing.”

“I didn’t mean that it was.”

“I know.”