Freedom and choices. She could seize the one and make the other. “I’m staying,” she said quietly. “Not for my dragon. Not even for my friends. I’m staying here for me. To make a place where I do belong.”

Tats looked over at her. “Not for me?” he asked without guile.

She shook her head. “Honesty,” she reminded him quietly.

He glanced away from her. “Well, at least you didn’t say you were staying for Rapskal.” Then, quite suddenly, Tats made a sound, a hoarse intake of breath. A moment later Thymara whispered on a sigh, “I see him.”

The animal that was moving cautiously from the perimeter of the forest and into the open meadow was magnificent. Thymara was slowly becoming accustomed to the great size that the hoofed creatures of this dry forest could attain. Even so, this was the largest she had seen yet. She could have slung a sleeping net between the reaches of his two flat-pronged antlers. They were not the tree-branch-like horns she had seen on the other deer of this area. These reminded her of hands with widespread fingers. The creature that bore them was worthy of such a massive crown. His shoulders were immense, and a large hummock of meaty flesh rode them. He paced like a rich man strolling through a market, setting one careful foot down at a time. His large, dark eyes swept the clearing once, and then he dismissed his caution. Thymara was not surprised. What sort of predator could menace a beast of that size? She drew the bowstring taut and held her breath, but her hope was small. At best, she could probably deliver a flesh wound through that thick hide. If she injured him sufficiently or made him bleed enough, she and Tats could track him to his death place. But this would not be a clean kill for any of them.

She gritted her teeth. This could very well take all day, but the amount of meat would be well worth it. One more pace and she would have a clear shot at him.

A scarlet lightning bolt fell from the sky. The impact of the red dragon hitting the immense deer shook the earth. Thymara’s startled response was to release her arrow: it shot off in wobbly flight and struck nothing. In the same instant, there was a loud snap as the deer’s spine broke. It bellowed in agony, a sound cut short as the dragon’s jaws closed on the deer’s throat. Heeby jerked her prey off the ground and half sheared the deer’s head from his neck. Then she dropped it before lunging in to rip an immense mouthful of skin and gut from the deer’s soft belly. She threw her head back and gulped the meat down. Dangling tendrils of gut stretched between her jaws and her prey.

“Sweet Sa have mercy!” Tats sighed. At his words, the dragon turned sharply toward them. Her eyes glittered with anger and spun scarlet. Blood dripped from her bared teeth.

“Your kill,” Tats assured her. “We’re leaving now.” He seized Thymara by the upper arm and pulled her back into the shelter of the forest.

She still gripped her bow. “My arrow! That was the best one I had. Did you see where it went?”

“No.” There was a world of denial in Tats’s single word. He hadn’t seen it fly and he wasn’t interested in finding it. He pulled her deeper into the forest and then started to circle the meadow. “Damn her!” he said quietly. “That was a lot of meat.”

“Can’t blame her,” Thymara pointed out. “She’s just doing what a dragon does.”

“I know. She’s just doing what a dragon does, and how I wish Fente would do it also.” He shook his head guiltily at his own words, as if shamed to find fault with his dragon. “But until she and Sintara get off the ground, we’re stuck with providing meat for them. So we’d best get hunting again. Ah. Here we are.”

He’d struck the game trail that had brought the big buck to the forest meadow. Reflexively, Thymara cast her gaze upward. But the trees here were not the immense giants that she was accustomed to. At home, she would have scaled a tree and then moved silently from limb to reaching limb, traveling unseen from tree to tree as she stalked the game trail. She would have hunted her prey from above. But half these trees were bare of leaves in the winter, offering no cover. Nor did the branches reach and intermingle with their neighbors as they did in her Rain Wild home. “We’ll have to hunt on foot, and quietly,” Tats answered her thoughts. “But first, we’ll have to get away from Heeby’s kill site. Even I can smell death.”

“Not to mention hear her,” Thymara answered. The dragon fed noisily, crunching bones and making sounds of pleasure with each tearing bite. As they both paused, she gave a sudden snarl, like a cat playing with dead prey; a large cracking sound followed it.