Читать книгу The Rain Wild Chronicles: The Complete 4-Book Collection - Робин Хобб - Страница 22

It was unusual for her mother to greet them with a smile on their return from their daily gathering. Even more unusual was for her to be fairly bursting with enthusiasm to speak to them. Thymara and her father were scarcely inside the door with their baskets before her mother spoke. Her eyes were bright with hope. ‘We’ve had an offer for Thymara.’

For an instant, both the young woman and her father froze as they were. Thymara could barely make sense of the words. An offer? For her? At sixteen years of age, she was long past the age when most Rain Wild girls were engaged. She knew that in some places in the world she would still be considered little more than a child. In others, she would be seen as just ripening for marriage. But in the Rain Wilds, folk did not live as long as other people. They knew that if a family bloodline was to continue, they’d best have their offspring spoken for as children, wed young as soon as they were fecund, and with child within the year. Even if a girl came from a poor family, if her looks were passable, she’d be spoken for by ten. Even the ugly girls had prospects by twelve.

Unless they were like Thymara, never meant to survive at all, let alone wed and produce children. Invisible to some folk, barely tolerated by others. Yet, here was her mother, eyes shining, saying there had been an offer for her. It was too strange. To accept a marriage offer when children were forbidden to her? It made no sense. Who would make such an offer and why would her mother even consider it?

‘A marriage offer for Thymara? From whom?’ Her father’s voice was thick with disbelief. Foreboding grew in Thymara’s heart as she studied her mother’s face. Her smile was thin. She did not look at either of them as she crouched by the baskets and began to select which items in them would become their evening meal. She spoke to the food they had gathered. ‘I said we’d had an offer for Thymara, Jerup. Not a marriage offer.’

‘What sort of an offer, then? From whom?’ her father demanded. A storm cloud of anger threatened in his words.

Her mother kept her aplomb. She didn’t look up from her task. ‘An offer of useful employment and a life of her own, apart from us in our declining years. As for “from whom”, it comes directly from the Rain Wild Traders’ Council. So it’s nothing to sniff at, Jerup. It’s a wonderful opportunity for Thymara.’

Her father shifted his glance to her, and waited for her to speak. It was no secret in their little family that her mother worried constantly about her ‘declining years’. Plainly she believed that if they could shed responsibility for Thymara’s upkeep, they could save more for their old age. Thymara wasn’t certain that were so; she toiled every day alongside her father. Much of what he carried home, Thymara had harvested from the highest reaches of the tallest branches, sunny places where no one else dared climb. Would her mother think it such a relief when her father’s baskets were lighter each day? And if she were gone, who would do the day-to-day chores for them as their bodies aged and grew feeble?

Thymara didn’t voice any of that. ‘What sort of “useful employment” did they offer?’ she asked quietly. Thymara kept her voice unaccusing, or tried to. She dreaded what her mother might answer. There were all sorts of ‘useful employment’ in Trehaug. There was always the most hazardous digging in the buried Elderling city. It was back-breaking labour, shovel- and barrow-work, often done in near-darkness, and always with the possibility that a door or wall in the ancient buried city might suddenly give way and release an avalanche of mud. Usually, they chose boys for that task because they were stronger. ‘Unproductive’ girls like her were most often given the task of maintaining the bridges that traversed the highest and lightest branches. There had been recent talk of a major expansion of the network of footbridges that connected the widely-scattered settlements on both sides of the Rain Wild River and a lot of debate as to how far a bridge of chain and wood could successfully be stretched. With a sinking heart, Thymara suspected she would be part of the team that would find out. Yes. That was probably it. Everyone in their neighbourhood knew of her prowess at climbing. And such work would require her to leave her home and live close to the project. It would take her far from her parents, and perhaps even promise a swift end to her existence. Her mother might welcome that.

Her mother’s voice was falsely cheery as she began her tale. ‘Well. There was a Trader in the trunk market today, dressed very fine in an embroidered robe, and with a scroll from the Rain Wild Council. He said he had come looking for strong young people, for people without spouses or children, to undertake a special task in service to Trehaug and to all the Rain Wilders. The pay would be very good, he said, and an advance would be given immediately, even before the task was begun, and at the end, when the workers returned to Trehaug, they would be well rewarded for their efforts. He said he expected many people would wish to be chosen, but that the candidates must be exceptionally hardy and tough.’

Thymara stifled her impatience. Her mother could never simply state something. She told a story or a piece of news by talking all around it. Asking her questions would simply take her down yet another side track. Thymara pressed her teeth together and held her tongue.

Her father didn’t have her patience. ‘So it’s not a marriage offer; it’s an offer of work. Thymara already has work. She helps me gather. And why should she wish for “a life of her own” as you put it, away from us? We are not getting any younger, and if there is a time when I would want her by my side, it is, as you put it, during our “declining years”. Who else do you think will take care of us? The Rain Wild Council?’

Her mother folded her lips tightly and the lines in her brow deepened. ‘Oh, very well, then,’ she said bitterly. ‘I’ll say no more. I see I was foolish to listen to the man at all, or to think that Thymara might wish to have a bit of adventure in her life.’ Almost quivering with indignation, she folded her lips and radiated silence and anger.

The main room of their house was tiny, but as her mother set the food on the woven pads onto the table mat, she pretended to ignore them. Thymara and her father both kept silent. Asking for more information would only increase her mother’s pleasure at withholding it from them. Feigning disinterest would win it more quickly. So her father filled the wash basin, used it, flung the dirty water out the window, and then refilled it for her. He passed it to her, saying casually, ‘I think that instead of harvesting tomorrow, we should make an expedition to bring back some new plants. Shall we rise early?’

‘I suppose that would be wisest,’ Thymara replied cautiously.

Her mother couldn’t stand that they appeared to be having a simple conversation. She spoke to the kura nuts she was grinding into paste. ‘I suppose I know nothing at all about my daughter. I thought she would be thrilled to work with the dragons. She seemed so interested in them when she was younger.’

Her father made a tiny hand motion at Thymara, cautioning her to keep silent so her mother would keep talking. Thymara couldn’t. ‘The dragons? The dragons I saw hatch, the abandoned dragons? I’d be working with them?’

Her mother gave a small, satisfied sniff. ‘Apparently not. Your father thinks it better that you remain here, to live with us until we shrivel up and die, and then for you to be alone for the rest of your life.’ She set the bowl of mashed kura nuts on the food mat and placed a plate of weddle stalks beside it. She had baked flatbread at the community oven earlier in the day. There were six flats, two for each of them. It was not a plentiful or elaborate meal, but it would ‘fill the belly’ as her father would say. Hungry as Thymara had been but a few seconds ago, she didn’t even want to look at it now.

But her father had been right. Thymara had fed her mother’s fury, not slaked it with her question and now the woman burned with a cold and righteous fire. She smiled, and made small talk during the meal, as if all were well and she were merely a subservient wife conceding to her husband’s demands. Thymara asked about it twice more, unable to resist the bait she had dangled, and each time her mother told her that surely Thymara would not want to leave home and family and she would say no more on such a silly topic.

All Thymara could do was simmer in her seething curiosity.

As soon as the meal was ended, Jerup announced he had errands and left the house. Thymara tidied away the remains of the meal, trying not to meet her mother’s resentful stare. As soon as she could, she left the house and the little walkways that connected it to its neighbours. She clambered higher in the canopy. She needed to think, and she’d do that best if she were alone. Dragons. What could the dragons possibly have to do with an offer for her?

Thymara had seen the dragons twice in her life. The first time had been five years ago, when Thymara had been almost eleven. Her father had taken her down the trunk and across the Necklace Bridges and then down, down, all the way to the earth. The trail that led to the hatchery by the riverbank had been trodden into muck by the passage of so many feet. That had been Thymara’s first visit to Cassarick.

The memory of watching them emerge haunted her still. Their wings had been weak and their flesh was thin on their bones. Tintaglia had come and gone, bringing fresh meat to feed them. Her father had felt sympathy for the poor misshapen creatures. A rueful smile twisted her mouth as she recalled his scrambling flight from one newly hatched dragon.

In the early days following the hatch, everyone had hoped that the dragons who survived would grow and prosper. Her father had been employed for a time as a hunter to help feed the dragons. But the densely forested Rain Wilds could not long support such large and ravenous carnivores. The best efforts of the hunters could not create more game than there was. The Council had become more and more penurious about paying for the hunters’ work. Her father soon quit that occupation and returned to their home in Trehaug. He told a sad tale of the sickly dragons quickly dying off. Those who remained grew larger, but not heartier nor more self-sufficient. ‘Sometimes Tintaglia comes, bringing meat, but one dragon cannot feed so many. And her shame for those poor creatures radiates from her. It will come to a bad end for all of us, I fear.’

For the earth-bound dragons, it had grown worse. For against all odds, Tintaglia had found a mate. All had believed that Tintaglia was the last true dragon in the world. To discover it was not so was shocking, and the tale of the black dragon that had risen from the ice was almost too far-fetched to believe.

Some prince of the far Six Duchies had unearthed the dragon, digging him out of an icy grave for reasons of his own, ones that did not matter to her. The black drake had not been dead after all; he had risen from his long and icy sleep and taken Tintaglia as his mate. They had flown off together to hunt and feed and mate. Wild as the tale was, one thing was unmistakably true: since that time, the queen dragon had returned to the Rain Wilds only sporadically. There were reports from some Rain Wilders that they had seen the two great dragons flying in the distance. Some said bitterly that now that she had no need of humans for companionship or aid, she had parted from them, not only abandoning to their care the ravenous young dragons but ceasing to cast her protective shadow over the waters of the Rain Wild River.

Even though Tintaglia had ceased to observe her end of their bargain, the Rain Wilders had little choice but to continue to care for the young dragons. As many had pointed out, the only thing worse than a herd of dragons living at the foot of your city was a herd of hungry, angry dragons living at the foot of your city. Although the cocooning grounds were substantially upriver of Trehaug, they were almost on top of the buried city of Cassarick. The most accessible parts of the ancient Elderling city beneath Trehaug had been mined of Elderling treasure long ago. Cassarick now seemed to offer the same potential, but only if the young dragons were kept in a frame of mind to allow the humans access to it.

Thymara wondered how many of the young dragons now remained alive. Not all of the serpents who entered their cocoons had emerged as dragons. The last time her father had journeyed to Cassarick, Thymara had gone with them. That had been a little more than two years ago. If she recalled correctly, there had been eighteen surviving creatures then. Disease, lack of fresh food and battles among themselves had taken a heavy toll on them. She had watched from the trees, not venturing near. The dirty hulking creatures seemed tragic, almost obscene when she recalled the glittering newness of the freshly emerged dragons. They were large, ill-formed hulks, smeared with mud, living in a trampled mucky area by the river. They stank. They stalked about listlessly, wading through their own droppings and nosing through the offal of old meals. None of the dragons had ever achieved the ability to fly. Some of them could hunt for their own food, in a very limited way. Their efforts consisted of wading out into the river and snatching at the migratory fish runs. A sensation of suppressed strife rose to her, thicker than their reptilian stench. She had turned away from them, unable to bear looking at the bony, ill-tempered creatures.

Thymara shook her head to clear it of memories and focus on her climb. She dug in her claws and moved up, into the branches that arched over the roof of her home. It was among the highest in Trehaug. From here, she looked down over most of the tree top city.

She drew her knees up under her chin and pondered as she sat watching nightfall devour the city and forest. She liked this particular perch. If she leaned out and angled herself just right, she had a tiny window up through all the intersecting branches, through which she could glimpse the night sky and the myriad stars that filled it. No one else, she thought to herself, knew that such a view existed. It belonged to her alone.

For a short time, she had peace. Then she felt the small vibrations of the branch that told her that someone was coming to join her in her precarious perch. Not her father. No. This person moved more swiftly than her father did. She did not turn to look at him, but spoke as if she had seen him. ‘Hello, Tats. What brings you up to the canopy tonight?’

She felt him shrug. He’d been standing up on the branch. Now he dropped to all fours to creep along the narrow limb to join her. When he reached her, he sat up but locked his wiry legs around the branch beneath him. ‘Just felt like visiting,’ the Tattooed boy said quietly. She finally turned her head to look at him.

Tats met her gaze without comment. She knew that recently her eyes had taken on the pale blue glow that some Rain Wilders had. He’d never commented on it, nor on her black claws. But then, she’d never asked any questions about the tattoos that sprawled across his face beside his nose. The one closest to his nose was a little horse symbol. The one that spread across most of his left cheek was a spider’s web. They marked that he had been born into slavery. She knew the bones of his tale. Six years ago, with the return of the serpents, the Rain Wilds had invited the Tattooed of Bingtown to emigrate there. Many of the recently freed slaves had few other prospects. Some had been criminals, others had been debtors, but the tattoos of slavery had reduced them all to a near equal footing. The Rain Wild Council had invited them to journey up the Rain Wild River, to settle and intermarry, to begin new lives. In exchange, the Tattooed had offered their labour in dredging out the river shoals and building the water ladders that had allowed the serpents to complete their migration. Many of the Tattooed had gone on to become valued citizens of the Rain Wilds. Those who had been debtors were often skilled artisans or craftsmen, and they brought their talents to the Rain Wilds.

Unfortunately, some of them had been thieves, murderers and pickpockets. And some of them brought those skills to the Rain Wilds as well. Despite the chance to make a new life, they had fallen back on what they knew. Tats’ mother had been one of them. Thymara had heard that she was a thief, and no more than that, until a burglary had gone wrong and turned into a murder. Tats’ mother had fled; no one knew where, least of all Tats, a boy of about ten at the time. Abandoned to his own devices, he had been fostered among the other Tattooed. Thymara had the impression that he had lived everywhere, and nowhere, picking up what food he could as it was offered to him, wearing cast-offs and doing whatever menial tasks he could to earn a coin or two for himself. She and her father had met him at one of the trunk markets, the large market days held closest to the huge trunks of the five main trees of central Trehaug. They had birds to sell that day, and he’d offered to do anything they needed, if only they’d give him the smallest one. He hadn’t had meat in months. Her father, as always, had been too kind-hearted. He’d put the boy to hawking their wares, a task he usually did himself, and much better, for his voice was louder and more melodious. Still, Tats had been willing, no, eager to earn a meal for himself.

Since that day, two years ago, they’d seen him often. When her father could make work for him, he did, and Tats was always grateful for whatever they could spare. He was a handy fellow, even here in the high canopy where folk who had been born on the ground never ventured. Often enough, Thymara welcomed his company. She had few friends. The children who had socialized with her when she was small had long grown up, wedded, and commenced new lives as parents and partners. Thymara had been left behind in her strangely extended adolescence. It was oddly comforting to have found a friend who was as single as she was. She wondered why he wasn’t married or at least courting by now.

Her thoughts had wandered. She only realized that her silence had grown long when he asked her, ‘Did you want to be alone tonight? I don’t intend to bother you.’

‘No, you’re no bother, Tats. I was just taking some time to myself to think.’

‘About what?’ He settled himself more firmly on the branch.

‘I’m considering my options for my future. Not that there are many.’ She managed a laugh.

‘No? Why not?’

She looked at him, wondering if he were teasing. ‘Well, I’m sixteen years old and still living with my parents. No one’s ever made an offer for me and no one ever will. So, either I live with my parents until the end of my days, or I strike out on my own. I know something about hunting, and I know something about gathering. But what I mostly know about both of them is that if I try to go it alone with those as my only skills, I’m going to lead a skimpy life. In the Rain Wilds, it always seems to take at least two people in partnership, working hard, to keep skin and bone together. And I’m always going to be just one.’

Tats looked startled at her flood of words, and a bit uncomfortable. He cleared his throat. ‘Why do you think you’re always going to have to make it on your own?’ More quietly he added, ‘You talk about living with your parents like it’s terrible. Me, I’d love to have a mother or a father to stay with.’ He gave a short laugh. ‘I can’t even imagine having both.’

‘Living with my parents isn’t terrible,’ she admitted. ‘Though sometimes, I know my mother wishes I weren’t around. Da is always good to me; he lets me know I’m welcome to stay for always. I suppose that when he brought me back home, he knew then that I’d probably be underfoot for the rest of my life.’

Tats knit his brows. His confused scowl made the spiderweb across his cheek crawl strangely. ‘Brought you back home? Where had you gone?’

It was Thymara’s turn to feel awkward. She’d always supposed that everyone knew what she was and the story behind it. Any Rain Wilder would be able to tell just by looking at her. But Tats wasn’t Rain Wilds born, and she and her kind were not something the Rain Wilders spoke about to outsiders. Just as some of them never spoke to her or looked directly at her, so her existence was not a topic for casual conversation with outsiders. That Tats didn’t know meant that most people still considered him an outsider. He truly didn’t know. The newness of that thought stung her. She gritted her teeth in a strange smile and held up her hand to him. ‘Notice anything?’

He leaned closer and peered at her hand. ‘You cracked one of your claws?’

She choked on a laugh, and suddenly understood something about him that she never had before. He’d acted friendly toward her because he truly didn’t know better.

‘Tats, what you should notice is that I have claws. Not fingernails. Claws like a toad. Or a lizard.’ She sank them into the branch and drew them back toward her, leaving four stripes of torn bark. ‘Claws make me what I am.’

‘I’ve seen lots of Rain Wilds folk with claws.’

She stared at him. Then she said, ‘No, you haven’t. You’ve seen lots of folk with black nails. Even thick black nails. But not claws. Because when a baby is born with claws instead of fingernails, the parents and the midwife know what they have to do. And they do it.’

He hitched closer to her on the branch. ‘Do what?’ he asked hoarsely.

She looked away from his intent stare, into the interlacing branches that webbed the night. ‘Get rid of it. Put it somewhere, away from where people go. And leave it there.’

‘To die?’ He was shocked.

‘Yes, to die. Or be eaten by something, a tree cat or a big snake.’ She glanced back at him and found she couldn’t meet his horrified stare. It seemed accusing, and it made her feel ungrateful, as if she were being disloyal to talk about what happened to deformed children. ‘Sometimes they strangle the baby or smother it so it doesn’t suffer too long. And then they drop it in the river. It depends on the midwife, I guess. My midwife just put me out of the way; wedged me into a forking branch away from any path and hurried back to my mother, who was bleeding more than she should.’ She cleared her throat. Tats was staring at her, his mouth slightly ajar. For the first time, she noticed that one of his middle bottom teeth slightly leaned past its neighbour. She glanced away from her rapt listener.

‘The midwife didn’t know my father had followed her. I was not their first child, but I was the first one to be born alive. Da says he just couldn’t stand to let go of me, that he felt I deserved a chance. So he followed the midwife and he brought me back home, even though he knew a lot of people would say he was doing wrong.’

‘Doing wrong? Why?’

She looked back at him, wondering if he were teasing her. He had pale eyes, blue or grey depending on the time of day. But they never glowed. Not like hers. They looked at her without guile. His earnest look almost exasperated her. ‘Tats, how can you not know these things? You’ve lived in the Rain Wilds for, what, six years? A lot of Rain Wilds children are born, well, touched by the Wilds. And as they grow, they become even more different. So, well, people had to draw the line somewhere. Because, if you’re too different when you’re first born, if you already have scales and claws, then who knows what you’ll grow to be? And if the ones like me married and had children, well those children would likely be even less close to human when they were born, and might grow to be Sa knows what.’

Tats took a deep breath and blew it out, shaking his head. ‘Thymara, you talk like you don’t think you’re human.’

‘Well,’ she said, and then stopped. For a time, she chased words around inside her mind. Maybe I’m not. Did she believe that? Of course not. Well, maybe not. What was she then, if not human? But if she was human, how could she have claws?

Tats spoke again before she could find words. ‘You don’t look that much stranger to me than most of the folk in the Rain Wilds. I’ve seen people here with a lot more scales and fringe than you have. Not that it bothers me now. When I was little, when I first came here, you were a pretty scary bunch. Not any more. Now you’re just, well, people that are marked. Just like Tattooed were marked.’

‘Your owners marked you. To say you were a slave.’

He flashed white teeth at her in a grin that denied her words. ‘No. They marked me to try to make people believe they owned me.’

‘I know, I know,’ she said quickly. It was a difference that many of the former slaves insisted on. She didn’t understand why it was so important to them, but it obviously was. She was willing to let him explain it however he liked. ‘But my point is that someone did it to you. Before then, you were just like everyone else. But me, I was born this way.’ She turned her hand over and regarded her black claws curving in toward her palm. ‘Always different. Not fit for marriage.’ She lowered her voice and looked away from him as she added, ‘Not even fit to live.’

He didn’t reply to her words. Instead he said quietly, ‘Your ma just came out and looked up here at us. She’s still down there, staring at me.’ He shifted a tiny bit, ducking his shaggy head and bowing his shoulders in toward his narrow chest as if that would make him invisible. ‘She doesn’t like me, does she?’

Thymara shrugged. ‘Right now, it’s me that she really doesn’t like. We had a, well, a family disagreement earlier. My Da and I came home from gathering, and my mother said that someone had made an offer for me. Not a marriage offer, but a work offer. So Da said I had work already and, well, she got angry and wouldn’t even say what the offer had been.’ She sprawled back on the branch and sighed. The Rain Wilds night was deepening around them. Lamps were being kindled in the little dangling houses. As far as she could see, the scattered sparks of the upper reaches of Trehaug sparkled through the network of branches and leaves. She shifted onto her belly and looked down; there, the lights were thicker and brighter in the more prosperous sections of the tree-built city. The lamplighters were at work now, illuminating the bridges that spanned the trees like glittering necklaces strung through the forest. Almost every evening it seemed there were more lights. Six years ago there had been a flood of Tattooed to swell the populations of Trehaug and Cassarick. And since then, more and more outsiders had come. She’d heard that the little trading villages downriver had grown as well.

The light-sprinkled forest below was beautiful. And it was hers, yet it would never be hers. She gritted her teeth and spoke through them. ‘It’s frustrating. I’ve got few enough choices, and my mother is holding one back from me.’ She glanced up at the skinny boy who shared the branch with her.

Tats’ grin, always startling in how it changed his face, suddenly broke through. ‘I know what your offer is. I think.’

‘You know what?’

‘I know what the offer was. Because I heard about it, too. That was one of the reasons I came up here tonight, to ask you and your da what you both thought of it. Because you’ve seen more of the dragons than I have.’

She sat up so suddenly that Tats gasped. But Thymara knew she was in no danger of falling. ‘What was the offer?’ she demanded.

His face lit with enthusiasm. ‘Well, there was a fellow that was posting notices at every trunk market. He tacked one up and then read it to me. According to him, the Rain Wild Council is looking for workers, young, healthy workers, “with few attachments”. Meaning no family, he said.’ Tats paused suddenly in his excited telling. ‘So I guess that couldn’t be your offer, could it? Because you’ve got family.’

‘Just tell,’ Thymara demanded brusquely.

‘Well, here is the gist of it. The dragons are getting to be too much trouble over at Cassarick. They’ve done some bad stuff, scaring people and acting up, and the Council has decided they have to be moved. So they’re looking for people to move them away from Cassarick. They need people to herd them along and get food for them, that sort of thing. And resettle them, and keep them from coming back.’

‘Dragon keepers,’ Thymara said softly. She looked away from Tats and tried to imagine what it would be like. From what she had seen of the dragons, they were not easily managed creatures. ‘I think it would be dangerous work. And that’s why they’re looking for orphans or people without family. So that no one complains when a dragon eats you.’

Tats squinted at her. ‘Seriously?’

‘Well …’

‘Thymara!’ Her mother’s sharp call broke the night. ‘It’s getting late. Come in.’

She was startled. Her mother seldom called her name in public, let alone desired her presence. ‘Why?’ she called down to her. Perhaps her father had come home and wanted her. She couldn’t recall that her mother had ever called her back into the house.

‘Because it’s late. And I said so. Come inside.’

Tats eyes had widened. He spoke in a whisper. ‘I knew she didn’t like me. I’d better go, before I get you in trouble.’

‘Tats, it’s nothing to do with you. I’m sure of it. You don’t have to go. She probably just has some chores for me.’ In truth, she had no idea why her mother would suddenly summon her back to the house. She knew she should probably go down to where their small dwelling swung gently from the branches that supported it. But she wasn’t inclined to go. When her father wasn’t home, the little rooms seemed uncomfortably small, filled with her mother’s disapproval. A sudden obstinacy, very unlike her usual subservience to her mother, suddenly filled her. She’d go, but not right away. After all, what could her mother do? She’d never come up on the flimsy branches where Thymara and Tats now perched. Her mother disdained even the tree-ways in this part of Trehaug. The Cricket Cages, as this district of tiny homes perched high in the upper reaches of the canopy was called, relied on lightweight bridges and fine trolley lines to ferry its populace from branch to branch. Her mother hated living in such a poor section of Trehaug, but the dangling cottages were affordable. Almost everything was cheaper up here in the higher reaches of the canopy.

‘Aren’t you going in?’ Tats asked her quietly.

‘No,’ she decided. ‘Not just yet.’

‘What were you thinking about, just then?’

She shrugged. ‘About how much everything has changed.’ She looked over the branch and down at the glittering lights of Trehaug. Their gleams were scattered and broken by the massive trunks and wide-reaching branches of the rainforest. ‘My family wasn’t always poor. Before I was born, when my parents were first married, they lived down there. Way down there. My father was the third son of a Rain Wild Trader. His family had a share of a claim in the old buried city, and they were fairly well-to-do. But then my grandfather died. My father has two older brothers. The eldest inherited the claim, and the next son had the knowledge of how best to manage it. But there really wasn’t enough there to support three families, and my father had to strike out on his own. Sometimes I think that made my mother bitter, even before I was born. I think she’d expected to live an easy life with pretty things, and have handsome children who married well.’

A strange smile twisted her face. ‘One little detail, and it might have been different for everyone. I think that if my father had been the eldest son and inherited, someone would have offered to marry me by now, even if I had a tail like a monkey and squeaked like a tree rat.’

A bubble of laughter burst from Tats, startling her. After a moment, she joined in.

‘Would you have liked that life better than what you have now?’ His question seemed genuine.

She snorted at how silly he was. ‘Well, I liked it better when I was younger and we weren’t as poor as we are now.’

‘Poor?’

‘You know. Hand to mouth. Living in the highest reaches of Trehaug where the branches are thin and the paths so narrow; we didn’t always live up here.’

‘You don’t seem poor to me,’ Tats protested.

‘Well. We’ve been richer. That’s for sure.’ Thymara’s mind roved back over her early childhood. They had lived well enough, then. ‘My da was a hunter back then, and a pretty good one. He did that for a time. And he hunted meat for the dragons for a while, until the Council stopped paying decent wages. That was when he decided to try being a grower.’

‘A grower? Where? There’s no land you can plant in the Rain Wilds.’

‘Not all food plants grow on land. That’s what he always says. Lots of the plants that we harvest for food actually grow in the canopy, in pockets of soil in the bends of the trunk, or with air roots, or as parasites on the trees.’ She tried to explain it to Tats, even though the idea of it always made her weary. Instead of wandering the branches, treetops and by-ways of the Rain Wilds, taking meat as he saw it and gathering whatever the canopy offered, her father began to attempt to cultivate a section of the canopy. It was an old idea, but no one had ever been able to make the forest yield predictably for any length of time. But every now and then, someone like her father would think he had it figured out. He had brought together the various food plants and tried to persuade them to grow in the locations he had chosen rather than where Sa had sown them.

Her father was not the first to attempt it. Others had failed before him. He was merely more dogged, more determined than those who had previously failed. Some folks said that determination was a good thing. Her mother had once told her that it just meant that their family had lived in poverty for more years than the others who had tried and failed at the same experiment and quickly gone back to hunting and gathering. Their ‘gardening’ took up a good amount of their time and yielded them less than their gathering, but her father persisted in it because he believed that one day, it would pay off for them.

‘I could see that could be true about your da,’ Tats said quietly.

‘My mother said that everything she cherished had been sacrificed for my father’s dream. Maybe it’s true. I don’t know. When I was little, and he was a gatherer all the time, we lived in four rooms, built so close to a trunk that they scarcely swayed even in storm winds.’

Those were the best houses in the Rain Wilds. The closer one lived to a trunk, the sturdier everything was, and the less wind and rain found them. The trunk markets were closer, and if one went down the trunks, there were taverns and playhouses. It was also true that there was less sunlight close to the trunk, but Thymara had always thought that a body could climb if she had a mind to feel sunlight and wind. The bridges and walkways that spanned the trees near their first home had been stoutly built, their guard walls tightly woven and kept in excellent repair. If she had to climb to find the sunlight, she also had the ability to go down and feel solid earth beneath her feet sometimes. She was never that enthused about those visits to the ground, but her mother had enjoyed them.

‘Why didn’t you like the ground? Seems the most natural place to live to me. I miss the ground. I miss just being able to run or walk and not be afraid of falling.’

Thymara shook her head. ‘I don’t think I could ever trust the ground. Here in the Rain Wilds if you’re close to the ground, then you’re close to the river. And sooner or later, the river always rises. Sometimes so suddenly that there is no warning. Anything we build on the ground, we know it won’t last. Once, the river rose high enough to flood the old city. That was awful. A lot of workers were trapped and drowned.’ The wide relentless river frightened Thymara. She knew that seasonally it rose and flooded and that sometimes there had been sudden floods. The water was mildly acidic at the best of times; after quakes, it sometimes turned a deathly grey-white, and when it ran that colour, it could mean a man’s death to fall into it, and those who had boats knew to hoist them from the water until the river returned to its usual colour. Every moment she was on the ground, she dreaded that suddenly the river would rush up and devour her. Only when she was in the sturdy trees, high above the vagaries of the river and surrounding swamplands did she feel safe. It was a foolish fear, a child’s fear, but one that many Rain Wilders shared.

Tats dismissed her fears with a shrug. He glanced around at the leafy branches that screened her from their neighbours and from a clear view of either sky or earth below. ‘You never seemed poor to me,’ he said quietly. ‘I always thought you had it pretty good, living up here.’

‘It’s not so bad, for me. It’s harder for my mother. She was used to a fancier way of life, with parties and pretty clothes and fine things. But there are other things I miss about where we used to live. Maybe it was just the age I was. But back then, down there, I had a lot more friends. When we were little, I guess no one cared so much about claws or nails. We just all played on the landings between levels. My father paid for me to be schooled; he bought my books, even though most of the other children paid by the week to borrow them. People thought he really spoiled me, and it made my mother furious about the wasted money. And we used to go places. I remember that once we travelled way down trunk to a play put on by actors from Jamaillia. I couldn’t understand what it was about, but the costumes were beautiful. Once we went to a grand entertainment, music, and a play, and jugglers and singers! I loved that. The stage was suspended in an opening among several trees, with the platform that supported it and the seating cross-roped and netted for sturdiness. That was the first time I realized just how big a city Trehaug really was. Leaves and branches hid most of the ground below us, but there was one vista of the river and overhead, through the hole in the canopy, I could see a huge patch of black sky and all sorts of stars. But the lights of thousands of homes twinkled, too, in the trees surrounding us, and the lantern-lit walkways reminded me of jewelled necklaces reaching from tree to tree.’ Thymara closed her eyes and turned her face up, recalling that sight.

‘And back then, once a month, as a family, we’d go out for an evening meal in Grassara’s Spice Bazaar, and we’d have meat as our main course. A whole piece of meat to eat myself, and one for my mother and one for my father.’ She shook her head. ‘My mother was discontented even then. But I guess she always was and always will be. No matter how much we have, she wants more.’

‘Sounds pretty normal to me,’ Tats said quietly. She opened her eyes and was surprised to see that he had edged closer to her perch without her even feeling it. He was getting better at moving though the branches. Before she could compliment him on it, he asked, ‘So when did it all change?’

‘It changed when my father started putting more of his time into trying to grow things. Seems like every year we had to move a bit higher and farther out.’ She glanced at Tats. He sat astride the limb, with one ankle locked around his other leg. He looked secure if a bit uncomfortable. His attention to her face made her self-conscious. Was he staring at her scaling? At the tiny scales that outlined her lips, at the nub of fringe that ran along her jawline? She turned her face away from him and spoke to the trees. ‘The last place we lived before we came to the Cricket Cages was the Bird Nests. Those used to be the poorest part of Trehaug. But then the Tattooed came and then other newcomers and we got pushed out of there.’

The houses in the Bird Nests had consisted of small rooms, woven of vine and lath, with airy narrow pathways that led down several levels before one reached the good wide walkways and branch paths. ‘We lived in the Bird Nests for only a couple of years before we saw a flood of artists and artisans moving in. A lot of them were Tattooed, new to the Rain Wilds and needing cheaper rents and neighbourhoods where their neighbours would not complain about noise and parties and strange lifestyles.’ Thymara smiled to herself. She had loved living in the Bird Nests as much as her mother had despised it. Artists displayed their creations on every branch. The poorest section of the city became rich in beauty. Wind chimes hung at every crossroads, the safety walls along the paths were tapestries of coloured string and beads, and faces were painted on the rough bark of the tree branches that supported the flimsy homes. Even her family’s chambers became bright with colour, for her father often was offered only barter for the small crops he managed to grow. Long before Diana earned a reputation as an inspired weaver, Thymara wore a sweater and scarf made by her clever fingers and the carved chest that held her clothing had been made by Raffles himself. She loved those things not because they were valuable, but because they were daring and new. It was only later that her mother would be able to sell them for prices that amazed them all, but did not console Thymara for their loss.

As always happens, or so her father said, the wealthy patrons of the artists began to frequent the Bird Nests. Not content to purchase merely what the artists made, the patrons began to buy their lifestyles as well. Soon the sons and daughters of the wealthier Rain Wild Trader families were living amongst them, behaving as if they were artists but creating nothing save noise, traffic and a wild reputation for the Bird Nests. Their families were able to pay much higher rents than her father could afford. The wealthy folk who had holiday homes among them demanded safer walkways and wider branch roads, and so they were taxed accordingly. Shops and cafés moved into adjacent trees. The artists who had established themselves were delighted. They were becoming wealthy and well known. ‘But the high rents pushed us right out. We couldn’t afford to pay the taxes any more, let alone eat in the cafés. We had to sell off all the art my father had received as barter, take what coin we could get, and move up again.’ She craned her head and looked up. A few yellow lights in tiny cottages flickered above. ‘I suppose the next time we get pushed out we’ll end up in the Tops. You get light every day up there, but I hear the rooms rock in the wind almost all the time.’

‘I don’t think I’d like all that swaying,’ Tats agreed.

‘Well, no. But I like it here in the Cricket Cages. We get plenty of rainwater, so we don’t have to haul it ourselves or buy it from the water-carriers. My mother wove us a bathing hammock when we first moved here, and it’s lovely in the summer when the water is naturally warm. Moss grows along the edges, and we get visits from little frogs and butterflies and basking lizards. And it isn’t so far to climb to find the flowers that reach for the sunlight. When I can get those, my mother takes them down trunk to sell, in the markets where they hardly ever see the flowers from the Tops.’

As if the mention of her had summoned her, her mother’s voice, sharp and angry, split the peace of the evening. ‘Thymara! Come in this minute. Now!’

Thymara flowed to her feet. There was something in her mother’s voice, something beyond ordinary irritation. A note of fear or danger that set Thymara’s teeth on edge.

‘Give me a moment,’ Tats said and began to untangle himself from the tree limb.

‘Thymara!’

‘I have to go now!’ she exclaimed. She took two swift steps toward him. She heard Tats’ gasp as she braced her hands on his shoulders and leapt lightly over him, landed on the still-swaying branch and then scampered across it to the trunk. Something her father had once said of her came back to her. You were made for the canopy, Thymara. Never be ashamed of that! Yet this was the first time she had ever felt a strange pride. Her agility had shocked Tats. His shoulders had been warm when she touched them.

‘Can I see you tomorrow?’ he called after her.

‘Probably!’ she replied. ‘When my chores are done.’

She went down the trunk swiftly, ignoring the safety line and the foot notches to dig in her claws and rapidly descend. When she reached the two outstretched branches that supported her family’s home, she scuttled along them and then swung down to slip in her bedchamber window. She landed on the fat leaf-stuffed cushion that was her bed; it completely occupied the floor of the chamber. A moment later she was in the main room. ‘I’m home,’ she announced breathlessly.

Her mother was sitting cross-legged in the centre of the small room. ‘What are you trying to do to me?’ she demanded furiously. ‘Is this your idea of revenge, after your father all but forbade me to speak about the offer? Do you seek to shame your whole family? What will folk think of us? What will they think of me? Will you be happy when they drive us all away from Trehaug completely? Isn’t it bad enough that because of you we have to live as close to the edge as we possibly can? Is that why you think it’s fine for you to shame us completely?’

There was a flower in the canopy Tops called an archer bloom. It was lovely and fragrant, but at the slightest touch to the stem, tiny thorns launched to pepper the assailant. Her mother’s questions stung her like a storm of thorns, each striking her and giving her no chance to react. When her mother paused for breath, her chest was heaving and her cheeks were pink.

‘I did nothing wrong! I did nothing to shame myself or my family!’ Thymara was so shocked she could scarcely get the words out.

Her words only woke more outrage in her mother’s eyes. They seemed to bulge from their sockets. ‘What! Will you sit there and lie to me? Shameless! Shameless! I saw you, Thymara! Everyone saw you, sitting up there in plain sight, so cosy with that man. You know it is forbidden to you! How can you let him call on you, how can you let him keep company with you, unchaperoned?’

Thymara’s mind scrambled to make sense of her mother’s words. Then, ‘Tats? You mean Tats? He works for Da, sometimes, at the market. You’ve seen him, you know him!’

‘I do indeed! Tattooed across his face like a criminal, and all know him as the son of a thief and a murderer! Bad enough that one such as you allows a man to call on her, but you have to pick the lowest of the low to dally with!’

‘Mother! I … he is just the boy who helps Father sometimes at the trunk market! Just a friend. That’s all. I know that I can never … that no one can ever court me. Who would want to? You’re being unfair. And foolish. Look at me? Do you really think that Tats came to court me?’

‘Why not? Who else would have him? And he is probably thinking that you’ll get no better offer, so you’ll take what pleasure you can get, with whomever you can get! Do you know what our neighbours would do to us if you became pregnant? Do you know what the Council would decree, for all of us? Oh, I tried to warn your father, from the very beginning, that it would come to this. But no, he never listens to a word I say! What can it come to, I asked him, what kind of life can she have? And he said, “No, no, I’ll look after her, I’ll keep her from being a burden, I’ll keep her from bringing shame on us”. Well, where is he now? Turned down the offer I had for you, without ever hearing me out, and then off he goes and leaves me here alone to deal with you, while you go flaunting yourself through the by-ways!’

‘Mother, I did nothing wrong. Nothing. We sat and we talked. That was it. Tats was not courting me. We had a conversation, and as you yourself said, we were out in plain sight of everyone. Tats was not courting me, he doesn’t think of me that way. No one will ever think of me that way.’ Thymara’s voice had started out low and controlled but by her final words her throat was so tight that she could scarcely squeeze the words out in a high-pitched whisper. Tears, rare for her and painfully acid, squeezed from the corners of her eyes and stung the scaled edges of her eyelids. She dashed them away angrily. Suddenly, she couldn’t stand to be in the same room with the woman who had given birth to her and hated her ever since. ‘I’m going to go sit outside. Alone.’

‘Stay where I can see you,’ was her mother’s harsh reply.

Thymara didn’t deign to give her a response.

But neither did she defy her. She climbed up onto the branch that was the main support for their home and walked out toward the end. That, she knew, would satisfy her mother. The branch led nowhere, and if her mother truly wanted to be sure she was alone, all she had to do was look out of the window. Thymara went farther out than she usually ventured and then sat down, both legs on the same side of the branch. She swung her feet and looked down, daring herself. If she focused her eyes one way, she became aware of the bright lights that sparkled below her. Each light was a lit window. Some were as bright as lanterns; others were distant stars in the depths of the forest below her.

If she focused her eyes another way, she saw the bars and stripes of darkness that latticed the forest below her. A falling body would not plummet straight down to the distant forest floor. No. Her body would strike and rebound and despite all her resolves, snatch and cling, however briefly, to every branch she struck on the way down. There was no swift plummet to an instant death there.

She’d learned that when she was eleven. It was strange. She remembered that day in fragments. It had begun with an encounter at the trunk market. As she recalled it now, it was the last time she had ever brought her mother flowers from the Top to sell at the market, and accompanied her there. The trunk markets were the best places to sell. Close to the trunk of the trees, the platforms were large and they were often the crossroads for hanging bridges from other trees. The traffic was good, and of course, the farther down one went, the wealthier the passing customers. The flowers she had gathered were deep purple and brilliant pink, as large as her head and brimming with fragrance. Their petals were thick and waxy, and bright yellow stamens and sepals extended past them. They were bringing a good price and twice her mother had smiled at her as she pocketed silver coins.

Thymara had been squatting beside her mother’s trading mat when she noticed that a pair of slipper-shod feet below a blue Trader’s robe had remained in front of her, unmoving, for quite a time. She looked up into an old man’s face. He scowled at her and took a step back, but his blunt, scolding words were for her mother. ‘Why did you keep such a girl? Look at her, her nails, her ears – she will never bear! You should have exposed her and tried for another. She eats today but offers us no hope for tomorrow. She is a useless life, a burden upon us all.’

‘It was her father’s will that she live, and he prevailed in it,’ her mother said briefly. She lowered her eyes in shame before the old man’s rebuke. By chance, her gaze met Thymara’s. She had been staring up at her, hurt that her mother offered so poor a defence of her. Perhaps her look stabbed a drop of pity from her mother’s shrivelled heart. ‘She works hard,’ she told the old man. ‘Sometimes she goes with her father to gather, and when she does, she brings home almost as much as he does.’

‘Then she should go out daily to gather,’ he replied severely. ‘So that her efforts may replenish the resources she consumes. Everything is dear here in the Rain Wilds. Have you lost sight of that?’

‘And a child’s life is most dear of all,’ her father had said, coming up behind the old man. He had come down to meet them at the end of their day’s trading. He had just come from the canopy; his clothes were bark-smeared and leaf-stained from his climbing. Thymara was far too old to be carried, but her father had scooped her up and carried her off with him as he strode away from the market. The carry basket on his other shoulder was half full. Her mother had hastily rolled up her mat with their unsold wares inside it, and hurried along the walkway to catch up with them.

‘Stupid, sanctimonious old man!’ her father growled. ‘And what, I’d like to know, does he do to be worth what he eats? How could you let him speak of Thymara like that?’

‘He was a Trader, Jerup.’ Her mother glanced back, almost fearfully. ‘It wouldn’t do to offend him or his family.’

‘Oh, a Trader!’ Her father’s voice was scathing with feigned awe. ‘A man born to position, wealth and privilege. He earned his place here exactly as any eldest child did; he was wise enough to be first to grow in the right woman’s belly. Is that it?’

Her mother was panting as she tried to keep up with them. Her father was not a large man but he was wiry and strong as were most Gatherers. Even carrying her, he crossed the bridges and climbed the winding stairs that circled the trees’ big trunks with ease. Her mother, burdened only with her market bag, could scarcely keep pace with his angry stride.

‘He saw her claws, Jerup, black and curved like a toad’s. She is only eleven, and already she is scaled like a woman of thirty. He saw the webbing of her toes. He knew she had been marked from birth and it offended him that you had – kept her. He isn’t the only one, Jerup. He simply happened to be old enough and arrogant enough to speak the truth aloud.’

‘Arrogant indeed,’ her father said brusquely, and then he had stepped up his pace again, leaving her mother behind.

On that long ago evening, Thymara had finished her day alone on their tiny veranda, fingering the budding wattles that fringed her jawline. Her knees were drawn up to her chest. Occasionally she flexed her webbed toes, regarding the thick black claws that ended each of them. Inside the house, all was silent, the silence that was her mother’s most potent anger. Her father had fled it, to do late bartering with what he had brought home. One could argue with words, but her mother’s silence denied everything. The silence left plenty of room for the old man’s words to echo in her mind.

Around her, the canopy of the rainforest rustled and bustled with life. Leaves stirred in the wind. Iridescent insects crawled on bark or flew from twig to leaf. The subtle-coloured lizards and the jewel-toned frogs basked or crawled or simply sat still, pulsing with life. All the living beauty of her forest home surrounded her. Thymara looked out past her curved toenails to the shadowed distance of the swamp that floored her world. She could not see the ground. In the thicker, safer branches below them, the sturdy homes of wealthy people clustered, offering their yellow window light to the gathering night. That, too, was a sort of living beauty.

She had tried to imagine living somewhere else, some city where the houses were built on the ground and the bright hot sunlight touched the earth. A place where the ground was hard and dry, and people grew crops in the earth and rode on horses to travel instead of poling a raft or boat. Bingtown, perhaps, where people kept huge animals to pull wheeled carts for them, and no proper lady would think of climbing a tree let alone spending most of her life in one. Thymara thought of that fabled city and imagined running away to it, but as swiftly as her smile came at the thought, it faded away. Rain Wilders seldom visited Bingtown. Even those of them who were not marked strongly by the Wilds knew that their appearances would attract stares. If Thymara ever went there, she’d have to go cloaked and veiled at all times. Even so, people would stare at her and wonder what she looked like beneath her shrouds. No. That would not be a life to dream about. Strong as her imagination was, Thymara still could not imagine a beautiful or even an ordinary face and body for herself. She had sighed.

And then, it seemed to her, she had simply leaned forward too far. She remembered that first moment with an odd kind of ecstasy. She had spread out her limbs to the wind’s rush past her, and almost, almost recalled flying. But then the first branch slapped her face stingingly, and then another thicker branch slammed into her midsection. She curled around it, gasping for air, but flipped past a hold and fell, back first, onto the next lower branch. It caught her across the small of her back, and she would have screamed if she’d had air in her lungs. The branch gave and then sprang up, flinging her into the air.

Instinct saved her life. Her next plummet was through a swathe of finer branches. She clutched at them, hand and foot, as she passed through them, and they sagged down with her, giving her grasping hands time to clamp tight on them. There she clung, mindless but alive, gasping and then panting, and finally weeping hopelessly. She was too frightened to seek for a better hold, too frightened to open her eyes and look for help or open her mouth and cry out.

A lifetime later, her father had found her. He had roped up to reach her, and when finally he could touch her, he had tied her body to his, and then painstakingly cut the thin branches that she would not let go of. Even when they no longer served any purpose, she had held tight to those handfuls of twigs, and continued to clutch them until she fell asleep that night.

At dawn her father had woken her and taken her with him for the day’s gathering. That day and every day after, she was always with him. She thought on that now and a chill question rose in her. Had he done so because he thought she had tried to kill herself? Or because he thought her mother had pushed her?

Had her mother pushed her?

She tried to recall that moment before the fall. Had a touch from behind given her momentum? Or only her own despair drawing her down? She couldn’t decide. She blinked her eyes and ceased trying to recall the truth. The truth didn’t matter. It was a thing that had happened to her, years ago. Let it go.

She felt the branches of her perch give and smelled her father’s pipe as he ventured out to join her. She spoke without looking at him. ‘Has she said any more about the offer for me?’

‘No. But I visited down branch, and Gedder and Sindy asked me what decision you had made. I had suspected your mother would brag to Sindy before she had even spoken to you and me about it. The offer is a bad one, Thymara. It’s not for you, and I’m angry that your mother even considered you for it. It’s more than dirty and hard; it’s dangerous to the point of no return.’ Her father was scowling and his words came faster with his cascading anger. ‘I’m sure you’ve heard talk. The Rain Wilds Council has long been weary of pouring resources into feeding the dragons. Tintaglia ceased keeping her end of the bargain long ago, and yet here we are, paying taxes to hire hunters or, worse, bring in sheep and cattle to keep the dragons fed. There is no end in sight to it, either, for all have heard tales of the longevity of dragons and it is obvious to all that these dragons will never be able to feed themselves. When Selden of the Khuprus and Vestrit Traders was present, he kept the Council soothed by promising them that Tintaglia and her new mate must eventually come and help with the problem. And he bullied them a bit by saying that if they neglected the dragons or were deliberately cruel to them, Tintaglia would certainly be angered. Well, Selden has been called away to Bingtown. The Elderlings Reyn and Malta Khuprus have spoken out on the dragons’ behalf, but they are not as persuasive as young Selden. The entire city is tired of living with a horde of hungry dragons nearby, and who can blame them?

‘But for the first time, the Council heard proposals for dealing with the situation. It was a closed session, but no door is so tight that rumours cannot escape it. One angry member of the Council said that the dragons have no future and that it would be kinder to put them out of their misery. No sooner had Trader Polsk spoken than Trader Lorek rose to denounce him and say that he but hoped to salvage the dragon corpses and sell them off. There have been rumours of the Duke of Chalced offering enormous sums of money for a whole dragon, alive or pickled, it was all one to him, and lesser sums for any part of a dragon. It is well known that Polsk’s affairs have suffered lately and that he might be tempted by such offers. There are rumours that already one dragon was lured away from the herd and slaughtered for trophies. All that is known for certain is that one dragon disappeared in the night. One member of the Rain Wild Council claims it was done by Chalcedean spies; others suspect their fellows, but most think the pathetic creature wandered off and died. So Polsk repeated that the dragons seemed in such poor condition that it would be mercy to kill them.

‘Trader Lorek asked him if he did not fear that Tintaglia might visit the same sort of “mercy” on Trehaug. So then another Council member pointed out that we have had offers from wealthy nobles and even cities hoping to buy dragons. Surely, he said, that was better and more sensible than killing valuable creatures. They proposed sending out notices to those considered most likely to be able to purchase a dragon, advertising the colours and genders available and rewarding the highest bidders with the dragons of their choosing.

‘Dujia, the woman who advises the Council on matters relating to the Tattooed, stood up angrily to protest that. She is among those who can hear the dragons, and so she spoke out strongly saying that creatures that can think and speak as the dragons do are not animals to be sold on an auction block. A few of the other Traders who dispute that the dragons are anything but animals said that she was taking the matter too seriously, that creatures that can only communicate with some people rather than everyone should not be treated as if they are equal to humans. And then, of course, the arguments degenerated. Some demanded to know if that meant speakers of foreign languages were not full humans. Someone else quipped that surely that explained Chalcedeans. That, from what I was told, at least broke the tension, and people began to discuss all sorts of possible solutions to the dragon problem.’

Thymara listened raptly. Her father did not often discuss Rain Wilds politics with her. She had heard scattered rumours of problems with the dragons, but had not paid much attention to the details before now. ‘Why cannot we just ignore the dragons, then? If they are dying off, then soon the problem will have solved itself.’

‘Not soon enough, I fear. Those that remain alive are tough, and some say becoming more vicious and unpredictable every day.’

‘Seems to me that we can scarcely blame them,’ Thymara said quietly. She thought back to the shining promise the newly hatched dragons had seemed to offer on that long-ago day and shook her head over what had become of them.

‘Blame them or not, the situation cannot go on. The diggers at Cassarick have refused to try to do any more work there while the dragons are loose. They’re a hazard. They have no respect for humans. They’ve had problems with dragons following the workers down into the excavations, and knocking loose the blocking and supports. One worker was chased. Some people say that the dragon wanted to eat him, others that he provoked the dragon, and still others that the dragon was after the food he was carrying. It all comes down to the same thing. The dragons are both a danger and a nuisance to the people who have moved to Cassarick to develop the digs there. And there has been a series of incidents involving the dead. At a recent funeral, a family was committing a grandmother’s body to the river. They let the river take the bound corpse, and as they were casting the wreaths and flowers out onto the river, a blue dragon waded out, seized the body, and ran off into the forest with it. The family gave chase, but couldn’t catch up with it. None of the dragons will admit it happened, but the family is virtually certain that their grandmother’s body was devoured by a dragon. And, of course, the worry is that while they may begin by sating their appetites with our dead, it may not be long before they eat the living.’

Thymara sat in shocked silence. Finally she said quietly, ‘I suppose they are not what I thought dragons would be. It’s disappointing to know that they are no more than animals.’

Her father shook his head. ‘Worse than the lowest beasts, my dear, if what we are hearing is true. Dragons can speak and reason. For them to sink to those sorts of things is inexcusable. Unless they are deranged. Or simple.’

Thymara unwillingly dragged out her memories of the hatch. ‘They did not seem healthy when they emerged from their cocoons. Perhaps their minds are as badly formed as their bodies.’

‘Perhaps.’ Her father sighed. ‘Reality is often unkind to legends. Or perhaps, in the distant past, dragons were intelligent and noble. Or perhaps we have looked at the images the Elderlings left us, and decided to imagine them as other than they really were. Still, I have to agree with you. I think I am as disappointed as you are, to find them such low beasts.’

After a time she asked, ‘But what does any of this have to do with me?’

‘Well, Gedder and Sindy only had the bones of it, but after much debate, the Council has decided on the obvious. The dragons must be moved away from Cassarick. Selden the Elderling has spoken of a place far upriver, a place where dragons and Elderlings once lived side by side, with plentiful hunting and elegant palaces and gardens … well … it all sounds to me like a tale of a place that might have existed long ago, when both Trehaug and Cassarick were above ground. Several years ago, he proposed an expedition to search for it. No one rose to the bait at the time. Well, who can say that it is not all sunken and buried in a swamp now? But the Council has chosen to believe it is not; evidently the young dragons have vague memories of it themselves, and some have spoken of it longingly. There are even rumours that it was the capital city of the Elderlings, and that their treasure houses were there. Of course, that has piqued quite a bit of interest. The Council wishes the dragons to leave and go there to live. The dragons have agreed to go, but only if they are accompanied by humans who will hunt for them and assist them on the journey. And so, in their wisdom, the Council has cast about for folk it considers expendable. And that is the “offer” that has been made to you, for you to be a dragon tender and herd them upriver to a place that possibly no longer exists, and that definitely has never been seen by any Rain Wilder.’ He snorted. ‘It will be a thankless, dangerous and futile task. All know that for miles both upriver and down, the area under the great trees is endless swamp, bog and slough. If there were a great city, our scouts would have found it long ago. I don’t know if it’s a mirage of riches that greed makes us seek, or exile for the dragons under the pretence of sending them to a refuge.’

Her father had become more and more outraged as he spoke. As he did when agitated, he had taken so many puffs on his pipe that Thymara felt she sat in a cloud of sweet tobacco smoke. When he fell silent at last, she turned her head to glance back at him. His eyes were faintly luminescent in the darkness. Her own, she knew, glowed a strong blue, yet another mark of her deformity. She held his gaze as she said quietly, ‘I think I’d like to go, Father.’

‘Don’t be silly, child! I doubt that any such place still exists. As for making a perilous trip upriver past any charts we have, in the company of hungry dragons and hired hunters and treasure seekers, well, there can be no good end to such an errand. Why would you want to go? Because of things your mother has said? Because no matter what she says about you or to you, I will always—’

‘I know, Father.’ She cut through his rising storm of words. As she spoke, she turned her head to look through the network of foliage at the lights of Trehaug. It was the only home, the only world she had ever known. ‘I know that I am always welcome in your home. I know that you love me. You must. You must have always loved me, to salvage my life when I was only a few hours old. I know that. But I think my mother is also right in another way. Perhaps it is time for me to go out and find a life of my own. I am not foolish, Father. I know this can end badly. But I also know I am a survivor. If it looks like the expedition is doomed, I’ll come back to you, and live out my life here as I always have. But I will have made at least an attempt at one adventure in my life.’ She cleared her throat and tried to speak lightly as she added, ‘And if the expedition to move the dragons is successful, if at the least we find a place for them, or if we are wildly successful and actually rediscover this fabled city, think what it could mean for us. For all the Rain Wilders.’

Her father finally spoke. ‘You don’t have to prove yourself, Thymara. I know your value. I’ve never doubted it. You don’t have to prove yourself to me, or your mother or anyone else.’

She smiled and again looked over her shoulder at him. ‘Perhaps not to anyone except myself, Father.’ She took a deep breath and spoke decisively. ‘I’m travelling down trunk tomorrow, to the Council Hall. I’m going to accept their offer.’

It seemed to take her father a long time to reply. When he spoke, his voice was deeper than usual and his smile seemed almost sickly. ‘Then I’ll go with you. To see you off, my dear.’