‘Are you and I a “mess”?’ Carson asked him gently.

‘No.’

‘You can be honest with me, Sedric. I know what I am, and that’s a simple man. I know I’m not educated or sophisticated. I know I’m not—’

‘It’s what you are that matters, not what you’re not.’ Sedric turned to him. He glanced around, and even as Carson grinned at his caution, he turned back and brushed a kiss across the hunter’s mouth. It startled Carson as much as it delighted him. But when the hunter would have embraced him again, Sedric stepped free, shaking his head. ‘You are one of the few things in my life that are not a part of the mess I’ve made. I didn’t deserve you and I don’t deserve you. Unfortunately for me, I do deserve to deal with most of the messes I’ve made.’

‘Such as?’ Carson gave up his pursuit of him and folded his arms on his chest against the morning chill.

‘Alise is angry with me, I think. She believes I lied to her about Leftrin.’

‘I think you might have,’ Carson pointed out affably.

‘I only repeated what Jess had told me, things I had every reason to believe were true.’

‘Perhaps if you’d talked to me first, I could have cleared that up for you.’

‘I was just getting to know you then.’

‘Sedric, my dear, you are still getting to know me.’

‘Look. The dragons are waking.’

‘And you’re changing the subject.’

‘Yes, I am.’ He didn’t mind admitting it. There were too many messes he never wished to discuss with Carson. Let him go on thinking he was a good person. He knew he wasn’t and he knew Carson deserved better, but he could not bear to give him up. Not yet. Soon enough he’d be found out but not yet. He diverted his attention. ‘Sweet Sa, look at their colours. That warm water did something to them.’

The dragons reminded him of geese or swans. Some were just waking. Others were stretching, opening their wings and shaking them. Droplets of water flew out from them and the rising steam of the heated water made them look as if they were rising out of a dream. All of the dragons seemed larger this day, their wings stronger and longer. He felt a whisper of assent from Relpda. Warmth to make us grow, warmth to make us strong.

Suddenly she emerged from the throng of dragons, brighter than gleaming coins, shimmering with warmth.

You think pretty of me she praised him. She opened her wings and held them wide so he could admire them. In the night, a tracery of black had developed on them. The patterns reminded him of ice spray on a cold window pane. She suddenly beat them frantically. She did not lift off the water, but she ‘flew’ over it to come to rest beside the barge looking up at him.

‘I am so beautiful!’

‘Oh, that you are, my lovely one.’

‘You were afraid in your dreams. Don’t be. I shall make you as beautiful as I am.’

He leaned over Tarman’s railing, felt the presence of the ship against his belly as he did so. ‘Then you know how to shape an Elderling.’

She preened the feathered scales of her wings. ‘It cannot be hard,’ she dismissed his concern. Then she looked over her shoulder. ‘Mercor comes, with Kalo. Kalo has a grievance. Changes will be made today. Do not fear. I will protect you.’

This was not the behaviour of dragons, Sintara thought to herself. Each dragon always acted on her own behalf. They did not descend in a swarm and impose their wills.

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 to herself 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.

When they had left Trehaug, there had been thirteen dragons, for she had not counted Relpda nor Spit as dragons then. Now there fourteen gathered here still, despite the loss of Heeby. Fourteen dragons, all stronger and more capable than when they had left Trehaug. Fourteen dragons that would not be considered as anything less than dragons ever again.

They waded purposefully out to the barge in the strengthening dawn. She smelled smoke; someone on board had started a cook-fire. On deck, Carson and Sedric looked down on them. The Bingtown man’s heart shone in his eyes as he smiled down on the beauty of his dragon. He, at least, had a proper attitude for a human to bear towards dragons.

‘Awake and attend us!’ Mercor trumpeted, shattering the quiet of the dawn. A flock of waterfowl, startled, flew up from a bank of reeds. Squawking, they fled upriver. Kalo set his shoulder to the barge and gave it a sudden shove. ‘Awake!’ he roared. The humans inside shrieked louder than the ducks, while the two men on deck clutched at the railing in fear.

‘Patience, Kalo,’ Mercor counselled him quietly. ‘You will frighten them witless and then we shall get no sense or satisfaction from them.’

Perhaps that warning was too late, she thought, for the humans came boiling out of the ship’s interior like termites from a crushed mound. The variety of sounds they made impressed her; some cursed, one wept, several were shouting, and the captain came out roaring threats at anyone who endangered Tarman. Alise was at his side, equally incensed. Waves of concern for her mate and the ship flowed off her wordlessly. No, Sintara thought to herself. No, she hadn’t been mistaken. Despite the correctness of her attitude towards dragons, Alise was not a fit keeper nor material for an Elderling. She had so quickly transferred all her loyalty to a human mate and a liveship. She watched the woman who had once professed to worship her as she ran her hands along the ship’s silvery railing as if she were soothing a flustered cat.