‘But… if you don’t believe we can find Kelsingra, if you never believed we could find Kelsingra, why did you undertake this expedition?’

He looked at her then, full in her green, green eyes. ‘You wanted to go. You wanted me to go. It was a way to be with you, even if only for a time.’ Her heart was in her eyes as he spoke those words. He looked aside from her. ‘That was what decided me. Before, when I first heard of it, I thought to myself, ‘Well, there’s a mission for a mad man. Small chance of success, and so I’ll bet they pay accordingly. A chunk of money up front, and a big promise of lots more “when all is done”. And a good adventure along the way. There isn’t a man on the river who doesn’t wonder where it comes from. Here was a chance to find out. And I’ve always been a bit of a gambler. Every one who works the river plays the odds one way or another. So I took the bet.’

He dared himself and took his own wager. Her hands were resting on the railing next to his. He lifted his hand and set it down gently upon hers. The effect on him was almost convulsive. A shiver ran over his body. Her hand was trapped under his and beneath her touch, there was Tarman. A thought floated through his mind. ‘The whole of everything I want in this world is right here, under my hand.’

The thought echoed through him, to his very bones and out to Tarman’s timbers and back again until he couldn’t define where it had originated.

Every one of the keepers had instantly recognized the danger when the shuddering water had rippled against their small boats. Ahead of them, the dragons had suddenly halted, spreading their legs wide and digging their feet into the riverbed as the wave of motion passed. The silver dragon had trumpeted wildly, flinging his head about as he tried to look in every direction simultaneously. Dislodged birds burst upwards from the trees and flew out over the river, croaking and squawking their distress.

When the second quake hit and branches and leaves showered down in the forest and on the shallows, Rapskal had exclaimed, ‘Good thing we didn’t run for the shore. Think any of the trees will fall on us?’

Thymara hadn’t worried about it until he mentioned it. She had been caught up in comparing how a quake felt on water to how it felt when one lived high in a treetop. She wondered if her parents had felt it; up high in the canopy of Trehaug, in the flimsy cheap houses known as the Bird Cages, a quake would make everything dance. People would shout and grip a tree limb if they could. Sometimes houses fell during quakes, heavy ones as well as flimsy ones. The thought had filled her with both worry for her parents and homesickness. But Rapskal’s wondering snapped her out of that as she realized that being crushed under a falling tree might be just as dangerous as tumbling out of one. ‘Move away from the shore,’ she directed him, digging her own paddle into the water more vigorously. They had nearly caught up with the waiting dragons. Around them, the scattered flotilla of keeper boats moved chaotically.

‘No. It’s all over now. Look at the dragons. They know. They’re moving on again.’

He was right. Ahead of them, the dragons made small trumpeting sounds to one another as they resumed their slogging march through muck and water. They had bunched up around Mercor when they first halted. Now they spread out again. Mercor led the way and the others fell in behind him. She had almost become accustomed to the daily sight of dragons wading upriver in front of her. At that moment, as they resumed their trek, she saw them afresh. There were fifteen of the creatures, varying in size from Kalo who was almost the size of a proper dragon now down to the copper, who was barely taller than Thymara at the shoulder. The sun glinted on the river’s face and on their scales. Gold and red, lavender and orange, gleaming blue black to azure, their hides threw the glory of the sun back up into the day. It made her realize that their colours had deepened and brightened. It was not just that the immense dragons were cleaner now; it was that they were healthier. Some of them were developing secondary colours. Sintara’s deep blue wings were laced with silver, and the ‘fringes’ on her neck were developing in a different shade of blue.

All of them moved with ponderous grace. Kalo and Sestican followed behind Mercor. Their heads wove back and forth as they moved, and as she watched them, Sestican darted his head into the water and brought up a fat, dangling river snake. He gave his head a sharp shake and the writhing creature suddenly hung limp in his jaws. He ate it as he walked, tilting his head back and swallowing it as if he were a bird with a worm.

‘I hope my little Heeby finds something to eat on the way. She’s hungry. I can feel it.’

‘If she doesn’t, we’ll do our best tonight to come up with something for her.’ She spoke the words almost without thinking. She was becoming resigned, she suddenly realized, to sharing whatever she could bring back from her evening hunt. Most often it went to whatever dragon was hungriest. That did not endear her to Sintara, but the blue queen had not been exactly generous with Thymara. Let her find out that loyalty was supposed to run both ways.

The rest of that day, Thymara expected to feel echoing quakes, but if they came, they were so small that she didn’t notice them. When they camped that night on a mud bank, the main topic of discussion had been the quake, and whether or not a rush of acid water would follow it. After spending the meal hour chewing over the potential threat to all of them, Greft had suddenly stood and dismissed the topic. ‘Whatever will happen is going to happen,’ he said sternly as if expecting them to argue. ‘It’s useless to worry and impossible to prepare. So just be ready.’

He stalked away from their firelit circle into the darkness. No one spoke for a few minutes after he left. Thymara sensed awkwardness; doubtless Greft was still smarting from his misspoken words about the copper dragon. His pronouncement of the obvious seemed a feeble attempt to assert his leadership over them. Even his closest followers had seemed embarrassed for him. Neither Kase nor Boxter followed him or even looked in the direction he had gone. Thymara had kept her eyes on the flames, but from the corner of her eyes, she marked how shortly after that Jerd stood up, made a show of stretching, and then likewise wandered away from their company. As she passed behind Thymara, she bid her ‘Good night’ in a small catty voice. Thymara gritted her teeth and made no response.

‘What’s bothering her lately?’ Rapskal, to Thymara’s right, wondered aloud.