It was exciting to communicate, mind to mind, with such a fabulous creature. She ventured a compliment. I am overjoyed to finally hear your true name. Sintara. Its glory is fitting to your beauty.

A stony silence met her thought. Sintara did not ignore her; she offered her only emptiness. Alise attempted to smooth things over with a question. What happened to the brown dragon? Is he ill?

The copper dragon hatched from her case as she is, and she has survived too long, Sintara replied callously.

She?

Stop thinking at me!

Alise stopped herself before she could think an apology. She judged it would only annoy the dragon more. And she had nearly caught up to Leftrin.. The crowd of keepers that had clustered around the brown dragon was dispersing. The big gold dragon and his small pink-scaled keeper were the lone guardians by the time she arrived at Leftrin’s side. As she approached, the gold dragon lifted his head and fixed his gleaming black eyes on her. She felt the ‘push’ of his regard. Leftrin abruptly turned to her.

‘Mercor wants us to leave the brown alone,’ he told her.

‘But, but, the poor thing may need our help. Has anyone found out what is wrong with him? Or her, perhaps?’ She wondered if Sintara had been mistaken or were mocking her.

The gold dragon spoke directly to her then, the first time he had done so. His deep bell-like voice resonated in her lungs as his thoughts filled her head. ‘Relpda has parasites eating her from the inside, and a predator has attacked her. I stand watch over her, to be sure that all remember that dragons are dragons’ business.’

‘A predator?’ She was horrified.

‘Go away,’ Mercor told her, ungently. ‘It is not your concern.’

‘Walk with me,’ Leftrin suggested strongly. The captain started to take her arm, and then abruptly withdrew his hand. Her heart sank. Sedric’s words had worked their mischief. Doubtless Sedric had thought it his duty to remind Captain Leftrin that Alise was a married woman. Well, his rebuke had done its damage. Nothing would ever be easy and relaxed between them again. Both of them would always be thinking of propriety. If her husband Hest himself had suddenly appeared and stood between them, she could not have felt his presence more strongly.

Nor hated him more.

That shocked her. She hated her husband?

She had known that he hurt her feelings, that he neglected her and humiliated her, that she disliked his manner with her. But she hated him? She’d never allowed herself to think of him in such a way, she realized.

Hest was handsome and educated, charming and well-mannered. To others. She was allowed to spend his wealth as she pleased, as long as she did not bother him. Her parents thought she had married well and most of the women of her acquaintance envied her.

And she hated him. That was that. She had walked some way in silence at Leftrin’s side before he cleared his throat, breaking in on her thoughts. ‘I’m sorry,’ she apologized reflexively. ‘I was preoccupied.’

‘I don’t think there’s much we can do to change things,’ he said sadly, and she nodded, attaching his words to her inner turmoil before he changed their significance by adding, ‘I don’t think anyone can help the brown dragon. She will live or she’ll die. And we’ll be stuck here until she decides she’s doing one or the other.’

‘It’s so hard to think of her as female. It makes me doubly sad that she is so ill. There are so few female dragons left. So I don’t mind. I don’t mind being stuck here, I mean.’ She wished he would offer her his arm. She’d decided she’d take it.

There was no clear dividing line between the shore and the river’s flow. The mud got sloppier and wetter and then it was the river. They both stopped well short of the moving water. She could feel her boots sinking. ‘Nowhere for us to go, is there?’ Leftrin offered.

She glanced behind them. There was the low riverbank of trampled grasses and beyond that a snaggled forest edge of old driftwood and brush before the real forest began. From where she stood, it looked impenetrable and forbidding. ‘We could try the forest,’ she began.

Leftrin gave a low laugh. There was no humour in it. ‘That wasn’t what I meant. I was talking about you and me.’

Her eyes locked with his. She was startled that he had spoken so bluntly, and then decided that honesty might be the only good thing that could come from Sedric’s meddling. There was no reason now for either of them to deny the attraction they felt. She wished she had the courage to take his hand. Instead, she just looked up at him and hoped he could read her eyes. He could. He sighed heavily.

‘Alise. What are we going to do?’ The question was rhetorical, but she decided she would answer it anyway.

They walked a score of paces before she found the words she truly wanted to say. He was watching the ground as he walked; she spoke to his profile, surrendering all control of her world as she did so. ‘I want to do whatever you want to do.’

She saw those words settle on him. She had thought they would be like a blessing, but he received them as a burden. His face grew very still. He lifted his eyes. His barge rested on the bank before them and he seemed to meet its sympathetic stare. When he spoke, perhaps he spoke to his ship as much as to her. ‘I have to do what is right,’ he said regretfully. ‘For both of us,’ he added, and there was finality in his words.

‘I won’t be packed off back to Bingtown!’

A smile twisted half his mouth. ‘Oh, I’m well aware of that, my dear. No one will be packing you off to anywhere. Where you go, you’ll go of your free will or not at all.’

‘Just so you understand that,’ she said, and tried to sound strong and free. She reached out and took his calloused hand in hers, gripping it tight, feeling the roughness and the strength of it. He squeezed her hand carefully in response. Then he released it.

The day seemed dim. Sedric closed his eyes tightly and then opened them again. It didn’t help. Vertigo spun him and he found himself groping for the wall of his compartment. The barge seemed to rock under his feet, but he knew it to be drawn up on the riverbank. Where was the handle to the damn door? He couldn’t see. He leaned against the wall, breathing shallowly and fighting not to vomit.

‘Are you all right?’ A deep voice at his elbow, one that was not unfamiliar. He fought to put his thoughts in order. Carson, the hunter. The one with the full ginger beard. That was who was talking to him.

Sedric took a careful breath. ‘I’m not sure. Is the light odd? It seems so dim to me.’

‘It’s bright today, man. The kind of light where I can’t look at the water for too long.’ Concern in the man’s voice. Why? He scarcely knew the hunter.

‘It seems dim to me.’ Sedric tried to speak normally, but his own voice seemed far away and faint.

‘Your pupils are like pinheads. Here. Take my arm. Let’s ease you down on the deck.’

‘I don’t want to sit on the deck,’ he said faintly, but if Carson heard him, he didn’t pay any attention. The big man took him by the shoulders and gently but firmly sat him down on the dirty deck. He hated to think what the rough boards would do to his trousers. Yet the world did seem to rock a little less. He leaned his head back against the wall and closed his eyes.

‘You look like you’ve been poisoned. Or drugged. You’re pale as white river water. I’ll be right back. I’m going to get you a drink.’

‘Very well,’ Sedric said faintly. The man was just a darker shadow in a dim world. He felt the man’s footsteps on the deck and even those faint vibrations seemed sickening. Then he was gone and Sedric felt other vibrations. Fainter and not rhythmic as the footsteps had been. They weren’t even really vibrations, he thought sickly. But they were something, something bad and they were directed towards him. Something knew what he had done to the brown dragon and hated him for it. Something old and powerful and dark was judging him. He closed his eyes tighter but that only made the malevolence seem closer.