‘Yes. We did.’ The dragon spoke around a mouthful of meat. She was pleased with herself. Pleased to hear Sedric tell of how she had saved him.

‘I’m not surprised you don’t recall everything. Looks like you took a hard knock to the head.’

Sedric lifted a hand to his swollen face. ‘That I did,’ he said quietly. And he tried to let the conversation die. It was almost pleasant to be still in the night next to the flickering fire in the pot. He was still hungry and he ached all over, but at least he didn’t have to wonder how he was going to survive the next day. Carson would take care of him, would get him back to the Tarman. His smelly little cabin beckoned him now, a haven from open water and starvation. There would be clean clothing there, and hot water and a razor. Cooked food in the galley. Simple things that he suddenly valued. That wasn’t very admirable, he thought to himself. Earlier in the day, he’d been able to take care of himself and a dragon. Yesterday, he’d been capable of killing to stay alive. But now he was ready to abandon all pretence of being competent in this world and let someone else do all the worrying and the thinking.

No wonder Hest had been able to discard him so easily.

Planning to smuggle dragon parts to Chalced was the closest he’d had to a personal plan of action in years. And look how well that had turned out! Almost as well as his previous suggestion that Hest marry Alise. Such happiness that had brought to all three of them. When had he let go of his own life? When had he become a bit of driftwood caught in Hest’s current, tossed and turned and shaped by him and then, eventually, washed up here with the other debris? Idly he watched Carson add a piece of twisted white wood to the pot. Yes. That was him. Fuel for another man’s flames.

Carson sighed suddenly. He seemed disappointed but game to forge ahead. ‘Well. Here’s our plan for tomorrow, then. I’d like to get up as early as we can see, and head back upriver to the Tarman. Captain Leftrin and I agreed that I wouldn’t go more than a day’s paddle downriver, but I’ll admit that I covered a lot more distance than I thought I would. I may have to paddle hard to get back to him before sunset tomorrow. Think your dragon will be ready to travel by then?’

His dragon. Was she his dragon now?

Just thinking that question turned her awareness towards him.

Yes. You are my keeper. And I’ll be ready to journey tomorrow. On to Kelsingra!

‘On to Kelsingra,’ he affirmed quietly. ‘We’ll be ready to travel.’

Carson grinned. The smile and the firelight transformed the man’s face. He was not, Sedric suddenly realized, that much older than he was. ‘Kelsingra,’ Carson agreed. ‘The end of the rainbow.’

‘You don’t believe we’ll get there?’

The hunter shrugged his shoulders. ‘Who cares? It will make a better tale if we do. But I’ve gone on longer expeditions than this with far humbler goals. This one called to me for a lot of reasons. Get Davvie out and about and away from danger. But I think I’m along for the same reason Leftrin is. A man wants to do something that leaves a mark. If we find that city, or even if we just find the place that it used to be, we’ll have set the Rain Wilds and Bingtown on its ear. How often does a fellow get a chance to do something like that? At the very least, we’ve expanded the map. Every night, Swarge sits down and does his sketches and entries, and Captain Leftrin adds his notes. Jess was keeping a log of his own. I’ve put in a bit or two about the game we caught and what sorts of trees and riverside we found. All that information will go into the records and be stored at the Rain Wild Traders’ Concourse. Years from now, when someone wants to anchor up for the night, they’ll be doing it on the basis of what we’ve told them. Our names will be remembered. The Tarman Expedition to Kelsingra. Something like that. That’s something, you know. That’s something to be part of.’

Sedric had been staring at the fire-pot as Carson spoke. Now he glanced at him surreptitiously. For the first time he saw the animation in his face. His deep-set brown eyes shone and his lips, nestled in his beard, curved in a smile of purest satisfaction. He’d never heard anyone so pleased over such an intangible thing. He’d seen Hest in a paroxysm of joy over closing a rich deal, and witnessed his father drunkenly celebrating a partnership in a trading trip. Always it had been about the wealth, the money, and the power and status that went with it. That had been the measure of the man, the status of the Trader in Bingtown. And it was how a man was measured in every town in Chalced and in Jamaillia and every other civilized place he’d ever visited. So he watched Carson and waited for the quirk of the lips or the bitter laugh that would expose his mockery of himself.

It didn’t come. And although he’d said he’d come along for the same reason as Leftrin he hadn’t mentioned the taking of dragon parts and the riches to be made from them.

‘It sounds like the stuff of dreams,’ he said, mostly to fill in the gap in the conversation, but wondering if it might provoke the man to confide the larger plan to him. Before he went back to the Tarman, he needed to know how ruthless Captain Leftrin was. Was Alise in physical danger from the man?

‘I suppose. Every man has a dream. But I’m not telling you anything. You and Alise, documenting the dragons and ferreting out what they can recall of the Elderlings. It’s the same thing, exploring territory where no one has gone, at least not in a long time.’

‘There will be money to be made from this,’ Sedric ventured.

Carson did laugh then. ‘Maybe. I rather doubt it. If it comes about, it will likely be after I’m in my grave. Oh, some of the keepers see it that way’ Carson smiled as he shook his head. ‘Greft’s full of himself, he’s going to be the founder of a new Rain Wild settlement, the keepers will claim the wealth of Kelsingra as their own and the dragons will help them defend their claim. The ships and workers will come up the river, there will be trade and he’ll be a rich man.’

‘Greft says that?’ Sedric was shocked. He respected Greft’s intelligence but the young man had always seemed to be too full of hostility to have grandiose plans for himself.

‘Not to me, of course. But he whispers it to the other keepers, as if such talk would stay in one place. I suspect a lot of his notions came from Jess. Jess is fond of claiming to be both worldly-wise and well educated. By which I think he means that he once read a book. He has filled that boy’s head with all sorts of nonsense.’ Carson leaned over and snapped a snag off a piece of the floating pack. The way he broke it spoke of extreme annoyance.

When he spoke again, he sounded calmer. ‘Oh, it may happen that Kelsingra is found and we establish a settlement there, but not the way he visualizes it. For one thing, he hasn’t got enough people and too few of them are female. He’s barely got the population to start a village, let alone a city. And Rain Wilders, as I’m sure you know, don’t breed easily. The babies that manage to be born sometimes live less than a year. And a Rain Wilder is an old man at forty’ Carson scratched his scaly cheek above his beard. ‘So, even if a big discovery does persuade a boatload of new settlers to come, the new will likely outnumber the old, and they’ll have their say about how things are done. And while Greft and the other keepers may discover riches, well, you can’t eat Elderling artefacts. Don’t we all know that! As long as the Elderling treasure remained in the Rain Wilds, it did no one any good. We had to ship them out to where people could come to bargain for them. That’s why Bingtown is the big trading town and Trehaug isn’t; if we didn’t trade, we’d starve. And if we do find Trehaug, and there is treasure there, the Traders driving the deals for those things will know that better than anyone. Men experienced at squeezing every bit of fat out of a deal will come. King Greft would have to sit at their bargaining table and play by their rules. Still. By the time Davvie’s a full man, there might be a future for him in Kelsingra.’