`It’s going to be harder,’ she agreed. ‘But the dragons have got better at feeding themselves. I think we’ll be all right.’

He was quiet for a time, following her along a horizontal stretch of branch. Then he asked, if you could go back to Trehaug, would you want to?’

‘What?’

‘Last night you said you couldn’t go home. I wondered if that was what you really wanted to do.’ He followed her silently for a time then added, ‘Because if it was, I’d find a way to take you there.’

She stopped, turned and met his eyes. He seemed so earnest and she suddenly felt so old. ‘Tats. If that was what I really wanted to do, I’d find a way to do it. I signed up to be part of this expedition. If I left it now well. It all would have been for nothing, wouldn’t it? I’d just be Thymara, slinking back home, to live in my father’s house and abide by my mother’s rules.’

He furrowed his brow. ‘”Just Thymara.” I don’t think that’s such a bad thing to be. What do you want to be?’

That stumped her. ‘I don’t know. But I know that I want to be something more than just my father’s daughter. I want to prove myself somehow. That’s what I told my Da when he asked why I wanted to go on this expedition. And it’s still true.’ They’d come to the next trunk and Thymara started up it, digging her claws into the bark. The same claws that had condemned her to a half-life in Trehaug might be her salvation out here, she thought to herself.

Tats came behind her, more slowly. When Thymara reached a likely branch, she paused and waited for him. When he caught up with her, his face was misted with sweat. ‘I thought only boys felt things like that.’

‘Like what?’

‘That we had to prove ourselves, so people would know we were men now, not boys any longer.’

‘Why wouldn’t a girl feel that?’ Her eyes had caught a glint of yellow. She pointed towards it, and he nodded. At the end of this branch, out over the river, a parasitic vine garlanded the tree. The weight of hanging yellow fruit sagged both vine and branches. It swayed and she saw the flicker of wings. Birds were feeding there, a sure sign the fruit was ripe. ‘I’m going out there,’ she told him. ‘I don’t know if the branches will take your weight.’

‘I’ll find out,’ he replied.

‘Your choice. But don’t follow me too closely.’

‘I’ll be careful. And I’ll stick to my own branch.’

And he was. She ventured out onto the branch and he transferred to one beside it. She crouched, digging her claws in as she ventured towards the vine. The farther she went, the more the branch sagged.

‘It’s a long drop to the river, and shallow down there,’ Tats reminded her.

‘Like I don’t know,’ she muttered. She glanced over at him. He was belly down on his branch, inching out doggedly. She could tell he was afraid. And she knew that he wouldn’t go back until she did.

Proving himself.

‘Why wouldn’t a girl want to prove herself?’

‘Well.’ He gave a grunt and inched himself along. She had to admire his nerve. He was heavier than she was and his branch was already beginning to droop with his weight. ‘A girl doesn’t have to prove herself. No one expects it of her. She just has to, you know, be a girl.’

‘Get married, have babies,’ she supplied.

‘Well. Something like that. Not right away, the having babies part. But, well, I guess no one expects a girl to, well—’

‘Do anything,’ she supplied for him. She was as far out as she dared to go, but the fruit was barely within her reach. She reached out and took a cautious grip on a leaf of the vine. She pulled it slowly towards her, careful not to pull the leaf off. When it was near enough, she hooked the vine itself with her free hand. Carefully she scooted back on the branch, pulling the vine with her as she went. Most of the parasitic vines had very tough and sturdy stemwork. She’d be able to pull it in from here and pluck as much fruit as she wanted.

Tats saw that, and she credited his intelligence that he stopped risking himself immediately and backed along the branch. He sighed slightly, watching her. ‘You know what I mean.’

‘I do. It didn’t used to be like that, among the early Traders. Women were among the toughest of the new settlers. They had to be, not only to live themselves but to raise their children.’

‘So maybe having babies was how a girl proved herself, back then,’ he pointed out, an edge of triumph in his voice.

‘Maybe,’ she conceded. ‘To some degree. But this was before any of the tree cities were built or Trehaug unearthed or any of it. It was just survival days at first, figuring out how to get drinkable water, how to build a house that would stay dry, how to make a boat that the river wouldn’t eat…’

‘It all seems pretty obvious now.’ He was working a smaller branch back and forth.

‘It usually is, after someone else thinks of it.’

He grinned at her. He’d broken the branch free. Now he stripped it of most of its leaves, and then used it to reach out and hook a different vine. Slowly and carefully, he pulled the vine towards him until he could catch hold of it. She twisted her mouth and then grinned back at him, conceding his cleverness. She opened her pouch and began to methodically strip fruit from the vine into it. ‘Anyway. Back then, women had to be able to do a lot of different things. Think of different ways to do things.’

‘And the men didn’t?’ he asked innocently.

She’d come to a bird-pecked fruit. She tugged it off, shied it at him and went on picking. ‘Of course they did. But that doesn’t change my point.’

‘Which is?’ He’d opened his own pack and was loading it now.

What was her point? ‘That at one time, Trader women proved themselves just as men did. By surviving.’ Her hands had slowed. She looked out through the leaves, over the river, into the distance. The far shore of the river was a misty line in the distance. She hadn’t realized how much it had widened until now. She tried to put her unruly thoughts in order. Tats was asking her the very same questions she’d been asking herself. She needed to formulate the answer for herself as much as she did for him.

‘When I was born,’ she said, careful not to look at him, ‘I was deemed unworthy to live. My dad saved me from being exposed, but that only proved something about him. It didn’t say anything about me. All the time I was growing up, I could look around and see people who didn’t think I’d deserved to live.’ Including her mother. She wouldn’t mention that to him. It sounded self-pitying, even to herself. And it had nothing to do with what she was saying. Did it? ‘I worked alongside my father. I gathered just like he did. I did all the work that was expected of me. But it still wasn’t enough to prove that I deserved to live. It was just what was expected of me. What would have been expected of any Rain Wild daughter.’ She did look at him then. ‘Proving I could be ordinary, despite how I looked, wasn’t enough for any of them.’

His hands, tanned brown, worked like separate little animals, stripping the fruit and loading it into his pack. She’d always liked his hands. ‘Why wasn’t it enough for you?’ he asked her.

There was the rub. She wasn’t sure, ‘It just wasn’t,’ she said gruffly, ‘I wanted to make them admit that I was as good as any of them and better than some.’

‘And then what would happen?’

She was quiet for a time, thinking. She stopped her gathering to eat one of the yellow fruit. Her father had had a name for them, but she couldn’t remember it. They didn’t commonly grow near Trehaug. These ones were fat and sweet. They’d have fetched a good price at the market. She got down to a fuzzy seed and scraped the last of the pulp off with her teeth before she tossed it away, ‘It would probably make them hate me more than they already did,’ she admitted. She nodded to herself and smiled, saying ‘But at least then they’d have a good reason for it.’