mouthful of phlegm. The person watching him made a disgusted sound.
Selden spoke hoarsely. “You don’t like what you see, go away. Or treat me decently so I have a chance to get better.”
“Told you he could talk.”
“That doesn’t mean he’s really human,” said another voice, and Selden realized there were two of them staring at him. Young voices. He pulled his legs tighter under his bedding, and the chain around his ankle rattled on the deck as he did so. The blanket had stuck to the oozing wound on his shoulder, the one that had won him this trip aboard a ship.
“I’m human,” he asserted hoarsely. “I’m human and I’m really sick.”
“He’s a dragon man. See that scaling. So I was right and you owe me the bet.”
“Do not! He says he’s human.”
“Boys!” Selden spoke sharply, trying to bring their attention back to him. “I’m sick. I need help. Hot food or at least something hot to drink. Another blanket. A chance to get up on deck and get some-”
“I’m getting out of here,” one of the boys announced. “We’re going to be in trouble if anyone finds out we were down here talking to that thing.”
“Please, don’t go!” Selden cried, but one of the boys had fled already, his bare feet pattering away into the darkness of the hold. Another coughing fit took Selden. He curled around the stabbing pain in his lungs. When it finally calmed and he wiped the tears away, he was surprised to see that one of the youngsters was still standing there. He rubbed his eyes, but the brightness of the lantern and the stickiness of the discharge made the boy’s form a blur still. “What’s your name?” he asked.
The boy cocked his head, his pale hair falling in a ragged sheaf across his eyes. “Uh. . not telling you. You could be a demon. That’s what the other fellows said. You should never tell a demon your name.”
“I’m not a demon,” Selden said wearily. “I’m a human. Just like you. Look. Can you help me at all? Can you at least tell me where we are, where I’m being taken?”
“You’re on the
“I’m not a slave. I don’t have an owner. I don’t believe in slavery.”
The boy made a skeptical noise. “But there you are, chained to a deck staple. Seems like what you believe doesn’t matter much.” He paused and thought about this for a moment, perhaps considering his own plight. Then, “Hey. Hey. If you’re a human, how come you look like you do? How come you got all those scales?”
Selden pulled his blanket in closer. He’d taken the cleanest straw from the floor and scraped it into a heap before he lay down on it and put the blanket over himself. For a time, it had cushioned his aching body from the rough timbers of the deck. But it had packed down and shifted under him in his restless sleep. He could feel the cold, splintery deck below him. A blanket over him was small use when the cold planks under him sucked away the warmth of his own blood. He needed the boy’s help. He spoke quietly. “A dragon made me her friend. Her name is Tintaglia. She changed me, as you see. To make me special to her.”
“If you got a dragon for a friend, how come you got taken to be a slave? Why didn’t your dragon save you?”
The boy had come a few steps closer. By his worn clothing and shaggy hair, Selden judged him to be on the lowest rung of sailorhood. Probably a street boy, taken on in the last port, to see if he could be hammered into use as a deckhand.
“The dragon sent me out. She feared she was the last of her kind, for the other dragons she had seen hatch were weak and sickly things. So I set out from Bingtown with a group of people I thought were my friends. Tintaglia asked me to travel afar and ask for news of other dragons. And for a time, that’s what I did. I went to a lot of places. Things went well, and people listened to me and my tales of my dragon. But I didn’t hear of any other dragons. Then my supply of money began to run low. And my friends proved to be false.”
He saw that the boy was hanging on the tale. He paused. “Bring me something hot to drink, and I’ll tell you the whole story,” he offered. Not that he wanted to remember it himself. They’d drugged him in a tavern, probably something dropped into his ale. He’d awakened in a wagon with a canvas tossed over him, his wrists bound behind his back. A few days later, he’d been put on display as the “Dragon Man.” How many months ago had that been? A year? More than a year? For a time, he’d tried to keep a tally of his days. He’d lost count of them during his first bout of fever and realized the uselessness of it since.
The boy shifted restlessly and glanced away into the darkness. “I’ll get a beating if anyone finds out I was down here looking at you. I bring you anything, I’ll get a double beating. Besides, I couldn’t even get a hot drink for myself, let alone take it out of the galley. Me and the other deck boys, we aren’t allowed in the galley to eat.” The boy scratched his dirty cheek. He turned away from Selden. “Sorry,” he added, almost as an afterthought. The lantern swung and cast stretched shadows as he walked away.
“Please,” Selden said, and then “PLEASE!” he shouted. At his cry, the boy took flight, the lantern jogging wildly as he ran. The darkness around him deepened and then was absolute again. The boy was gone. With him went all hope. He wouldn’t be back. The threat of a beating was stronger than the lure of a tale. “I should have said I was a demon,” he muttered to himself. “I should have threatened to curse him if he didn’t bring me a blanket and hot food.”
Curses and threats. That was what worked in the world.
Nothing was going well for Leftrin. People were too curious, asking him too many questions at every turn. Merchants wanted to know why he was using the Khuprus line of credit so freely. He’d replied that they were advancing into a partnership, one he could not yet divulge. He didn’t even want to say that much, but he needed it to be plausible for Reyn and his sister to have signed off on such massive purchases of supplies. Tillamon was bearing the brunt of the gossip seekers and coping well with it. She put her veil to its maximum use, ignoring people as she chose. The Khuprus interest in the mysterious “expedition” had fueled no less than three other offers of financial backing from young Traders. Leftrin had feigned great reluctance as he turned them down, saying that Tillamon had specified that their arrangement was to be both exclusive and private. He regretted that now, for it seemed to have ignited curiosity to a feverish pitch. Two Traders had come in hastily from Trehaug and urgently requested meetings with him. He had scheduled them for a date three days hence, knowing full well he planned to be gone by then.
Worse were the messages from the Council. They had begun to arrive as soon as the winter light filtered down and proclaimed day on the Rain Wild River. The first one had suggested a meeting to discuss “unclear” language in the original contract and the “clear and true intent” of the contract as “revealed by its general purpose.” He knew what that meant. Given a chance, they’d reinterpret the contract to their great benefit and try to frighten him into complying. They wanted his charts of the river, and they wanted to know what he had found up there. They’d get neither from him.
As the day crept by and he continued to load the ship, more queries and demands were piling up. Why was he in such a hurry for these goods? In some cases, he’d paid double to have goods ordered by other customers diverted to his ship. It was exciting animosity as well as curiosity. His own relatives were pestering him with queries, especially his brother. Why hadn’t he come to visit? Why hadn’t Skelly come to spend time with her parents? She should visit her fiance, too. She was getting close to an age at which Leftrin would have to give her up as a deckhand for a time so that she could be married, and then, after a year or so, she and her new husband would be expected to move aboard Tarman and begin to learn its routines, so that when Skelly inherited the liveship, her husband would be competent enough to help her run it. He hadn’t replied to that one. A letter was no way to tell his brother that once Alise could free herself from Hest, he intended to marry her and possibly get his own heir. Even less did he want to tell his brother and his sister-in-law that their daughter was currently very infatuated with a dragon keeper who was rapidly turning into an Elderling, and that she had spoken of her hopes that her fiance would break off their marriage agreement when he learned that she was no longer the first heir to the ship, because then she would be free to marry Alum. When he asked her, of course.
Just thinking of that whole tangle made Leftrin’s head ache. And freight was coming aboard too fast, making Hennesey and Swarge quarrelsome about the best way to stow it. When consecutive notices arrived from the Council commanding that he come to meet with them, and then one forbidding him from departing without the Council’s consent as he “may have in his possession documents and charts that are the rightful possessions of the Cassarick Traders’ Council,” he once again set his teeth and dismissed the courier with no reply. When yet another
