Nightfall found all the keepers sleeping in a row on the deck of the
“For money,” Jerd whispered back. She sighed contentedly and rolled over in her blanket. “To be doing something new.”
“ ’Cause we haven’t got anything better to do?” Rapskal asked from the dimness on her left. “And because it’s the best time I ever had in my life.” He sounded deeply satisfied with his day.
“To get away from everything else and start something new,” Greft asserted grandly. Thymara gritted her teeth.
“I need to sleep!” Tats complained. “Could you all keep it down?” Tonight, he had thrown his blanket down on the deck next to Rapskal. He’d seemed in a foul temper about something.
Someone, possibly Harrikin, chuckled. Silence fell again. The river lapped at the barge. On the shore, one of the dragons grunted loudly in its sleep, and was still again. Thymara pulled her blanket up over her head to block out the mosquitoes and stared into a smaller darkness.
Nothing was as Thymara had expected it to be. There was no grand adventure to this journey. So quickly the days had settled into a routine. They woke early and the keepers breakfasted together, usually on ship’s bread and dried fish or porridge. They refilled their water bottles from the sand-wells they’d dug the night before. The hunters left camp before dawn each day, paddling upriver. They needed to go before the dragons’ noise and activity frightened all the game. The dragons went next, as soon as they roused; then the keepers set out in their small boats, followed by the barge.
The others traded off partners in their boats, but no one else ever offered to partner with Rapskal. Several of the other keepers had expressed interest in sharing a boat with her. Warken had asked her, and Harrikin. Sylve had suggested twice that they might travel together the next day. But each morning, there was Rapskal, sitting expectantly in the boat by the shore, waiting for her. She had thought of partnering with someone else, knowing that if she did someone would be forced to share a boat with him. But so far, she hadn’t. Part of it was that they moved a boat very well together. And part of it was that his good nature and optimism were cheering to her at a time when she felt very much alone. Conversations with him might be odd and wandering, but he was not the lackwit that some of the others seemed to think he was. He simply came at life from a different angle. That was all.
And he was, after all, rather pleasant to look at.
Her body was becoming more accustomed to a full day of paddling the boat, but she still ached each night. The blisters on her hands were turning into calluses. The sunlight glinting on the water no longer seemed as harsh as it first had to her canopy-trained eyes. Her hair felt more like straw each day, and she had the uneasy sensation that her scaling was progressing faster than it had when she lived in the trees. But that was to be expected. Rain Wilders always seemed to scale more as they aged. Those things she could accept, but the physical monotony of paddling, day after day, was beginning to tell on her spirits.
Today had provided no exception. The morning had passed slowly, with little change in the endless foliage along the riverbank. In early afternoon, the keepers had been dismayed to hear wild trumpeting from the dragons ahead. When they caught up to them, some sort of disaster seemed to have befallen them, for the dragons were splashing wildly and sometimes immersing themselves completely in the water.
After several near disastrous accidents among the keepers in their canoes, they had made the discovery that the dragons had simply intercepted a thick run of fish and had made the most of their chance to gorge. Shortly after that, the dragons had hauled themselves out onto a long, low, reedy bank and promptly gone to sleep. By the time the keepers caught up with them there had still been plenty of daylight left. They could have travelled farther upstream, but the sleeping dragons refused to be prodded along. Their keepers had had little choice save to pull their small boats up into the shallows and stop for the rest of the day.
Skymaw had plainly got her share of the fish. Her belly bulged with it, and her somnolence was that of a sated predator. She had not wanted to be bothered by cleaning and grooming. Not only had she refused to awaken, she had growled in her sleep, baring teeth that looked longer and sharper for the fresh blood on her muzzle.
Fente was the only dragon social enough to tell them about it. She was very excited and insisted on telling the tale over and over as Tats groomed her. She made the process more exciting for him as she became caught up in her bragging, and acted out how she had darted in her head, seized a huge fish and broke his spine with a single snap. “And I ate him, gulping him down whole. Now you see that I am a dragon to reckon with, not a penned cow to be fattened with bad meat. I can kill. I have killed a riverpig, and I have eaten a hundred fish of my own catching. Now you see that I am a dragon, and I do not need to be kept by any human!”
Thymara and several of the others had clustered around to hear her words and watch Tats attempt to groom the lively little green. The small dragon had smears of blood on her face and several long threads of sticky guts stuck to her jaw and throat. Tats energetically scrubbed at her scaled face, smiling indulgently at her brags and her insistence that dragons had no need of human intervention. He was obviously infatuated with her. Thymara knew of the reputation the dragons had for charisma; she did not doubt that the ever-pragmatic Tats was more than a little under the glamour of the creature.
She suspected that even she herself was under Skymaw’s spell. It had hurt her feelings more than a little that Skymaw had not even wakened enough to tell her of her triumphant kill. She felt excluded from her dragon’s life, and a bit jealous of Tats. At the same time, there was a tickling of unease at the back of her mind, as a perception she was reluctant to recognize became clearer for her. No matter how Tats might smile as he washed the blood and guts from Fente’s face, she was not a cute or even remotely masterable creature. She was a dragon, and even if her boasting sounded childish, she was swiftly discovering what it meant to be a dragon. Her declarations that she had no need for humans were not idle brags. The dragons tolerated the keepers and their attentions for now, but perhaps not for always.
Somehow, she had expected all dragons to be somewhat alike. In her early fancies about her new career, she had imagined them as noble and intelligent with generous natures. Well, perhaps Sylvie’s golden could live up to that concept, but the others were as diverse as their keepers. Tats’ green was a nasty bit of work when she wished to be. Nortel’s lavender dragon was shy, until one approached too close and then he might take a snap. Good-natured Lecter and the large blue male he had befriended seemed well matched, right down to the spikes both were growing on their necks. The cousins Kase and Boxter’s orange dragons seemed as like-minded as their keepers.
Ever since she had witnessed the hatching, Thymara had seen the dragons as creatures that needed humans to survive. That perception of them had blinded her to how lethal they could be. She had, of course, always known that any of them was large enough to kill a man easily. Some were quick and clever enough that if they desired to become man-eaters, they’d be deadly and cunning enemies. Their disdain for humanity and sense of superiority had, until today, seemed an annoying but merely dragonish trait. Now her gaze wandered from the lively and occasionally good-natured Fente past her own sleeping Skymaw to Kalo.
The largest and most aggressive of the dragons had made himself a rough nest in the coarse reeds. His large claws had raked up damp earth and the reeds that had grown there to make a sleeping place. He dozed there, his massive head cushioned on his front feet, his wings folded against his back in sleep. Like all the dragons, he lacked the ability to fly, but in every other way, he looked fully-formed. When she focused both her gaze and her thoughts on him, it seemed to her that he seethed with anger and frustration, as if his immense blue-black body concealed a simmering cauldron of rage. Greft, his keeper, sat on the ground not far from Kalo. The great dragon was clean, his scales gleaming. Thymara had wondered if his keeper had done that, or if Kalo had cleaned himself. Greft’s eyes were almost closed. He looked, she thought, like a man warming himself at a fire. For a moment, she had a sense of Greft enjoying the simmering heat of Kalo’s aggression and anger. Even as the image came to her, Greft opened his eyes. She caught a flash of gleaming blue in them and cast her gaze aside, trying to
