with blood as it tried to attack the creature who gripped it. She had shrieked as the blood hit her and flung the animal to the ground. Tats had been ready and waiting with a hatchet. It hadn’t got far. She’d stood numbly, shaking with her dragon’s shared pain. She’d dragged her sleeve across her face, but it only smeared the thick blood more. It had smelled and tasted of dragon, and even now, after she’d washed it off, the clinging scent of it filled her nose and she could not be rid of the taste of it. Afterwards, Leftrin had swabbed the injury with rum and then sealed it over with a daub of tar lest the acid river water ulcerate it. The captain spoke as he worked. ‘After this, you’ll have to do nightly checks of your dragons. Those snakes got something in their mouths that numbs the flesh. You don’t even feel one burrowing in. I got a little one in my leg once, didn’t even know it was there until I got out of the water.’
As Alise and Sylve worked, the copper dragon made small sounds of pain. Thymara squatted down beside her to look into her face, but the dragon’s eyes were closed. She wondered if Relpda were even conscious. She stood up again slowly. ‘Well, at least we know what’s wrong with her now. If we can get them out of her, clean her wounds, and seal them against the river water, maybe she’ll have a chance.’
‘We’ve cleaned away enough dirt. Let’s get them off her,’ Sylve decided.
Thymara stood with the circle of watchers, staring in sick fascination. As Leftrin stepped forward with his pot and brush, she turned aside. Ever since Sintara’s blood had hit her face, it was all she could smell or taste. She had no desire to see more of it tonight. She saw Sintara waiting on the outskirts of the gathering, and pushed through the other onlookers to get to her dragon. ‘I don’t want to watch this,’ she told her in a low voice. ‘It was hard to see one snake removed from you, and you hadn’t carried it long. I can’t watch this.’
Sintara turned her head to regard her keeper. Her copper eyes whirled, and suddenly they appeared molten to Thymara, pools of liquid copper whirling against the gleaming backdrop of her lapis lazuli scales. Dragon glamour, she tried to warn herself, but couldn’t care. She let herself be drawn into that gaze, let herself become important because of the dragon’s regard for her. A tiny cynical part of her snidely asked if a dragon’s regard truly made her important. She ignored it.
‘You should go hunting,’ Sintara suggested to her.
She was reluctant to leave the dragon. Moving away from her glorious copper gaze would be like leaving the warmth of a cheery fire on a cold and stormy night. She clung to the dragon’s gaze, refusing to believe her dragon might wish her to leave.
‘I’m hungry,’ Sintara said softly. ‘Won’t you go and find food for me?’
‘Of course,’ Thymara responded promptly, overcome by Sintara’s will.
Sintara’s voice grew very soft, as if it were no more than a breath blowing past Thymara’s ear. ‘Greft and Jerd went into the forest not so long ago. Perhaps they know where the hunting is good. Perhaps you should follow them.’
That stung. ‘I am a better hunter than Greft will ever be,’ she told her dragon. ‘I’ve no need to follow him.’
‘Nonetheless, I think you should,’ Sintara insisted, and suddenly it did not seem like a bad idea. A thought teased at the edge of her mind; if Greft had already made a kill, perhaps she could help herself to a share, just as he had with hers. She still had not paid him back for that trespass.
‘Go on,’ Sintara urged her, and she went.
Each of the keepers had formed the habit of keeping their gear in their boats. Dealing with Rapskal’s untidiness was a daily trial for Thymara. When she thought about it, it seemed unfair that a random choice on the first day had doomed her to be his partner. The others regularly rotated partners, but Rapskal had no interest in such swaps. And she doubted she would find anyone willing to take him on, even if she could persuade him to try it. He was handsome, and adept on the river. And always optimistic. She tried to recall him speaking crossly, and could not. She smiled to herself. So he was strange. It was a strangeness that she could get used to. She pushed his gear bag to one side and rummaged in her own for her hunting items.
Away from Sintara’s gaze, it was easier to think about what she was doing and why. She recognized that the dragon had exerted some sort of glamour over her. Yet even being aware of it did not disperse it entirely. She had nothing more pressing to do, and certainly they could use the meat; they could always use the meat. The copper would benefit from a meal after they’d cleared the snakes off her, and certainly Mercor could do with some meat. But as she slung her bag over her shoulder, she wondered if she were merely trying to find a more acceptable reason to let herself follow the dragon’s suggestion. She shrugged at the uselessness of wondering about it and set off for the forest eaves.
The shores of the Rain Wild River were never the same and never different. Some days, they passed ranks of needled and lacy fronded evergreens. The next day those dark green ranks might give way gradually to endless columns of white-trunked trees with reaching pale green leaves, and all their branches festooned with dangling vines and creepers heavy with late blossoms and ripening fruit. Today there was a wide and reedy bank, with ranks of rushes topped with tufts of fluffy seedheads. The bank was only silt and sand, temporary land that might vanish in the next flood. Beyond it and only slightly elevated above it a forest of grey-barked giants with wide-spreading branches chilled the earth with their eternal shade. Vines as thick as her waist dropped down from those spreading branches, creating an undergrowth as restrictive as the bars of a cage.
It was easy enough to follow Greft’s trail through the marsh grasses. Water was already welling up in some places to fill his boot tracks. The prints of Jerd’s bare feet were less visible. Thymara scarcely gave her mind to her tracking, thinking instead of the dragon. The more time and distance she acquired from Sintara, the clearer came her own thoughts. Why Sintara had sent her hunting was an easy question to answer; the dragon was always hungry. Thymara had intended to hunt today anyway; she did not mind her errand. More puzzling was why the dragon had suddenly decided to make the effort to charm her. She never had before. Did that mean that she now considered Thymara more important than she had previously?
A thought light as wafting bulrush down floated into her mind. ‘Perhaps she could not use her glamour before. Perhaps she grows stronger in many ways, not just physically, as she challenges herself.’
She had whispered the words aloud. Was the thought hers, or had she, briefly, touched minds with one of the other dragons? That question was as disturbing as the thought itself. Was Sintara acquiring more of the powers that legends associated with dragons? Were the other dragons? And if so, how would they use them? Would their keepers be blinded by glamours, to become little more than fawning slaves?
‘It doesn’t work that way. It’s more like a mother loves a wayward child.’ Again she spoke the words aloud. She stopped, just beneath the eaves of the forest, and shook her head wildly, making her black braids whip against her neck. The small charms and beads that adorned them snapped against her neck. ‘Stop it!’ she hissed at whoever was invading her thoughts. ‘Leave me alone.’
Not a wise choice, but the choice is yours, human.
And like a gauzy mantle lifting from her head and shoulders, the presence was gone. ‘Who are you?’ she demanded, but whoever it had been was gone. Mercor? She wondered. ‘I should have asked that question first,’ she muttered to herself as she entered the thick shade of the forest. In the dimmer light, Greft’s trail was not as easy to follow, but he had still left plenty of sign. And she had not gone far before she no longer needed to bother with tracking him. She heard his voice, his words indistinct, and then another voice in reply to his. Jerd, she thought to herself. They must be hunting together. She went more slowly and quietly, and then came to a complete halt.
Sintara had all but insisted she follow them. Why? She suddenly felt very awkward. How would it seem to them if she suddenly came up on them? What would Jerd think? Would Greft see it as her admitting he was a better hunter than she was? She moved up into a tree and began to traverse from branch to branch. She was curious to see if he’d made