“You want me to take the lead for a while?”

“No,” she replied curtly. No, she didn’t want anyone doing anything for her. Because who knew what she would owe them then?

He should have known better than to say anything more. But a few moments later, he asked in a low voice, “So, what are you going to do when we get back to camp?”

She’d been pondering that question herself. Having him poke her with it didn’t help her indecision. “What if I did nothing? Would that make me a coward?”

He was quiet for a time. She slapped mosquitoes on the back of her neck and brushed her hands wildly over her ears, trying to drive them and their persistent buzzing away. “I think you’d be doing the sensible thing,” he said quietly.

It surprised Thymara when Sylve spoke. “He’ll make you look selfish if you say anything. Turn everyone against you. Like he did with Tats that night. Saying he wasn’t one of us.” The girl was huffing and puffing. Her words came in short bursts. Thymara was rapidly realizing that Sylve was not the little girl she had thought she was. She was younger, but she listened and she thought about what she heard. “Ouch! Stupid branch!” she complained abruptly and then went on, “Greft is like that. He can seem so nice, but there’s a mean part of him. He talks like he wants good things for everyone. Changes, he says. But then he has those other times. And you see that he has a mean part of him. He scares me. He talked to me once, for a long time, and, well, sometimes I think that if I stay away from him, that’s the safest thing to do. Other times I think that if I don’t find a way to be one of his friends, that will be the most dangerous thing.”

Silence fell except for their breathing, the sounds of their loads bumping and dragging, and the normal night sounds of the forest. Insects buzzed all around Thymara’s head, almost as maddening as the thoughts buzzing inside her head. Thymara wondered just what Greft had said to Sylve in their “talk.” She feared she knew, and she felt fresh outrage. Tats broke their mutual reverie. “I’m scared of him for the same reasons. And one other. He has plans. He’s not just a fellow taking on a bad job for money or because it looks like an adventure. He’s thinking something about all this.”

Thymara nodded. “He says he wants to make a place where he can change the rules.”

For a time, they plodded on in silence, each pondering this. At last Tats said softly, “Rules exist for a reason.”

“We don’t have any rules,” Sylve interjected.

“Of course we do!” Thymara objected.

“No, we don’t. Back home, there were our parents. And the Rain Wild Council, and the Traders, each with a vote to say what got done or didn’t happen. But we left all that behind. We signed contracts, but who is really in charge? Not Captain Leftrin. He’s only in charge of the boat, not us or the dragons. So who says what the rules are? Who enforces them?”

“The rules are what they’ve always been,” Thymara replied doggedly, but she had an uneasy feeling that the girl was seeing things more clearly than she was. When Greft spoke of making changes, what could he be talking about except changing the rules they’d accepted all their lives? But he couldn’t do that. Could he?

There was light breaking through the trees ahead of them, the fading evening light of the Rain Wild Forest. Somehow her legs found the strength to pick up their pace.

“Hey! Hey! Where have you been? I was starting to get worried about you all! The hunters came in and brought a whole load of riverpigs. You should see, Thymara! There’s a whole one cooking on a spit for all to share, and the dragons got half a pig each. Hey! What you dragging? Did you kill something?”

It was Rapskal, jumping and hopping as if he were a boy half his age. He stopped dead when he reached Thymara, staring at the meat she was dragging. “What was that thing?”

“An elk,” she replied shortly.

“An elk. That’s big! You were lucky, I guess. Greft got one, too. He said he brought the meat back to share with everyone, but it was all dirty and beat up and then the hunters brought the riverpig and started building a big fire, so Greft’s elk got fed to one of the dragons. Oh, you should come and see Heeby! She ate so much today, she looks like a stomach with a dragon wrapped around it. She snores when she’s full. You got to hear her to believe it!” Rapskal laughed joyously. He clapped Thymara on the shoulder. “Glad you’re back, because I’m starving. I didn’t want to eat until I found you and made sure you got a share, too!”