‘These are past the season, but I could probably find more on the tree. And where one bread leaf vine grows, there are usually others.’

‘That’s good to know. Until we know more of our situation, we’re going to have to manage whatever food we can acquire carefully.’

‘Well, there’s plenty of dead fish floating in the river. The current is pushing the floaters up against the debris pack.’ This was from Sylve. She and Harrikin carried a line of fish suspended by a stick shoved through their gills.

‘They won’t be good much more than a day or so,’ Harrikin observed quietly. ‘The acid in the water is already softening them. We probably shouldn’t try to eat the skin, only the meat.’

Thymara removed her garland of bread leaf vine and began to strip the leaves from it methodically. Tats had already divvied the fruit into piles. Now he began to deal the leaves out as well. With the fish, each keeper would have an adequate breakfast. There was no sense worrying about dinner just yet.

Greft seemed to have the same thought. ‘We should hold some food back for later,’ he suggested.

‘Or we can give each keeper a share and tell them, “that’s it for the day, ration yourself”,’ Tats countered.

‘Not everyone will have the self-discipline to be wise about it,’ Greft spoke the words but it didn’t sound like an argument. Thymara suspected they were continuing an earlier discussion.

‘I don’t think any one of us has the authority to ration the food,’ Tats said.

‘Not even if we’ve provided it?’ Greft pushed.

‘Thymara!’

She turned her head to Alise’s voice. The Bingtown woman teetered awkwardly along one of the logs. Thymara winced to look at her. Her face was pebbled with blisters and her red hair was a tangled mat that dangled half down her back. Always before, Alise had been so clean and well groomed. ‘Where did you go?’ she demanded when she was still most of a log away.

‘Out to look for food.’

‘By yourself? Isn’t that dangerous?’

‘Not usually. I almost always hunt or gather alone.’

‘But what about wild animals?’ Alise sounded genuinely concerned for her.

‘Up where I travel, I’m one of the larger creatures. As long as I watch out for the big snakes, tree cats and little poisonous things, I’m pretty safe.’ She thought briefly of Nortel. No. She didn’t intend to mention that incident at all.

‘There are other dangers besides wild animals,’ Greft observed darkly.

Thymara glanced at him in annoyance. ‘I’ve been moving through the trees all my life, Greft, and usually much higher in the canopy than I went today. I’m not going to fall.’

‘He’s not worried about you falling,’ Tats said in a quiet voice.

‘Then someone should say plainly what he is worried about,’ Thymara observed sourly. They seemed to be talking about her and deliberately making the words go past her without meaning.

Greft glanced at Alise and away. ‘Perhaps later,’ he said, and Thymara saw Alise bridle. His words and look had pointed her out as an outsider, someone not to be brought into keeper affairs. Whatever it was that was chafing him, Thymara already wanted to defy whatever older, male wisdom he intended to inflict on her. From the look on Jerd’s face, he had annoyed her as well. She shot Thymara a look that was full of venom, but Thymara could not master the coldness to be angry at her. Grief for her missing dragon had ravaged Jerd. Her tears had left scarlet tracks down her face. Impulsively, she addressed her directly.

‘I’m sorry about Veras. I hope she manages to rejoin us. There are already so few female dragons.’

‘Exactly,’ Greft said, as if that proved some point for him.

But Jerd looked at her, weighed her comment and decided she was sincere. ‘I can’t feel her. Not clearly. But it doesn’t feel like she’s gone, either. I’m afraid that she’s injured somewhere. Or just disoriented and unable to find her way back to us.’

‘It will be all right, Jerd,’ Greft said soothingly. ‘Don’t distress yourself. It’s the last thing you need right now.’

This time both Thymara and Jerd shot him furious looks.

‘I’m only thinking of you,’ he said defensively.

‘Well, I’m thinking and speaking about my dragon,’ Jerd replied.

‘Perhaps we’d best get the fish cooking before the fire burns too low,’ Sylve suggested, and the alacrity with which the fish were taken up and fixed on wooden skewers over the fire attested to how uncomfortable the near-quarrel was making everyone.

‘Have you asked the other dragons if they can feel her?’ Sylve asked her as they began to ferry the cooked fish and other foods from the fire to the main raft. Boxter had found shelf mushrooms and onion-moss to share, welcome additions to an otherwise bland meal.

Jerd shook her head mutely.

‘Well, my dear, you should!’ Alise smiled at her. ‘Sintara and Mercor would be the best ones to approach with this. I’ll ask Sintara for you, shall I?’

The words were said so innocently, with such a hopeful helpfulness. Thymara bit down on her anger. ‘Do you really think so?’

‘Of course. Why wouldn’t she?’

‘Well, because she is Sintara,’ Thymara replied, and Sylve laughed.

‘I know what you mean. Just when I think I understand Mercor and that he will do any simple favour I ask of him, he asserts he is a dragon and not my plaything. But I think he might help with this.’

Jerd struggled for a moment and then asked quietly, ‘Would you ask him, then? I didn’t think to ask the other dragons. It just seemed to me that I should know if she is alive or dead. I should be able to feel it, without help.’

‘Are you that close to Veras?’ Thymara asked and tried not to let envy creep into her voice.

‘I thought I was,’ Jerd said quietly. ‘I thought I was.’

Alise looked around the circle of dragon keepers. In her hands, she held two broad, thick leaves topped with a piece of partially-cooked fish. A mushroom and a tangle of shaggy greenery topped the fish. She balanced a fruit that Thymara had called a ‘sour pear’ on her leg. They’d given her the same share that any other keeper had received. She’d slept alongside them and now ate with them, but knew that despite her efforts, she was not one of them. Thymara did not make as much of their differences as the others did, but the girl still deferred to her in a way that kept her at a distance. She felt that Greft resented her, but if she’d had to say why, the only reason she could come up with was that she was not of the Rain Wilds. It made her feel desperately alone.

And being so useless did not make it any easier.

She envied how quickly the others seemed to have adapted and then reacted to their situation. They shifted their lives and responded to recover from the disaster so quickly that she felt both old and inflexible in comparison. And they spoke so little of their losses. Jerd wept, but she did not endlessly rant. The calm the keepers showed seemed almost unnatural. She wondered if it was the response of people who had grown up with near-disaster at every turn. Quakes were not a rarity to them, any more than they were to the people of Bingtown. But all knew that in the Rain Wilds, quakes were more dangerous. So many of the Rain Wilders worked underground, salvaging Elderling artefacts as they unearthed the buried halls and chambers of the ancient cities. Cave-ins and collapses were sometimes triggered by quakes; had the keepers been inured to loss from an early age?

She wished they had been less reticent. She wanted to howl at the moon, to shake and rant, to weep hopelessly and fall apart. She longed to talk about Tarman and Captain Leftrin, to ask if they thought the ship had survived, to ask if they expected him to come searching. As if talking about rescue could make it a reality! It would have been strangely comforting to discuss it all, over and over. Yet in the face of all these youngsters simply dealing with this disaster, how could she?