Dragon Haven (25 page)

He took a step away, then halted and looked back at her again. For a moment, his gaze seemed almost sympathetic. “Don’t think this is something I’m imposing on you. I simply happen to see people and situations for what they are. While the rest of you were singing songs and telling stories about the fire, I was talking with Jess. There was a man with book education and ideas. I’m sorry he’s gone. He opened my eyes to a lot of things, including how the greater world works. I know you think that I’m overbearing, Thymara. The truth is, I want us all to survive. I can’t force you to do this. I can only point out to you that, right now, you have the opportunity to make a choice. Wait too long, even a few days more, and that choice may be taken from you. Once men have fought over you and one has claimed you, it will be too late for anyone to assert you have the right to choose your own mate. Then you’ll have to live with what you have.”

“You are monstrous!” she cried in a low voice.

“Life
is
monstrous,” he replied imperturbably. “I was trying to make it less so for you. To make you aware that you should choose while you still can.”

He moved quietly and gracefully across the shifting logs. She watched him reenter the shelter. All peace had gone out of her night. Did Jerd know the sorts of things he said about her? He’d preferred her. That thought sent a shiver down her spine, and not of the pleasant kind. She recalled now that she had initially found him attractive. It had been flattering to have an older man pay attention to her. But even then, she recalled, he had been talking of “changing the rules.” Somehow his claim of honoring the Rain Wild traditions that women could determine their own futures rang false to her.

“I won’t be pushed,” she said aloud to the night. “If they fight one another, that’s their problem, not mine. If any one of them thinks that somehow they can claim me that way, he’s going to find out he’s wrong.”

She had not been aware of Sintara on the edge of her thoughts until the dragon responded sleepily,
Now you are thinking like a queen. There may be hope for you yet
.

Day the 21st of the Prayer Moon

T
he dragons woke her. Alise had heard nothing before their trumpeting calls jerked her from her slumbers. All around her in the crowded shelter, keepers were rolling to their knees. The raft shifted, and a wave of vertigo washed over her. She clenched her teeth. She missed her nights on the
Tarman,
when the barge was beached and the world was still beneath her. And she missed Leftrin, more than she dared think about.

The dragons trumpeted again, not in unison, but in a ragged response to a sound she hadn’t heard. She heard Sintara’s clear clarion call, and Mercor’s bull bellow. Fente’s note was a drawn-out shriek, while Nortel’s lavender dragon made a sound like a bow thrumming. “What is it?” she asked, but only heard her question echoed in half a dozen voices. A jam of bodies trying to exit the shelter plunged her back into dimness and tipped the crude raft. She waited where she was, looking up at the blue sky
through the crude roof woven of leafy branches and wondering if some new disaster was about to befall them all.

By the time she could join the others outside, all the dragons were roused. Among their excited trumpeting, in a small gap of quiet, she heard both the winding of a long horn call and the cry of another dragon. “Veras! It’s Veras!” Jerd shrieked. She went scuttling over the packed logs, heading for the unstable edge of the floating debris pack, and Greft went scrambling after her. He caught her by the shoulders and held her back from falling in as Veras approached. In her wake, periodically blowing three short blasts on a horn, was one of the hunters from the
Tarman
. Alise’s heart leaped and then sank at the sight of him. It was Carson, Leftrin’s friend. But he was not Leftrin, and the barge was nowhere in sight.

A hail of questions peppered them both as they drew nearer. Carson didn’t even attempt to reply. He abandoned blowing his horn and applied his efforts to his paddle to swiftly approach the shore. By the time he could toss a line to one of the awaiting keepers, Veras had already thrust her way into the packed debris and was allowing a weeping Jerd to stroke her face. Alise crowded forward with the keepers to hear what tidings he might bring.

“Are you all here and safe?” was his first question, and when Greft shook his head, the hunter’s face fell into lines of disappointment.

“The
Tarman
and Captain Leftrin are just around the last bend. They should be showing any minute now. As soon as he’s here, he’ll take you on board and get a hot meal into you. Not much we can do for the dragons just yet, but the river’s been dropping fast since dawn. I hope that by this evening, there will be some shallows where they can at least stand and take some rest.”

Lecter had caught the rope and secured the small boat to their raft as Carson spoke. Now the hunter clambered nimbly from the boat to the raft and looked around at the gathered people, grinning. As he scanned the waiting faces, hope slowly died. “Who’s missing?” he asked.

“Who’s on board the
Tarman
?” Greft countered.

Carson looked annoyed with him but answered, “Captain Leftrin and the full crew came through just fine. Big Eider banged up his ribs some, but nothing’s broken so far as we can tell. My boy Davvie’s on board, too. We lost our other hunter, unless Jess is here with you. And what about Sedric? Is he here?”

“Sedric!” Alise gasped his name. Sedric was missing? She’d always thought he was safe on board the
Tarman
. He’d been there, in his cabin, when she left. How could he be missing, unless the barge had taken a terrible beating in the wave? Had his shelter been torn free, had he been drowned in his bed? The devastating news that Sedric was definitely missing collided with her joy that Leftrin was fine and would soon appear to rescue her. It was as if neither emotion would allow her to fully experience the other, and so she was trapped between them, feeling disloyal and numb. She worked her way around the clustered keepers and through them until she stepped out in front of Carson. At the sight of her, a sudden smile lit his face.

“Alise! You are here! Well, that will take away the captain’s greatest fear.” A light of cautious hope spread over his face. “And Sedric? Is he with you?”

She shook her head as Carson sidestepped Greft and came straight to her. She found her voice and tongue, though she could scarcely draw breath to push out the words. “I thought he was on the
Tarman
.” A devastating guilt dizzied her. She’d made him come with her. And now he was missing. Dead. Sedric was no swimmer, no tree climber. He was dead. Unthinkable. Impossible.
Don’t think on it, don’t allow it to be real.
She cleared her throat, and her tongue babbled on without her. “Now that Veras has returned, we are missing only the copper dragon, the silver one, and Heeby. Of keepers, we’ve seen nothing of Rapskal, Alum, or Warken. Are any of them with you?”

A silence fell, and when Carson slowly shook his head, low groans and sighs met his denial of their hopes. “They’re gone, then,” Alise said aloud, and she hated the finality of her words. It was like pronouncing them dead.

“I intend to keep looking.” Carson’s words jolted her back to
awareness of the world around her. The keepers were milling around and talking, absorbing this latest piece of news. Veras had rejoined the other dragons; Jerd, Sylve, and Harrikin were working together to show her how to use the logs to float so she could rest.

“I found her wedged between some trees,” Carson told her. His gaze had followed hers. “She’d climbed up there when she was too weary to swim anymore. That probably saved her life. But as the water went down, she found herself wedged. She’d probably have gotten herself out after she starved a bit more, but I’m glad it didn’t come to that.”

Alise met his eyes. “You’re trying to tell me that the others may be in similar situations somewhere. Stuck, but alive.”

“That’s what I’m going to keep believing. Excuse me.” He turned away from her, lifted the horn to his lips, and blew three short but deafening blasts. This time, in the distance, she heard an answering horn. He turned back to her with a smile and raised his voice so that all on the raft could hear him. “And that will be the
Tarman
. We’ll ferry all of you out to the barge as soon as we can. The floats for the dragons are a good idea. We may be able to make them a bit more sturdy with line from the
Tarman
. If the river continues to fall, they probably won’t need them much longer.

“Jess is still missing, and I’m going to continue searching rather than hunting. So I suggest that gathering any food you can find would be an excellent idea. You’re going to have to do more toward feeding yourselves for a few days, until we can resume hunting again.”

Greft had come to stand just behind Carson’s shoulder. He looked irritated, Alise thought, and wondered what could annoy him about being rescued. When he spoke, his words sounded like a rebuke.

“If you’ve finished chatting with Carson, I’ve some important information to share with him, if he’d give me his attention. The wave that struck us deposited most of us in the trees along here. I gathered those I could find, and the dragons called to one another until they found one another. We’ve been able to pro
vide for ourselves here. I’ll organize some of the keepers to collect more food for tonight. Most of it will be fruit or vegetable. Luckily, I kept my wits about me, and we caught three of our boats. No paddles remained; they were tossed about and almost all our gear was lost. It will make it hard for us to help bring in meat or fish for the dragons.”

Carson nodded slowly. “Damn shame. We can carve some paddles, but that will take time. And the missing gear will be largely impossible to replace. We can try to make some fish spears, too, even if they’re not much more than sharpened sticks. But at least you’re all alive.”

Greft’s eyes narrowed. Alise realized that was not the response he had expected from the hunter. “Saving lives seemed a bit more important to me than saving gear,” he said tartly. “I did the best I could at the time.”

He’d expected the hunter to praise him, she realized. To give him the credit for saving the keepers. “And of course you were very helpful to Thymara and me when Sintara brought us here,” Alise interjected, hoping to soothe his ruffled feathers. He flicked a glance at her that was like a slap. It suddenly reminded her of Hest and how annoyed he would get, even in a social situation, if she spoke during what he deemed “a man’s conversation.” Her sympathy for him evaporated. Almost vindictively she added, “Thymara has been doing most of our providing. I’ll speak to her now about going out.”

She turned and walked away from them, surprised by the strength of the anger washing through her.
He isn’t Hest,
she reminded herself fiercely and, in doing so, realized the true source of her anger. In a short time, the man she had come to love would be here beside her again.

And her husband still stood between them.

T
HREE SHORT BLASTS
of the horn!

The first time he heard it echoing back to him, he hadn’t dared to hope. Sounds traveled strangely across the wet lands of
the Rain Wilds. Leftrin had not seen Carson for some hours. He had vanished around one of the gentle bends in the immense river. Then Tarman had been delayed when Davvie had spotted exactly what Leftrin had most feared to see: a body tangled in the driftwood and debris along the side of the river.

It had been Warken, and he had not drowned but been smashed against the flotsam in the river. Carefully they had taken up the body of the young keeper, wrapped him in a fold of canvas, and laid him on the deck of the barge. Every time he passed the body, it seemed an ill omen of things to come. How many more draped bodies would weight Tarman’s deck before this day was out?

So he had been cautious when he first heard the three short blasts clearly. He had Davvie signal back and then had asked Tarman to make haste. Even as the barge picked up speed, he reminded himself that the three short blasts could signify anything; Carson could have discovered more bodies just as easily as survivors. But as the boat rounded the bend and came in sight of the tiny camp and its smoldering signal fire, his heart had leaped. He had squinted at the small figures in the shade of the great trees and tried to make out who might be there.

Sooner than he had a right, he saw her. There was no mistaking the sun glinting off that head of glorious red hair. He’d given a roar of delight and felt an answering surge of speed from his ship. “Easy, Tarman! We’ll be there soon enough!” Swarge had bellowed, and the ship had reluctantly slowed. Not even a liveship was immune to every danger the river offered. Now was not the time to discover a submerged rock or a waterlogged snag.

It was hard to remain on board and wait patiently for Carson to begin the slow process of ferrying the keepers back to the barge. He dared not let Tarman go nosing in among the debris. The push and wake of the bigger ship could easily disrupt the fragile unity of the mat and send the keepers plunging into the cold river water. No. No matter how he longed to somehow fling himself across the distance that separated them, he stood
firmly on the deck of his ship and waited. He muttered imprecations when he saw that Carson’s first passengers were Greft and Jerd and Sylve.

Despite his disappointment, he was still able to welcome them warmly aboard. All three looked a bit worse for wear, but the girls both hugged him and thanked him for finding them. He sent them off to the galley for hot fish soup to warm them up. “Get some food in your bellies and you’ll be your old selves. But I have to warn you, go easy on the fresh water! Share a bucket and a rag for now. Until we get rain or the river goes down so we can make a sand well, we’re going to have to conserve. Off you go now!”

And the girls had gone, obedient and grateful, while Leftrin watched Carson heading back to the floating mat for more passengers.

“Captain.” Greft’s officious voice was an unwelcome distraction.

“What is it?” he said, and upon hearing the impatience in his own voice, he added, “You must be as weary and hungry as the others. Why don’t you get yourself some soup?”

“Soon enough,” Greft replied brusquely. “First, we have to lay our plans for what will happen next. Three keepers and three dragons are still missing. We have to discuss plans for either continuing or abandoning the search.”

Leftrin shot a look at the younger man. “I’ll make it easy for you and tell you my plans, son. First, I’m sorry to tell you that only two keepers are still missing. We found young Warken dead in the river only a few hours ago. And second, we’ll continue our search for at least another day and perhaps two. Once we have the rest of the keepers aboard, Carson will set out to see if he can find anyone else. We’ll either hold here with the dragons, or leave a few keepers here with the dragons and follow Carson more slowly. That just may depend on what the river does. The water is going down fast. I think whatever broke loose upriver has just about passed us by now.”

“Captain, in my opinion, there isn’t much point in our delaying our journey. You’d only be wasting time and precious fresh
water. What you’ve told me about Warken saddens me, but it confirms what I’ve feared since we first pulled ourselves out of the water. I think the others are dead. And I feel that…”

“Go feel whatever you’re feeling in the galley, lad. On the
Tarman,
the only opinion that counts is the captain’s, and oh, looky, that’s me. Go on with you, now. Eat something. Sleep. You’ll more clearly remember who I am and who you are, and that you’re standing on the deck of
my
ship.”

His words were considerably gentler than how he would have addressed a deckhand who so far forgot himself as to speak to his captain like that. Besides, he could see Alise stepping into Carson’s tippy little boat and he wanted to watch her come aboard without distractions.

He saw the youngster’s jaw snap shut and marked the baleful look in his eye. Well, he’d get over it. And if he didn’t, he’d just get smacked down a bit more firmly the next time. Leftrin didn’t watch him leave. His eyes were locked on the boat, which Carson was paddling crosscurrent toward them.