Davvie nudged the small boat up onto the bank of the river as close as he could get to a tree’s outthrust roots. She and Tats disembarked onto the knees of the trees. From there, Thymara sprang for the trunk and was able to sink her claws in and scrabble up. Tats bid Davvie farewell and then followed her more laboriously. Once they reached the branches, they both traveled more easily. Neither one of them said much for a time, other
than, “Watch out, it’s slippery here,” or “Stinging ants. Move quickly.”
She led and he followed, moving in parallel to the river’s edge, moving upstream as she traveled higher into the branches.
“Where are we going?” he asked her at last.
“Looking for fruit vines. The kind with air roots. They like the light along the riverbank.”
“Good. I don’t feel like having to climb all the way up to the canopy today.”
“I don’t either. We’d waste most of our time just going up and coming down again. I want to gather as much food as we can today.”
“Good idea. It’s going to be harder to feed everybody now. Most all our fishing gear is gone. Along with most of our other supplies. Our blankets are gone. We lost a lot of knives.”
“It’s going to be harder,” she agreed. “But the dragons have got better at feeding themselves. I think we’ll be all right.”
He was quiet for a time, following her along a horizontal stretch of branch. Then he asked, “If you could go back to Trehaug, would you want to?”
“What?”
“Last night you said you couldn’t go home. I wondered if that was what you really wanted to do.” He followed her silently for a time, then added, “Because if it was, I’d find a way to take you there.”
She stopped, turned, and met his eyes. He seemed so earnest, and she suddenly felt so old. “Tats. If that was what I really wanted to do, I’d find a way to do it. I signed up to be part of this expedition. If I left it now…well. It all would have been for nothing, wouldn’t it? I’d just be Thymara, slinking back home, to live in my father’s house and abide by my mother’s rules.”
He furrowed his brow. ‘“Just Thymara.’ I don’t think that’s such a bad thing to be. What do you want to be?”
That stumped her. “I don’t know. But I know that I want to be something more than just my father’s daughter. I want to prove myself somehow. That what I told my da when he
asked why I wanted to go on this expedition. And it’s still true.” They’d come to the next trunk and Thymara started up it, digging her claws into the bark. The same claws that had condemned her to a half life in Trehaug might be her salvation out here, she thought.
Tats came behind her, more slowly. When Thymara reached a likely branch, she paused and waited for him. When he caught up with her, his face was misted with sweat. “I thought only boys felt things like that.”
“Like what?”
“That we had to prove ourselves, so people would know we were men now, not boys any longer.”
“Why wouldn’t a girl feel that?” Her eyes had caught a glint of yellow. She pointed toward it, and he nodded. At the end of this branch, out over the river, a parasitic vine garlanded the tree. The weight of hanging yellow fruit sagged both vine and branches. It swayed and she saw the flicker of wings. Birds were feeding there, a sure sign the fruit was ripe. “I’m going out there,” she told him. “I don’t know if the branches will take your weight.”
“I’ll find out,” he replied.
“Your choice. But don’t follow me too closely.”
“I’ll be careful. And I’ll stick to my own branch.”
And he was. She ventured out onto the branch, and he transferred to one beside it. She crouched, digging her claws in as she ventured toward the vine. The farther she went, the more the branch sagged.
“It’s a long drop to the river, and shallow down there,” Tats reminded her.
“Like I don’t know,” she muttered. She glanced over at him. He was belly down on his branch, inching out doggedly. She could tell he was afraid. And she knew that he wouldn’t go back until she did.
Proving himself.
“Why wouldn’t a girl want to prove herself?”
“Well.” He gave a grunt and inched himself along. She had to admire his nerve. He was heavier than she was, and his branch
was already beginning to droop with his weight. “A girl doesn’t have to prove herself. No one expects it of her. She just has to, you know, be a girl.”
“Get married, have babies,” she said.
“Well. Something like that. Not right away, the having babies part. But, well, I guess no one expects a girl to, well—”
“Do anything,” she supplied for him. She was as far out as she dared to go, but the fruit was barely within her reach. She reached out and took a cautious grip on a leaf of the vine. She pulled it slowly toward her, careful not to pull the leaf off. When it was near enough, she hooked the vine itself with her free hand. Carefully she scooted back on the branch, pulling the vine with her as she went. Most of the parasitic vines had very tough and sturdy stemwork. She’d be able to pull it in from here and pluck as much fruit as she wanted.
Tats saw that, and she credited his intelligence that he stopped risking himself immediately and backed along the branch. He sighed slightly, watching her. “You know what I mean.”
“I do. It didn’t used to be like that, with the early Traders. Women were among the toughest of the new settlers. They had to be, not only to live themselves but to raise their children.”
“So maybe having babies was how a girl proved herself, back then,” he pointed out, an edge of triumph in his voice.
“Maybe,” she conceded. “To some degree. But this was before any of the tree cities were built or Trehaug unearthed or any of it. It was just survival days at first, figuring out how to get drinkable water, how to build a house that would stay dry, how to make a boat that the river wouldn’t eat…”
“It all seems pretty obvious now.” He was working a smaller branch back and forth.
“It usually is, after someone else thinks of it.”
He grinned at her. He’d broken the branch free. Now he stripped it of most of its leaves and then used it to reach out and hook a different vine. Slowly and carefully, he pulled the vine toward him until he could catch hold of it. She twisted her mouth and then grinned back at him, conceding his cleverness. She opened her pouch and began to methodically strip fruit
from the vine into it. “Anyway. Back then, women had to be able to do a lot of different things. Think of different ways to do things.”
“And the men didn’t?” he asked innocently.
She’d come to a bird-pecked fruit. She tugged it off, shied it at him, and went on picking. “Of course they did. But that doesn’t change my point.”
“Which is?” He’d opened his own pack and was loading it now.
What was her point? “That at one time, Trader women proved themselves just as men did. By surviving.” Her hands had slowed. She looked out through the leaves, over the river, into the distance. The far shore of the river was a misty line in the distance. She hadn’t realized how much it had widened until now. She tried to put her unruly thoughts in order. Tats was asking her the very same questions she’d been asking herself. She needed to formulate the answer for herself as much as she did for him.
“When I was born,” she said, careful not to look at him. “I was deemed unworthy to live. My father saved me from being exposed, but that only proved something about him. It didn’t say anything about me. All the time I was growing up, I could look around and see people who didn’t think I’d deserved to live.” Including her mother. She wouldn’t mention that to him. It sounded self-pitying, even to herself. And it had nothing to do with what she was saying. Did it? “I worked alongside my father. I gathered just like he did. I did all the work that was expected of me. But it still wasn’t enough to prove that I deserved to live. It was just what was expected of me. What would have been expected of any Rain Wild daughter.” She did look at him then. “Proving I could be ordinary, despite how I looked, wasn’t enough for any of them.”
His hands, tanned brown, worked like separate little animals, stripping the fruit and loading it into his pack. She’d always liked his hands. “Why wasn’t it enough for you?” he asked her.
There was the rub. She wasn’t sure. “It just wasn’t,” she said gruffly. “I wanted to make them admit that I was as good as any of them and better than some.”
“And then what would happen?”
She was quiet for a time, thinking. She stopped her gathering to eat one of the yellow fruit. Her father had had a name for them, but she couldn’t remember it. They didn’t commonly grow near Trehaug. These were fat and sweet. They’d have fetched a good price at the market. She got down to a fuzzy seed and scraped the last of the pulp off with her teeth before she tossed it away. “It would probably make them hate me more than they already did,” she admitted. She nodded to herself and smiled, saying, “But at least then they’d have a good reason for it.”
Tats’s backpack was full. He pulled the drawstring tight. She’d never seen that pack before; probably ship’s gear. He picked another fruit, took a bite of it, and then asked, “So, for you, it wasn’t about proving yourself and then being able to break their rules? Get married, have babies.”
She thought about it. “No. Not really. Just making them admit that I deserved to live might have been enough for me.” She turned her head and added, “I don’t think I really focused on the ‘get married, have babies’ part of it. The rules about us were just the rules about us.”
“Not for Greft,” he said, shaking his head. He’d finished the fruit. He put the whole seed in his mouth, chewed on it for a moment, and then spat it out.
“Greft and his new rules,” she muttered to herself.
“You never wanted to live without the rules they put on you? Just do what you wanted to do?”
“The rules are different for me than for him,” she said slowly.
“How?”
“Well, he’s male. Women like me…just about as often as we give birth to children who can’t or shouldn’t survive, we don’t survive ourselves. The rules about not having husbands or having children, my father said they were there to protect me as much as anything else.” She shrugged one shoulder. “Greft changes the rules, it’s no risk for him, is it? He’s not the one who’s going to go into labor out here with no midwife. He’s not the one who’ll have to deal with a baby who can’t survive. I
don’t think he’s ever wondered what he’s going to do with that baby if Jerd dies and the baby lives.”
“How can you think of such things?” Tats was aghast.
“How can you
not
think of them?” she retorted. She let go of the vine and settled her carry-sack on her shoulder. She stared out through the leaves at the distant shore. After a time, in a quieter voice she said, “It’s all very well for Greft to talk about new rules. It infuriates me when he says that I ‘must make my choice soon’ as if my only choice is choosing which male. To him, it probably seems so simple. There’s no authority out here to tell him that he can’t do a thing, so he does it. And he never thinks about the reason that rule came to be. To him, it’s just a bar that keeps him from doing what he wants.”
She turned her head to look at him. “Can you see that for me, it’s just another rule that he’s talking about putting on me? His rule is that I have to choose a mate. ‘For the good of all the keepers,’ to keep boys from fighting over me. How is that better than the old rule?”
When he didn’t answer, she glanced back out over the river. “You know, I just now realized something. Jerd and Greft, they think that breaking the rules is the same as proving themselves. To me, breaking an old rule doesn’t mean anything except that they broke a rule. I don’t think Jerd is braver or stronger or more capable because she did it. In fact, right now, with a baby growing in her belly, she’s more vulnerable. More dependent on the rest of us, regardless of how hard that makes it. So. What does that prove about Jerd? Or the boys who slept with her?”
In unfolding her thought, she’d forgotten to whom she was speaking. The stunned look on Tats’s face stopped her words. She wanted to apologize, to say she hadn’t meant it. But her tongue couldn’t find the lie. After a few moments of his silence, she said quietly, “My bag is full. Let’s take what we have back to the barge.”
He bobbed his head in a brusque nod of agreement, not looking at her. Had she shamed him? Made him angry? Suddenly it all just made her tired, and she didn’t want to understand him or have him understand her. It was all too much
trouble. It was so much easier being alone. She stood and led the way back.
She was only about three trees away from where they had left the boat when she saw Nortel coming up a trunk toward them. She halted where she was, moving back on the branch to make room for him. He came up fast and when he reached the branch he halted there, looking from her to Tats and back again, breathing hard with the effort of his climb. “Where have you been?” he demanded. Thymara bridled at the unexpected question.
“Picking fruit,” Tats replied before she could say anything.
“How can you think that’s fair?” he asked Tats. “You heard what Greft said. We all agreed. She gets to make her decision and
then
we all abide by it.”
“I didn’t—” Tats began, but Thymara raised a sudden hand, halting his words. She looked from one to the other. “
What Greft said,
” she repeated, making the words a demand for clarification.
Nortel let his gaze settle on Thymara. “He said we all had to play fair, and not take advantage of your situation.” He shifted his eyes back to Tats. “But that’s what you’re doing, isn’t it? Taking advantage of being old friends, of her mourning Rapskal. You’re using every excuse to be around her all the time. Not letting anyone else even get the chance to talk to her.”
“I went with her to pick fruit. We’ve lost a lot of hunting equipment. We need to gather what food we can, while we can.” Tats spoke in a flat voice. His words were reasonable, but the sparks in his eyes were not. They were, she suddenly knew, a challenge. She saw how Nortel swelled his chest, and she saw a pale lavender light kindle behind the green of his eyes. He reminded her, she thought, of his dragon and suddenly recognized what she was seeing; here was a male, come to challenge all comers for the right to be her mate. A strange thrill went through her. Her heart leaped and raced, and she felt her skin flush.