“I don’t think there’s much we can do to change things,” he said sadly, and she nodded, attaching his words to her inner turmoil before he changed their significance by adding, “I don’t think anyone can help the brown dragon. She will live or she’ll die. And we’ll be stuck here until she decides she’s doing one or the other.”

“It’s so hard to think of her as female. It makes me doubly sad that she is so ill. There are so few female dragons left. So I don’t mind. I don’t mind being stuck here, I mean.” She wished he would offer her his arm. She’d decided she’d take it.

There was no clear dividing line between the shore and the river’s flow. The mud got sloppier and wetter and then it was the river. They both stopped well short of the moving water. She could feel her boots sinking. “Nowhere for us to go, is there?” Leftrin offered.

She glanced behind them. There was the low riverbank of trampled grasses and beyond that a snaggled forest edge of old driftwood and brush before the real forest began. From where she stood, it looked impenetrable and forbidding. “We could try the forest,” she began.

Leftrin gave a low laugh. There was no humor in it. “That wasn’t what I meant. I was talking about you and me.”

Her eyes locked with his. She was startled that he had spoken so bluntly, and then decided that honesty might be the only good thing that could come from Sedric’s meddling. There was no reason now for either of them to deny the attraction they felt. She wished she had the courage to take his hand. Instead, she just looked up at him and hoped he could read her eyes. He could. He sighed heavily.

“Alise. What are we going to do?” The question was rhetorical, but she decided she would answer it anyway.

They walked a score of paces before she found the words she truly wanted to say. He was watching the ground as he walked;she spoke to his profile, surrendering all control of her world as she did so. “I want to do whatever you want to do.”

She saw those words settle on him. She had thought they would be like a blessing, but he received them as a burden. His face grew very still. He lifted his eyes. His barge rested on the bank before them and he seemed to meet its sympathetic stare. When he spoke, perhaps he spoke to his ship as much as to her. “I have to do what is right,” he said regretfully. “For both of us,” he added, and there was finality in his words.

“I won’t be packed off back to Bingtown!”