Thymara crouched down on the tree branch and waited for pain and tears to come. They didn’t. Instead a strange numbness flowed up from her belly. She had killed him. She had killed him by getting so angry at him that she’d stopped caring about him. “I was so angry at him,” she confessed to Tats. “What he told me ruined my idea of him, and I thought I’d just have to stop knowing him, stop letting him be near me. And now he’s gone.”

“Ruined your idea of him?” Tats asked cautiously.

“I just never thought he’d do a thing like that. I’d thought he was better than that,” she said awkwardly.

Too late she saw that Tats accepted that judgment upon himself as well. “Maybe none of us are quite what the others think we are,” he observed shortly and stood. He walked back toward the trunk, and she could not think of any words to call him back.

Alise called after him, “No one can know that he and Heeby are dead. He might have made it to the Tarman. Maybe Captain Leftrin will bring him back to us.”

Tats glanced back at them. His voice was flat as he said, “I’m going to tell Jerd that you saw Veras. It might give her a little comfort. Greft has been trying to encourage her, but she hasn’t been listening to him.”

“That’s a good idea,” Alise agreed. “Tell her that when we saw her dragon, she was afloat and swimming strongly.”

Thymara let him go. Let him go to comfort Jerd. It didn’t matter to her. She had let go of him when she had let go of Rapskal. She hadn’t really known either of them. It was much better to keep her heart to herself. She wondered if she were being stupid. Did she have to hold on to her hurt and anger? Could she just let it go and forgive him and have him back as her friend? For a moment, it seemed as if it were purely her decision; she could make what he had done an important matter or she could let it go as just something that had happened. Holding on to it was hurting both of them. Before she had known what he had done with Jerd, he’d been her friend. All that had changed was that now she knew.

“But I can’t unknow it,” she whispered to herself. “And knowing that he could do something like that does show me that he’s a different person from what I believed.”

“Are you all right?” Alise asked her. “Did you say something?”