“They all went, each more jealous than the next, to be sure of getting a fair share. What did you bring?”

“Bread leaf and sour pear. My shirt is full of sour pear. I couldn’t think of any other way to carry them.”

Sylve laughed. “We’ll be glad to have them, no matter how you got them here. Greft and Tats are trying to get enough of a fire going that we can cook the fish. If it doesn’t work, I suppose raw will have to do.”

“Better than nothing, certainly.”

Harrikin had been quiet through their conversation. He was never much of a talker. The first time she had seen him, he had reminded her of a lizard. He was long and slender, and much older than Sylve, but she seemed very comfortable with him. Thymara had not realized that he, too, had claws, until she watched him using them. He looked up from his task, caught her eyes on his hands, and nodded an acknowledgment to her.

A little silence fell over the group. Unanswered questions were answered by it. No one spoke of Rapskal, and in the distance, she heard Alum’s dragon give a long, anxious cry. Arbuc still called for his missing keeper. Warken’s red dragon, Baliper, held his mourning silence. The remaining keepers were still marooned on a raft of floating debris. Nothing had changed. Thymara wondered in passing what would become of them if their dragons abandoned them here. Would they? Did the dragons need them any longer? What if they decided to travel on without them?

She looked up to see Tats coming toward them and wondered if she looked as bad as he did. His skin was scalded red from the river water, and his hair stuck up in tufts. The water had attacked his clothing as well, mottling the already-worn shirt and trousers. He looked haggard, but he still managed to put on a smile for her. “What are you wearing?” he asked her.

“Our breakfast. Bread leaf and sour pear. Looks like you have a fire going for the fish.”

He glanced back to the little blaze that Greft tended. Jerd had come from somewhere to join him. She leaned against him quietly as he broke dry bits of root from the end of the snag and fed it to the small fire he’d kindled in the main nest of roots. “It wasn’t easy to get it going. And the fear is that if we succeed too well, it may spread to the rest of the debris pack and send us fleeing again. We don’t have much security here, but at least we’re still afloat.”

“And the water is going down. But if we must, we would take to the trees. Here. Hold your shirt out.”