Harrikin suddenly spoke up. “I wouldn’t want to just sink down in the muck of the river bottom. I’d give myself to Ranculos. I want everyone here to know that now. If something does befall me, give my body to my dragon.”

“Same for me,” Kase said, and predictably Boxter echoed him with a, “Same.”

“And I,” Sylve chimed. “I am Mercor’s, in life or death.”

“Of course,” Jerd conceded, and Greft added, “For me, also.”

The assents rounded the circle of gathered keepers. When it came back to her, Thymara bit her lip and held her silence. Sintara reared up out of the water, standing briefly on her hind legs to look down on her. “What?” she demanded of the girl.

Thymara looked up at her. “I belong to myself,” she said quietly. “To get, you must give, Sintara.”

“I saved you from the river!” The dragon’s outraged trumpeting split the darkening sky.

“And I have served you from the day I met you,” Thymara replied. “But I do not feel that our bond is complete. So I will hold my thoughts until such time as a decision must be made. And then I will leave it up to my fellow keepers.”

“Insolent human! Do you think that you—”

“Another time.” Mercor cut into their quarrel. “Render to Baliper what is his.”

“Warken wouldn’t have had a problem with it,” Lecter said decidedly. He straightened from where he’d been leaning on the railing. “I’ll do it.”

“I’ll help,” Tats said quietly.

“Keepers’ decision,” Leftrin announced, as if they had waited for his permission. “Swarge will show you how to use a plank to slide his body over the side. If you want words said, I’ll say them.”

“There should be words,” Lecter said. “Warken’s mother would want that.”

And so it went, and Thymara watched it unfold and wondered at the strange little community they had become. I am and am not a part of this, she thought as she listened to Leftrin say his simple words and then watched Warken’s body slip over the railing on a plank. She wanted to turn her head away from what would happen next but somehow she could not. She needed to see it, she told herself. Needed to see how the keepers and their dragons had become so intertwined that such an outrageous and macabre request could be seen as reasonable and even inevitable.