She felt a warm rush of pleasure at hearing his voice and turned to find Leftrin bearing down on her. He carried two cups of tea. As she took the heavy, stained mug from his calloused and scaled hand, she thought of how she might have flinched away from him only a month ago. She would have wondered if the mug were clean and tsked over the stale tea. Now she knew that the mug had been given only a tiny swirl of water to clean it, or perhaps been wiped out with a rag. Knew and didn’t care. As for the tea, well…She toasted him with her mug. “Best tea to be had for miles around!”

“It is that,” he agreed. “And the best company to be had in the entire world, I’m thinking.”

She laughed softly and looked down at her hands. Her freckles were dark against her water-scalded skin. She didn’t want to think about her face and hair. She had glanced at them in the small dim mirror in her cabin after she had brushed and pinned up her hair and given it up as hopeless. “How can you give me such outrageous compliments and not sound foolish doing it?”

“Maybe you’re the right audience for such words. And maybe I don’t care if I sound foolish, for I know it’s the truth.”

“Oh, Leftrin.” She turned to look out over the river, resting her teacup on the ship’s railing. “What are we going to do?” She hadn’t known she was going to ask him that. The question came out of her as naturally as the steam that rose off her tea.

He purposely misunderstood her. “Well, Carson left before dawn. We’re going to hold in place here for a day. The dragons can rest a bit and gorge some more. A little bit upriver, they found an eddy full of acid-killed fish. So we’ll let them eat and rest while Carson continues the search. He’ll go another full day down the river. If he finds survivors, he’ll guide them back to us. If he finds nothing, he’ll give it up and come on back to us. He took the horn with him, and the sound carries quite a ways. I heard him blow three long blasts, not that long ago.”

“I didn’t hear it.”

“Well, it was faint, and I’m accustomed to listening for such things.” Something in his tone rang oddly to her. She sensed a secret but was willing, for now, to let it go.

“Do you think he’ll find anyone else?”

“It’s impossible to predict a thing like that. But we found almost all our survivors in one place. So, it seems to me that what that river picked up in one place, it kept mostly together and dumped in another place.”