She turned her head to look at him. “Can you see that for me, it’s just another rule that he’s talking about putting on me? His rule is that I have to choose a mate. ‘For the good of all the keepers,’ to keep boys from fighting over me. How is that better than the old rule?”

When he didn’t answer, she glanced back out over the river. “You know, I just now realized something. Jerd and Greft, they think that breaking the rules is the same as proving themselves. To me, breaking an old rule doesn’t mean anything except that they broke a rule. I don’t think Jerd is braver or stronger or more capable because she did it. In fact, right now, with a baby growing in her belly, she’s more vulnerable. More dependent on the rest of us, regardless of how hard that makes it. So. What does that prove about Jerd? Or the boys who slept with her?”

In unfolding her thought, she’d forgotten to whom she was speaking. The stunned look on Tats’s face stopped her words. She wanted to apologize, to say she hadn’t meant it. But her tongue couldn’t find the lie. After a few moments of his silence, she said quietly, “My bag is full. Let’s take what we have back to the barge.”

He bobbed his head in a brusque nod of agreement, not looking at her. Had she shamed him? Made him angry? Suddenly it all just made her tired, and she didn’t want to understand him or have him understand her. It was all too much trouble. It was so much easier being alone. She stood and led the way back.

She was only about three trees away from where they had left the boat when she saw Nortel coming up a trunk toward them. She halted where she was, moving back on the branch to make room for him. He came up fast and when he reached the branch he halted there, looking from her to Tats and back again, breathing hard with the effort of his climb. “Where have you been?” he demanded. Thymara bridled at the unexpected question.

“Picking fruit,” Tats replied before she could say anything.

“How can you think that’s fair?” he asked Tats. “You heard what Greft said. We all agreed. She gets to make her decision and then we all abide by it.”

“I didn’t—” Tats began, but Thymara raised a sudden hand, halting his words. She looked from one to the other. “What Greft said,” she repeated, making the words a demand for clarification.