Leftrin leaned over the railing and looked down. There was almost always a sandbar whenever two bodies of moving water met—always a delta of some sort. Tarman knew that, as did every riverman aboard him. Tarman knew it, and Tarman never ran aground. Hadn’t for years, even before Leftrin had had the opportunity to modify him. Yet there they were, stuck fast in mud, with the ship making no effort at all to free himself. It made no sense.

He leaned on the railing, growled deep in his throat. “Tarman. What are you doing?”

He felt no response from the ship that he could decipher. He was well and truly wedged on the muddy bottom.

“Captain?” It was Hennesey, confusion all over his face.

“I don’t know,” he replied quietly to the mate’s unvoiced question. He gave an exasperated sigh. “Get the extra poles out. The keepers may as well earn their keep today. Let’s get off this mudbank and back on our way.”

“Aye, sir,” Hennesey responded and began to shout his relay of the orders. Leftrin gave the ship’s railing a brief squeeze. “We’ll have you off this bar and under way again soon enough,” he promised Tarman quietly. But as he lifted his hands away, he wondered if he felt assent or amusement from his ship.

THE KEEPERS GATHERED on the forward deck, summoned by Hennesey’s shouted orders. Thymara had been working in the galley, trying to scrub ancient burned-on residue from the bottoms of the ship’s pots, when the sudden lurch had tossed her against the galley table. She’d hurried out to see what the fuss was about and was shocked to find they were stuck. It had never happened before: they had passed numerous small tributaries feeding into the Rain Wild River. Some had been small streams wending through the trees and out to dump into the river. Others had been wide rivers cutting their own boggy paths through the forest before adding their waters to the river. Tarman never got stuck in any of their deltas. But this was different.

To the left was an immense river with a wide, free-running channel down its center. It was obvious that it had recently been a flood channel. Damaged trees with dangling limbs and mud-daubed debris lined the shores of it. The color of the water was definitely lighter as it fed into the main channel and dispersed. Up that river was the source of both the torrent that had nearly killed them all and the acid that colored the waters of the Rain Wild River white. The river and the forest that bound it to either side ran off into an unimaginable distance. A bluish shadow against the sky at the far horizon might have been mountains, or her imagination. The dragons were silhouettes against that horizon as they made their way upriver.