Leftrin glared at Skelly. She folded her lips and turned away. He wasn’t angry with her, but the idea that Tarman could be reasoned with only irritated him. He’d gone out on deck in the morning to discover that the barge had only hunkered down deeper into the mud in the night. Leftrin had had every hand he could muster straining to shove the ship off for half the morning. It was impossible to ignore that the barge was deliberately resisting efforts to move him. Every member of the crew knew it; the confusion and worry were painted in their eyes.

The keepers were beginning to pick up on the uneasiness. It was strange for him to realize that every one of them must know that Tarman was a liveship, but so few of them seemed to grasp fully what that meant. They seemed to have forgotten that at his core, Tarman was kin to the dragons and just as capable of being cantankerous. Or dangerous.

Leftrin glanced over at Skelly, who was not looking at him. She had her pole over the side again, positioned and ready for when he might demand another effort from them. He pitched his voice for her ears alone. “I’ll try. You come with me.”

“Hold on to this for me, will you?” she asked Bellin, surrendering her pole to her crewmate. She followed her captain forward. “He showed us Kelsingra,” she whispered. “Why would he do that, and then wedge himself in the mud here? Why would he make us want to go there, and then refuse to budge?”

“I don’t know, but I do know we’re wasting daylight. It won’t be long before the dragons decide they’re ready to go, and we have to be ready to follow them. Not stuck in the mud.”

“What happened with the dragons earlier this morning?”

“No idea. Some sort of a dustup. Not too serious, I suspect, as it was over so fast. Probably just a bit of sorting out as to who’s on top. Happens in any group of creatures, animal or humans. Or dragons.”

He heard his own words and realized a truth he hadn’t before. Dragons were not animals to him in the way that deer or birds were animals. But they weren’t humans, either. It suddenly seemed a very large truth to him. When he had been a boy growing up, he had divided creatures that lived and moved into two groups: animals and humans. And now there were dragons in his life. When, he wondered, had that distinction formed in his mind? When they had begun this expedition, they had been animals to him. Oddly intelligent animals who spoke. But now they were dragons, not animals and not humans.

And what about Tarman, then?