For a moment he was silent and uncomfortable. Then, “Yes,” he blustered. “It does. Because it would show that you cared for me as much as I care for you. Right now, what we do, it’s like teasing me. I feel like a fool when you suddenly stop me and say no as if I’m a child begging for another sweet. When people love each other, one doesn’t say no to the other.”

His absolute certainty took her breath away. “Married people say no to each other all the time!” she insisted, thinking of her parents’ frequent quarrels. Then she stopped, wondering if that was so. Her father and mother had disagreed often, but was that true of other long-married folk?

“I’m tired of you making a fool of me, Thymara.” Tats turned away from her.

“I’m not trying to make a fool of you,” she hissed after him. “I just don’t want to get pregnant! Can’t you understand that?”

“I understand that you don’t care enough about me to want to take a chance. We both know it’s very unlikely I’d get you with child. But you don’t care enough about me to risk even that small chance!”

She drew breath to speak, and then wondered what she could say. It was true. He was right. She liked Tats, even loved him a little, and his touch sent her heart racing and warmed every inch of her skin. But when she weighed that pleasure against the chance that she’d get pregnant, her blood cooled and her belly tightened with dread—as it did now. She tried to find something to say, some way to tell him what she felt.

At that moment, a dragon’s roar of outrage pierced the night. Thymara felt the entire ship shudder under her, and she heard the querulous sounds of people jolted awake from a sound sleep.

Then the roar was followed by a man’s yell of terror.

She heard the slam of a stateroom door, and Leftrin shouted, “Hennesey! Swarge! Eider! Lanterns! What’s going on out there?”

There was another roar. This time she recognized the dragon’s voice. It was Kalo’s. She heard a high-pitched scream that wavered in the night, and then the sound of a loud splash not far from the ship. Kalo’s outraged words shocked her. “You are no keeper of mine, Greft! Never again will I speak to you! Never again will you touch me!”

“Man overboard!” shouted Skelly.