CARSON HAD DECIDED to act on the assumption that Greft was attempting to head back to Trehaug. “Where else could he go?” he asked Sedric. “He’s a man in failing health, alone. He doesn’t have a lot of choice. One of his options was to remain with us. He decided against that. He must have felt there was too much hostility for him to endure. That makes me wonder why he’d try to get back to Trehaug. I doubt he’d be treated any better there. He’s looking at traveling a long, hard way alone, to die among the people who rejected him in the first place.”

Sedric nodded silently. He had a guilty theory of his own, one he kept to himself. He hoped he was wrong.

They had been backtracking through the reeds and shallow water, though how Carson knew where to go, Sedric could not have said. For days, the scenery had seemed unendingly the same to him. From time to time, Carson would say something like, “See, the dragons trampled that area flat when they came through here,” or, “Remember that stand of rushes with the three blackbird nests in a row? We passed that late yesterday.”

They had come to an area of scrubby brush on stilt roots. There was no solid ground anywhere, but the feeble current pushed floating branches and twigs and reeds up around the stilt roots where they formed soggy mattresses of plant material. This seemed to be the favorite bedding spots for gallators. The immense, toothy salamanders dozed in clusters in such places, the pallid bodies marked with brilliant stripes of blue and red. The wet-skinned creatures had proven especially vulnerable to dragon venom. Just touching the moist skin of a gallator was death for most creatures, but the dragons ate them with no apparent ill effects.

This area Sedric did remember clearly. Yesterday, the dragons had preceded them, devouring a number of gallators and sending the rest into hiding. But today the dozing creatures did not flee; instead, they lifted their heads and regarded the small boat with hungry interest. Sedric glanced around for Spit, only to discover that this was the time when the dragon had chosen to lag behind. “Carson?” he hissed in quiet warning as two of the gallators launched silently into the water and vanished from sight beneath the surface.