Tats took a deep breath and blew it out, shaking his head. “Thymara, you talk like you don’t think you’re human.”
“Well,” she said, and then stopped. For a time, she chased words around inside her mind. Maybe I’m not. Did she believe that? Of course not. Well, maybe not. What was she then, if not human? But if she was human, how could she have claws?
Tats spoke again before she could find words. “You don’t look that much stranger to me than most of the folk in the Rain Wilds. I’ve seen people here with a lot more scales and fringe than you have. Not that it bothers me now. When I was little, when I first came here, you were a pretty scary bunch. Not anymore. Now you’re just, well, people who are marked. Just like Tattooed were marked.”
“Your owners marked you. To say you were a slave.”
He flashed white teeth at her in a grin that denied her words. “No. They marked me to try to make people believe they owned me.”
“I know, I know,” she said quickly. It was a difference that many of the former slaves insisted on. She didn’t understand why it was so important to them, but it obviously was. She was willing to let him explain it however he liked. “But my point is that someone did it to you. Before then, you were just like everyone else. But me, I was born this way.” She turned her hand over and regarded her black claws curving in toward her palm. “Always different. Not fit for marriage.” She lowered her voice and looked away from him as she added, “Not even fit to live.”
He didn’t reply to her words. Instead he said quietly, “Your ma just came out and looked up here at us. She’s still down there, staring at me.” He shifted a tiny bit, ducking his shaggy head and bowing his shoulders in toward his narrow chest as if that would make him invisible. “She doesn’t like me, does she?”
Thymara shrugged. “Right now, it’s me that she really doesn’t like. We had a, well, a family disagreement earlier. My da and I came home from gathering, and my mother said that someone had made an offer for me. Not a marriage offer, but a work offer. So Da said I had work already and, well, she got angry and wouldn’t even say what the offer had been.” She sprawled back on the branch and sighed. The Rain Wild night was deepening around them. Lamps were being kindled in the little dangling houses. As far as she could see, the scattered sparks of the upper reaches of Trehaug sparkled through the network of branches and leaves. She shifted onto her belly and looked down; there, the lights were thicker and brighter in the more prosperous sections of the tree-built city. The lamplighters were at work now, illuminating the bridges that spanned the trees like glittering necklaces strung through the forest. Almost every evening it seemed there were more lights. Six years ago there had been a flood of Tattooed to swell the populations of Trehaug and Cassarick. And since then more and more outsiders had come. She’d heard that the little trading villages downriver had grown as well.
The light-sprinkled forest below was beautiful. And it was hers, yet it would never be hers. She gritted her teeth and spoke through them. “It’s frustrating. I’ve got few enough choices, and my mother is holding one back from me.” She glanced up at the skinny boy who shared the branch with her.
Tats’s grin, always startling in how it changed his face, suddenly broke through. “I know what your offer is. I think.”
“You know what?”
“I know what the offer was. Because I heard about it, too. That was one of the reasons I came up here tonight, to ask you and your da what you both thought of it. Because you’ve seen more of the dragons than I have.”
She sat up so suddenly that Tats gasped. But Thymara knew she was in no danger of falling. “What was the offer?” she demanded.
His face lit with enthusiasm. “Well, there was a fellow who was posting notices at every trunk market. He tacked one up and then read it to me. According to him, the Rain Wild Council is looking for workers, young, healthy workers, ‘with few attachments.’ Meaning no family, he said.” Tats paused suddenly in his excited telling. “So I guess that couldn’t be your offer, could it? Because you’ve got family.”
“Just tell,” Thymara demanded brusquely.
“Well, here is the gist of it. The dragons are getting to be too much trouble over at Cassarick. They’ve done some bad stuff, scaring people and acting up, and the Council has decided they have to be moved. So they’re looking for people to move them away from Cassarick. They need people to herd them along and get food for them, that sort of thing. And resettle them, and keep them from coming back.”