LITMIR.BIZ

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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 Wilds 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’ 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 that 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.’

      ‘Dragon keepers,’ Thymara said softly. She looked away from Tats and tried to imagine what it would be like. From what she had seen of the dragons, they were not easily managed creatures. ‘I think it would be dangerous work. And that’s why they’re looking for orphans or people without family. So that no one complains when a dragon eats you.’

      Tats squinted at her. ‘Seriously?’

      ‘Well …’

      ‘Thymara!’ Her mother’s sharp call broke the night. ‘It’s getting late. Come in.’

      She was startled. Her mother seldom called her name in public, let alone desired her presence. ‘Why?’ she called down to her. Perhaps her father had come home and wanted her. She couldn’t recall that her mother had ever called her back into the house.

      ‘Because it’s late. And I said so. Come inside.’

      Tats eyes had widened. He spoke in a whisper. ‘I knew she didn’t like me. I’d better go, before I get you in trouble.’

      ‘Tats, it’s nothing to do with you. I’m sure of it. You don’t have to go. She probably just has some chores for me.’ In truth, she had no idea why her mother would suddenly summon her back to the house. She knew she should probably go down to where their small dwelling swung gently from the branches that supported it. But she wasn’t inclined to go. When her father wasn’t home, the little rooms seemed uncomfortably small, filled with her mother’s disapproval. A sudden obstinacy, very unlike her usual subservience to her mother, suddenly filled her. She’d go, but not right away. After all, what could her mother do? She’d never come up on the flimsy branches where Thymara and Tats now perched. Her mother disdained even the tree-ways in this part of Trehaug. The Cricket Cages, as this district of tiny homes perched high in the upper reaches of the canopy was called, relied on lightweight bridges and fine trolley lines to ferry its populace from branch to branch. Her mother hated living in such a poor section of Trehaug, but the dangling cottages were affordable. Almost everything was cheaper up here in the higher reaches of the canopy.

      ‘Aren’t you going in?’ Tats asked her quietly.

      ‘No,’ she decided. ‘Not just yet.’

      ‘What were you thinking about, just then?’

      She shrugged. ‘About how much everything has changed.’ She looked over the branch and down at the glittering lights of Trehaug. Their gleams were scattered and broken by the massive trunks and wide-reaching branches of the rainforest. ‘My family wasn’t always poor. Before I was born, when my parents were first married, they lived down there. Way down there. My father was the third son of a Rain Wild Trader. His family had a share of a claim in the old buried city, and they were fairly well-to-do. But then my grandfather died. My father has two older brothers. The eldest inherited the claim, and the next son had the knowledge of how best to manage it. But there really wasn’t enough there to support three families, and my father had to strike out on his own. Sometimes I think that made my mother bitter, even before I was born. I think she’d expected to live an easy life with pretty things, and have handsome children who married well.’

      A strange smile twisted her face. ‘One little detail, and it might have been different for everyone. I think that if my father had been the eldest son and inherited, someone would have offered to marry me by now, even if I had a tail like a monkey and squeaked like a tree rat.’

      A bubble of laughter burst from Tats, startling her. After a moment, she joined in.

      ‘Would you have liked that life better than what you have now?’ His question seemed genuine.

      She snorted at how silly he was. ‘Well, I liked it better when I was younger and we weren’t as poor as we are now.’

      ‘Poor?’

      ‘You know. Hand to mouth. Living in the highest reaches of Trehaug where the branches are thin and the paths so narrow; we didn’t always live up here.’

      ‘You don’t seem poor to me,’ Tats protested.

      ‘Well. We’ve been richer. That’s for sure.’ Thymara’s mind roved back over her early childhood. They had lived well enough, then. ‘My da was a hunter back then, and a pretty good one. He did that for a time. And he hunted meat for the dragons for a while, until the Council stopped paying decent wages. That was when he decided to try being a grower.’

      ‘A grower? Where? There’s no land you can plant in the Rain Wilds.’

      ‘Not all food plants grow on land. That’s what he always says. Lots of the plants that we harvest for food actually grow in the canopy, in pockets of soil in the bends of the trunk, or with air roots, or as parasites on the trees.’ She tried to explain it to Tats, even though the idea of it always made her weary. Instead of wandering the branches, treetops and by-ways of the Rain Wilds, taking meat as he saw it and gathering whatever the canopy offered, her father began to attempt to cultivate a section of the canopy. It was an old idea, but no one had ever been able to make the forest yield predictably for any length of time. But every now and then, someone like her father would think he had it figured out. He had brought together the various food plants and tried to persuade them to grow in the locations he had chosen rather than where Sa had sown them.

      Her father was not the first to attempt it. Others had failed before him. He was merely more dogged, more determined than those who had previously failed. Some folks said that determination was a good thing. Her mother had once told her that it just meant that their family had lived in poverty for more years

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