“Leftrin!” Alise gasped, but the captain’s fist had already connected solidly with Greft’s mouth. The force of the blow slammed the keeper up against the deckhouse wall. His head wobbled on his neck, but he managed to pull himself straight and stand up. He glared at the staring bystanders, then deliberately spat blood on Tarman’s deck. Skelly gasped in horror and leaped past him to wipe it up with her sleeve. Greft deliberately leaned closer to Leftrin. Alise had hold of his arm, trying to restrain him, but Thymara knew that it was the captain’s own will that knotted the muscles in his jaw and swelled his chest tight.

“I’m tired of pretending!” Greft said. There was something so disillusioned and broken in his voice that for a moment pity for him swelled her heart. “I thought the Council was finally offering us a chance. I thought there was some sort of a future for me. That’s why I signed up.” He looked around at all of them, and his eyes were accusing.

“I tried to make you all see how it could be. I tried to make you see we could change all of it. But some of you didn’t want any changes.” He glared at Thymara. “And some of you just wanted someone to think for you and tell you what to do!” His accusing eyes came back to Boxter. Kase had stepped up behind his cousin. He’d put a hand on Boxter’s shoulder, but Swarge still hadn’t released him from his hug.

“Sa, how I tried!” Greft shouted the words up into the night. Then he glared at everyone again. “But none of you really listened to me. And then Jess told me why. Told me what a web of lies this whole thing was. Well, now he’s dead and gone, and I don’t think that was an accident. And I heard that some of the dragons were changing their keepers on purpose, had given them blood to make them change. But not Kalo, no. Not for Greft. Nothing ever for Greft. I took care of that monster. I hunted for him, I fed him, I groomed him, I scraped the filth off him. But would he give me one drop of blood, one scale? No. Not one drop to change me, not to put my body right, not to give me something I could sell to make a new life for myself.” He looked around at them, self-righteous and angry. Blood was seeping from his scored flesh. Thymara guessed now that Kalo had seized him in his jaws and flung him, tearing his skin as he did so. It was only surprising that the dragon had not sheared him in two and eaten him.

Greft’s voice was suddenly calm and level. “I’ve known all my life that I wouldn’t get as much as anyone else did. Not respect. Not even time. People like me, like us, we die young. Unless a dragon takes us on and makes sure we don’t. I know that now. I heard Sylve and Harrikin talking about it in the night, talking about waiting now because they’d have maybe hundreds of years together, after their dragons changed them. But not Greft. Not for me. So I went tonight to take what should have been given to me. All the times I groomed him, fed him, you think he’d give me just one scale, just a few drops of blood. But no. No.”

He sighed out through his nose and looked all around at every one of them. He shook his head slowly as he did so, as if he could not believe his bad luck or the harshness of fate that had doomed him to be here.

“I’m going to die,” he said finally. His tone made it their fault. “Things are starting to go wrong inside me. I can feel things going wrong. My gut hurts when I’m hungry and hurts worse when I eat. The shape of my mouth has changed so much that I can’t chew or even close my mouth comfortably. My eyes are dry, but I can’t close my eyelids all the way. Nothing simple is simple anymore. I can’t get enough air through my nose when I try to breathe, and when I breathe through my mouth, my throat dries out until it cracks and I spit blood.” He looked around at them again and his eyes came to rest on Thymara. “That’s my life,” he said quietly. “Or my death. The death of someone who is changing, without a dragon to guide it. The death of someone who was born so Rain Wild touched that I can’t even live to be middle-aged, let alone old.”

Suddenly he was standing alone in their midst, with no one touching him. When he walked away from them, people parted wordlessly to let him pass. Alise stooped down and picked up the small glass bottle that had been dropped. She looked at it, then glanced at Sedric in consternation. “It looks like an ink bottle,” she said.

Sedric shrugged. His mouth was pinched and his face pale. He looked sick. Carson moved closer to him. Alise slowly turned her gaze on Leftrin. “It’s not true, is it? The hunter lied to that boy, didn’t he?”

Leftrin looked at her for a long, silent time. He glanced around at the watching keepers. “Someone thought they could force me to do something like that. Because they knew about Tarman, knew how much wizardwood was in him. But I never agreed to it, Alise. I never agreed to it, and I never planned to do it.”