Since that day, two years ago, they’d seen him often. When her father could make work for him, he did, and Tats was always grateful for whatever they could spare. He was a handy fellow, even here in the high canopy where folk who had been born on the ground never ventured. Often enough, Thymara welcomed his company. She had few friends. The children who had socialized with her when she was small had long grown up, wedded, and commenced new lives as parents and partners. Thymara had been left behind in her strangely extended adolescence. It was oddly comforting to have found a friend who was as single as she was. She wondered why he wasn’t married or at least courting by now.
Her thoughts had wandered. She only realized that her silence had grown long when he asked her, ‘Did you want to be alone tonight? I don’t intend to bother you.’
‘No, you’re no bother, Tats. I was just taking some time to myself to think.’
‘About what?’ He settled himself more firmly on the branch.
‘I’m considering my options for my future. Not that there are many.’ She managed a laugh.
‘No? Why not?’
She looked at him, wondering if he were teasing. ‘Well, I’m sixteen years old and still living with my parents. No one’s ever made an offer for me and no one ever will. So, either I live with my parents until the end of my days, or I strike out on my own. I know something about hunting, and I know something about gathering. But what I mostly know about both of them is that if I try to go it alone with those as my only skills, I’m going to lead a skimpy life. In the Rain Wilds, it always seems to take at least two people in partnership, working hard, to keep skin and bone together. And I’m always going to be just one.’
Tats looked startled at her flood of words, and a bit uncomfortable. He cleared his throat. ‘Why do you think you’re always going to have to make it on your own?’ More quietly he added, ‘You talk about living with your parents like it’s terrible. Me, I’d love to have a mother or a father to stay with.’ He gave a short laugh. ‘I can’t even imagine having both.’
‘Living with my parents isn’t terrible,’ she admitted. ‘Though sometimes, I know my mother wishes I weren’t around. Da is always good to me; he lets me know I’m welcome to stay for always. I suppose that when he brought me back home, he knew then that I’d probably be underfoot for the rest of my life.’
Tats knit his brows. His confused scowl made the spiderweb across his cheek crawl strangely. ‘Brought you back home? Where had you gone?’
It was Thymara’s turn to feel awkward. She’d always supposed that everyone knew what she was and the story behind it. Any Rain Wilder would be able to tell just by looking at her. But Tats wasn’t Rain Wilds born, and she and her kind were not something the Rain Wilders spoke about to outsiders. Just as some of them never spoke to her or looked directly at her, so her existence was not a topic for casual conversation with outsiders. That Tats didn’t know meant that most people still considered him an outsider. He truly didn’t know. The newness of that thought stung her. She gritted her teeth in a strange smile and held up her hand to him. ‘Notice anything?’
He leaned closer and peered at her hand. ‘You cracked one of your claws?’
She choked on a laugh, and suddenly understood something about him that she never had before. He’d acted friendly toward her because he truly didn’t know better.
‘Tats, what you should notice is that I have claws. Not fingernails. Claws like a toad. Or a lizard.’ She sank them into the branch and drew them back toward her, leaving four stripes of torn bark. ‘Claws make me what I am.’
‘I’ve seen lots of Rain Wilds folk with claws.’
She stared at him. Then she said, ‘No, you haven’t. You’ve seen lots of folk with black nails. Even thick black nails. But not claws. Because when a baby is born with claws instead of fingernails, the parents and the midwife know what they have to do. And they do it.’
He hitched closer to her on the branch. ‘Do what?’ he asked hoarsely.
She looked away from his intent stare, into the interlacing branches that webbed the night. ‘Get rid of it. Put it somewhere, away from where people go. And leave it there.’
‘To die?’ He was shocked.
‘Yes, to die. Or be eaten by something, a tree cat or a big snake.’ She glanced back at him and found she couldn’t meet his horrified stare. It seemed accusing, and it made her feel ungrateful, as if she were being disloyal to talk about what happened to deformed children. ‘Sometimes they strangle the baby or smother it so it doesn’t suffer too long. And then they drop it in the river. It depends on the midwife, I guess. My midwife just put me out of the way; wedged me into a forking branch away from any path and hurried back to my mother, who was bleeding more than she should.’ She cleared her throat. Tats was staring at her, his mouth slightly ajar. For the first time, she noticed that one of his middle bottom teeth slightly leaned past its neighbour. She glanced away from her rapt listener.
‘The midwife didn’t know my father had followed her. I was not their first child, but I was the first one to be born alive. Da says he just couldn’t stand to let go of me, that he felt I deserved a chance. So he followed the midwife and he brought me back home, even though he knew a lot of people would say he was doing wrong.’
‘Doing wrong? Why?’
She looked back at him, wondering if he were teasing her. He had pale eyes, blue or grey depending on the time of day. But they never glowed. Not like hers. They looked at her without guile. His earnest look almost exasperated her. ‘Tats, how can you not know these things? You’ve lived in the Rain Wilds for, what, six years? A lot of Rain Wilds children are born, well, touched by the Wilds. And as they grow, they become even more different. So, well, people had to draw the line somewhere. Because, if you’re too different when you’re first born, if you already have scales and claws, then who knows what you’ll grow to be? And if the ones like me married and had children, well those children would likely be even less close to human when they were born, and might grow to be Sa knows what.’
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 any more. Now you’re just, well, people that 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