the sons and daughters of the wealthier Rain Wild Trader families were living amongst them, behaving as if they were artists but creating nothing save noise, traffic and a wild reputation for the Bird Nests. Their families were able to pay much higher rents than her father could afford. The wealthy folk who had holiday homes among them demanded safer walkways and wider branch roads, and so they were taxed accordingly. Shops and cafés moved into adjacent trees. The artists who had established themselves were delighted. They were becoming wealthy and well known. ‘But the high rents pushed us right out. We couldn’t afford to pay the taxes any more, let alone eat in the cafés. We had to sell off all the art my father had received as barter, take what coin we could get, and move up again.’ She craned her head and looked up. A few yellow lights in tiny cottages flickered above. ‘I suppose the next time we get pushed out we’ll end up in the Tops. You get light every day up there, but I hear the rooms rock in the wind almost all the time.’
‘I don’t think I’d like all that swaying,’ Tats agreed.
‘Well, no. But I like it here in the Cricket Cages. We get plenty of rainwater, so we don’t have to haul it ourselves or buy it from the water-carriers. My mother wove us a bathing hammock when we first moved here, and it’s lovely in the summer when the water is naturally warm. Moss grows along the edges, and we get visits from little frogs and butterflies and basking lizards. And it isn’t so far to climb to find the flowers that reach for the sunlight. When I can get those, my mother takes them down trunk to sell, in the markets where they hardly ever see the flowers from the Tops.’
As if the mention of her had summoned her, her mother’s voice, sharp and angry, split the peace of the evening. ‘Thymara! Come in this minute. Now!’
Thymara flowed to her feet. There was something in her mother’s voice, something beyond ordinary irritation. A note of fear or danger that set Thymara’s teeth on edge.
‘Give me a moment,’ Tats said and began to untangle himself from the tree limb.
‘Thymara!’
‘I have to go now!’ she exclaimed. She took two swift steps toward him. She heard Tats’ gasp as she braced her hands on his shoulders and leapt lightly over him, landed on the still-swaying branch and then scampered across it to the trunk. Something her father had once said of her came back to her. You were made for the canopy, Thymara. Never be ashamed of that! Yet this was the first time she had ever felt a strange pride. Her agility had shocked Tats. His shoulders had been warm when she touched them.
‘Can I see you tomorrow?’ he called after her.
‘Probably!’ she replied. ‘When my chores are done.’
She went down the trunk swiftly, ignoring the safety line and the foot notches to dig in her claws and rapidly descend. When she reached the two outstretched branches that supported her family’s home, she scuttled along them and then swung down to slip in her bedchamber window. She landed on the fat leaf-stuffed cushion that was her bed; it completely occupied the floor of the chamber. A moment later she was in the main room. ‘I’m home,’ she announced breathlessly.
Her mother was sitting cross-legged in the centre of the small room. ‘What are you trying to do to me?’ she demanded furiously. ‘Is this your idea of revenge, after your father all but forbade me to speak about the offer? Do you seek to shame your whole family? What will folk think of us? What will they think of me? Will you be happy when they drive us all away from Trehaug completely? Isn’t it bad enough that because of you we have to live as close to the edge as we possibly can? Is that why you think it’s fine for you to shame us completely?’
There was a flower in the canopy Tops called an archer bloom. It was lovely and fragrant, but at the slightest touch to the stem, tiny thorns launched to pepper the assailant. Her mother’s questions stung her like a storm of thorns, each striking her and giving her no chance to react. When her mother paused for breath, her chest was heaving and her cheeks were pink.
‘I did nothing wrong! I did nothing to shame myself or my family!’ Thymara was so shocked she could scarcely get the words out.
Her words only woke more outrage in her mother’s eyes. They seemed to bulge from their sockets. ‘What! Will you sit there and lie to me? Shameless! Shameless! I saw you, Thymara! Everyone saw you, sitting up there in plain sight, so cosy with that man. You know it is forbidden to you! How can you let him call on you, how can you let him keep company with you, unchaperoned?’
Thymara’s mind scrambled to make sense of her mother’s words. Then, ‘Tats? You mean Tats? He works for Da, sometimes, at the market. You’ve seen him, you know him!’
‘I do indeed! Tattooed across his face like a criminal, and all know him as the son of a thief and a murderer! Bad enough that one such as you allows a man to call on her, but you have to pick the lowest of the low to dally with!’
‘Mother! I … he is just the boy who helps Father sometimes at the trunk market! Just a friend. That’s all. I know that I can never … that no one can ever court me. Who would want to? You’re being unfair. And foolish. Look at me? Do you really think that Tats came to court me?’
‘Why not? Who else would have him? And he is probably thinking that you’ll get no better offer, so you’ll take what pleasure you can get, with whomever you can get! Do you know what our neighbours would do to us if you became pregnant? Do you know what the Council would decree, for all of us? Oh, I tried to warn your father, from the very beginning, that it would come to this. But no, he never listens to a word I say! What can it come to, I asked him, what kind of life can she have? And he said, “No, no, I’ll look after her, I’ll keep her from being a burden, I’ll keep her from bringing shame on us”. Well, where is he now? Turned down the offer I had for you, without ever hearing me out, and then off he goes and leaves me here alone to deal with you, while you go flaunting yourself through the by-ways!’
‘Mother, I did nothing wrong. Nothing. We sat and we talked. That was it. Tats was not courting me. We had a conversation, and as you yourself said, we were out in plain sight of everyone. Tats was not courting me, he doesn’t think of me that way. No one will ever think of me that way.’ Thymara’s voice had started out low and controlled but by her final words her throat was so tight that she could scarcely squeeze the words out in a high-pitched whisper. Tears, rare for her and painfully acid, squeezed from the corners of her eyes and stung the scaled edges of her eyelids. She dashed them away angrily. Suddenly, she couldn’t stand to be in the same room with the woman who had given birth to her and hated her ever since. ‘I’m going to go sit outside. Alone.’
‘Stay where I can see you,’ was her mother’s harsh reply.
Thymara didn’t deign to give her a response.
But neither did she defy her. She climbed up onto the branch that was the main support for their home and walked out toward the end. That, she knew, would satisfy her mother. The branch led nowhere, and if her mother truly wanted to be sure she was alone, all she had to do was look out of the window. Thymara went farther out than she usually ventured and then sat down, both legs on the same side of the branch. She swung her feet and looked down, daring herself. If she focused her eyes one way, she became aware of the bright lights that sparkled below her. Each light was a lit window. Some were as bright as lanterns; others were distant stars in the depths of the forest below her.
If she focused her eyes another way, she saw the bars and stripes of darkness that latticed the forest below her. A falling body would not plummet straight down to the distant forest floor. No. Her body would strike and rebound and despite all her resolves, snatch and cling, however briefly, to every branch she struck on the way down. There was no swift plummet to
