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’s gasp as she braced her hands on his shoulders and leaped 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 center 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 cozy 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 neighbors 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 byways!”
“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.”