The Dragon Keeper

  If Leftrin chose that path, he need do no more than find a way to get the ponderously heavy log intact to Chalced. Surely the remains of the half-formed dragon inside it would fetch an amazing price there. Just get the cocoon to Chalced. If he said it quickly, it almost sounded simple, as if it would not involve hoists and pulleys just to move it from where it was wedged and load it on his barge. To say nothing of keeping such a cargo hidden, and also arranging secret transport from the mouth of the Rain Wild River north to Chalced. His river barge could never make such a trip. But if he could arrange it, and if he was neither robbed nor murdered on the trip north or on his way home, then he could emerge from his adventure as a very wealthy man.

  He limped faster. The stinging inside his boot had become a burning. A few blisters he could live with; an open wound would quickly ulcerate and hobble him for weeks.

  As he emerged from the undergrowth into the relatively open space alongside the river, he smelled the smoke of the galley stove and heard the voices of his crew. He could smell flatcakes cooking and coffee brewing. Time to be aboard and away before any of them wondered what their captain had been up to on his morning stroll. Some thoughtful soul had tossed a rope ladder down the bow for him. Probably Swarge. The tillerman always was two thoughts ahead of the rest of the crew. On the bow, silent, hulking Eider was perched on the railing, smoking his morning pipe. He nodded to his captain and blew a smoke ring by way of greeting. If he was curious as to where Leftrin had been or why, he gave no sign of it.

  Leftrin was still pondering the best way to convert the wizardwood log into wealth as he set his muddy foot on the first rung of the ladder. The painted gaze of Tarman’s gleaming black eyes met his own, and he froze. A radical new thought was born in his mind. Keep it. Keep it, and use it for myself and my ship. For several long moments, as he paused on the ladder, the possibilities unfolded in his mind like flowers opening to the early dawn light.

  He patted the side of his barge. “I might, old man. I just might. ” Then he climbed the rest of the way up to his deck, pulled off his leaking boot, and flung it back into the river for it to devour.

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  Day the 15th of the Fish Moon

  Year the 7th of the Reign of the Most Noble and Magnificent Satrap Cosgo

  Year the 1st of the Independent Alliance of Traders

  From Detozi, Keeper of the Birds, Trehaug

  To Erek, Keeper of the Birds, Bingtown

  Within the sealed scroll, a message of Great Importance from the Rain Wild Traders’ Council at Trehaug to the Bingtown Traders’ Council. You are invited to send whatever representatives you wish to be present on the occasion of the Rain Wild dragons emerging from their cases. At the direction of the most exalted and queenly dragon Tintaglia, the cases will be exposed to sunlight on the 15th day of the Greening Moon, forty-five days hence. The Rain Wild Traders’ Council looks forward with pleasure to your attendance as our dragons emerge.

  Erek!

  Clean your nesting boxes and paint the walls of your coop with fresh limewash. The last two birds I received from you were infested with lice and spread it to one of my coops.

  Detozi

  Chapter Two The Hatch

  Luck brought Thymara to the right place at the right time. It was the best good luck that had ever favored her, she thought, as she clung to the lowest branch of a tree at the edge of the serpents’ beach. She did not usually accompany her father down to the lower levels of Trehaug, let alone make the journey to Cassarick. Yet here she was, and on the very day that Tintaglia had decreed that the dragon cocoons be uncovered. She glanced at her father, and he grinned at her. No. Not luck, she suddenly knew. He had known how much she would enjoy being here, and he scheduled their jaunt accordingly. She grinned back at her father with all the confidence of her eleven years and then returned her gaze to the scene below her. Her father’s cautioning voice reached her from where he perched like a bird on a thicker branch closer to the trunk of the immense tree that they shared.

  “Thymara. Be careful. They’re newly hatched. And hungry. If you fell down there, they might mistake you for just another piece of meat. ”

  The scrawny girl dug her black claws deeper into the bark. She knew he was only half teasing. “Don’t worry, Da. I was made for the canopy. I won’t fall. ” She was stretched out along a drooping branch that no other experienced limbsman would have trusted. But she knew it would hold her. Her belly was pressed to it as if she were one of the slender brown tree lizards that shared her perch. And like them, she clung with the full length of her body, fingers and toes dug into the wide cracks in the bark, thighs hugging the limb. Her glossy black hair was confined to a dozen tight braids that were knotted at the back of her neck. Her head was much lower than her feet. Her cheek was pressed tight to the rough skin of the tree as her gaze devoured the drama unfolding below her.

  Thymara’s tree was one of uncounted thousands that made up the Rain Wild Forest. For days and days in all directions, the forest spread out on either side of the wide gray Rain Wild River. Close to Cassarick and for several days upriver, picket trees predominated. The wide-spread horizontal branches were excellent for home building. Mature picket trees dropped questing roots from their branches down to the earth far below, so that each tree established its own “picket fence” around its root structure, anchoring the tree securely in the muddy soil. The forest that surrounded Cassarick was much denser than that around Trehaug. The horizontal branches of the picket trees were far more stable than those Thymara was accustomed to. They made climbing and moving from tree to tree almost ridiculously easy. Today she had ventured out onto the unsupported end branch of one, to gain an unobstructed view of the spectacle below her.

  Before her, on the other side of the mudflats, the panorama of moving water stretched flat and milky. She had a foggy glimpse of the distant, dense forest on the opposite side of the river. Summer had awakened a million shades of green there. The sound of the river’s rush, of gravel churning beneath its opaque waters, was the constant music of her life. Closer to the shore, on Thymara’s side of the river, the waters were shallow, and strips of exposed gravel and clay broke up the current’s access to the flat clay banks below her tree. Last winter, this section of the riverbank had been hastily reinforced with timber bulkheads; the floods of winter had not been kind to them, but most of the logs remained.

  For several acres, the bare riverbank was littered with serpent cases like drift logs. Once the area had been covered with tufts of coarse grass and prickly brush, but all that had been destroyed with the wave of sea serpents that had arrived last winter. She had not seen that migration, but she had heard about it. No one who lived in the tree cities of the Rain Wilds had escaped the telling of that tale. A herd, a tangle of more than one hundred immense serpents, had come up the Rain Wild River, escorted by a liveship and shepherded by a glorious blue-and-silver dragon. The young Elderling Selden Vestrit had been there to greet the serpents and welcome them back to their ancestral home. He had supervised the ranks of Rain Wilders who had turned out to assist the serpents in forming their cases. For most of that winter, he had remained in Cassarick, checking on the dormant serpents, seeing that the cases were kept well covered with leaves and mud to insulate them from cold and rain and even sunlight. And today, she had heard, he was here again, to witness the hatch.

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  She hadn’t seen him, much as she would have liked to. Chances were good that he was over at the central part of the hatching grounds, on the raised dais that had been set up for the Rain Wild Council members and other important dignitaries. It was crowded over there, with robed Traders mobbed around the dais, and many of the general population festooning the trees like a flock of migratory birds. She was glad her father had brought her here, to the far end of the hatching area, where there might be fewer cases but also fewer people to block her view. Still, it would have been nice t
o be close enough to the dais to hear the music and hear the speeches, and to see a real Elderling.

  Just to think of Selden Vestrit swelled her heart with pride. He was Bingtown stock, of Trader descent, just like her, but the dragon Tintaglia had touched him and he had begun to change into an Elderling, the first Elderling that any living person had ever seen. There were two other Elderlings now, Selden’s sister Malta and Reyn Khuprus, himself of the Rain Wilds. She sighed. It was all like a fairy tale, come true. Sea serpents and dragons and Elderlings had returned to the Cursed Shores. And in her lifetime, she would see the first hatch of dragons within anyone’s memory. By this afternoon, the young dragons would have emerged and taken flight.

  The dull gray cases that now littered the riverbank for as far as Thymara could see each held what had been a serpent. The layers of leaves, twigs, and mulch that had covered them all winter and spring had been cleared away from them. Some of the cases were immense, as long as a river barge. Others were smaller, like log sections. Some of the cases gleamed fat and silvery. Others, however, had collapsed or sagged in on themselves. They were a dull gray color and to Thymara’s sensitive nose, they stank of dead reptile. The serpents that had entered those cases would never emerge as young dragons.

  As the Rain Wild Traders had promised Tintaglia, they had done their best to tend the cocooned serpents under Selden’s supervision. Additional layers of clay had been smoothed over any case that seemed thin, and then leaves and branches had been heaped protectively over them. Tintaglia had decreed that the cases had to be protected not just from winter storms, but from the early spring sunlight, too. The dragons had cocooned late in the year. Light and warmth would stimulate them to hatch, and so she had wished them to remain covered until high summer, to give the dragons more time to develop. The Rain Wild guardians and the Tattooed—former Jamaillian slaves, now freed—had done their best. That had been part of the bargain the Rain Wild Traders had struck with the dragon Tintaglia. She had agreed to guard the mouth of the Rain Wild River against incursions by the Chalcedeans; in return, the Traders had promised to help the serpents reach their old cocooning grounds and tend them while they matured inside the cases. Both sides had kept their bargains. Today would see the fruit of that agreement as a new generation of dragons, dragons allied with Bingtown and the Rain Wilds, rose in their first flight.

  The winter had not been kind to the dragon cases. Tearing winds and pounding rains had taken their toll on them. Worst, once the storm-swollen river had swept through the cocooning grounds, damaging many of the cases as it rolled them up against others or ate away at the protective clay. The count taken after the flood had subsided showed that a full score of the cocoons had been swept away. Of the seventy-nine cocooned dragons, only fifty-nine remained, and some were so battered that it was doubtful the occupants had survived. Flooding was a familiar hazard of living in the Rain Wilds, but it grieved Thymara all the same. What, she wondered, had become of those missing cases and the half-formed dragons within them? Had they been eaten by the river? Washed all the way to the salt sea?

  The river ruled this forested world. Wide and gray, its current and depth fluctuated wildly. No real banks confined it. It flowed where it wished, and nowhere in Thymara’s world was “dry ground” a meaningful phrase. What was forest floor today might be swamp or slough tomorrow. The great trees alone seemed impervious to the river’s shifting flow, but even that was not a certainty. The Rain Wilders built only in the largest and stoutest trees; their homes and walkways bedecked the middle branches and trunks of the forest trees like sturdy garlands. Their swaying bridges spanned from tree to tree, and closer to the ground, where the trunks and limbs were thickest, sturdy structures housed the most important markets and provided dwelling space for the wealthiest families. The higher one went in the trees, the smaller and more lightweight the structures became. Rope-and-vine bridges joined the neighborhoods, and staircases spiraled up the main trunks of the huge trees. As one ascended, the bridges and walkways became flimsier. All Rain Wilders had to have some level of limbsman skills to move throughout their settlement. But few had Thymara’s skill.

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  Thymara had no trepidations about her precarious roost. Her mind was occupied and her silver-gray eyes filled with the wonders unfolding below her.

  The sun had risen high enough that its slanting rays could reach over the tall branches of the forest and rest on the serpent cocoons littering the beach. It was not an exceedingly warm day for summer, but some of the cases had begun to steam and smoke as the sun warmed them. Thymara focused her attention on the large case directly below her. The rising steam reached her, carrying a reptilian stink with it. She narrowed her nostrils and gazed in rapture. Below her, the wizardwood of the log was losing it solidity.

  Thymara was familiar with wizardwood; for years her people had used it as exceptionally strong timber. It was hard, far beyond what other people called “hardwood. ” Working it could blunt an ax or dull a saw in less than a morning. But now the silvery-gray “wood” of the dragon case below was softening, steaming and bubbling, sagging to mold around the still form within it.

  As she watched, the form twitched and then gave a lively wriggle. The wizardwood tore like a membrane. The liquefied cocoon was being absorbed by the skeletal creature inside the log. As Thymara watched, the dragon’s meager flesh plumped and color washed through it. It was smaller than she had expected it to be, given the size of the case and what she had heard of Tintaglia. A cloud of stink and moisture wafted up, and then the blunt-nosed head of a dragon thrust clear of the sagging log.

  Outside!

  Thymara felt a wave of vertigo as the dragon-speak touched her mind. Her heart leaped like a bird bursting into upward flight. She could hear dragons! Ever since Tintaglia had appeared, it had become clear that some folk could “hear” what a dragon said, while others heard only roaring, hissing, and a sinister rattling. When Tintaglia had first appeared in Trehaug and spoken to the crowd, some had heard her words right away. Others had shared nothing of her thoughts. It thrilled Thymara beyond telling to know that if a dragon ever deigned to speak to her, she would hear it. She edged lower on the branch.

  “Thymara!” her father warned her.

  “I’m careful!” she responded without even looking at him.

  Below her, the young dragon had opened a wide red maw and was tearing at the decaying fibers of the log that bound her. Her. Thymara could not say how she knew that. For a newly hatched thing, her teeth were certainly impressive. Then the creature ripped a mouthful of the sodden wizardwood free, tossed her head back, and swallowed visibly. “She’s eating the wizardwood!” she called to her father.

  “I’ve heard they do that,” he called back. “Selden the Elderling said that when he witnessed Tintaglia’s emergence, her cocoon melted right into her skin. I think they derive strength from it. ”

  Thymara didn’t reply. Her father was obviously right. It did not seem possible that an enclosure that had held a dragon would now fit inside the belly of one, but the dragon below her seemed intent on trying to consume it all. She continued to struggle free of the confining case as she ate her way out of it, ripping off fibrous chunks and swallowing them whole. Thymara grimaced in sympathy. It seemed tragic that something so newly born could be so ravenously hungry. Thank Sa she had something she could eat.

  A collective gasp from the watching crowd warned Thymara. She clutched her tree limb more tightly just in time. The gush of pushed air that swept past her nearly tore her loose and left her branch swaying wildly. An instant later, there was a huge thump that vibrated through her tree as Tintaglia landed.

  The queen dragon was blue and silver and blue again, depending on how the sunlight struck her. She was easily three times the size of the young dragons who were hatching. Watching her fold her wings was like watching a ship lower its sails. She tucked them neatly to her body, then folded them tight to fit
as closely against her as a bird’s wings so that her scaled feathers seemed a seamless part of her skin. She dropped the limp deer that hung from her jaws. “Eat,” she instructed the young dragons. She did not pause to watch them, but moved off to the river. She lowered her great head and drank the milky water. Sated, she raised her head and partially opened her wings. Her powerful hindquarters flexed; she sprang high, and two battering beats of her wide wings caught her before she could plummet back to earth. Wings beating heavily, she rose slowly from the riverbank and flew off, upriver, hunting again.

  “Oh. ” Her father’s deep voice was heavy with pity. “What a shame. ”

  The dragon below Thymara was still tearing sticky strips of wizardwood free from her case and devouring them. A gray swathe of it stuck to her muzzle. She pawed at it with the small claws on her stubby front leg. To Thymara, she looked like a baby with porridge smeared on its cheeks and hair. The dragon was smaller than she had expected, and less developed, but surely she would grow to fulfill her promise. Thymara glanced at her father in puzzlement, and then followed his gaze.