Dragon Keeper Read online

  “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 an instant death there.

  She’d learned that when she was eleven. It was strange. She remembered that day in fragments. It had begun with an encounter at the trunk market. As she recalled it now, it was the last time she had ever brought her mother flowers from the Top to sell at the market and accompanied her there. The trunk markets were the best places to sell. Close to the trunk of the trees, the platforms were large and they were often the crossroads for hanging bridges from other trees. The traffic was good, and of course, the farther down one went, the wealthier the passing customers. The flowers she had gathered were deep purple and brilliant pink, as large as her head and brimming with fragrance. Their petals were thick and waxy, and bright yellow stamen and sepals extended past them. They were bringing a good price and twice her mother had smiled at her as she pocketed silver coins.

  Thymara had been squatting beside her mother’s trading mat when she noticed that a pair of slipper-shod feet below a blue Trader’s robe had remained in front of her, unmoving, for quite a time. She looked up into an old man’s face. He scowled at her and took a step back, but his blunt, scolding words were for her mother. “Why did you keep such a girl? Look at her, her nails, her ears—she will never bear! You should have exposed her and tried for another. She eats today but offers us no hope for tomorrow. She is a useless life, a burden upon us all.”

  “It was her father’s will that she live, and he prevailed in it,” her mother said briefly. She lowered her eyes in shame before the old man’s rebuke. By chance, her gaze met Thymara’s. She had been staring up at her, hurt that her mother offered so poor a defense of her. Perhaps her look stabbed a drop of pity from her mother’s shriveled heart. “She works hard,” she told the old man. “Sometimes she goes with her father to gather some days, and when she does, she brings home almost as much as he does.”

  “Then she should go out daily to gather,” he replied severely. “So that her efforts may replenish the resources she consumes. Everything is dear here in the Rain Wilds. Have you lost sight of that?”

  “And a child’s life is most dear of all,” her father had said, coming up behind the old man. He had come down to meet them at the end of their day’s trading. He had just come from the canopy; his clothes were bark smeared and leaf stained from his climbing. Thymara was far too old to be carried, but her father had scooped her up and carried her off with him as he strode away from the market. The carry basket on his other shoulder was half full. Her mother had hastily rolled up her mat with their unsold wares inside it and hurried along the walkway to catch up with them.

  “Stupid, sanctimonious old man!” her father growled. “And what, I’d like to know, does he do to be worth what he eats? How could you let him speak of Thymara like that?”

  “He was a Trader, Jerup.” Her mother glanced back, almost fearfully. “It wouldn’t do to offend him or his family.”

  “Oh, a Trader!” Her father’s voice was scathing with feigned awe. “A man born to position, wealth, and privilege. He earned his place here exactly as any eldest child did; he was wise enough to be first to grow in the right woman’s belly. Is that it?”

  Her mother was panting as she tried to keep up with them. Her father was not a large man but he was wiry and strong as were most gatherers. Even carrying her, he crossed the bridges and climbed the winding stairs that circled the trees’ big trunks with ease. Her mother, burdened only with her market bag, could scarcely keep pace with his angry stride.

  “He saw her claws, Jerup, black and curved like a toad’s. She is only eleven, and already she is scaled like a woman of thirty. He saw the webbing of her toes. He knew she had been marked from birth and it offended him that you had—kept her. He isn’t the only one, Jerup. He simply happened to be old enough and arrogant enough to speak the truth aloud.”

  “Arrogant indeed,” her father said brusquely, and then he had stepped up his pace again, leaving her mother behind.

  On that long ago evening, Thymara had finished her day alone on their tiny veranda, fingering the budding wattles that fringed her jawline. Her knees were drawn up to her chest. Occasionally she flexed her webbed toes, regarding the thick black claws that ended each of her toes. Inside the house, all was silent, the silence that was her mother’s most potent anger. Her father had fled it, to do late bartering with what he had brought home. One could argue with words, but her mother’s silence denied everything. The silence left plenty of room for the old man’s words to echo in her mind.

  Around her, the canopy of the rain forest rustled and bustled with life. Leaves stirred in the wind. Iridescent insects crawled on bark or flew from twig to leaf. The subtle colored lizards and the jewel-toned frogs basked or crawled or simply sat still, pulsing with life. All the living beauty of her forest home surrounded her. Thymara looked out past her curved toenails to the shadowed distance of the swamp that floored her world. She could not see the ground. In the thicker, safer branches below them, the sturdy homes of wealthy people clustered, offering their yellow window light to the gathering night. That, too, was a sort of living beauty.

  She had tried to imagine living somewhere else, some city where the houses were built on the ground and the bright, hot sunlight touched the earth. A place where the ground was hard and dry, and people grew crops in the earth and rode on horses to travel instead of poling a raft or boat. Bingtown, perhaps, where people kept huge animals to pull wheeled carts for them, and no proper lady would think of climbing a tree, let alone spending most of her life in one. Thymara thought of that fabled city and imagined running away to it, but as swiftly as her smile came at the thought, it faded away. Rain Wilders seldom visited Bingtown. Even those of them who were not marked strongly by the Wilds knew that their appearances would attract stares. If Thymara ever went there, she’d have to go cloaked and veiled at all times. Even so, people would stare at her and wonder what she looked like beneath her shrouds. No. That would not be a life to dream about. Strong as her imagination was, Thymara still could not imagine a beautiful or even an ordinary face and body for herself. She had sighed.

  And then, it seemed to her, she had simply leaned forward too far. She remembered that first moment with an odd kind of ecstasy. She had spread out her limbs to the wind’s rush past her, and almost, almost recalled flying. But then the first branch slapped her face stingingly, and then another thicker branch slammed into her midsection. She curled around it, gasping for air, but flipped past a hold and fell, back first, onto the next lower branch. It caught her across the small of her back, and she would have screamed if she’d had air in her lungs. The branch gave and then sprang up, flinging her into the air.

  Instinct saved her life. Her next plummet was through a swathe of finer branches. She clutched at them, hand and foot, as she passed through them, and they sagged down with her, giving her grasping hands time to clamp tight on them. There she clung, mindless but alive, gaspi
ng and then panting, and finally weeping hopelessly. She was too frightened to seek for a better hold, too frightened to open her eyes and look for help or open her mouth and cry out.

  A lifetime later, her father had found her. He had roped up to reach her, and when finally he could touch her, he had tied her body to his, and then painstakingly cut the thin branches that she would not let go of. Even when they no longer served any purpose, she had held tight to those handfuls of twigs and continued to clutch them until she fell asleep that night.

  At dawn her father had woken her and taken her with him for the day’s gathering. That day and every day after, she was always with him. She thought on that now and a chill question rose in her. Had he done so because he thought she had tried to kill herself? Or because he thought her mother had pushed her?

  Had her mother pushed her?

  She tried to recall that moment before the fall. Had a touch from behind given her momentum? Or was it only her own despair drawing her down? She couldn’t decide. She blinked her eyes and ceased trying to recall the truth. The truth didn’t matter. It was a thing that had happened to her, years ago. Let it go.

  She felt the branches of her perch give and smelled her father’s pipe as he ventured out to join her. She spoke without looking at him. “Has she said any more about the offer for me?”

  “No. But I visited down branch, and Gedder and Sindy asked me what decision you had made. I had suspected your mother would brag to Sindy before she had even spoken to you and me about it. The offer is a bad one, Thymara. It’s not for you, and I’m angry that your mother even considered you for it. It’s more than dirty and hard; it’s dangerous to the point of no return.” Her father was scowling, and his words came faster with his cascading anger. “I’m sure you’ve heard talk. The Rain Wild Council has long been weary of pouring resources into feeding the dragons. Tintaglia ceased keeping her end of the bargain long ago, and yet here we are, paying taxes to hire hunters or, worse, bring in sheep and cattle to keep the dragons fed. There is no end in sight to it, either, for all have heard tales of the longevity of dragons, and it is obvious to all that these dragons will never be able to feed themselves. When Selden of the Khuprus and Vestrit Traders was present, he kept the Council soothed by promising them that Tintaglia and her new mate must eventually come and help with the problem. And he bullied them a bit by saying that if they neglected the dragons or were deliberately cruel to them, Tintaglia would certainly be angered. Well, Selden has been called away to Bingtown. The Elderlings Reyn and Malta Khuprus have spoken out on the dragons’ behalf, but they are not as persuasive as young Selden. The entire city is tired of living with a horde of hungry dragons nearby, and who can blame them?

  “But for the first time, the Council heard proposals for dealing with the situation. It was a closed session, but no door is so tight that rumors cannot escape it. One angry member of the Council said that the dragons have no future and that it would be kinder to put them out of their misery. No sooner had Trader Polsk spoken than Trader Lorek rose to denounce him and say that he but hoped to salvage the dragon corpses and sell them off. There have been rumors of the Duke of Chalced offering enormous sums of money for a whole dragon, alive or pickled, it was all one to him, and lesser sums for any part of a dragon. It is well known that Polsk’s affairs have suffered lately and that he might be tempted by such offers. There are rumors that already one dragon was lured away from the herd and slaughtered for trophies. All that is known for certain is that one dragon disappeared in the night. One member of the Rain Wild Council claims it was done by Chalcedean spies; others suspect their fellows, but most think the pathetic creature wandered off and died. So Polsk repeated that the dragons seemed in such poor condition that it would be mercy to kill them.

  “Trader Lorek asked him if he did not fear that Tintaglia might visit the same sort of ‘mercy’ on Trehaug. So then another Council member pointed out that we have had offers from wealthy nobles and even cities hoping to buy dragons. Surely, he said, that was better and more sensible than killing valuable creatures. They proposed sending out notices to those considered most likely to be able to purchase a dragon, advertising the colors and genders available and rewarding the highest bidders with the dragons of their choosing.

  “Dujiaa, the woman who advises the Council on matters relating to the Tattooed, stood up angrily to protest that. She is among those who can hear the dragons, and so she spoke out strongly saying that creatures that can think and speak as the dragons do are not animals to be sold on an auction block. A few of the other Traders who dispute that the dragons are anything but animals said that she was taking the matter too seriously, that creatures that can only communicate with some people rather than everyone should not be treated as if they are equal to humans. And then, of course, the arguments degenerated. Some demanded to know if that meant speakers of foreign languages were not full humans. Someone else quipped that surely that explained Chalcedeans. That, from what I was told, at least broke the tension, and people began to discuss all sorts of possible solutions to the dragon problem.”

  Thymara listened raptly. Her father did not often discuss Rain Wild politics with her. She had heard scattered rumors of problems with the dragons, but had not paid much attention to the details before now. “Why cannot we just ignore the dragons, then? If they are dying off, then soon the problem will have solved itself.”

  “Not soon enough, I fear. Those that remain alive are tough, and some say becoming more vicious and unpredictable every day.”

  “Seems to me that we can scarcely blame them,” Thymara said quietly. She thought back to the shining promise the newly hatched dragons had seemed to offer on that long-ago day and shook her head over what had become of them.

  “Blame them or not, the situation cannot go on. The diggers at Cassarick have refused to try to do any more work there while the dragons are loose. They’re a hazard. They have no respect for humans. They’ve had problems with dragons following the workers down into the excavations, and knocking loose the blocking and supports. One worker was chased. Some people say that the dragon wanted to eat him, others that he provoked the dragon, and still others that the dragon was after the food he was carrying. It all comes down to the same thing. The dragons are both a danger and a nuisance to the people who have moved to Cassarick to develop the digs there. And there have been a series of incidents involving the dead. At a recent funeral, a family was committing a grandmother’s body to the river. They let the river take the bound corpse, and as they were casting the wreaths and flowers out onto the river, a blue dragon waded out, seized the body, and ran off into the forest with it. The family gave chase, but couldn’t catch up with it. None of the dragons will admit it happened, but the family is virtually certain that their grandmother’s body was devoured by a dragon. And, of course, the worry is that while they may begin by sating their appetites with our dead, it may not be long before they eat the living.”

  Thymara sat in shocked silence. Finally she said quietly, “I suppose they are not what I thought dragons would be. It’s disappointing to know that they are no more than animals.”

  Her father shook his head. “Worse than the lowest beasts, my dear, if what we are hearing is true. Dragons can speak and reason. For them to sink to those sorts of things is inexcusable. Unless they are deranged. Or simple.”

  Thymara unwillingly dragged out her memories of the hatch. “They did not seem healthy when they emerged from their cocoons. Perhaps their minds are as badly formed as their bodies.”

  “Perhaps.” Her father sighed. “Reality is often unkind to legends. Or perhaps, in the distant past, dragons were intelligent and noble. Or perhaps we have looked at the images the Elderlings left us and decided to imagine them as other than they really were. Still, I have to agree with you. I think I am as disappointed as you are, to find them such low beasts.”

  After a time she asked, “But what does any of this have to do with me?”

  “Well, Gedder
and Sindy only had the bones of it, but after much debate, the Council has decided on the obvious. The dragons must be moved away from Cassarick. Selden the Elderling has spoken of a place far upriver, a place where dragons and Elderlings once lived side by side, with plentiful hunting and elegant palaces and gardens . . . well . . . it all sounds to me like a tale of a place that might have existed long ago, when both Trehaug and Cassarick were aboveground. Several years ago, he proposed an expedition to search for it. No one rose to the bait at the time. Well, who can say that it is not all sunken and buried in a swamp now? But the Council has chosen to believe it is not; evidently the young dragons have vague memories of it themselves, and some have spoken of it longingly. There are even rumors that it was the capital city of the Elderlings, and that their treasure houses were there. Of course, that has piqued quite a bit of interest. The Council wishes the dragons to leave and go there to live. The dragons have agreed to go, but only if they are accompanied by humans who will hunt for them and assist them on the journey. And so, in their wisdom, the Council has cast about for folk it considers expendable. And that is the ‘offer’ that has been made for you, for you to be a dragon tender and herd them upriver to a place that possibly no longer exists, and that definitely has never been seen by any Rain Wilder.” He snorted. “It will be a thankless, dangerous, and futile task. All know that for days both upriver and down, the area under the great trees is endless swamp, bog, and slough. If there were a great city, our scouts would have found it long ago. I don’t know if it’s a mirage of riches that greed makes us seek, or exile for the dragons under the pretense of sending them to a refuge.”