The Dragon Keeper

by Robin Hobb

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  While she had been focused on the hatchling right beneath her tree, other dragons had been breaking free of their cases. The fallen deer and the reek of its fresh blood now summoned them. Two dragons, one a drab yellow and the other a muddy green, had staggered and tottered over to the carcass. They did not fight over it, being too intent on their feeding. The fighting, Thymara suspected, would come when it was time to seize the last morsel. For now, both squatted over the deer, front feet braced on the carcass, tearing chunks of hide and flesh free and then throwing their heads back to gulp the warm meat down. One had torn into the soft belly; entrails dangled from the yellow dragon’s jaws and painted stripes of red and brown on his throat. It was a savage scene, but no more so than the feeding of any predator.

  Thymara glanced at her father again, and this time she caught the true focus of his gaze. The feeding dragons, hunched over the rapidly diminishing carcass, had blocked her view. The young dragon her father was watching could not stand upright. It wallowed and crawled on its belly. Its hindquarters were unfinished stubs. Its head wobbled on a thin neck. It gave a sudden shudder and surged upright, where it teetered. Even its color seemed wrong; it was the same pale gray as the clay, but its hide was so thin that she could glimpse the coil of white intestines pushing against the skin of its belly. Plainly it was unfinished, hatched too soon to survive. Yet still it crawled toward the beckoning meat. As she watched, it gave too strong a push with one of its malformed hind legs and crashed over on its side. Foolishly, or perhaps in an effort to catch itself, it opened its flimsy wings. It landed on one, which bent the wrong way and then snapped audibly. The cry the creature gave was not as loud as the bright burst of pain that splashed against Thymara’s mind. She flinched wildly and nearly lost her grip. Clinging to her tree branch, eyes tightly shut, she fought a pain-induced wave of nausea.

  Understanding slowly came to her; this was what Tintaglia had feared. The dragon had sought to keep the cocoons shielded from light, hoping to give the forming dragons a normal dormancy period. But although they had waited until summer, they had still emerged too soon, or perhaps had been too worn and thin when they went in. Whatever the reason for their deformities, they were wrong, all wrong. These creatures could scarcely move their own bodies. She felt the confusion of the young dragon mixed with its physical pain. With difficulty, she tore her mind free of the dragon’s bafflement.

  When she opened her eyes, a new horror froze her. Her father had left the tree. He was on the ground, threading his way among the hatching cases, heading directly toward the downed creature. From her vantage, she knew it was dead. An instant later, she realized it was not that she could see it was dead so much as that she had felt it die. Her father, however, did not know that. His face was full of both trepidation and anxiety for the creature. She knew him. He would help it if he could. It was how he was.

  Thymara was not the only one who had felt it die. The two young dragons had reduced the deer to a smear of blood and dung on the trodden, sodden clay. They lifted their heads now and turned toward the fallen dragon. A newly hatched red dragon, his tail unnaturally short, was also making his tottering way toward it. The yellow let out a low hiss and increased his pace. The green opened its maw wide and let out a sound that was neither a roar nor a hiss. Feeble globs of spittle rode the sound and fell to the clay at his feet. The target had been her father. Thank Sa that the creature was not mature enough to release a cloud of burning toxin. Thymara knew that adult dragons could do that. She had heard about Tintaglia using her dragon’s breath against the Chalcedeans during the battle for Bingtown. Dragon venom ate right through flesh and bone.

  But if the green did not have the power to scald her father with his breath, his act of aggression had directed the short-tailed red dragon’s attention to her father. Without hesitation, both yellow and green dragons closed in on the dead hatchling and began snarling threats at each other over its fallen body. The red began his stalk.

  She had thought that her father would realize that the hatchling had died and was beyond his help. She had expected him to retreat sensibly from the danger the young dragons presented. A hundred times, a thousand times, her father had counseled her to wariness where predators were concerned. “If you have meat and a tree cat wants it, leave the meat and retreat. You can get more meat. You cannot get another life. ” So surely, when he saw the red dragon lurching toward him, its stubby tail stuck straight out behind him, he would retreat sensibly.

  But he wasn’t watching the red. He had eyes only for the downed hatchling, and as the other two dragons closed on it, he shouted, “No! Leave it alone, give it a chance! Give it a chance!” He waved his arms as if he were shooing carrion birds away from his kill and began to run toward it. To do what? she wanted to demand of him. Either of the hatchlings was bigger than he was. They might not be able to spit fire yet, but they already knew how to use their teeth and claws.

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  “Da! No! It’s dead, it’s already dead! Da, run, get out of there!”

  He heard her. He halted at her words and even looked up at her.

  “Da, it’s dead, you can’t help it. Get out of there. To your left! Da, to your left, the red one! Get clear of it!”

  The yellow and the green were already preoccupied with their dead fellow. They dove on it with the same abandon they had showed toward the deer. Strengthened by their earlier feast, they seemed more inclined to quarrel with each other over the choicest parts. Thymara had no interest in them, except that they kept each other busy. It was the red she cared about, the one who was lurching unevenly but swiftly toward her father. He saw his danger now. He did what she had feared he would do, a trick that often worked with tree cats. He opened his shirt and spread it, holding the fabric wide of his body. “Be large when something threatens you,” he had often told her. “Take on a shape it doesn’t recognize and it will become cautious. Present a larger aspect and sometimes it will back down. But never turn away. Keep an eye on it, be large, and move back slowly. Most cats love a chase. Don’t ever give them one. ”

  But this was not a cat. It was a dragon. Its jaws were wide open and its teeth showed white and sharp. Its hunger was the strongest thing in it. Although her father became visually larger, it showed no fear. Instead, she heard, no, felt its joyful interest in him. Meat. Big meat. Food! Hunger ripped through it as it staggered after the retreating man.

  “Not meat!” Thymara shouted down at it. “Not food. Not food! Run, Da, turn and run! Run!”

  The two miracles happened simultaneously. The first was that the young dragon heard her. Its blunt-nosed head swiveled toward her, startled. It threw itself off balance when it turned to look at her and staggered foolishly in a small circle. She saw then what had eluded her before. It was deformed. One of its hind legs was substantially smaller than the other. Not food? She felt a plaintive echo of her words. Not meat? No meat? Her heart broke for the young red. No meat. Only hunger. For that moment of oneness with it, she felt its hunger and its frustration.

  But the second miracle tore her from that joining. Her father had listened to her. He had lowered his arms, turned away, and was fleeing back to the trees. She saw him dodge away from a small blue dragon who reached after him with yearning claws. Then her father reached the tree trunk and with the experience of years, ascended it almost as swiftly as he had run across the ground. In a few moments he was safely out of any dragon’s reach. A good thing, for the small blue had trotted hopefully after him. Now it stood at the foot of the tree, snorting and sniffing at the place where her father had climbed up. It took an experimental nip at the tree trunk, and then backed away shaking its head. Not meat! it decided emphatically, and it wobbled off, charting a weaving path through the hatching grounds where more and more young dragons were emerging from their wizardwood logs. Thymara didn’t watch the blue go. She had already slithered up onto the top of her branch. She came to one knee, t
hen stood and ran up the branch to the trunk of the tree. She met her father as he came up. She grabbed his arm and buried her face against his shoulder. He smelled of fear sweat.

  “Da, what were you thinking?” she demanded, and was shocked to hear the anger in her voice. An instant later, she knew that she had every right to be angry. “If I had done that, you’d be furious with me! Why did you go down there, what did you think you could do?”

  “Up higher!” her father panted, and she was glad to follow him as he led the way to a higher branch. It was a good branch, thick and almost horizontal. They both sat down on it, side by side. He was still panting, from fear or exertion or perhaps both. She pulled her water skin from her satchel and offered it to him. He took it gratefully and drank deeply.

  “They could have killed you. ”

  He took his mouth from the bag’s nozzle, capped it, and gave it back to her. “They’re babies still. Clumsy babies. I would have got away. I did get away. ”

  “They’re not babies! They weren’t babies when they went into their cocoons and they’re full dragons now. Tintaglia could fly within hours of hatching. Fly, and make a kill. ” As she spoke, she pointed up through the foliage to a passing glint of blue and silver. It suddenly plummeted as the dragon dived. The wind of wildly beating wings assaulted both tree and Rain Wilders as the dragon halted her descent. A deer’s carcass fell from her claws to land with a thump on the clay, and without a pause her wings carried her up and away, back to her hunt. Squealing dragon hatchlings immediately scampered toward it. They fell on the food, tearing chunks of meat free and gulping them down.

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  “That could have been you,” Thymara pointed out to her father. “They may look like clumsy babies now. But they’re predators. Predators that are just as smart as we are. And bigger than we are, and better at killing. ” The charm of the hatching dragons was fading rapidly. Her wonder at them was being replaced with something between fear and hate. That creature would have killed her father.

  “Not all of them,” her father observed sadly. “Look down there, Thymara. Tell me what you see. ”

  From this higher vantage point, she had a wider view of the hatching grounds. She estimated that a fourth of the wizardwood logs would never release young dragons. The dragons who had hatched were already sniffing at the failed cases. As she watched, one young red dragon hissed at a dull case. A moment later, it began to smoke, thin tendrils of fog rising from it. The red set its teeth to a wizardwood log and tore off a long strip. That surprised Thymara. Wizardwood was hard and fine-grained. Ships were built from it. But now the wood seemed to be decaying into long fibrous strands that the young dragons were tearing free and eating greedily. “They are killing their own kind,” she said, thinking that was what her father wished her to see.

  “I doubt it. I think that in those logs, the dragons died before they could break free of their cases. The other dragons know that. They can smell it, probably. I think something in their saliva triggers a reaction to soften the logs and make them edible. Probably the same reaction that makes the logs break down as the youngsters are hatching. Or maybe it’s the sunlight. No, that wasn’t what I was talking about. ”

  She looked again. Young dragons wandered unsteadily on the clay beach. Some had ventured down to the water’s edge. Others clustered around the sagging cases of the failed dragons, tearing and eating. Of the deer that Tintaglia had brought and of the dead hatchling, scarcely a smear of blood remained. Thymara watched a dragon with stubby forelegs sniffing at the sand where it had been. “He’s badly formed. ” She looked at her father. “Why are so many of them badly formed?”

  “Perhaps . . . ” her father began, but before he could speak on, Rogon dropped down from a higher branch to join them. Her father’s sometime hunting partner was scowling.

  “Jerup! You’re unharmed then! What were you thinking? I saw you down there and saw that thing go for you. From where I was, I couldn’t see if you’d made it up the trunk or not! What were you trying to do down there?”

  Her father looked down, half smiling, but perhaps a bit angry as well. “I thought I could help the one that was being attacked. I didn’t realize it was already dead. ”

  Rogon shook his head contemptuously. “Even if it wasn’t, there would be no point. Any fool could see it wasn’t fit to live. Look at them. Half of them will be dead before the day is out, I should think. I had heard rumors that the Elderling boy was concerned something like this might happen. I was just over at the dais; no one knows how to react. Selden Vestrit is visibly devastated. He’s watching, but not saying a word. No music playing now, you can bet. And half of those important folks clutching scrolls with speeches on them won’t give them now. You never saw so many important people with so little to say. This was supposed to be the big day, dragons taking to the skies, our agreement with Tintaglia fulfilled. And instead, there’s this fiasco. ”

  “Does anyone know what went wrong?” Her father asked his question reluctantly.

  His friend tossed his wide shoulders in a shrug. “Something about not enough time in the cocoons, and not enough dragon spit to go around. Bad legs, crooked backs—look, look at that one there. It can’t even lift its head. The sooner the others kill it and eat it, the kinder for it. ”

  “They won’t kill it. ” Thymara’s father spoke with certainty. She wondered how he knew it. “Dragons don’t kill their own kind, except in mating battles. When a dragon dies, the others eat it. But they don’t kill one another for food. ”

  Rogon had sat down on the tree limb next to her father. He swung his bare calloused feet lazily. “Well, there’s no problem that doesn’t benefit someone. That’s what I was coming to talk to you about. Did you see how quickly they ate that deer?” He snorted. “Obviously they can’t hunt for themselves. And not even a dragon like Tintaglia can possibly hunt enough to feed them all. So I’m seeing an opportunity for us here, old friend. Before this day is out, it’s going to dawn on the Council that someone has to keep those beasties fed. Can’t very well leave a hungry little herd of dragonlings running wild at the base of the city, especially not with the excavation crews going back and forth all the time. That’s where we come in. If we approach the Rain Wild Council to hire us to hunt to feed the dragons, there’ll be no end of work for us. Not that we could keep up with the demand, but while we can, the pay should be good. Even with the big dragon helping us kill for them, we’ll quickly run short of meat animals for them. But for a while, we should do well. ” He shook his head and grinned. “I don’t like to think of what will happen when the meat runs out. If they don’t turn on one another and eat their kin, well, I fear that we’ll be the closest prey. These dragons were a bad bargain. ”

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  Thymara spoke. “But we made a deal with Tintaglia. And a Trader’s word is his bond. We said we’d help Tintaglia take care of them if she kept the Chalcedeans away from our shores. And she has done that. ”

  Rogon ignored her. Rogon always ignored her. He never treated her as badly as some of the others did, but he never looked directly at her or replied to her words. She was accustomed to that. It wasn’t personal. She glanced away from the men, caught herself cleaning her claws on the tree’s bark, and stopped. She looked back at them. Her father had black nails. So did Rogon. Sometimes it seemed such a small difference to her, that her father had been born with black nails on his hands and feet and that she had been born with claws, like a lizard. Such a small difference on which to base a life-or-death decision.

  “My daughter speaks the truth,” her father said. “Our Council agreed to the bargain; they have no choice but to live up to it. They thought their promise to aid the dragons would end with the hatching. Obviously, it isn’t going to. ”

  Thymara resisted the impulse to squirm. She hated it when Da forced his comrades to acknowledge her existence. It was better when he allowed them to ignore her. B
ecause then she could ignore them as well. She looked aside and tried not to listen to the men as they discussed the difficulties of hunting enough meat to feed that many dragons, and the impossibility of simply ignoring the newly hatched dragons at the base of the city. There were ruins beneath the swampy grounds of Cassarick. If the Rain Wilders wanted to excavate them for Elderling treasure, then they’d have to find some way to keep these young dragons fed.

  Thymara yawned. The politics of the Rain Wild Traders and the dragons would never have anything to do with her and her life. Her father had told her that she should still care about things like that, but it was hard to force herself to be interested in situations she would never have a say in. Her life was apart from such things. When she considered her future, she knew she was the only one she could ever rely on.

  She looked down at the dragons and suddenly felt queasy. Her father had been right. And Rogon was right. Below her, young dragons were dying. Their fellows were not killing them, though they did not hesitate to ring the ones who had collapsed, eagerly waiting for them to shudder out a final breath. So many of them, she thought, so many of the hatched dragons had emerged unfit to face the harsh conditions of the Rain Wilds. What had gone wrong? Was Rogon right?

  Tintaglia paid another swooping visit. Another carcass plummeted from above, narrowly missing the young dragons who had gathered at her approach. Thymara didn’t recognize the beast Tintaglia had dropped. It was larger than any deer she had ever seen and had a rounded body with coarse hair. She glimpsed a thick leg with a split hoof before the mob of dragons hid it from her view. She didn’t think that was a deer; not that she had seen many deer. The swampy tussocks that characterized the forest floor of the Rain Wilds were not friendly to deer. One had to journey days and days to get to the beginning of the foothills that edged the wide river valley. Only a fool hunted that far from home. Such hunters consumed food on the way there and had to eat from their kill on the way back. Often the meat that survived the journey was half spoiled, or so little of it remained that the hunter would have been better off to settle for a dozen birds or a good fat ground lizard closer to home. The dropped creature had a glossy black hide, a big hump of flesh on its shoulders, and wide sweeping horns. She wondered what it was called, and then a brief touch of dragon mind told her. Food!