Dragon Keeper

by Robin Hobb

“Because it’s late. And I said so. Come inside.”

  Tats eyes had widened. He spoke in a whisper. “I knew she didn’t like me. I’d better go, before I get you in trouble.”

  “Tats, it’s nothing to do with you. I’m sure of it. You don’t have to go. She probably just has some chores for me.” In truth, she had no idea why her mother would suddenly summon her back to the house. She knew she should probably go down to where their small dwelling swung gently from the branches that supported it. But she wasn’t inclined to go. When her father wasn’t home, the little rooms seemed uncomfortably small, filled with her mother’s disapproval. A sudden obstinacy, very unlike her usual subservience to her mother, suddenly filled her. She’d go, but not right away. After all, what could her mother do? She’d never come up on the flimsy branches where Thymara and Tats now perched. Her mother disdained even the tree-ways in this part of Trehaug. The Cricket Cages, as this district of tiny homes perched high in the upper reaches of the canopy was called, relied on lightweight bridges and fine trolley lines to ferry its populace from branch to branch. Her mother hated living in such a poor section of Trehaug, but the dangling cottages were affordable. Almost everything was cheaper up here in the higher reaches of the canopy.

  “Aren’t you going in?” Tats asked her quietly.

  “No,” she said decisively. “Not just yet.”

  “What were you thinking about, just then?”

  She shrugged. “About how much everything has changed.” She looked over the branch and down at the glittering lights of Trehaug. Their gleams were scattered and broken by the massive trunks and wide-reaching branches of the rain forest. “My family wasn’t always poor. Before I was born, when my parents were first married, they lived down there. Way down there. My father was the third son of a Rain Wild Trader. His family had a share of a claim in the old buried city, and they were fairly well-to-do. But then my grandfather died. My father has two older brothers. The eldest inherited the claim, and the next son had the knowledge of how best to manage it. But there really wasn’t enough there to support three families, and my father had to strike out on his own. Sometimes I think that made my mother bitter, even before I was born. I think she’d expected to live an easy life with pretty things and have handsome children who married well.”

  A strange smile twisted her face. “One little detail, and it might have been different for everyone. I think that if my father had been the eldest son and inherited, someone would have offered to marry me by now, even if I had a tail like a monkey and squeaked like a tree rat.”

  A bubble of laughter burst from Tats, startling her. After a moment, she joined in.

  “Would you have liked that life better than what you have now?” His question seemed genuine.

  She snorted at how silly he was. “Well, I liked it better when I was younger and we weren’t as poor as we are now.”

  “Poor?”

  “You know. Hand to mouth. Living in the highest reaches of Trehaug where the branches are thin and the paths so narrow; we didn’t always live up here.”

  “You don’t seem poor to me,” Tats protested.

  “Well. We’ve been richer. That’s for sure.” Thymara’s mind roved back over her early childhood. They had lived well enough, then. “My da was a hunter back then, and a pretty good one. He did that for a time. And he hunted meat for the dragons for a while, until the Council stopped paying decent wages. That was when he decided to try being a grower.”

  “A grower? Where? There’s no land you can plant in the Rain Wilds.”

  “Not all food plants grow on land. That’s what he always says. Lots of the plants that we harvest for food actually grow in the canopy, in pockets of soil in the bends of the trunk, or with air roots, or as parasites on the trees.” She tried to explain it to Tats, even though the idea of it always made her weary. Instead of wandering the branches, treetops, and byways of the Rain Wilds, taking meat as he saw it and gathering whatever the canopy offered, her father began to attempt to cultivate a section of the canopy. It was an old idea, but no one had ever been able to make the forest yield predictably for any length of time. But every now and then, someone like her father would think he had it figured out. He had brought together the various food plants and tried to persuade them to grow in the locations he had chosen rather than where Sa had sown them.

  Her father was not the first to attempt it. Others had failed before him. He was merely more dogged, more determined than those who had previously failed. Some folks said that determination was a good thing. Her mother had once told her that it just meant that their family had lived in poverty for more years than the others who had tried and failed at the same experiment and quickly gone back to hunting and gathering. Their “gardening” took up a good amount of their time and yielded them less than their gathering, but her father persisted in it because he believed that one day it would pay off for them.

  “I could see that could be true about your da,” Tats said quietly. “My mother said that everything she cherished had been sacrificed for my father’s dream. Maybe it’s true. I don’t know. When I was little, and he was a gatherer all the time, we lived in four rooms, built so close to a trunk that they scarcely swayed even in storm winds.”

  Those were the best houses in the Rain Wilds. The closer one lived to a trunk, the sturdier everything was, and the less wind and rain found them. The trunk markets were closer, and if one went down the trunks, there were taverns and playhouses. It was also true that there was less sunlight close to the trunk, but Thymara had always thought that a body could climb if she had a mind to feel sunlight and wind. The bridges and walkways that spanned the trees near their first home had been stoutly built, their guard walls tightly woven and kept in excellent repair. If she had to climb to find the sunlight, she also had the ability to go down and feel solid earth beneath her feet sometimes. She was never that enthused about those visits to the ground, but her mother had enjoyed them.

  “Why didn’t you like the ground? Seems the most natural place to live to me. I miss the ground. I miss just being able to run or walk and not be afraid of falling.”

  Thymara shook her head. “I don’t think I could ever trust the ground. Here in the Rain Wilds, if you’re close to the ground, then you’re close to the river. And sooner or later, the river always rises. Sometimes so suddenly that there is no warning. Anything we build on the ground, we know it won’t last. Once, the river rose high enough to flood the old city. That was awful. A lot of workers were trapped and drowned.” The wide relentless river frightened Thymara. She knew that seasonally it rose and flooded and that sometimes there had been sudden floods. The water was mildly acidic at the best of times; after quakes, it sometimes turned a deathly gray-white, and when it ran that color, it could mean a man’s death to fall into it, and those who had boats knew to hoist them from the water until the river returned to its usual color. Every moment she was on the ground, she dreaded that suddenly the river would rush up and devour her. Only when she was in the sturdy trees, high above the vagaries of the river and surrounding swamplands did she feel safe. It was a foolish fear, a child’s fear, but one that many Rain Wilders shared.

  Tats dismissed her fears with a shrug. He glanced around at the leafy branches that screened her from their neighbors and from a clear view of either sky above or earth below. “You never seemed poor to me,” he said quietly. “I always thought you had it pretty good, living up here.”

  “It’s not so bad, for me. It’s harder for my mother. She was used to a fancier way of life, with parties and pretty clothes and fine things. But there are other things I miss about where we used to live. Maybe it was just the age I was. But back then, down there, I had a lot more friends. When we were little, I guess no one cared so much about claws or nails. We just all played on the landings between levels. My father paid for me to be schooled; he bought my books, even though most of the other children paid by the week to borrow them. People thought he really spoiled me, and it ma
de my mother furious about the wasted money. And we used to go places. I remember that once we traveled way down trunk to a play put on by actors from Jamaillia. I couldn’t understand what it was about, but the costumes were beautiful. Once we went to a grand entertainment, music, and a play, and jugglers and singers! I loved that. The stage was suspended in an opening among several trees, with the platform that supported it and the seating cross-roped and netted for sturdiness. That was the first time I realized just how big a city Trehaug really was. Leaves and branches hid most of the ground below us, but there was one vista of the river, and overhead, through the hole in the canopy, I could see a huge patch of black sky and all sorts of stars. But the lights of thousands of homes twinkled, too, in the trees surrounding us, and the lanternlit walkways reminded me of jeweled necklaces reaching from tree to tree.” Thymara closed her eyes and turned her face up, recalling that sight.

  “And back then, once a month, as a family, we’d go out for an evening meal in Grassara’s Spice Bazaar, and we’d have meat as our main course. A whole piece of meat to eat myself, and one for my mother and one for my father.” She shook her head. “My mother was discontented even then. But I guess she always was and always will be. No matter how much we have, she wants more.”

  “Sounds pretty normal to me,” Tats said quietly. She opened her eyes and was surprised to see that he had edged closer to her perch without her even feeling it. He was getting better at moving through the branches. Before she could compliment him on it, he asked, “So when did it all change?”

  “It changed when my father started putting more of his time into trying to grow things. Seems like every year we had to move a bit higher and farther out.” She glanced at Tats. He sat astride the limb, with one ankle locked around his other leg. He looked secure if a bit uncomfortable. His attention to her face made her self-conscious. Was he staring at her scaling? At the tiny scales that outlined her lips, at the nub of fringe that ran along her jawline? She turned her face away from him and spoke to the trees. “The last place we lived before we came to the Cricket Cages was the Bird Nests. Those used to be the poorest part of Trehaug. But then the Tattooed came and then other newcomers, and we got pushed out of there.”

  The houses in the Bird Nests had consisted of small rooms, woven of vine and lath, with airy narrow pathways that led down several levels before one reached the good wide walkways and branch paths. “We lived in the Bird Nests for only a couple of years before we saw a flood of artists and artisans moving in. A lot of them were Tattooed, new to the Rain Wilds and needing cheaper rents and neighborhoods where their neighbors would not complain about noise and parties and strange lifestyles.” Thymara smiled to herself. She had loved living in the Bird Nests as much as her mother had despised it. Artists displayed their creations on every branch. The poorest section of the city became rich in beauty. Wind chimes hung at every crossroads, the safety walls along the paths were tapestries of colored string and beads, and faces were painted on the rough bark of the tree branches that supported the flimsy homes. Even her family’s chambers became bright with color, for her father often was offered only barter for the small crops he managed to grow. Long before Diana earned a reputation as an inspired weaver, Thymara wore a sweater and scarf made by her clever fingers and the carved chest that held her clothing had been made by Raffles himself. She loved those things not because they were valuable, but because they were daring and new. It was only later that her mother would be able to sell them for prices that amazed them all, but did not console Thymara for their loss.

  As always happens, or so her father said, the wealthy patrons of the artists began to frequent the Bird Nests. Not content to purchase merely what the artists made, the patrons began to buy their lifestyles as well. Soon the sons and daughters of the wealthier Rain Wild Trader families were living among 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 anymore, 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’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.”