by Robin Hobb
Sedric took a deep breath. His throat kept closing up. Give in to the inevitable, he counseled himself. “Relpda,” Sedric said softly. “Listen to me, now. Listen carefully.”
Day the 19th of the Prayer Moon
Year the 6th of the Independent Alliance of Traders
From Erek, Keeper of the Birds, Bingtown
To Detozi, Keeper of the Birds, Trehaug
Enclosed, a message from Trader Wycof to the First Mate Jos Peerson of the liveship Ophelia, soon to dock at Trehaug, informing him of the birth of twin daughters to his wife on this day.
Detozi,
An illness in my family has forced me to postpone all thoughts of leaving Bingtown at this time. My father is seriously ill. I fear that my hopes of visiting the Rain Wilds and finally meeting you must be put off for the time being. I am disappointed.
Have you yourself ever considered a visit to Bingtown? I am sure your nephew would be very pleased by such a visit.
Erek
CHAPTER SEVEN
RESCUE
Night had been every bit as miserable as Thymara had feared it would be. The keepers had banded together to build a sort of platform, layering drift logs in alternating angles on top of one another. Leafy branches were torn down to provide cushioning over the bumpy logs. The resulting “raft” had not been sturdy, but there had been room for them to huddle together and commiserate while the mosquitoes and gnats feasted on them. There was no flat place to sleep, so Thymara had balanced her body on one of the wider logs. She had considered taking to the trees for the night but had finally decided to stay closer to the dragons and the other keepers. Every time she started to doze off, Alum’s dragon would trumpet mournfully and she’d rouse. Too many times that night, tears had followed. The small sounds she heard from the others on the raft told her that she was not alone in her fears. Toward morning, not even the sorrow and sounds, let alone the buzzing, bites, and branch nubs could keep Thymara alert any longer. She had dozed down past the nightmares and grief to a deep sleep and had awakened chill and stiff and damp with morning dew.
The flooding was subsiding slowly. The high waterline on the nearby tree trunks was now shoulder-high on her. Next to her, Alise slept deeply, curled in a ball. Tats was just beyond her, breathing huskily. Jerd, she noted, slept tucked into the curve of Greft’s body. For a moment, she envied them the warmth they shared and then dismissed the thought. That wasn’t for her. Boxter and Nortel were perched on the edge of the platform, staring out at the flooded forest and talking softly. The dragons were hunched on their log perches. They looked uncomfortable and precarious, but they were sleeping heavily. The chill of the water and the deep shade of the trees had plunged them into deep lethargy. They probably wouldn’t stir until midmorning, or later.
Thymara nudged Sylve and whispered, “I’m going to see if I can find us some food,” and then picked her way through her sleeping comrades. Log by log, she clambered over the pack of floating debris to the closest major tree trunk. It had no branches within reach, but her claws served her well as she scaled it. It was strange how good it felt to be back in the trees again. Safer. She might still be hungry, thirsty, and insect bitten, but the trees had always befriended and sheltered her.
She had not gone far when the forest rewarded her for her efforts. She found a trumpet vine and drank the nectary water from the blossoms with only a small twinge of guilt. She had no way to carry the meager mouthful that each flower offered her. She’d drink now, renew her own strength, and hope she’d find something she could transport back to her friends. There was not really enough liquid to quench her thirst, but at least her tongue no longer felt like leather. When she had emptied every flower, she climbed on.
The exertion required a different use of her arms and shoulders than she had become accustomed to, and soon the injury on her back began to leak fluid again. It did not hurt as much as it had, though she could feel the skin pull every time she reached for a new handhold. The tickle of liquid down her spine was distracting and annoying, but there was nothing she could do about it. Twice she saw birds that would have been easy prey for her if she’d had a bow, and once she hastily dropped down to a lower limb and changed trees when she came across a large constrictor snake who lifted his head and eyed her with interest. At that moment, she decided that her decision to sleep on the raft instead of in the trees had been a good one.
She was looking for a good horizontal branch to allow her to cross to another tree when she encountered Nortel. He was sitting on the branch that was her chosen path, and from the way he greeted her, she suspected he’d seen her and watched her progress down the trunk.
“Find anything to eat?” he asked her.
“Not yet. I got some water from a trumpet vine, but I haven’t found any fruit or nuts yet.”
He nodded slowly, then asked her, “Are you alone?”
She shrugged and wondered why his question made her uncomfortable. “Yes. Everyone else was asleep.”
“I wasn’t.”
“Well, you were talking to Boxter. And I like to hunt and forage alone. I always have.” She took another step toward him, but he made no sign of moving to allow her to pass him on the branch. It was wide enough that he could easily have moved to one side. Instead, he remained perched where he was, looking up at her. She didn’t know Nortel well; she’d never realized his eyes were green. He was not as scaled as most of the other boys, and what he did have, around his eyes, was very fine. When he blinked, his lashes caught the light and sparked silver at her.
After a long moment, he said, “I’m sorry about Rapskal. I know you two were close.”
She looked away from him. She was trying not to think of Rapskal and Heeby and whether they had died quickly or struggled for a long time in the water. “I’ll miss him,” she said. Her voice went thick and tight on the words. “But today is today, and I need to see what food I can find. May I get past you, please?”
“Oh. Of course.” Instead of just sliding to one side, he stood up. He was taller than she was. He turned sideways on the branch and motioned that she should edge past him. She hesitated. Was there a challenge in how he stood there or was she imagining it?
She decided she was being silly. She edged past him, sliding her feet and facing him as she did so. She was halfway past him when he shifted slightly. She dug her toenails into the bark of the branch and hissed in alarm. He immediately caught her by the arms and held her facing him. His grip on her arms was firm, and she was closer to him than she wanted to be. “I wouldn’t let you fall,” he promised her, his face solemn. His green eyes bored down into hers.
“I wasn’t about to fall. Let go.”
He didn’t. They were frozen in a tableau, looking at each other. A struggle would almost certainly mean that one or both of them would fall. The smile on his face was warm, the look in his eyes inviting.
“I’m getting angry. Let go now.”
The warmth faded from his eyes, and he granted her request. But he slid his hand down her arm before he lifted it away. She hopped past him, resisting the urge to give him a slight shove as she did so.
“I didn’t mean to make you angry,” he said. “It’s just…well, Rapskal is gone. And I know you’re alone now. So am I.”
“I’ve always been alone,” she told him furiously and then strode off along the branch. She wasn’t fleeing, she reminded herself, only leaving him behind. When she reached the next trunk, she went up it more quickly than a lizard and refused to look back to see if he was watching her climb. Instead, she concentrated on climbing higher, heading for the upper reaches of the canopy where more sunlight increased the chances of finding fruit.
Fortune favored her. She found a bread leaf vine parasitizing a handprint tree. The fat yellow leaves didn’t offer much flavor, but they were filling and crisp with moisture as well. For a time, she perched and ate her fill, then tore several trailing strings of leaves from it. She wound the vines into a loose wreath and put them around her nec
k hanging down her back.
She started back down and on the way saw a sour pear tree only a few trunks away. She crossed to it. The fruit was past its prime and slightly wrinkly, but she doubted her friends would be fussy. With no other way to carry it, she filled the front of her shirt and then went more slowly, trying to avoid crushing the food she carried. When she reached the tree by the river’s edge and climbed down to the flotsam raft, she was surprised to find that many of the keepers were still sleeping. Tats was awake; he and Greft were trying to kindle a small fire at the root end of one of the big snags. A thin tendril of smoke wound up into the morning air. As she approached, she saw Sylve and Harrikin crouched at the edge of the packed driftwood. She watched as Sylve reached out with a long stick and then dragged something closer. It wasn’t until she was near that she realized they were pulling dead fish from the river. Harrikin was cleaning them, sticking a claw in each belly, slitting it open, and scooping out the guts before adding it to the row of fish beside him.
“Where are the dragons?” she called anxiously to them.
Sylve turned to her and gave her a weary smile. “There you are! I thought I’d dreamed you telling me you were going hunting, but then you were gone when I woke all the way. The acid run killed a lot of fish and other creatures. The dragons have moved upriver. They’ve discovered an eddy full of carrion and are eating their fill. I’m glad there’s something for them. They’re tired from treading water and so much swimming, but at least they won’t be hungry after this. Even Mercor was beginning to be bad-tempered, and I was afraid a couple of the bigger males were going to fight this morning.”
“Did Sintara go with them?”
“They all went, each more jealous than the next, to be sure of getting a fair share. What did you bring?”
“Bread leaf and sour pear. My shirt is full of sour pear. I couldn’t think of any other way to carry them.”
Sylve laughed. “We’ll be glad to have them, no matter how you got them here. Greft and Tats are trying to get enough of a fire going that we can cook the fish. If it doesn’t work, I suppose raw will have to do.”
“Better than nothing, certainly.”
Harrikin had been quiet through their conversation. He was never much of a talker. The first time she had seen him, he had reminded her of a lizard. He was long and slender, and much older than Sylve, but she seemed very comfortable with him. Thymara had not realized that he, too, had claws, until she watched him using them. He looked up from his task, caught her eyes on his hands, and nodded an acknowledgment to her.
A little silence fell over the group. Unanswered questions were answered by it. No one spoke of Rapskal, and in the distance, she heard Alum’s dragon give a long, anxious cry. Arbuc still called for his missing keeper. Warken’s red dragon, Baliper, held his mourning silence. The remaining keepers were still marooned on a raft of floating debris. Nothing had changed. Thymara wondered in passing what would become of them if their dragons abandoned them here. Would they? Did the dragons need them any longer? What if they decided to travel on without them?
She looked up to see Tats coming toward them and wondered if she looked as bad as he did. His skin was scalded red from the river water, and his hair stuck up in tufts. The water had attacked his clothing as well, mottling the already-worn shirt and trousers. He looked haggard, but he still managed to put on a smile for her. “What are you wearing?” he asked her.
“Our breakfast. Bread leaf and sour pear. Looks like you have a fire going for the fish.”
He glanced back to the little blaze that Greft tended. Jerd had come from somewhere to join him. She leaned against him quietly as he broke dry bits of root from the end of the snag and fed it to the small fire he’d kindled in the main nest of roots. “It wasn’t easy to get it going. And the fear is that if we succeed too well, it may spread to the rest of the debris pack and send us fleeing again. We don’t have much security here, but at least we’re still afloat.”
“And the water is going down. But if we must, we would take to the trees. Here. Hold your shirt out.”
Tats lifted the front of his shirt to form a sling, and Thymara reached down her own shirt front to extract the sour pears she had carried inside her shirt against her belly. The wrinkled fruit were no relation to true pears, but she had heard that the flavor was similar. When she had emptied her shirt into his, she followed him back to Greft’s fire. She feared there would be awkwardness when she got there, comments or mockery, but Jerd only turned away from her while Greft said simply, “Thanks. Any chance of more?”
“These are past the season, but I could probably find more on the tree. And where one bread leaf vine grows, there are usually others.”
“That’s good to know. Until we know more of our situation, we’re going to have to manage whatever food we can acquire carefully.”
“Well, there’s plenty of dead fish floating in the river. The current is pushing the floaters up against the debris pack.” This was from Sylve. She and Harrikin carried a line of fish suspended by a stick shoved through their gills.
“They won’t be good much more than a day or so,” Harrikin observed quietly. “The acid in the water is already softening them. We probably shouldn’t try to eat the skin, only the meat.”
Thymara removed her garland of bread leaf vine and began to strip the leaves from them methodically. Tats had already divvied the fruit into piles. Now he began to deal the leaves out as well. With the fish, each keeper would have an adequate breakfast. There was no sense worrying about dinner just yet.
Greft seemed to have the same thought. “We should hold some food back for later,” he suggested.
“Or we can give each keeper a share and tell them, ‘that’s it for the day, ration yourself,’” Tats countered.
“Not everyone will have the self-discipline to be wise about it,” Greft spoke the words, but it didn’t sound like an argument. Thymara suspected they were continuing an earlier discussion.
“I don’t think any one of us has the authority to ration the food,” Tats said.
“Not even if we’ve provided it?” Greft pushed.
“Thymara!”
She turned her head to Alise’s voice. The Bingtown woman teetered awkwardly along one of the logs. Thymara winced to look at her. Her face was pebbled with blisters and her red hair was a tangled mat that dangled halfway down her back. Always before, Alise had been so clean and well groomed. “Where did you go?” she demanded when she was still most of a log away.
“Out to look for food.”
“By yourself? Isn’t that dangerous?”
“Not usually. I almost always hunt or gather alone.”
“But what about wild animals?” Alise sounded genuinely concerned for her.
“Up where I travel, I’m one of the larger creatures. As long as I watch out for the big snakes, tree cats, and little poisonous things, I’m pretty safe.” She thought briefly of Nortel. No. She didn’t intend to mention that incident at all.
“There are other dangers besides wild animals,” Greft observed darkly.
Thymara glanced at him in annoyance. “I’ve been moving through the trees all my life, Greft, and usually much higher in the canopy than I went today. I’m not going to fall.”
“He’s not worried about you falling,” Tats said in a quiet voice.
“Then someone should say plainly what he is worried about,” Thymara observed sourly. They seemed to be talking about her and deliberately making the words go past her without meaning.
Greft glanced at Alise and away. “Perhaps later,” he said, and Thymara saw Alise bridle. His words and look had pointed her out as an outsider, someone not to be brought into keeper affairs. Whatever it was that was chafing him, Thymara already wanted to defy whatever older, male wisdom he intended to inflict on her. From the look on Jerd’s face, he had annoyed her as well. She shot Thymara a look that was full of venom, but Thymara could not master the coldness to be angry at her. Grief for her missing dra
gon had ravaged Jerd. Her tears had left scarlet tracks down her face. Impulsively, she addressed her directly.
“I’m sorry about Veras. I hope she manages to rejoin us. There are already so few female dragons.”
“Exactly,” Greft said, as if that proved some point for him.
But Jerd looked at her, weighed her comment, and decided Thymara was sincere. “I can’t feel her. Not clearly. But it doesn’t feel like she’s gone, either. I’m afraid that she’s injured somewhere. Or just disoriented and unable to find her way back to us.”
“It will be all right, Jerd,” Greft said soothingly. “Don’t distress yourself. It’s the last thing you need right now.”
This time both Thymara and Jerd shot him furious looks.
“I’m only thinking of you,” he said defensively.
“Well, I’m thinking and speaking about my dragon,” Jerd replied.
“Perhaps we’d best get the fish cooking before the fire burns too low,” Sylve suggested, and the alacrity with which the fish were taken up and fixed on wooden skewers over the fire attested to how uncomfortable the near quarrel was making everyone.
“Have you asked the other dragons if they can feel her?” Sylve asked Jerd as they began to ferry the cooked fish and other foods from the fire to the main raft. Boxter had found shelf mushrooms and onion-moss to share, welcome additions to an otherwise bland meal.
Jerd shook her head mutely.
“Well, my dear, you should!” Alise smiled at her. “Sintara and Mercor would be the best ones to approach with this. I’ll ask Sintara for you, shall I?”
The words were said so innocently, with such a hopeful helpfulness. Thymara bit down on her anger. “Do you really think so?”
“Of course. Why wouldn’t she?”
“Well, because she is Sintara,” Thymara replied, and Sylve laughed.
“I know what you mean. Just when I think I understand Mercor and that he will do any simple favor I ask of him, he asserts he is a dragon and not my plaything. But I think he might help with this.”
