by Hobb, Robin
She could focus her eyes but not her unruly thoughts. Jerd had been very quick to cast off the rules of their Rain Wild upbringing. Girls such as she and Jerd and Sylve were not allowed to take husbands. All knew that Rain Wild children who were scaled or clawed at birth would likely not grow to adulthood. They were not worth the resources it would take to raise them, for even if they lived, they seldom bore viable children. Those who tried usually died in labor, leaving the monsters that survived the births to be exposed. Husbands were forbidden to those strongly touched by the Rain Wilds, as deeply forbidden as mating outside the marriage bed was forbidden to all Rain Wilders. But Jerd had chosen to ignore both those rules. Jerd was lovely, with her fair hair and piercing eyes and lithe body. She had chosen which keepers she wished to bed, and then picked them off one at a time like a cat at a mouse nest and with as little compunction about the outcome of her appetite. Even when some of the youths came to blows over her, she seemed to accept it as her due. Thymara had been torn between envy for the freedom Jerd had claimed and fury at the swath of emotional discord she cut through the company.
Eventually, she’d paid the price, one that Thymara did not like to remember. When Jerd’s unlikely pregnancy ended in a premature birth, Thymara had been one of the women to attend her. She had seen the tiny body of the fish-girl before they delivered the corpse to Veras, Jerd’s dragon. It was strange to think that Thymara had taken a lesson from that, but Jerd had seemed unaffected by it. Thymara had refrained from sharing her body with any of the keepers, while Jerd continued to take her pleasure wherever she pleased. It made no sense. Some days she resented Jerd’s stupidity that could bring trouble for all of them; but more often she envied how the other girl had seized her freedom and her choices and seemed not to care what anyone else thought of her.
Freedom and choices. She could seize the one and make the other. “I’m staying,” she said quietly. “Not for my dragon. Not even for my friends. I’m staying here for me. To make a place where I do belong.”
Tats looked over at her. “Not for me?” he asked without guile.
She shook her head. “Honesty,” she reminded him quietly.
He glanced away from her. “Well, at least you didn’t say you were staying for Rapskal.” Then, quite suddenly, Tats made a sound, a hoarse intake of breath. A moment later Thymara whispered on a sigh, “I see him.”
The animal that was moving cautiously from the perimeter of the forest and into the open meadow was magnificent. Thymara was slowly becoming accustomed to the great size that the hoofed creatures of this dry forest could attain. Even so, this was the largest she had seen yet. She could have slung a sleeping net between the reaches of his two flat-pronged antlers. They were not the tree-branch-like horns she had seen on the other deer of this area. These reminded her of hands with widespread fingers. The creature that bore them was worthy of such a massive crown. His shoulders were immense, and a large hummock of meaty flesh rode them. He paced like a rich man strolling through a market, setting one careful foot down at a time. His large, dark eyes swept the clearing once, and then he dismissed his caution. Thymara was not surprised. What sort of predator could menace a beast of that size? She drew the bowstring taut and held her breath, but her hope was small. At best, she could probably deliver a flesh wound through that thick hide. If she injured him sufficiently or made him bleed enough, she and Tats could track him to his death place. But this would not be a clean kill for any of them.
She gritted her teeth. This could very well take all day, but the amount of meat would be well worth it. One more pace and she would have a clear shot at him.
A scarlet lightning bolt fell from the sky. The impact of the red dragon hitting the immense deer shook the earth. Thymara’s startled response was to release her arrow: it shot off in wobbly flight and struck nothing. In the same instant, there was a loud snap as the deer’s spine broke. It bellowed in agony, a sound cut short as the dragon’s jaws closed on the deer’s throat. Heeby jerked her prey off the ground and half sheared the deer’s head from his neck. Then she dropped it before lunging in to rip an immense mouthful of skin and gut from the deer’s soft belly. She threw her head back and gulped the meat down. Dangling tendrils of gut stretched between her jaws and her prey.
“Sweet Sa have mercy!” Tats sighed. At his words, the dragon turned sharply toward them. Her eyes glittered with anger and spun scarlet. Blood dripped from her bared teeth.
“Your kill,” Tats assured her. “We’re leaving now.” He seized Thymara by the upper arm and pulled her back into the shelter of the forest.
She still gripped her bow. “My arrow! That was the best one I had. Did you see where it went?”
“No.” There was a world of denial in Tats’s single word. He hadn’t seen it fly and he wasn’t interested in finding it. He pulled her deeper into the forest and then started to circle the meadow. “Damn her!” he said quietly. “That was a lot of meat.”
“Can’t blame her,” Thymara pointed out. “She’s just doing what a dragon does.”
“I know. She’s just doing what a dragon does, and how I wish Fente would do it also.” He shook his head guiltily at his own words, as if shamed to find fault with his dragon. “But until she and Sintara get off the ground, we’re stuck with providing meat for them. So we’d best get hunting again. Ah. Here we are.”
He’d struck the game trail that had brought the big buck to the forest meadow. Reflexively, Thymara cast her gaze upward. But the trees here were not the immense giants that she was accustomed to. At home, she would have scaled a tree and then moved silently from limb to reaching limb, traveling unseen from tree to tree as she stalked the game trail. She would have hunted her prey from above. But half these trees were bare of leaves in the winter, offering no cover. Nor did the branches reach and intermingle with their neighbors as they did in her Rain Wild home. “We’ll have to hunt on foot, and quietly,” Tats answered her thoughts. “But first, we’ll have to get away from Heeby’s kill site. Even I can smell death.”
“Not to mention hear her,” Thymara answered. The dragon fed noisily, crunching bones and making sounds of pleasure with each tearing bite. As they both paused, she gave a sudden snarl, like a cat playing with dead prey; a large cracking sound followed it.
“Probably the antlers,” Tats said.
Thymara nodded. “I’ve never seen a deer that big. I’ve never seen any animal that big, except dragons.”
“Dragons aren’t animals,” he corrected her. He was leading and she was following. They trod lightly and spoke softly.
She chuckled quietly. “Then what are they?”
“Dragons. The same way that we aren’t animals. They think, they talk. If that’s what makes us not animals, then dragons are not animals, either.”
She was quiet for a time, mulling it over. She wasn’t sure she agreed. “Sounds like you’ve given this some thought.”
“I have.” He ducked low to go under an overhanging branch, and she copied him. “Ever since Fente and I bonded. By the third night, I was wondering, what was she? She wasn’t my pet, and she wasn’t like a wild monkey or a bird. Not like the tame monkeys that a few of the pickers used to go after high fruit. And I wasn’t her pet or her servant, even if I was doing a lot of things for her. Finding her food, picking vermin away from her eyes, cleaning her wings.”
“Are you sure you’re not her servant?” Thymara asked with a sour smile. “Or her slave?”
He winced at the word and she reminded herself whom she was talking to. He’d been born a slave. His mother had been enslaved as punishment for her crimes, so when he was born, he was born a slave. He might have no memory of that servitude, for he had been a very small child when they escaped it. But he’d grown up with the marks on his face and the knowledge that many people thought differently of him as a result.
They had come to a low stone wall, grown over with vines. Beyond it, several small huts had collapsed on their own foundations. Trees grew in and around
them. Thymara eyed them thoughtfully, but Tats pressed on. Ruins in the forest were too common even to comment on. If Sintara were not so hungry, Thymara would have poked around in the shells looking for anything useful. A few of the keepers had found tool parts, hammer heads, axe bits, and even a knife blade in the debris of some of the collapsed huts. Some of the tools had been of Elderling make, still holding an edge after all the years. One collapsed table had held cups and the remains of broken plates. Whatever had ended Kelsingra had ended it swiftly. The inhabitants had not carried their tools and other possessions away. Who knew what she might find buried in the rubble? But her dragon’s hunger pressed on her mind like a knife at her back. She’d have to come back later when she had more time. If Sintara ever let her have time to herself.
Tats’s next words answered her question and her thoughts.
“I’m not her slave because I don’t do those things the way a slave would do them. At first it seemed almost like she was my child or something. I took pride in making her happy and seeing how pretty I could make her. It was really satisfying to put meat or a big fish in front of her and feel how good it made her feel to eat.”
“Glamour,” Thymara said bitterly. “We all know about dragon glamour. Sintara has used it on me more than once. I find myself doing something because I think I really want to do it. Then, when I’ve finished, I realize that it wasn’t my desire at all. It was just Sintara pushing me, making me want to do whatever she wants me to do.” Just the thought of how the big blue queen could manipulate her made her want to grind her teeth.
“I know Sintara does that to you. I’ve seen it happen a few times. We’ll be in the middle of talking about something, something important, and suddenly you stop even looking at me and say that you have to go hunting right away.”
Thymara kept a guilty silence. She didn’t want to tell him he was mistaken, that going hunting was her best excuse for avoiding him whenever their conversations became too intense.
Tats seemed unaware of her lack of assent. “But Fente doesn’t do that to me. Well, hardly ever. I think she loves me, Thymara. The way she’s changing me, being so careful about it. And after I’ve fed her and groomed her, sometimes she just wants me to stay right there with her and keep her company. Because she enjoys my company. That’s something I’ve never had before. My mom was always asking the neighbors to watch me when I was little. And when she killed that man, she just took off. I still think it was an accident, that she only meant to rob him. Maybe she thought she’d just have to hide for a short time. Maybe she meant to come back for me. She never did. When she knew she was in trouble, she just ran away and left me to whatever might happen to me. But Fente wants me to be with her. Maybe she doesn’t really ‘love’ me, but she sure wants me around.” He gave a half shrug as he walked, as if she would think him sentimental. “The only other one who ever seemed to like me was your father, and even he always kept a little distance between us. I know he didn’t like me spending so much time with you.”
“He was afraid of what our neighbors might think. Or my mother. The rules were strict, Tats. I wasn’t supposed to let anyone court me. Because it was forbidden for me to get married. Or to have any child. Or to even take a lover.”
Tats gestured in wonder at the antler scores on a tree they passed. The deer that had done it must have been just as immense as the one Heeby had just killed. She touched them with a finger. Antler scores? Or claw marks? No, she couldn’t even imagine a tree cat that large.
“I knew his rules for you. And for a long time, I didn’t even think of you that way. I wasn’t that interested in girls then. I just envied what you had, a home and parents and a regular job and regular meals. I wished I could have it, too.”
He paused at a split in the game trail and raised an eyebrow at her.
“Go left. It looks more traveled. Tats, my home was not as wonderful as you thought it was. My mother hated me. I shamed her.”
“I think . . . well, I’m not sure she hated you. I think maybe the neighbors made her ashamed of wanting to love you. But even if she did hate you, she never left you. Or threw you out.” He sounded almost stubborn in his insistence.
“Except that first time when she gave me to the midwife to expose,” Thymara pointed out bitterly. “My father was the one who brought me back and said he was going to give me a chance. He forced me on her.”
Tats was unconvinced. “And I think that’s what really shamed her. Not what you were but that she hadn’t stood up to the midwife and said she was keeping you, claws and all.”
“Maybe,” Thymara replied. She didn’t want to think about it. Useless to think about it now, so far away from it in both time and place. It wasn’t as if she could go and ask her mother what she had felt. She knew her father had loved her, and she’d always hold that knowledge close. But she also knew he had agreed with the rules that said she must never have a lover or a husband, never produce a child. Every time she thought of crossing that boundary, she felt she was betraying him and what he had taught her. He had loved her. He’d given her rules to keep her safe. Could she be wiser than he was in this matter?
It seemed as if it should be her decision. Actually, yes, it was her decision. But if she decided her father was wrong, if she decided she was free to take a mate, did that somehow damage her love for him? His love for her? She knew, without doubt, that he would disapprove of her even considering such a thing.
And even at this distance, his disapproval stung. Perhaps more so because she was so far from home and alone. What would he expect of her? Would he be disappointed if he knew how much kissing and touching she’d indulged in with Tats?
He would. She shook her head, and Tats glanced back at her. “What is it?”
“Nothing. Just thinking.”
But as she said it, she became aware of a rhythmic pounding. Something was running, with no effort at stealth, coming up the trail behind them.
“What is that?” Tats asked and then glanced at the trees nearby. She knew what he was thinking. If they had to take refuge, climbing a tree might be their best hope.
“Two legs,” she said abruptly, surprising even herself that she had deduced that from the sounds.
An instant later, Rapskal came into view. “There you are!” he shouted merrily. “Heeby said you were nearby.”
He was grinning, full of joy at finding them. Full of pleasure in life itself, as he always was. Thymara could seldom look at Rapskal without returning that smile. He’d changed a great deal since they had left Trehaug. The boyishness of his face had been planed away by hardship and the approach of manhood. He’d shot up, taller than anyone should grow in a matter of months. Like her, he had been born marked by the Rain Wilds. But since their expedition had begun, he’d grown lean and lithe. His scaling was unmistakably scarlet now to complement Heeby’s hide. His eyes had always been unusual, a very pale blue. But now the lambent blue glow that some Rain Wilders acquired with age gleamed constantly in them, and the soft blue sometimes had the hard silver bite of steel. Instead of becoming more dragonlike, the features of his face were chiseled to classical humanity: he had a straight nose and flat cheeks, and his jaw had asserted itself in the last couple of months.
He met her gaze, pleased at her stare. She dropped her eyes. When had his face become so compelling?
“We were trying to hunt,” Tats responded irritably to Rapskal’s greeting. “But between you and your dragon, I suspect anything edible will have been scared out of the area.”
The smile faded slightly from Rapskal’s face. “I’m sorry,” he responded sincerely. “I just wasn’t thinking. Heeby was so glad to find so much food, and it feels so good when she’s happy and has a full belly. It made me want to be with my friends.”
“Yes, well, Fente isn’t so fortunate. Nor Sintara. We’ve got to hunt to feed our dragons. And if Thymara had brought down that deer, instead of Heeby crashing on it, we would have had enough to give both of them a decent meal.”
; Rapskal set his jaw and sounded defensive as he insisted, “Heeby didn’t know you were nearby until after she’d killed her meat. She wasn’t trying to take it from you.”
“I know,” Tats replied grumpily. “But all the same, between the two of you we’ve wasted half the day.”
“I’m sorry.” Rapskal’s voice had gone stiff. “I said that already.”
“It’s all right,” Thymara said hastily. It was unlike Rapskal to become prickly. “I know that you and Heeby didn’t mean to spoil our hunt.” She gave Tats a rebuking look. Fente was just as willful as Sintara. He should know that there would not have been anything Rapskal could have done to stop Heeby from taking the deer, even if he’d known they were stalking the same prey. The lost meat was not the main source of Tats’s irritation.
“Well, there’s a way that you can make it up,” Tats declared. “When Heeby’s finished, maybe she can make a second kill. One for our dragons.”
Rapskal stared at him. “When Heeby has eaten, she’ll need to sleep. And then finish off whatever is left of the meat. And, well, dragons don’t hunt or make kills for other dragons. It’s just not . . . just not something she’d ever do.” At the stern look on Tats’s face, he added, “You know, the real problem is that your dragons don’t fly. If they would fly, they could make their own kills and I’m sure they’d love it as much as Heeby does. You need to teach them to fly.”
Tats stared at him. Sparks of anger lit his eyes. “Thanks for telling me the obvious, Rapskal. My dragon can’t fly.” He rolled his eyes in exasperation. “That’s a real insight into the problem. So useful to know. Now, I need to go hunting.” He turned abruptly and stalked off.
Thymara watched him go, openmouthed. “Tats!” she called. “Wait! You know we aren’t supposed to hunt alone!” Then she turned back to Rapskal. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what made him so angry.”
