Dragon Keeper

by Robin Hobb

  Sedric looked ill. “The palat lotion was a gift.” “For my mother,” Hest cut in. “And the cottage is a place that Sedric uses, not I. He said he needed some privacy, and I agreed. It seemed a small accommodation to make for him, as well as he has served me. And if he chooses to entertain there, and who he has in to visit him, I consider none of my business. Nor yours, Alise. He’s a man, and a man has needs.” He bit off a piece of a sausage and chewed and swallowed it. “Frankly, I’m shocked at all this. You are my wife. To imagine you shuffling through my papers, digging in the hope of discovering some nasty secret; well, it’s dismaying. What ails you, woman, to even think of such a thing?”

  She found she was trembling. Was it all so easily explained away? Could she be that wrong? “You’re a man, too.” She pointed out in a shaking voice. “With needs. Yet you seldom visit me. You ignore me.”

  “I’m a busy man, Alise. With concerns much more profound than, well, your carnal desires. Must we speak of this in front of Sedric? If you cannot spare my feelings, can you at least consider his?”

  “You have to have someone else. I know you do!” The words came out of her as a quavering cry.

  “You know nothing,” Hest retorted in sudden disgust. “But you shall. Sedric. As Alise has made you a party to our nasty little squabble, I shall avail myself of you. Sit up and tell the truth.” Hest turned suddenly back to her. “You will believe Sedric, won’t you? Even if you consider your wedded husband a lying adulterer.”

  She locked eyes with Sedric. The man was pale. He was breathing audibly, his mouth half ajar. What had ever possessed her to speak out in front of him that way? What would he think of her now? He had ever been her friend. Could she salvage at least that? “He has never lied to me,” she said. “I’ll believe him.”

  “Alise, I . . .”

  “Now, quiet, Sedric, until you hear the question.” Hest put his forearms on the table and leaned on them thoughtfully. His voice was as measured as if he were stating the terms of a contract. “Answer my wife truthfully and fully. You are with me almost every hour of my working day and sometimes far into the night. If anyone knows my habits, it’s you. Look at Alise and tell her true: Do I have another woman in my life?”

  “I . . . that is, no. No.”

  “Have I ever shown any interest, here in Bingtown or on our trading journeys, in any woman?”

  Sedric’s voice had grown a little stronger. “No. Never.”

  “There. You see.” Hest leaned forward to help himself to a slice of fruit bread. “Your foul accusations had no foundation at all.”

  “Sedric?” She was almost pleading with him. She had been so sure. “You are telling me the truth?”

  Sedric took a ragged breath. “There are no other women in Hest’s life, Alise. None at all.”

  He looked down at his hands, embarrassed, and she saw that the ring she had seen on Hest’s hand last night was now on Sedric’s. Shame scalded her. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

  Hest thought she spoke to him. “Sorry? You insult me and humiliate me in front of Sedric, and ‘sorry’ is the best you can manage? I think I’m owed substantially more than that, Alise.”

  She had come to her feet, but she felt unstable. Suddenly she just wished to be out of the room and away from this horrible man who had somehow come to dominate her life. All she wanted now was the quiet of her room, and to lose herself in ancient scrolls from another world and time. “I don’t know what else I can say.”

  “Well. There’s isn’t much you can say, after such a grave insult. You’ve apologized, but it scarcely mends the matter.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said again, surrendering to him. “I’m sorry I ever brought it up.”

  “That makes two of us. Now let this be an end of this. Don’t ever accuse me of something like that again. It’s beneath you. It’s beneath both of us to have conversations like this.”

  “I won’t. I promise.” She nearly knocked her chair over as she left the table and hurried toward the door.

  “I will hold you to that promise!” Hest called after her.

  “I promise,” she repeated dully and fled from the room.

  NIGHT WAS CLOSING IN. Even in summer, the days seemed short. The towering trees of the rain forest carpeted the wide flat valley and gave way only to the river’s gray swathe. Daylight trickled down only when the sun was high enough for its light to strike the narrow alley of water and land between the brooding walls of trees that hemmed the river. Evening began its slow creep when the sun moved past it. Bright daylight was short, and twilight dominated their lives. Four years had passed since the summer she had emerged from her case. Four years of thwarted hopes, poor food, and neglect. Four summers of too much shade, four winters of rainy gray days. Four years of no life save eating and then sleeping, sleeping far too many hours of every day. Instead of feeling as if she slept too much, Sintara always felt vaguely weary. Swampy land and dimness was the province of newts, not dragons. Dragons, she thought, were creatures of strong sunlight, dry sand, and long, hot days. And flight. How she longed to fly. Fly away from the mud and the crowded conditions and the gloomy riverbank.

  She craned her neck to nuzzle at a patch of gritty mud that had dried behind her wing. She rubbed at it, then stretched her stunted wing and slapped it several times against her body in an attempt to dislodge the irritation. Most of it went trickling down her side in a cascade of dust. It was a minor relief. She longed to bathe herself in a pool of hot, still water, to emerge into strong sunlight to dry, and then to roll and scratch in abrasive sand until her scales gleamed. None of those things existed in her current life. Only her ancestral dreams informed her of them.

  It was not the only dragon memory that taunted her. She had many dreams. Dreams of flight, of hunting, of mating. Memories of a city with a well of liquid silver where a dragon could slake that thirst no water could quench. Many memories of gorging on hot, freshly killed meat. Memories of mating in flight, of hollowing out a sandy beach nest for her eggs. Many, many frustrating memories. Yet for all that, she knew she did not have a full complement of memories. It was maddening that she knew enough to know she was missing whole areas of knowledge, but could not reconstruct for herself exactly what that missing knowledge was. It was an additional cruelty that the dragon memories she did have showed her so clearly all her physical body lacked.

  The memories were a heritage denied her. It was the way of her kind. In the serpent stage of their lives, they retained access to an ancestral hoard of serpent memories. Migration routes, warm currents, and fish runs were not the only information; there was also the knowledge of the gathering places and the songs and the structure of their society as serpents. When a serpent entered the cocoon, such memories faded until by the time the dragon emerged from its case, its life as a serpent was only a hazy recollection. Replacing those memories was the hereditary wealth of a dragon’s proper knowledge. How to fly by the stars, and where the best hunting was to be found in each season, the traditional challenges for a mating duel, and what beach was best for the laying of eggs were some of those memories. But each dragon also could claim the more distant but personal memories of a dragon’s particular ancestry. The memories came, not just from the serpent’s changing body, but from the saliva of the dragons who helped the serpents shape their cocoons. There had been precious little of that when this generation of serpents cocooned. Perhaps that was what they were all lacking now. Perhaps that was why some of their number were as dull-witted as cattle.

  The sun must have reached the unseen horizon. The stars were beginning to show in the narrow stripe of sky over the river. She looked up at the band of night and thought it a good metaphor for her truncated and restricted existence. This muddy beach by the river bounded by the immense forest behind her was the only existence she had known since she hatched into this life. The dragons could not retreat into the forest. The picket trees fenced them onto the shore as effectively as their namesake. Although the immense trees
had been well spaced out by nature, their supplementary roots and all manner of underbrush, vines, and plants grew in the swampy spaces between them. Not even the much smaller humans could travel easily on the rain forest floor. Paths pushed through the brush soon became sodden trails and eventually swampy fingers of mud. No. The only way out of this forest for a dragon was up. She flapped her useless wings again and then folded them onto her back. Then she lowered her head from her stargazing and looked around her. The others were huddled together beneath the trees. She despised them. They were stunted and misshapen things, sickly, quarrelsome, weak, and unworthy.

  Just as she was.

  She plodded through the mud to join them. She was hungry, but she scarcely noticed that anymore. She had been constantly hungry since the day she hatched from her case. Today she’d been fed seven fish, large if not fresh, and one bird. The bird had been stiff. Sometimes she dreamed of meat that was warm and limp with the blood still running. It was only a dream now. The hunters were seldom able to find large game close by; when they did get a marsh elk or a riverpig, the creatures had to be chopped into pieces before they could be transported back to the dragons. And the dragons seldom got the best parts of the beasts. Bones and guts and hide, tough shanks and horned heads, but seldom the hump from a riverpig’s back or the meat-rich hind haunch of a marsh elk. Those parts went to the humans’ tables. The dragons were left with the scraps and offal like stray dogs begging outside a city’s gate.

  The boggy ground sucked at her feet each time she lifted them and her tail seemed permanently caked with mud. The land here suffered as much as the dragons did; it never had a chance to harden and heal. All the trees that bordered the clearing were showing the effects of the dragons’ residence. The lower trunks were scarred and scraped. Dragons scratching vermin from their skin had eroded bark from some of the trees, and the roots of others had been exposed by the traffic of clawed feet. She had overheard the humans worrying that even trees with trunks the size of towers would eventually die from such treatment. And what would happen when such a tree fell? The humans had somewhat wisely moved their homes out of the treetops of the affected trees. But didn’t they realize that if one of the trees fell, it would doubtless crash through the branches of neighboring trees? Humans were stupider than squirrels in that regard.

  Only in the summer months did the muddy beach approach a level of firmness that made walking less strenuous. In winter, the smaller dragons struggled to lift their feet high enough to walk. At least they had struggled. Most of them had died off last winter. She thought of that with regret. She had anticipated each of the weaklings dying and had been swift enough, twice, to fill her belly with their meat and her mind with their memories. But they were all gone now, and barring accidents or disease, her mates looked as if they would survive the summer.

  She approached the huddled mass of dragons. That was not right. Serpents slept so, tangled and knotted together beneath the waves lest the currents of the ocean sweep them apart and scatter them. Most of her serpent memories now were dimmed, as was appropriate. She had no need of them in this incarnation. She had been Sisarqua in that life. But that was not who she was now. Now she was Sintara, a dragon, and dragons did not sleep huddled together like prey.

  Not unless they were crippled, useless, weakling things, little better than moving meat. She approached the sleeping creatures and shouldered her way into them. She stepped on Fente’s tale, and the little green wretch snapped at her. At her, but not scoring her skin. Fente was vicious, but not stupidly so. She knew that the first time she actually bit Sintara was the last time she’d bite anything. “You’re in my spot,” Sintara warned her, and Fente clapped her tail close to her side.

  “You’re clumsy. Or blind,” Fente retorted, but quietly, as if she hadn’t meant Sintara to hear her. In casual vengeance, Sintara shouldered Fente into Ranculos. The red had already been asleep. Without so much as opening his silver eyes, he kicked Fente in rebuke and resettled his bulk.

  “What were you doing?” Sestican, the second-largest blue male asked her as she settled against him. It was her place. She always slept between him and the dour Mercor. It did not indicate friendliness or any sort of alliance. She had chosen the place because they were two of the largest males, and sheltering between them was the wisest place to sleep.

  She didn’t mind his question. He was one of the few she considered capable of intelligent conversation. “Looking at the sky.”

  “Dreaming,” he surmised.

  “Hating,” she corrected him.

  “Dreaming and hating are the same for us, in this life.”

  “If this is to be the last life, if all my memories must die with me, why must it be so dreary?”

  “If you keep up your useless talk and disturb my sleep, I might make your last life end much faster than you expected.” This from Kalo. His blue-black scaling made him nearly invisible in the dark. Sintara felt the small venom sacs in her throat swell with her hatred of him, but she kept her silence. He was the largest of them all. And the meanest. If she had been capable of producing enough venom to damage him, she would probably have spit it at him, regardless of the consequences. But even on days when she had fed well, her sacs produced barely enough venom to stun a large fish. If she spat at Kalo, he would kill her with his teeth and eat her. Useless. Useless anger from an impotent dragon. She wrapped her tail around herself and folded her stumpy wings on her back. She closed her eyes.

  There were only fifteen of them left now. She cast her mind back. More than one hundred serpents had massed at the mouth of the river and migrated up it. How many had actually cocooned? Fewer than eighty. She didn’t know how many had initially emerged, nor how many had survived the first day. It scarcely mattered now. Disease had taken some, and a few had fallen prey to a flash flood. The disease had been the most terrifying to her. She could not recall anything similar, and those others who were capable of intelligent speech had likewise been baffled by it. It had begun with a dry barking cough at night, one that disturbed the whole gathering of dragons. It had continued and spread until almost all of the dragons suffered from it to various degrees.

  Then one of the smaller dragons had awakened them all by squawking hoarsely. It had been a small orange dragon with stumpy legs and wings that were only stubs. If he had ever had a name, Sintara couldn’t recall it now. He had been trying to paw at his eyes that were crusted shut with mucus. His truncated front legs would not reach. With every distressed squawk he gave, he sprayed thick tendrils of phlegm. All the dragons had moved aside from him in disgust. By midmorning he was dead, and a few moments later, all that remained of him was a smear of blood on the damp earth and a couple of fellow dragons with full bellies. By then, two of the others were wheezing and drooling mucus from their mouths and nostrils.

  Drier weather brought an end to the malaise. All had suffered from it to some degree. Sintara suspected that the constantly wet riverbank and the mud they had to live in, combined with the dense population, had caused the sickness. If any of them had been able to fly, they would have left and, she suspected, in doing so outflown the contagion.

  One dragon actually had left. Gresok had been the largest red, a male who was physically among the healthiest but mentally among the dullest. One afternoon, he had simply announced that he was leaving to find a better place, a city he’d seen in his dreams. Then he walked away, crashing through underbrush until they could no longer hear his passage. They’d let him go. Why not? He seemed to know what he wanted, and it would mean slightly more food for the rest of them when the human hunters meted out what they’d killed.

  But no more than half a day had passed before they’d felt his dying thoughts. He cried out, not to them, but simply shouting his fury to himself. Humans had attacked him. That much was clear. And as they felt him die, two of the other dragons, Kalo and Ranculos, had charged off to follow his trail. They went, not to assist or avenge him, but only to claim his carcass as their rightful food. That nigh
t, they had returned to the riverbank. Neither had spoken of what they had done, but Sintara had her suspicions. Both had smelled of human blood as well as Gresok’s flesh. She suspected they’d come upon humans butchering the fallen Gresok, and included them in their feasting. She saw nothing wrong in that. Any human who dared to attack a dragon deserved to die himself. And dead, of what use was he, unless someone ate him? She didn’t see why leaving a human to be eaten by worms was more acceptable.

  All of the dragons were well aware that it was better to cover all traces of such encounters. The humans were very poor at concealing their thoughts. The dragons were well aware of the anger and resentment that some felt toward them. Illogical as it was, it seemed that they preferred to have their dead eaten by fish rather than let a dragon have the use of the meat. Only a few afternoons ago, a group of humans had been putting the body of a dead relative into the river. She had waded out into the water and followed the weighted canvas packet as the current carried it until it sank under the water. She had retrieved it and dragged it ashore, well away from human eyes. She had eaten it, canvas covering and all. When she returned and realized how distressed the humans were, she had sought to save their feelings by denying she had eaten the corpse. They hadn’t believed her.

  Their reaction made no sense to her. If the body had sunk to the bottom, fish and worms would have devoured it, tearing it to insignificant pieces. But because she had eaten the body, the human’s tiny store of memories had been preserved in her. True, most of the memories made little sense to her, and the woman had lived but a breath of time, only some fifty turnings of the seasons. Even so, something of her would go on. Did humans think it better that the woman’s body do no more than nourish another generation of sucker fish? Humans were so stupid.

  Her dragon memories included a few scattered recollections of Elderlings. She wished they were clearer; they slipped and slid through her mind like a fish seen through murky water. The flavor of those memories offered tolerance, even fondness of such beings. They were useful and respectful creatures, willing to groom and greet dragons, to build their cities to accommodate them; they acknowledged the intelligence of dragons. How could sophisticated creatures such as Elderlings possibly be related to humans?