Dragon Keeper

by Robin Hobb

  It had pleased her, too, to be the only dragon with two attendants hovering around her. Now it seemed that both of them had defected to the mindless silver dragon, a prospect that was very distasteful to her. It had been pleasant to feel the vibrations of jealousy between the two women as they vied for her attention. Thymara had taken great pleasure in bringing her that fish, a pleasure that was rooted not only in serving the dragon but in serving her better than Alise could. Sintara had been looking forward to nudging them into sharper competition. She noted their current cooperation with displeasure and felt insulted that they now seemed as solicitous of the silver dragon as they had been of her. Alise’s useless male companion had joined them as well.

  Kalo had taken advantage of her distraction to sink his teeth into a goat carcass that had been closer to her than to him. Sintara hissed her displeasure and seized the other end of it. It was no great prize. It was nearly rotten and tore in half before she had even tugged at it. Kalo swallowed the piece he had stolen and observed, “You should teach your tender more respect or you’ll lose her.”

  It was humiliating that he had noticed the girl’s defection. Sintara had been on the point of going after her and the other woman. Now her pride prevented her from doing that. “I don’t need a keeper,” she informed him.

  “Of course not. None of us do. Nevertheless, I wouldn’t allow anyone to take mine from me. He’s very satisfactory. You have noticed, of course, that the leader of the humans has chosen me to tend. He says it is because they have recognized me as the leader of the dragons.”

  “Have they? How nice for you. What a pity that none of the dragons has!” Quicker than a lizard’s blink, she shot her head out, seized a young riverpig carcass that had been right in front of him and dragged it over to her spot. He bristled at her, the half-formed spines of his mane trying to rise. “Pitiful,” she commented quietly, as if she hadn’t intended him to hear it. She clamped her jaws on the pig, crushed it to a pulp, and swallowed it whole. When it was down, she added, “One of the females who tends me is quite knowledgeable about both dragons and Elderlings, and highly respected in her city. She chose to come with us out of admiration for me. And she knows that when the dragons of the past did acknowledge one as a leader, it was always a queen. Like me.”

  “A queen like you? So, even then, there were dragons with no wings?”

  “I have teeth.” She opened her jaws wide, reminding him.

  Across the circle from them, Mercor slowly lifted his head. Since he had been cleaned, his gold scaling flashed in the sunlight. On the sides of his neck, a subtle mottling marked where he might have carried false-eyes in his serpent days. He was not as large as either of them, yet when he lifted his head, he radiated command. “No fighting,” he said calmly, as if he had the right to regulate them. “Not today. Not when we are so close to leaving this place and beginning our journey back to what we were. To what we are meant to be.”

  “What do you mean?” she demanded of him. Secretly, she was glad of the distraction. She had no desire to fight, not when there was food to eat.

  Mercor met her gaze. His eyes were solid, gleaming black, like obsidian set into his eye sockets. She could read nothing there. “I mean, today we begin our journey back to Kelsingra. Search your memory, and perhaps you will understand.”

  “Kelsingra,” Kalo retorted skeptically. Sintara suspected that he, too, was relieved that Mercor had spoken and diverted them from a fight. But he could not admit that, and so he turned his disdain on the golden male.

  “Kelsingra,” Mercor agreed and bent his head and snuffed the ground, searching for any remaining scraps of food. The humans had brought more than they usually did, perhaps as a farewell gift or perhaps to be rid of any surplus they’d been holding in reserve. Even so, the dragons had devoured it quickly, and Sintara knew that she was not the only one who remained hungry. She wished she could remember what it felt like to be full; in this life, she’d never known the sensation.

  “Kelsingra,” Veras suddenly echoed Mercor, and around the circle, other dragons lifted their heads.

  “Kelsingra!” Fente suddenly trumpeted and actually leaped, her front two legs leaving the ground. Her wings opened and flapped spasmodically and uselessly. She snapped them back to her body as if shamed.

  “Kelsingra!” Both orange dragons chorused a response, as if the word brought them joy.

  Mercor lifted his head, looked around at all of them, and then said ponderously, “It is time to leave this place. For too long we have been kept here, corralled as humans corral meat animals. We have slept in the place they have left for us, eaten what they fed us, and accepted that we were doomed to these shadow lives. Dragons do not live like this, and I for one will not die like this. If die I must, I will die as a dragon. Let us go.” Then he turned and headed toward the river shallows. For a time, all the dragons just watched him go. Then, without warning, some of the dragons began to follow him.

  Sintara found herself trailing after them.

  THE GASH IN the silver dragon’s tail looked as if it had been made by another dragon’s claw. It had never been a clean cut; it looked more like a tear. Thymara wondered if it had been intentional or merely an accident during the daily scramble for food. She also wondered how long ago it had happened. The injury was close to where his tail joined his body and was about as long as her forearm. A raised ridge of flesh along either side of the gaping tear indicated it had tried to close and heal, but had broken open again. It looked bad and smelled worse. Flies, some large and buzzing, others tiny and myriad, swarmed and settled on it.

  Alise and Sedric, both her elders, were standing there like timid children, waiting for her to do something about it. The silver seemed to be paying no attention to them; it was at the far end of the crescent of dumped meat and feeding dragons, snatching at what it could reach and then retreating a half step from the others to eat it. She wished she had something larger to feed him, something that would keep him standing still and his mouth occupied. She watched him pick up at large bird, toss it up, catch it, and gulp it down. She had to act soon; when the food was gone, there would be nothing to distract him.

  Sedric had fetched his kit of bandages and salves. It lay on the ground, open and ready. Thymara had brought other, more prosaic supplies: a bucket of clean water and a rag. She felt like a messenger who’d forgotten the words he’d been paid to say as they all waited for one of them to begin. She turned away from them and tried to think what she would do if she were here alone, as she had expected to be.

  Well, no, she admitted to herself. She’d expected Tats to be here with her, or at least Sylve or Rapskal. She now felt a fool for volunteering to take on the hapless silver dragon. Skymaw was more than enough to deal with. She couldn’t possibly care for this dullwitted creature as well. She pushed that thought away and angrily crushed her self-doubt before the two Bingtowners. She set one hand lightly on the silver dragon’s dirty hide, well away from the wound on his tail. “Hello?” she said quietly.

  He twitched slightly at her touch, but made no reply. She refused to let herself glance at her companions. She didn’t need their approval or guidance. She made her hand more firm on his skin. He didn’t pull away. “Listen, dragon, I’m here to help take care of you. Soon we’ll all be going up the river to look for a better place for you to live. But before we start traveling, I want to look at the injury on your tail. It looks infected. I’d like to clean it and bandage it. It may be a bit painful, but I think it has to be done. Otherwise, the river water will eat at it. Will you let me do that?”

  The dragon turned his head to look at her. Half of a dead animal hung from his jaws. She couldn’t determine what it had been, but it smelled dreadful and she didn’t think he should eat it. But before she could frame that warning, he tipped his head up, opened his jaws, and swallowed it. She felt her gorge rise. Lots of animals ate carrion, she sternly reminded herself. She couldn’t let herself be upset by it.

  The dragon look
ed at her again. His eyes were blue, a mingling of sky and periwinkle that swirled slowly as he stared at her. He made a questioning rumble at her, but she received no sense of words. She tried to find some spark of intelligence in his gaze, something more than bovine acceptance of her presence. “Silver dragon, will you let me help you with your injury?” she asked him again.

  He lowered his head and rubbed his muzzle against his front leg to clear a strand of intestine that dangled from the side of his mouth. He pawed at his nose, snorting, and with a sinking heart she noticed that his nostrils and ears were infested with tightly clinging parasites. Those would have to go, too. But first, the tail, she reminded herself sternly. He opened his mouth, revealing a long jaw full of glistening pointed teeth. He seemed so placid, even unaware, but if she hurt him and it angered him, those teeth could end her life.

  “I’m going to start now,” she told the dragon and her companions. She forced herself to turn to the Bingtowners and add, “Be ready. He’s not really responding to anything I say. I don’t feel like he’s any more intelligent than an ordinary animal. So when I try to look at his tail, there’s no telling what he’ll do. He may try to attack me. Or all of us.”

  Sedric looked properly daunted, but Alise actually bared her teeth in determination. “We must do something for him,” she said.

  Thymara dipped the rag into the water and wrung it out over the gash. Water trickled from the rag into the gash and ran away in a dirty rivulet down the dragon’s tail. It carried off a few maggots and disturbed a cloud of insects, large and small, that rose, buzzed, and tried to resettle immediately. It did little more than wash away surface dirt, but at least the dragon had not turned and snapped at her. She mustered her courage and gently pressed the rag to the injury. The dragon rippled his flesh around the area but did not growl. She wiped gently around it, taking off a layer of filth and insects and baring a raw stripe down the center. She plunged the rag into the bucket, rinsed and wrung it out, and applied it more firmly. Crusty scab came away and there was a sudden trickle of stinking liquid from the wound.

  The dragon gave a sudden snort and whipped his head around to see what they were doing to him. When he darted his head toward Thymara, she thought she was going to die. She couldn’t find breath to shriek.

  Instead the dragon nosed at the oozing injury. He pressed his nose flat to the swelling, forcing the pus from it. For a moment he worked at it, starting at the top of the gash and pushing his snout along it. The smell was terrible. Flies buzzed excitedly. She closed her nostrils as much as she could and lifted her hand, pressing the back of her wrist against her nose. “At least he’s trying to help us clean it,” she said through clenched teeth.

  Abruptly, the dragon lost interest and turned back to his feeding. Thymara seized the opportunity to wet the rag again and wipe the pus away from the injury. Three times she rinsed out the rag and cleansed it, until she feared the water in the bucket was as foul as the stuff she was trying to wipe away.

  “Here. Use this.”

  She turned to find a grim-faced Sedric offering her a thinbladed knife. She stared at it; she’d been expecting him to hold out salve or bandaging. “For what?” she demanded.

  “You need to cut away the proud flesh. Then we need to bind it closed. Perhaps even stitch it closed. Otherwise, it’s not going to heal well.”

  “Proud flesh?”

  “That swollen, tough-looking stuff at the edges of the wound. You need to cut it away so that you can bandage it, fresh cut to fresh cut. So the flesh can heal together.”

  “Cut away the dragon’s flesh?”

  “You have to. Look at it. It’s all dried out and thick. It’s already dead, really. It can’t heal that way.”

  She looked at it and swallowed sickly. He was right. From the palm of his hand, on a flat fold of clean cloth, he offered her the shining knife.

  “I don’t know how to do this,” she admitted.

  “I doubt that any of us do. But we know it has to be done.”

  She took the proffered knife and tried to grip it firmly. She set her free hand flat on the dragon’s tail. “Here I go,” she warned them, and she gingerly set the blade to the ridged flesh at the edge of the wound. The knife was very sharp. Almost without effort, it slid into the flesh. She watched her own hand move, carving away the stiffened skin at the edge of the injury. It came away like shriveled rind from a dried-up fruit. It was caked with dirt and scales; the moving knife bared dark red flesh. It oozed blood in slow, bright droplets, but the dragon went on snorting through his food, as if he didn’t feel it.

  “That’s it,” Sedric said in a low, excited voice. “That’s right. Cut that piece free and I’ll get it out of your way.”

  She did as he bade her, scarcely noticing how he deftly caught it in a gloved hand. Alise had gone silent, either raptly watching or intently not watching. Thymara could not afford to look at her to find out which. She had cleared one edge of the wound of proud flesh. She took a breath, steeled herself again, and set the blade to the other side.

  A trembling ran through the dragon. She froze, the razor-sharp blade set in the rubbery edge of his injury. He didn’t turn his head toward her. He hissed low. “Fight.” The word barely reached her ears; it was spoken with a childish inflection, without force.

  Dread edged the word. She wondered if she had imagined it.

  “Fight?” Alise asked him gently. “Fight what?”

  “What?” Sedric asked, startled.

  “Fight—together, fight. No. No.”

  Thymara stood absolutely still. She had begun to think the silver had no intelligence beyond animal instinct. It was almost a shock to hear him speak.

  “No fight?” Alise said as if she were talking to a baby.

  “Fight what?” Sedric demanded. “Who’s fighting?”

  It was an unwelcome distraction. Thymara caught her breath before she could lose her temper and said quietly, “She isn’t talking to you. The dragon mumbled something and it’s the first time we’ve been aware of him speaking. Alise is trying to talk to him.” She took a breath, recalled her task, and moved the sharp knife steadily through the stiffened flesh at the edges of the wound.

  “Concentrate on what you’re doing,” Sedric suggested, and she found herself grateful for his support.

  “What’s your name?” Alise said quietly. “Lovely silver one, dragon of the stars’ and moon’s color, what is your name?” She put cajoling music into her voice. Thymara felt a subtle difference in the dragon. He didn’t speak, but it felt as if he were listening.

  “What are you doing?” Tats demanded behind Thymara. She jumped but didn’t let the twitch reach her hand.

  “What I said I would do. Taking care of the silver.”

  “With a knife?”

  “I’m cutting away the proud flesh before we bind it.” She felt a small satisfaction in knowing the right term to use. Tats crouched beside her and surveyed her work intently.

  “Still a lot of pus there.”

  She felt a moment of annoyance with him, as if he had criticized her, but then he offered, “Let’s clean it again. I’ll go get more water.”

  “Please,” she said and felt him leave. She carved carefully, and again, as the ridge of dried flesh and clinging scales fell away, Sedric caught it and whisked it out of her way. As she gave the knife back to him, she realized her hands were trembling. “I don’t think we should do anything else until we’ve washed it a bit more,” she suggested.

  He was stowing things away in his case, working quickly and carefully, as if that were more important than tending the dragon. She caught a strong smell of vinegar and heard the sound of glass on glass. “Probably not,” he agreed.

  She had pushed Alise’s murmuring voice into the back of her awareness. Now she listened as the woman said, “But you’d like to go somewhere, right? Somewhere nice. Go where, little one? Go where?”

  The dragon said something. It wasn’t a word, and suddenly Thymara realized
that it had never been “words” she had been hearing. Her mind had imposed that reference. The dragon didn’t “say” anything to her, but he remembered something strongly. She recalled a flash of hot sunlight beating on her scaled back; the scent of dust and citrus flowers floated in the air on the distant music of drums and a softly droning pipe.

  Just as suddenly as it had come, the sensory image faded, leaving her bereft. There was a place, a kindly place of warmth and food and companionship, a place whose name was lost in time.

  “Kelsingra.”

  The silver had not spoken. The name came to her from at least two of the other dragons. But it was like a frame falling around a picture. It captured and contained the images the silver had been trying to convey. Kelsingra. That was the name of the place he longed to be. A shiver ran over him, and when it had passed, he felt different to her. Confirmed. Consoled, almost.

  “Kelsingra,” Alise repeated in a low and soothing voice. “I know Kelsingra. I know its leaping fountains and spacious city squares. I know its stone steps and the wide doors of its buildings. The river banked with grassy meadows, and the well of silver water. The Elderlings with their flowing robes and golden eyes used to come to greet the dragons as they landed in the river.”

  Alise’s words fed the silver dragon’s coalescing awareness. Without thinking about it, Thymara reached to put a hand on the creature’s back. For a fleeting moment, she sensed him, like brushing hands with a stranger in a market crowd. They did not speak with words, but shared a longing for a place.

  “But not here!” he said plaintively, and Alise murmured, “No, dear, of course not here. Kelsingra. That is where you belong. That is where we have to take you.”