Dragon Keeper

by Robin Hobb

  His hands were shaking too much. He’d never done this sort of thing and found it much more distressing than he had imagined. A drop of blood missed the mouth of the flask and ran greasily over his fingers. He grimaced and then braced the neck of the flask against the end of the knife. In that instant, the drips became a trickle and then a sudden flow of blood. “Merciful Sa!” he exclaimed in terror and delight. The flask grew heavy in his hand and then suddenly overflowed. He snatched it away. He had to pour out some of the blood before it would admit the stopper, and he wished in vain that he had brought a second flask. He wiped his bloody hands on his trousers and then carefully stowed the flask in his pack. A quick tug freed the knife from the dragon’s flesh and he added it to the pack.

  But the blood had continued to run.

  The smell of it, reptilian and strangely rich, filled his nostrils. The insects that had been buzzing around his head forsook him for this flowing feast. They clustered around the wound, feeding greedily. The trickle of blood became a scarlet rivulet down the dragon’s shoulder. It dripped from the animal onto the trampled ground. A small puddle started to form. In the moonlight, it was black, and then as he stared at the deepening pool, it reddened. It gleamed scarlet and crimson, the two reds swirling like dyes stirred into water, separated only by silver edging. He felt drawn to it and crouched by the puddle, entranced by the color.

  His gaze lifted to the thin stream of falling blood that fed the puddle. He put his hand out, touched two fingers to the flow. The stream parted and ran over his fingers like silken thread. He pulled his fingers back, watching the unimpeded flow and then set his bloody fingers to his mouth and licked them.

  He recoiled from the touch of dragon’s blood on his tongue, shocked that he had obeyed an impulse he couldn’t even recall having. The taste of the blood flooded his mouth and filled his senses. He smelled it everywhere, not just in his nose but in the back of his throat and in the roof of his mouth. His ears rang with the scent, and his tongue tingled and stung. He tried to shake the remaining blood from his fingers, then wiped his hand down his shirt front. He was covered in blood and mud now. And still the dragon bled.

  He stooped and cupped a handful of mud-and-blood. It was both warm and cold in his hand, and he felt as if it squirmed there, a liquid serpent coiling and uncoiling within his hand. He plastered it over the injury. When he lifted his hand, the tiny trickle of red burst forth afresh. Another handful of mud and another one, and the last one he held hard against the dragon’s throat, panting through his mouth both in fear and with the effort. He tasted and smelled only dragon, he felt dragon inside his mouth and down his throat. He was a dragon. There were scales down his neck and back, his claws were sunken in mud, his wings would not unfold and what was a dragon who could not fly? He rocked on his feet dizzily, and when he staggered back from the dragon, the flow of blood had finally ceased.

  For a time he had stood there, his hands braced just above his knees, breathing the night air and trying to recover. When his head had cleared a bit, he straightened and felt instead of dizziness, a rush of horror at how badly he had managed this. What had happened to his stealth and his “leave no sign” intentions? He was covered in mud and blood, and the dragon was lying in a pool of blood. How subtle!

  He kicked mud over the blood, tore marsh grass loose and spread it there, and then kicked more mud over it. It seemed to take him hours. By moonlight, he could not tell if any red showed through his efforts on the ground or on the dragon’s neck. The creature slept on. At least it would have no recall of him.

  He went back to the barge and attempted to reboard it. He spent an agonized near hour in the shadow of the bow. Above him, Leftrin and Alise talked softly about knots, of all things. When finally they moved away, he clambered up the rope ladder and fled to his cabin. There he had changed hastily into clean clothing and hidden his precious blood and scales in his case. It had taken him three furtive attempts before he was able to clean his muddy, bloody tracks from the deck of the barge. Leftrin and Alise had nearly caught him in the act of throwing his soiled clothing and ruined boots overboard. If they had not been so completely engrossed in each other, they would surely have discovered him.

  But they had not. They had not, and the vial of blood that he now held in his hand was his prize for all he had gone through. He stared at it, at the slow shifting and tangling of the trapped red stuff inside it. Like serpents twining round one another, he thought, and a ghostly image of sea serpents wrapping one another in the dim blue of an undersea world invaded his thoughts. He shook his head clear of the fancy, and he resisted the sudden urge to uncap the flask and smell the contents. He had sealing wax in his case. He should melt some over the neck of the flask to seal it securely. He should. He’d do it later.

  The sight of his treasure left him oddly calmed. He put the flask back into the secret drawer and took up a small shallow box made from cedar. He opened the sliding lid and looked inside. The scales rested there on a shallow bed of salt. They were slightly iridescent in the dim light of the cabin. He closed the lid, replaced the box in the secret drawer, and shut and locked it. They’d probably find the brown dragon dead. They wouldn’t suspect him, he suddenly knew. He’d covered his tracks well. He’d smeared the blood away, and the wound from his knife was so tiny that no one would find it. He hadn’t killed the beast, not really. Everyone saw that it was nearly ready to die anyway. If his bleeding of the dragon had hastened its death, well, that didn’t mean he’d killed it. It was only an animal anyway, despite how Alise might moon over it. A dragon was only an animal, just like a cow or a chicken, to be used by a man in any way he saw fit.

  Exactly the opposite, really.

  The intrusion of that thought was so sudden and foreign that it shocked him. The opposite? That man was to be exploited by dragons as they saw fit? Preposterous. Where had such a silly idea come from?

  He straightened his jacket, unlatched his door, and stepped out onto the Tarman’s deck.

  Day the 5th 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

  A missive from Trader Kincarron to the Councils of Trehaug and Cassarick, expressing confusion and concern about the Councils’ contract with his daughter Alise Kincarron Finbok and asking for clarification. A speedy reply is requested.

  Detozi,

  When Trader Kincarron dropped this off, he promised a handsome bonus if both his query and a response traveled quickly. If you can prod anyone at the Council there to send a response before the day is out, and use your swiftest pigeon, I would consider the debt settled for the peas.

  Erek

  Bonus Excerpt

  Continue reading for a free excerpt of Robin Hobb’s Dragon Haven: Volume Two of the Rain Wilds Chronicles.

  Dragon Haven will be available in hardcover and e-book in May 2010.

  The humans were agitated. Sintara sensed their darting, stinging thoughts, as annoying as a swarm of biting insects. The dragon wondered how humans had ever managed to survive when they could not keep their thoughts to themselves. The irony was that despite spraying out every fancy that passed through their small minds, they didn’t have the strength of intellect to sense what their fellows were thinking. They tottered through their brief lives, misunderstanding one another and almost every other creature in the world. It had shocked her the first time she realized that the only way they could communicate with one another was to make noises with their mouths and then to guess what the other human meant by the noises it made in response. “Talking” they called it.

  For a moment, she stopped blocking the barrage of squeaking and tried to determine what had agitated the dragon keepers today. As usual, there was no coherence to their concerns. Several were worried about the copper dragon who had fallen ill. It was not as if they could do much about it; she wondered why they were flapping about it instead of te
nding to their duties for the other dragons. She was hungry, and no one had brought her anything today, not even a fish.

  She strolled listlessly down the riverbank. There was little to see here, only a strip of gravel and mud, reeds and a few scrawny saplings. Thin sunlight touched her back but gave small warmth. No game of any size lived here. There might be fish in the river, but the effort of catching one was scarcely worth the small pleasure of eating it. Now, if someone else brought it to her. . .

  She thought about summoning Thymara and insisting the girl go hunting for her. From what she had overheard from the keepers, they’d remain on this forsaken strip of beach until the copper dragon either recovered or died. She considered that for a moment. If the copper died, that would make a substantial meal for whichever dragon got there first. And that, she decided bitterly, would be Mercor. The gold dragon was keeping watch. She sensed that he suspected some danger to the copper, but he was guarding his thoughts now, not letting dragons or keepers know what he was thinking. That alone made her feel wary.

  She would have asked him outright what danger he feared if she hadn’t been so angry at him. With no provocation at all, he had given her true name to the keepers. Not just to Thymara and Alise, her own keepers. That would have been bad enough. But no, he had trumpeted her true name out as if it were his to share. That he and most of the other dragons had chosen to share their true names with their keepers meant nothing to her; if they wanted to be foolishly trusting, it was up to them. She didn’t interfere between him and his keeper. Why had he felt so free about unbalancing her relationship with Thymara? Now that the girl knew her true name, Sintara could only hope that she had no idea of how to use it. No dragon could lie to someone who demanded the truth with her true name or used it properly when asking a question. Refuse to answer, of course, but not lie. Nor could a dragon break an agreement if she entered into it under her true name. It was an unconscionable amount of power that he had given to a human with the life span of a fish.

  She found an open place on the beach and lowered her body onto the sun-warmed river stones, closed her eyes, and sighed. Should she sleep? No. Resting on the chilly ground did not appeal to her.

  Reluctantly, she opened her mind again, to try to get some idea of what the humans had planned. Someone else was whining about blood on his hands. The elder of her keepers was in an emotional storm as to whether she should return home to live in boredom with her husband or mate with the captain of the ship. Sintara made a grumble of disgust. There was not even a decision to ponder there. Alise was agonizing over trivialities. It didn’t matter what she did, any more than it mattered where a fly landed. Humans lived and died in a ridiculously short amount of time. Perhaps that was why they made so much noise when they were alive. Perhaps it was the only way they could convince one another of their significance.

  Dragons made sounds, it was true, but they did not depend on those sounds to convey their thoughts. Sound and utterances were useful when one had to blast through the clutter of human thought and attract the attention of another dragon. Sound was useful to make humans in general focus on what a dragon was trying to convey to it. She would not have minded human sounds so much if they did not persist in spouting out their thoughts at the same time they tried to convey them with their squeaking. The dual annoyance sometimes made her wish she could just eat them and be done with them.

  She released her frustration as a low rumble. The humans were useless annoyances, and yet fate had forced the dragons to rely on them. When the dragons had hatched from their cases, emerging from their metamorphosis from sea serpent to dragon, they had wakened to a world that did not match their memories of it. Not decades but centuries had passed since dragons had last walked this world. Instead of emerging able to fly, they had come out as badly formed parodies of what a dragon was supposed to be, trapped on a swampy riverbank beside an impenetrable forested wet land. The humans had grudgingly aided them, bringing them carcasses to feed on and tolerating their presence as they waited for them to die off or muster the strength to leave. For years, they had starved and suffered, fed barely enough to keep them alive, trapped between the forest and the river.

  And then Mercor conceived of a plan. The golden dragon concocted the tale of a half-remembered city of an ancient race, and the vast treasures that surely resided there still, waiting to be rediscovered. It did not particularly bother any of the dragons that only the memory of Kelsingra, an Elderling city built to a scale that welcomed dragons, was a true memory. If a treasure of glittering riches was the false bait it took to encourage the humans to help them, so be it.

  And so the trap was set, the rumor spread, and when sufficient time had passed, the humans had offered to assist the dragons as they sought to rediscover the Elderling city of Kelsingra. An expedition was mounted, with a barge and boats, hunters to kill for the dragons, and keepers to see to the needs of the dragons as they escorted them upriver and back to a city they recalled clearly only when they dreamed. The grubby little merchants who held power in the city did not give them their best, of course. Only two real hunters were hired to provide for over a dozen dragons. The “keepers” the Traders had selected for them were mostly adolescent humans, the misfits of their population, those they preferred would not survive and breed. The youngsters were marked with scales and growths, changes the other Rain Wilders wished not to see. The best that could be said of them was that they were mostly tractable and diligent in caring for the dragons. But they had no memories from their forebears, and skittered through their lives with only the minimal knowledge of the world that they could gather in their own brief existence. It was hard to hold converse with one, even when she had no intent of seeking intelligent dialogue. As simple a command as “go bring me meat” was usually met with whining about how difficult it was to find game and queries such as, “Did not you eat but a few hours ago?” as if such words would somehow change her mind about her needs.

  Sintara alone of the dragons had had the foresight to claim two keepers as her servants instead of one. The older human, Alise, was of little use as a hunter, but she was a willing if not adept groomer and had a correct and respectful attitude. Her younger keeper, Thymara, was the best of the hunters among the keepers, but suffered from an unruly and impertinent nature. Still, having two keepers assured her that one was almost always available for her needs, at least for as long as their brief lives lasted. She hoped that would be long enough.

  For most of a moon cycle, the dragons had trudged up the river, staying to the shallows near the densely grown riverbank. The banks of the river were too thickly forested, too twined with vines and creepers, too tangled with reaching roots to provide walking space for the dragons. Their hunters ranged ahead of them, their keepers followed in their small boats, and last of all came the liveship Tarman, a long, low river barge that smelled much of dragon and magic. Mercor was intrigued with the so-called liveship. Most of the dragons, including Sintara, found the ship unsettling and almost offensive. The hull of the ship had been carved from “wizardwood,” which was not wood at all but the remains of a dead sea serpent’s cocoon. The timber that such “wood” yielded was very hard and impervious to rain and weather. The humans valued it highly. But to dragons, it smelled of dragon flesh and memories. When a sea serpent wove its case to protect it while it changed into a dragon, it contributed saliva and memories to the special clay and sand it regurgitated. Such wood was, in its own way, sentient. The painted eyes of the ships were far too knowing for Sintara’s liking, and Tarman moved upriver against the current far more easily than any ordinary ship should. She avoided the barge and spoke little to his captain. The man had never seemed to wish to interact with the dragons much. For a moment, that thought lodged in Sintara’s mind. Was there a reason he avoided them? He did not seem cowed by dragons, as some humans did.

  Or repulsed. Sintara thought of Sedric and snorted disdainfully. The fussy Bingtown man trailed after her keeper Alise, carrying her pens and paper, sket
ching dragons and writing down snippets of information as Alise passed it on to him. He was so dull of brain that he could not even understand the dragons when they spoke to him. He heard her speech as “animal sounds” and had rudely compared it to the mooing of a cow! No. Captain Leftrin was nothing like Sedric. He was not deaf to the dragons, and obviously he did not consider them unworthy of his attention. So why did he avoid them? Was he hiding something?

  Well, he was a fool if he thought he could conceal anything from a dragon. She dismissed her brief concern. Dragons could sort through a human’s mind as easily as a crow could peck apart a pile of dung. If Leftrin or any other human had a secret, they were welcome to keep it. Human lives were so short that knowing a human was scarcely worth the effort. At one time, Elderlings had been worthy companions for dragons. They had lived much longer than humans and been clever enough to compose songs and poetry that honored dragons. In their wisdom, they had made their public buildings and even some of their more palatial homes hospitable to dragon guests. Her ancestral memories informed her of fatted cattle, of warm shelters that welcomed dragons during the wintry season, of scented oil baths that soothed itching scales and other thoughtful amenities the Elderlings had contrived for them. It was a shame they were gone from the world. A shame.

  She tried to imagine Thymara as an Elderling, but it was impossible. Her young keeper lacked the proper attitude toward dragons. She was disrespectful, sullen, and far too fascinated with her own firefly existence. She had spirit but employed it poorly. Her older keeper, Alise, was even more unsuitable. Even now, she could sense the woman’s underlying uncertainty and misery. An Elderling female had to share something of a dragon queen’s decisiveness and fire. Did either of her tenders have the potential for them? she wondered. What would it take to put spurs to them, to test their mettle? Was it worth the effort of challenging them to see what they were made of?