by Robin Hobb
She tapped on Sedric’s door and, half a heartbeat later, cursed herself for stupidity. She opened the door and went in, closing it behind her.
Had absence sharpened her awareness? Everything in the room seemed wrong. It smelled of unwashed clothing and sweat. The blankets were rucked about like an animal’s nest, the floor littered with discarded garments. Untidiness was very unlike Sedric, let alone this sliding into grubbiness. Her guilt hit her with a double sharpness. Sedric had been suffering from dark spirits for days, ever since he had poisoned himself with bad food. How could she have left him alone so much, even if he had been unpleasant and cold to her? How could she have visited this room for even a few minutes and not admitted how he was declining? She should have tidied things for him here, kept it as clean and bright as she could. The signs of his despondency were obvious in every part of the room. For one shocking moment, she wondered if he had deliberately done away with himself.
Knowing it was ridiculous, a mercy performed too late, she gathered his unwashed garments and carefully folded them, setting some aside to launder. She shook out his bedding and re-made his pallet. A promise to herself—a foolish promise—that he would return and be relieved to find a tidy room waiting for him. She took up the bundle he had been using for a pillow and shook it to fluff it.
As she did so, something fell to the floor. She stooped in the darkness and groped until her fingers found a fine chain. She lifted it and held it to the light. A locket swung from it. It gleamed gold and flashed even in the dim light. She had never seen Sedric wear it, and the moment it had tumbled from its hiding place in his pillow, she knew it was something private. She smiled even as her heart ached. She’d never suspected that he had a sweetheart, let alone that she’d gifted him with a locket. With a sudden wrench, she understood his reluctance to be stolen away from Bingtown, and his agony over being gone so long. Why hadn’t he told her? He could have confided in her, and then she would have understood his driving need to return. His melancholy of the last week suddenly shone in a different light. He was heartsick. With her free hand, she caught the locket as it swung.
She had not intended to open it. She was not the sort of woman who pried and spied. But as her hand closed on the locket, the catch sprung and it opened in her hand. With an exclamation of dismay, she saw that a lock of gleaming black hair was now escaping from its golden prison. She opened the locket the rest of the way to tuck it back in, and then stopped. Gazing up at her from the locket’s confines were features that she recognized. Whoever had painted the miniature had known him well, to catch his face at just that moment before he burst into laughter. His green eyes were narrowed, his finely chiseled lips pulled tight enough to partially bare his white teeth. The painting was the work of a skilled artist. She looked down at Hest smiling up at her. What did it mean? What could it mean?
She sank down slowly to sit on Sedric’s bed. With trembling fingers, she poked the curl of black hair, tied with a single golden thread, back into the locket. It took her three tries before it would stay snapped shut. And when it was closed, the mystery only enlarged. For engraved on the outside of the golden clam-shell was a single word. “Always,” she whispered to herself.
She sat for a long time as the afternoon sunlight outside the small window slowly died. There could be but one explanation. Hest had had the locket made and entrusted it to Sedric to give to her. Why had he done such a thing?
Always. What did that word mean to her, coming from Hest? Had he feared to lose her? Did he actually care for her, in some thwarted bizarre way that he could not confess to her face? Was that what this locket was supposed to tell her? Or had it been intended as a threat, that “Always” he would keep a hold on her? No matter where she went, no matter how far, or how long she stayed away, Hest held her leash. Always. Always. She looked at the locket in the palm of her hand. Carefully, she lifted the chain and puddled it in a golden coil around the closed locket. She shut her fist around it, thrust her hand inside Sedric’s pillow and dropped it. Carefully, she set the pillow down on his pallet.
Her eyes roved around the small place where she had kenneled Sedric. Dim and small and crowded. Untidy. Completely unlike his personal chambers at their home in Bingtown. He loved high ceilings and tall windows open to the breeze. His desk and shelves were always a model of organization. Hest’s servants knew to stock his room daily with fresh flowers, that he loved fragrant applewood burning in his small fireplace and hot tea served on an enameled tray. Scented candles in the evening and mulled wine. And from all that, she had snatched him away and condemned him to this. “Sedric, I will make it up to you. I promise. Just be alive. Just be where we can find you. My friend, I’ve treated you badly, but I swear it was not with intent. I swear.”
She stood on her tiptoes to open the small windows to the evening breeze. As soon as they had water for washing, she’d see that his clothes were laundered and hung fresh in his wardrobe. It was all she could do. She refused to consider the futility of promises made to a dead man. He had to be alive and he had to be found. That was all there was to it.
“THAT’S SIMPLY NOT POSSIBLE.” Thymara spoke firmly.
“We are not asking you,” Sintara rejoined. “It’s his right.”
“We do not eat our dead,” Tats said stiffly.
Evening had fallen, and much to the relief of everyone the river had finally subsided to an almost normal level. The dragons were still belly-deep in water, but now they had river bottom to stand on, even if it was thick with a fresh coat of silt and muck. The crew had moved the barge to an anchoring spot that was close to the dragons without threatening the barge with getting stranded. Every keeper had had a hot meal, even if it had been a small one.
Plans for the next day had been set. The keepers, dragons, and the barge would remain where they were for the next two days while Carson traveled a full day down the river and back up again, looking for survivors or bodies. Davvie had wanted to go with him and been refused. “I can’t load the boat up with passengers here, lad. I need room to ferry back anyone I find.”
Kase had offered to accompany him in one of the other boats, but with the makeshift paddles they had, Carson had said he would only slow him down. “Use the time while I’m gone to see what you can do about carving out some decent paddles. Davvie and I have some extra spear-and arrowheads. Jess had a good stock of hunting equipment in his chest on board, but don’t raid that just yet. I’ve still got hopes that we’ll find him alive. He’s a pretty savvy riverman. It would take more than a big wave to do him in, I’ll wager.”
Everything had been decided, and some of the keepers were already settling for the night when the dragons had waded out to surround the barge and Baliper had made his outrageous demand.
Now Mercor spoke. “You are free to eat or not eat whatever you desire. As are we. We do devour our dead. It is Baliper’s right to feed on the body of his keeper. Warken should be given to him before his meat rots any more.” The dragon turned his head to look at his own keeper. “Are my words not clear? What is the delay?”
“Mercor, mirror of both the sun and the moon, what you ask is against our custom.” Sylve seemed calm, but her voice trembled a bit. Thymara suspected that she did not often defy her dragon.
The great dragon spun his eyes at her. “I am not asking. To reach Warken’s body, Baliper may have to damage your boat. This, we think, would distress all of you. So, to aid you, we suggest you put his body over the side.”
“It’s what we’d have to do soon in any case,” Captain Leftrin pointed out in a low voice. “We’ve nowhere to bury him. So, the river will have him in any case, and moments after he’s in the river, the dragons will have him. It’s what they do, my friends.”
If he was seeking to console them, Thymara thought, he was doing it in an odd way. There was not a one of them who could look at Warken’s draped form and not imagine herself or himself lying there.
Sintara picked up the image from Thymara’s mind and agilely
turned it against her. “If you died tomorrow, which would you wish? To rot in the river, eaten by fishes? Or be devoured by me, and your memories live on in me?”
“I’d be dead and thus I wouldn’t care either way,” Thymara replied brusquely. She felt the dragon was using her against the rest of the keepers and was not entirely comfortable with that.
“Exactly my point,” Sintara purred. “Warken is dead. He no longer cares about anything. Baliper does. Give him to Baliper.”
Harrikin suddenly spoke up. “I wouldn’t want to just sink down in the muck of the river bottom. I’d give myself to Ranculos. I want everyone here to know that now. If something does befall me, give my body to my dragon.”
“Same for me,” Kase said, and predictably Boxter echoed him with a, “Same.”
“And I,” Sylve chimed. “I am Mercor’s, in life or death.”
“Of course,” Jerd conceded, and Greft added, “For me, also.”
The assents rounded the circle of gathered keepers. When it came back to her, Thymara bit her lip and held her silence. Sintara reared up out of the water, standing briefly on her hind legs to look down on her. “What?” she demanded of the girl.
Thymara looked up at her. “I belong to myself,” she said quietly. “To get, you must give, Sintara.”
“I saved you from the river!” The dragon’s outraged trumpeting split the darkening sky.
“And I have served you from the day I met you,” Thymara replied. “But I do not feel that our bond is complete. So I will hold my thoughts until such time as a decision must be made. And then I will leave it up to my fellow keepers.”
“Insolent human! Do you think that you—”
“Another time.” Mercor cut into their quarrel. “Render to Baliper what is his.”
“Warken wouldn’t have had a problem with it,” Lecter said decidedly. He straightened from where he’d been leaning on the railing. “I’ll do it.”
“I’ll help,” Tats said quietly.
“Keepers’ decision,” Leftrin announced, as if they had waited for his permission. “Swarge will show you how to use a plank to slide his body over the side. If you want words said, I’ll say them.”
“There should be words,” Lecter said. “Warken’s mother would want that.”
And so it went, and Thymara watched it unfold and wondered at the strange little community they had become. I am and am not a part of this, she thought as she listened to Leftrin say his simple words and then watched Warken’s body slip over the railing on a plank. She wanted to turn her head away from what would happen next but somehow she could not. She needed to see it, she told herself. Needed to see how the keepers and their dragons had become so intertwined that such an outrageous and macabre request could be seen as reasonable and even inevitable.
Baliper was waiting. The body slid out from under its draping and as it entered the river, the dragon ducked his head and seized it. He lifted Warken, his head and feet dangling out either side of his mouth, and carried him off. The other dragons, she noted, did not follow him, but turned away and half swam, half waded back to the shallows at the edge of the river. Baliper disappeared upriver into the darkness with his keeper’s body. So it was not a simple devouring of meat that humans would otherwise discard. It meant something, not just to Warken’s dragon, but to all of them. It was important enough to them that when Baliper’s demand had been initially refused, they had massed and made it plain that they would not let him be denied.
The other keepers reminded her of the dragons. They dispersed quietly from their places along the railings. No one wept, but it did not mean no one wished to. Seeing Warken dead, really dead, had brought home the reality of Rapskal’s absence. He was gone, and the chances were that if she saw him again he would be like Warken, battered and bloated and still.
The keepers congregated in small groups. Jerd was with Greft, of course. Sylve was with Harrikin and Lecter. Boxter and Kase, the cousins, moved as one as they always did. Nortel trailed after them. And she stood apart from all of them, as she so often seemed to do. The only one who had refused her dragon. The only one who never seemed to know what rules the group had discarded and which ones they kept. Her back ached abominably, she was river scalded and insect bitten, and the loneliness that filled her up from the inside threatened to crack her body. She missed Alise’s company, but now that they were back on the barge and she had her captain’s attention, she probably wouldn’t want to spend time with Thymara.
And she missed Rapskal, with a keenness that shocked her.
“Are you all right?”
She turned, startled to discover Tats standing at her side. “I suppose I am. That was a hard, strange thing, wasn’t it?”
“In some ways, it was the simplest solution. And Lecter had spent a lot of time with Warken; they partnered in the boats most days. So I’m willing to believe that he knew what Warken would have wanted.”
“I’m sure he did,” Thymara replied quietly.
They stood for a time, staring over the river. The dragons had dispersed. Thymara could still feel, like a fire radiating cold, Sintara’s anger with her. She didn’t care. Her skin hurt all over, the injury between her shoulders burned, and she didn’t belong anywhere.
“I can’t even go home.”
Tats didn’t ask what she meant. “None of us can. None of us was ever really at home in Trehaug. This, here, on this barge tonight, this is as close to home as any of us have. Alise and Captain Leftrin and his crew included.”
“But I don’t fit in, even here.”
“You could if you chose to, Thymara. You’re the one keeping a distance.” He moved his hand, not putting it over hers, but setting it on the railing beside hers so that his hand touched hers.
Her first impulse was to move her hand away. By an effort, she didn’t. She wondered both why she had wanted to move it away, and why she hadn’t. She didn’t have an answer to either question, so she asked Tats a question of her own. “Do you know what Greft said to me about you?”
The corner of his mouth quirked. “No. But I’m sure it wasn’t flattering. And I hope you recalled that you know me far better than Greft can ever hope to.”
So at least it hadn’t been a male conspiracy to get the lone uncommitted female to make a choice. That made her opinion of her fellow keepers rise slightly. She kept her voice level and noncommittal as if she were speaking about how pleasant the night was. “He came out when I was on watch last night and asked if I’d chosen you. He explained that if I had, I’d best declare it clearly, or let him know at least so that he could enforce my choice with the others. He said, otherwise, there might be a lot of competition. That some of the other keepers might even challenge you or start fights with you.”
“Greft is a pompous ass who thinks he can speak for everyone,” Tats said after a profound silence. Just as she was ready to dismiss her experience with Greft as an aberration, he added, “But I’d like it if you said to everyone that you had chosen me. He’s right about that; it would make things simpler.”
“What ‘things’ would it make simpler?”
He gave her a sideways glance. They both knew he was treading on shaky ground now. “Well. One thing is that it would give me an answer. One that I’d like to have. And another is—”
“You’ve never even asked me a question,” she broke in. She spoke hastily and was appalled to realize that she’d just pushed them deeper into the quagmire.
She wanted to run away, to get away from this stupidity that stupid Greft had triggered with his stupid lecture. Tats seemed to know that. He put his calloused hand over hers. She could feel the softness of his palm against the scaled back of her hand. The warmth from that touch flooded through her, and for a moment her breath caught. Her mind flashed to Jerd and Greft, entwined and moving together. No. She forbade the thought and reminded herself that her hand under his was probably cold, slick with scales, like a fish. He did not look down at the hand he had captured. He took a breath and
puffed it out. “It’s not a question. Not a specific question. It’s, well, I’d like to have what Greft and Jerd have.”
So would she.
No! Of course she didn’t. She denied the thought.
“What Jerd and Greft have? You mean mating?” She didn’t completely succeed in keeping accusation out of her voice.
“No. Well, yes. But they also have a certainty of each other. That’s what I want.” He looked away from her and spoke more gently as if she were fragile. “I know Rapskal has not been gone that long, but—”
“How can anyone seriously think that Rapskal and I were anything more than friends?” she burst out indignantly. She jerked her hand out from under his and used it to push back the hair from her face.
He looked surprised. “You were always with him, all the time. Ever since we left Cassarick. Always sharing a boat, always sleeping together…”
“He always lay down to sleep next to me. And no one else ever offered to share a boat with me. I liked him, when he wasn’t making me cross or annoying me or saying strange things.” Suddenly her diatribe against him seemed disloyal. She halted her words and admitted in a whisper, “I liked him a lot. But I never imagined I was in love with him, and I don’t think he ever thought of me that way. In fact, I’m certain of it. He was just my peculiar friend who always looked on the bright side of things and who was always in a good temper. He always sought me out. I didn’t have to work to be his friend.”
“He was that,” Tats agreed quietly. For a moment, that mourning silence held, and during it she felt closer to Tats than she had for a long time. Thymara broke the silence at last. “What was the other reason?”
“What?”
“You started to say and I interrupted you. What was the other reason you thought it would be best if I declared that I was—that I was with you.” She tried to find a better euphemism, couldn’t, and gave up on it. She looked at him directly and waited.