by Robin Hobb
The mist burned off as if it had never been. A landscape appeared around them, a place so different that at first Thymara wondered if somehow they’d made a mystical passage to another world. To their right was a river rushing past them, tossing up and carrying off the debris of what had been still swamp but an hour before. The rush of its passage was a loud and joyous noise. To their left, there was a narrower strip of river, rapidly closing as Tarman worked his way closer to the bank. The dragons were moving hastily now, stringing out in a glittering line as they hurried upstream.
But it was the riverbank that Thymara stared at. The land rose. It was not just the trees that towered. The land rose in a way that Thymara had never seen before. She had heard of hills and even mountains and thought she had imagined how they must be. But to stare at land that hummocked upward, higher and higher, was almost more than she could grasp. “Dry land!” Alise breathed beside her. “Tonight we’ll camp on dry land. And build a fire! And walk about without getting muddy! Oh, Thymara, have you ever seen anything so beautiful?”
“I’ve never seen anything so strange,” Thymara whispered in awe.
A wild shrill cry startled everyone aboard the ship. Thymara looked up. Heeby’s scarlet wings were stretched wide against a blue crack in the cloudy sky. She swooped lower and ever closer. Rapskal’s thin shout reached them. “This way! This way!”
“I have never seen anything so beautiful as that,” she whispered, and Alise leaned closer to hug her.
“We’re nearly there. We’re nearly home,” she said, and it did not seem at all a strange thing for her to say.
AT LEAST SIX times that day, Rapskal and Heeby flew with them, urging them on and tantalizing them with shouts of “It’s not far now! A pity you can’t fly!” and other useful bits of information.
As they followed, the land to either side became firmer. The reed beds gave way slowly to ferns and grasses, to boggy meadows and then to low, rolling grasslands that met forested foothills in the distance. The river became wider, and stronger, fed by streams and rivulets as the land rose up around it. The young Rain Wilders had looked out in wonder at vistas and hilly horizons they had heard of in old tales but never seen. They had exclaimed over rocky cliffs seen in the distance, and then shores with sand and rock along the edges. A different sort of forest edged closer to the river, one of small deciduous trees with random groves of evergreen. On one sunny day, a row of toothy mountains had appeared in the distance. And that afternoon they had come to the outskirts of Kelsingra.
Leftrin had nosed Tarman up to the sandy bank. The barge crawled, exhausted, to rest half on the shore and half on the water. The dragons had emerged from the shallows, clambering out and looking around as if they could not believe their good fortune. Most of them promptly found sunning spots and stretched out to rest. Mercor had not paused but had left the water behind, climbing ever higher up the grassy slopes. Sylve had run after him, barely keeping pace with her dragon. The other keepers had climbed down from the barge almost hesistantly and stared around at a landscape completely foreign to them. High up the slope behind them, Mercor had suddenly reared up on his hind legs and trumpeted out his triumph. On the riverbanks below him, the other dragons had lifted their heads and wearily returned his challenge. And Alise had stared, torn between triumph and heartbreak, at the towering ruins of Kelsingra…
On the other side of the swift-flowing river.
“I’M WRITING IT down for posterity. Just as we know from the journals and letters of the time how Trehaug was founded, so will my journal one day tell our descendants how Kelsingra was rediscovered. By you and Heeby. You want your descendants to know that, don’t you?”
She’d had a night and part of a day to recover from her initial disappointment. The city was not that far away. As soon as he could, Leftrin would find a way to get her there. In the meanwhile, he had other duties to his ship, his crew, and the keepers. And so did she. She’d practically had to strong-arm Rapskal to pull him away from the other keepers, but she had insisted. “It has to be recorded, while it is still fresh in your mind. There are so many things that we think we’ll remember clearly, or we think that everyone will ‘always’ know. It won’t take long, Rapskal, I promise. And then whoever comes after us will always know the tale about what you did.”
Now she waited while the boy shifted restlessly and tried to order his thoughts. He had changed so much, and yet so little. His skin was scarlet, scaled fine as a brook trout, and he seemed to have grown. He was leaner and more muscled and completely unaware of how his tattered clothes scarcely covered his flesh.
Rapskal’s uplifted eyes followed Heeby’s flight. The dragon was hunting the hills and cliffs across the river. Alise followed his gaze with longing. It was all there, just as she had seen it in the Elderling tapestry on the walls of the Traders’ Concourse. The sun touched the glittering stone of the map tower and glinted off the domes of the majestic buildings. She longed to be there, to walk the wide streets, to ascend the steps and see what wondrous artifacts the Elderlings had left for them to discover. Leftrin had explained to her a dozen times that the current swept deep and wild along that shore. On this side of the river, it had been easy to nose Tarman ashore. Over there, the current ran swift and deep, and there was nothing to tie the barge to. They’d found the remains of the stone piers that had once run out into the river, but time had worn them and the river had eaten them. Tarman did not trust them, and Leftrin would not ignore his ship’s uneasiness. He had promised Alise that once the ancient docks of Kelsingra had been restored, it would be a fine place to tie up a boat. But for now, for a short time, she was doomed to look on the Elderlings’ side of Kelsingra with longing.
“Well, I guess I’ve told you everything, right?” Rapskal was standing up again. He was looking down the hillside now to where the other keepers were walking along the shore or exploring the stony, skeletal remains of the town. Hundreds of foundations were scattered along the shore; a few standing structures remained, enough for the keepers to take shelter in by night. Leftrin had climbed up the hill and discovered the intact shepherd’s hut and insisted it was perfect for them. She tended to agree with him. It was the most privacy they had ever had. The first night, he’d built a crackling fire in the old hearth and discovered that, once he removed an old bird’s nest from it, the chimney drew as well as ever. Golden firelight had filled the single room of the cottage. They’d spread their bedding on the floor in front of it and hung a blanket where once a wooden door had swung. She’d felt, for the first time in her life, that she was truly mistress of this tiny home. The very next morning, she’d brought her journals and notes up from the barge. Now she sat on the stone doorstep of the little house and surveyed her domain. From here, she had a wide view of the sweep of the river’s bend and Leftrin’s ship. She had the vista of all of old Kelsingra to tempt and taunt her.
She called her thoughts back to the moment at hand. Her four remaining sheets of good paper rested on her battered lap desk. “You haven’t really told me anything, Rapskal.”
He took a breath that lifted his narrow shoulders. He smiled at her, his white teeth showing strangely in his red-scaled face. “Well. Here’s how it was. I was talking to Tats and he was mad at me for telling Thymara that I’d like to do to her what Jerd had taught me to do with her…Why aren’t you writing?”
“Because, well, that’s not the important part,” Alise replied and heard her Bingtown primness come to the fore as a blush heated her face.
“Well, after that, then. Then that wave hit. And I got washed away by it.”
“Yes.”
“And then, I was trying to swim and I felt that Heeby was near, so I shouted for her, and she came to me. And we swam together for a while. Then a really big tangle of wood floated by. Maybe it had been part of the bonfire, I don’t know. But it hit us and we sort of got tangled in it. Well, I didn’t. I climbed up on top, but Heeby got tangled. She wasn’t drowning, but she couldn’t break free. So I tol
d her, ‘Don’t fight it, let’s just ride it out.’ And we did, all that night, and the next morning we found we were way out in the middle of the river and could hardly see the shores. I didn’t think we could swim to the shore so I thought, well, just stay with the floating wood tangle until we can see the shore. And that was a bad time for both of us, because she was stuck and we just got pushed on and on by the river. No food or water for either of us.”
“How long was that?”
“Don’t remember. More than two days, anyway.” His claws were black. He scratched under his chin, gave a happy wriggle, and then settled again. “By and by, anyway, the river washed us up on the place where there was a big low meadow. Must have been on the other side of the river from the side we kept to when we were following the Tarman, because it didn’t look to me like anywhere we had passed. And the river was on the wrong side of us, if you get what I mean. Well, there I could help Heeby get untangled and we went ashore. And we didn’t have much, but I still had my fire-starting stuff, because I always keep it in this pouch. See?”
“I see,” she replied. Her pen flew, but she glanced up briefly as he held up the pouch he wore on a string around his neck.
“So I built a fire to warm up my dragon and waited for someone to see it and find us. But no one did. But there was pretty good hunting in the meadow place. There were these animals, maybe goats, maybe sheep I think, from what my dad used to tell me. They weren’t deer or riverpig, anyway. They weren’t very fast, and at first they weren’t very scared of us. By the second or third day, they started to be scared because they figured out that Heeby liked to kill them and eat them. So we were eating those, and then we found this place back near some trees. It had a get-warm place for Heeby that she knew how to make work. And a stone building, mostly fallen down, but two rooms of it had good roofs, so that was plenty big enough for us. And Heeby hunted a lot and ate a lot, and so did I. And sometimes we slept on the get-warm place, and sometimes we slept in the old building. Heeby started to grow and get brighter colors, and her wings were growing, and her tail, and even her teeth! And we kept doing her flying lessons, you know what I mean. You used to see us doing them, right?”
“Yes. I used to see you trying to get her to fly.”
“Yes. Well, her wings just got bigger and stronger, and one day she flew, just a little bit. And the next day, she could fly more, and then more. But she couldn’t fly for a long time then, not for a whole day. But she could fly long enough that it got so she could hunt really good. And that girl of mine, all she wanted to do was hunt and eat and sleep on the get-warm place and hunt and sleep some more, and she just kept getting bigger and stronger all the time.”
He shook his head, smiling indulgently. Then he stood up again and looked longingly down at the riverbank. Some of the keepers and their dragons were splashing one another and shouting and laughing. Tats had Fente on the bank and seemed to be scratching her with sand. The dragon looked stupefied with pleasure. Alise looked at her wet letters. She sprinkled sand over her page to dry the ink, waited a breath, and shook it clean. She set out a fresh page. “And then?”
He paced a turn, restless as a tethered dog. “Oh, you know. Ate more, slept more, and got even bigger. We both got lonely, and Heeby said one day, ‘So, let’s go to Kelsingra.’ And I said, ‘Can you find it?’ and she said she thought she could. And I said, ‘Can you fly that far?’ and she said she thought she could, as long as she could find places to land and rest at night. And no landing in the river because she knows she can’t fly up from water, and after being stuck in the tangle of wood and in water for days, she hates it now. So I said, ‘Well, then, let’s go,’ and we did. And we found Kelsingra, but no one was here. And I was really sad thinking you all must be dead, but she said, ‘No, I can feel some of the dragons, but they don’t or can’t hear me.’ So we just started flying around every day, looking and looking and calling and calling. And then one day we heard dragons trumpeting, and it sounded like a big fight starting. So we went to see and found out it was just Sintara having a fuss. But we found you all up in that slough and told you to come here and here we are.”
He was silent until her pen stopped moving. Then he asked with a trace of impatience, “So. It’s done now, right? Posterity will know.”
“It will indeed, Rapskal. And your name and Heeby’s name will be remembered, generation after generation after generation.”
That seemed, finally, to give him pause. He looked at her and smiled. “Good, then. That’s nice. Heeby will like that. She wasn’t sure about her name at first. And maybe I should have thought of something longer and grander, but I’d never named a dragon before.” He lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “She got used to it. She likes her name, now.”
“Well, she will be remembered by many, many people as the dragon who gave Kelsingra and its history back to us.” Alise once more stared at the gleaming city on the other side of the swiftly flowing river. “It’s a torment to see it and not be able to get over there. I cannot wait until the day I can walk those streets and enter those buildings and find what is left to us of them. I dare to hope for their city records, for scrolls and perhaps even a library…”
“Not much there, really.” Rapskal dismissed her dreams with a shrug. “Most of the wood is gone rotten. I didn’t see any scrolls or books in the places where I slept. Heeby and I walked around over there for a couple of days. Just an empty city.”
“You’ve been over there!” Why had it never occurred to her before? He and his dragon would not be inconvenienced by a dangerous current. Of course they had gone first to the main part of the ancient Elderling city. “Rapskal, wait, come back. Sit down. I need to know what you’ve seen.”
He turned and gave an impatient wriggle that made him a boy again. “Please, Alise, ma’am, not now! Later today, after Heeby hunts and kills and eats and sleeps, when she wakes up, I’ll ask her to take you over there. Then you can see it for yourself and write it down and draw it or whatever. But it’s been so long since I had time with my friends, and I’ve been lonely.”
“What?”
“I’ve been by myself for so long! I really missed having people to talk to and…”
“No. No, not that! Heeby would take me across to Kelsingra? She would fly me there?”
He cocked his head at her. “Well, yes. She doesn’t swim that good, you know, so she’d have to fly you there. She doesn’t like to swim at all anymore. Doesn’t even like to wade out in the water since we got stuck in the river like that.”
“No, no, of course she doesn’t! Who could blame her? But—but she’d let me ride on her back? I could fly on a dragon’s back?”
“Yes, fly you to Kelsingra. And then you could see it all yourself and write it down as much as you want. I’m going to go down there now, with my friends. If you don’t mind, please, ma’am.”
“Oh, of course I don’t mind. Thank you, Rapskal. Thank you so much.”
“You’re welcome, ma’am, I’m sure.”
Then, as if fearing she would delay him again, he spun and ran. She watched him go, watched his long red-scaled legs flash in the sunlight. His clothing looked ridiculous on him now; the ragged trousers were too short for his Elderling legs, and the tattered shirt that had long ago lost its buttons flapped as he ran. His stride ate up the distance, and he shouted to his friends as he went. They turned and called to him in return, motioning to him to hurry and join them.
“Well, he has changed,” Leftrin observed, watching Rapskal run down the grassy hillside toward the river.
“NOT AS MUCH as you might think,” Alise replied as she turned to him. She was smiling, unaware of the ink smear by the side of her nose. He went to her, turned her face up to his and kissed her, and then tried to thumb the smear away but only succeeded in spreading it across her cheek. He laughed and showed her his inky thumb.
“Oh, no!” she cried and pulled a tattered kerchief from her pocket. She dabbed at her face. “Is it gone now?”
“Most of it,” he told her, taking her hand. Still such a fine lady she was, to worry about something as trivial as a bit of ink smeared on her face. He loved it. “I see you’ve added some more pages to your stack. Did you get his entire story, then?”
“I got a summary of what happened to him, and how they found us again.” She smiled and shook her head in wonder. “These youngsters take so much in stride. He sees nothing extraordinary in that he found a place where sheep or goats were running wild, near what had to have been an ancient Elderling dwelling. He doesn’t even consider what it means that he found land, dry land suitable for pasturing livestock, right there on the Rain Wild River. Do you know what that would mean to Trehaug or Cassarick? The possibility of raising meat! Perhaps even sheep for wool. And he shrugs it off as an interesting spot with a ‘get-warm’ place for his dragon.”
“Well. I’ll agree that is a big discovery, one that is likely to remain undiscovered again for almost as long as it has been.”
“Not when the dragons start flying,” she said, and then, to his shock, sprang at him and trapped him in a hug. “Leftrin, you’ll never guess what Rapskal told me! He said he’d ask Heeby to carry me across to the main part of Kelsingra, so I can walk the streets there as long as I want!”