The Dragon Keeper trwc-1

by Robin Hobb

  'She mopes only when you mistreat her.' The words were out of Sedric's mouth almost before he knew he was going to say them. He met Hest's flinty gaze. There was a quarrel foretold in the lines at the corners of his eyes and the flat disapproval of his thinned lips. Too late for apologies or explanations. Once Hest wore that look the quarrel was inevitable. Might as well have his full say while he had a chance, before Hest riposted with his icy sharp logic and cut his opinion to shreds. 'You did promise Alise that she might go to see the dragons. It was in your marriage vows. You spoke it aloud and then you signed your name to it. I was there, Hest. You do remember it, and you do know what it means to her. It's not some girlish whim; it's her life's interest. Her study of the creatures and her scholarly pursuit of knowledge about them are really all she has to take pleasure in, Hest. It's wrong of you to deny that to her. It's not fair to her. And it's dishonourable of you to pretend that you don't recall your promise to her. Dishonourable and unworthy of you.'

  He paused to take a breath. That was his mistake.

  'Dishonourable?' Hest's voice was chill, disbelieving. 'Dishonourable?' he repeated, and Sedric felt his breathing grow shallower.

  Then Hest laughed, the sound like a burst of cold water over Sedric. 'You're so naive. No. No, that's not it. You're not naive, you're childishly obsessed with your idea of «fair». "Fair" to her, you say. Well, what about «fair» to me? We made our bargain, Alise and I. She was to wed me and bear me an heir, and in return, I let her make free with my fortune and my home to follow her obsessive studies. You're privy to my finances, Sedric. Has she deprived herself at all in her pursuit of rare manuscripts and scrolls? I think not. But where is the child I was promised? Where is the heir that will end my mother's carping and my father's rebuking glances?'

  'A woman cannot force her body to conceive,' he dared to point out quietly. Coward that he was, he did not add, 'nor can she conceive a child alone'. He knew better than to bring that up to Hest.

  But even if he didn't utter the words, Hest seemed to hear them. 'Perhaps she cannot force herself to conceive, but all know that there are ways a woman can prevent conception. Or be rid of a child that doesn't suit her fancy.'

  'I don't think Alise would do that,' Sedric asserted quietly. 'She seems very lonely to me. I think she would welcome a child into her life. Moreover, she spoke a vow to do all she could to give you an heir. She wouldn't go back on her word. I know Alise.'

  'Do you?' Hest fairly spat the words. 'Then how surprised you would have been had you heard our conversation earlier! She all but refused to do her wifely duties until she had made her trip to the Rain Wilds and returned. She blathered some nonsense about not wishing to travel while she was pregnant. And then put all the blame on me that she is not already pregnant! And threatened to shame me, publicly, for what she deems my failures!' He picked up an ivory pen stand from his desk and slammed it down. Sedric heard the ornament crack and silently flinched. Hest's temper was roused now, and on the morrow, when he recalled how he'd broken the expensive stand, he'd be angry all over again. Hest hissed out a furious sigh. 'I will not tolerate that. If my father offers me one more lecture, one more suggestion, about how to get that red cow with calf, I will…' He strangled wordlessly on humiliation. Hest's clashes with his father had become more frequent of late, and every one of them put him in a foul temper for days.

  'That does not sound like the Alise I know,' Sedric tried to divert the conversation. Sedric knew he ventured onto dangerous ground when he did so. Hest was very capable of exaggerating, or slanting a story to put himself in the right, but he seldom lied outright. If he said that Alise had threatened him, then she had. Yet that seemed at odds with all Sedric knew of her. The Alise he knew was gentle and retiring; yet he had known her to be very obstinate on occasion. Would her obstinacy extend to threatening her husband to force him to live up to his word? He wasn't sure. Hest read his uncertainty in his face. He shook his head at Sedric.

  'You persist in thinking of her as some angelic girl-child who befriended you when no one else would. Perhaps she was, at one time, though I doubt it myself. I suspect she was just being kind to someone as friendless and awkward as she was herself. A sort of alliance of misfits. Or kindred spirits, if you would prefer. But she is not that now, my friend, and you should not let those old memories sway you. She is out to get whatever she can from our relationship and at as little cost to herself as she can manage.'

  Sedric was silent. Friendless and awkward. Misfits. The words rattled inside him like sharp little stones. Yes, he had been so.

  As always, Hest had told the truth. But he had a knack for studding it with tiny, painful but undeniably true insults. A memory rose, unbidden. A hot summer day in Chalced. He and Hest had been invited to an afternoon's relaxation at a merchant's home. The entertainment had consisted of a wild boar confined in a circular pit. The guests had been given darts and tubes to blow them from. The others had found great amusement in maddening the trapped creature, vying to stick the darts in its most tender places. The culmination of the diversion had been when three large dogs were set on the creature to finish it off. Sedric had tried to rise from his bench and move away. Hest had unobtrusively gripped his wrist and hissed at him, 'Stay. Or we'll both be seen as not only weak but rude.'

  And he had stayed. Even though he'd hated it.

  The way Hest now jabbed him with tiny insults reminded him of how he had helped torment the pig. Hest's face then had had that same dispassionate but calculating look that it did now. Going for the tenderest flesh with tiny, sharp words. His sculpted mouth was a flat line, his green eyes were narrowed and cold, catlike as they watched him.

  'I wasn't friendless,' he said quietly. 'Because Alise was my friend. She came to visit my sisters, but she always took time to speak with me. We exchanged favourite books, and played cards and walked in the garden.' He thought of himself as he had been then, shunned by most of the young men at his school, a source of bafflement to his father, a target for teasing by his sisters. 'I had no one else,' he said softly, and then hated himself for how much those words betrayed about him. 'We helped each other.'

  But the whispered comment seemed to have touched and softened something in his friend. 'I'm sure you did,' Hest agreed smoothly. 'And the little girl that she was then was probably flattered by the attention of an "older man". Perhaps she was even infatuated with you.' He smiled at Sedric and said quietly, 'How could I blame her? Who wouldn't have been?'

  Sedric stared at him, breathing quietly. Hest returned his gaze, unflinching. And now his eyes were the deep green of moss under shade trees. Sedric turned away from him, his heart tight in his chest. Damn him. What gave him such power? How could Hest hurt him so, and a moment later melt his heart?

  He looked down at his hands, still holding Hest's blue shirt. 'Do you ever wish it were different?' he asked quietly. 'I am so tired of the deceptions and trickery. So tired of holding up my end of the pretence.'

  'What pretence?' Hest asked him.

  Sedric looked up at him, startled. Hest returned his gaze blandly. 'If I had your wealth,' Sedric ventured, 'I'd go somewhere else, away from everyone who knows us. And start a new life. On my own terms. Without apologies.'

  Hest spat out a laugh. 'And very quickly there would be no wealth. Sedric, I've told you this before. There is an immense difference between having money and true wealth. My family has wealth. Wealth takes generations. Wealth has roots that stretch far and wide, and branches that reach out and twine through a city. You can take money and run away with it, but when the money is gone, you are poor. And all you have before you is the prospect of long years of very hard work so you can build a foundation for wealth for the next generation.

  'And that's something I have absolutely no interest in doing. I like my life, Sedric. I like it the way it is. Very much. And that is why I do not like it when Alise proposes to upset it. I dislike it even more when you seem to think that's acceptable behaviour on her part. If I fell, what
do you think would become of you?'

  Sedric found himself looking down at his feet as if shamed as he mustered the last of his courage to take Alise's side. 'She needs to go to the Rain Wilds, Hest. Give her that, and I think it will be enough to last her the rest of her life. One chance to be out in the world, doing things, seeing things for herself instead of reading about them in tattered old scrolls. That's all. Let her go to the Rain Wilds. You owe her that. I owe her that, for wasn't I instrumental in bringing her to marriage with you! Give her this small, simple thing. What can it hurt?'

  Hest snorted, and when Sedric lifted his eyes to look at him, his face was set in mockery and his eyes were green ice. Sedric reviewed his own words and saw his mistake. Hest never liked to hear that he owed anyone anything. Hest rose from his desk and paced a turn around the room. 'What can it hurt?' He asked, in a voice that mimicked Sedric's. 'What can it hurt? Only my wallet. And my reputation! My pride, too, but I suppose that is nothing to you. I should let my wife go traipsing off to the Rain Wilds, unaccompanied, on some crackpot mission to find an Elderling hiding under a rock or save the poor crippled dragons? It's bad enough that she spends every spare hour of her day immersed in such idiocy; should I let her make her obsession public?'

  Sedric kept his voice reasonable. 'It's not an obsession, Hest. It's her scholarly interest…'

  'Scholarly interest! She's a woman, Sedric! And not a particularly well-educated one! Look at the schooling she received, sharing a governess with her sisters! A cheap governess, probably couldn't teach them much more than how to read and do arithmetic and embroider little flowers on scarves. Just enough education to get her into trouble, if you ask me! Just enough to make her give herself airs about being a «scholar» and think she can buy a passage on a ship and go off on her own, with no thought at all about propriety or her duties to her husband and family. And never a pause, I'm sure, to wonder how much such a frivolous trip will cost her husband!'

  'You can well afford it, Hest! Just the other day, I was listening to Braddock talking about how much his wife spends on dresses, and little parties for her friends and her constant refurbishing of their home. Alise costs you none of that; she lives as simply as can be, except for the materials she requires for her scholarly pursuits. Really, Hest, don't you feel you owe her that outlet, after all the years she has waited? So let her make her journey. You've plenty of connections up the Rain Wild River. A word from you would probably win her free passage on the Goldendown or any other liveship. And I can think of half a dozen Rain Wild Traders who would be delighted to offer her hospitality, no matter how eccentric she might be. They'd do it to gain favour with you and—'

  'Favour I'd later have to pay back. And you said it just now, yourself. "No matter how eccentric she might seem!" There's a fine recommendation for me. I can hear it now. "Oh, yes, we had Hest Finbok's mad wife come stay with us. Spent all her time nosing about in the ruins and chatting up the dragons. Delightful woman. Her brain is riddled as a tree full of beetles."'

  Hest was adept at voices and mannerisms. Upset as he was with him, still Sedric had to stifle the impulse to smile as his friend suddenly became a gossipy old woman with a swampy Rain Wilds accent. He held his tongue and shook his head at him rebukingly.

  Hest spoke decisively. 'I don't care what she says or what she has arranged. She can't go. Certainly not alone.'

  Sedric found a voice. 'Then don't send her off alone. See this as the opportunity it is! Go to the Rain Wilds with her. Freshen up your trade contracts there; it must be six years since you last visited—'

  'And for very good reasons. Sedric, you cannot imagine how that river smells. Nor the endless gloom of that forest. People living in houses made of paper and sticks, eating lizards and bugs. And half of them are touched by the Rain Wilds in ways that make me shudder just to look at them. I can't help myself. No. Going face to face with the Rain Wild Traders would only damage my contacts there, not strengthen them.'

  Sedric folded his lips for a moment and then ventured a topic that had been at the back of his mind for some time. 'Do you remember what Begasti Cored said to us on our last visit to Chalced? That a merchant who could provide the Duke of Chalced with even the smallest part of a dragon could be a rich man to the end of his days?'

  'Begasti Cored. The bald merchant with the horrible breath?'

  'The bald, extremely rich merchant with the horrible breath,' Sedric corrected him, grinning. 'The one who has founded his fortune not on trading vast amounts of anything, but, as he told us, in delivering a small amount of something very rare to the right man at the right time.'

  Hest gave a martyred sigh. 'Sedric, those tales have been circulating for the last year and a half. All know the Duke of Chalced is aging, and perhaps dying. He thrashes about, trying every quackery under the sun in hopes of a cure for death.'

  'And he has the money to do so. Hest, if you travelled to the Rain Wilds with Alise, you'd have the perfect excuse to get close to the dragons and those who tend them. Alise has contacts with them; I know she does, I've sent off her missives for her and brought dozens of posts back to her. If she goes, you know she'll manage to get to Cassarick, and she'll go directly to the dragon grounds. She'll be as close to the beasts as anyone can get.' He found he had lowered his voice as he said, 'A few shed scales. A vial of blood. A tooth. Who knows what you might be able to bring back? What we do know is that anything you acquired would be worth, not a small fortune, but a very large one.' Sedric let the clothing he had been folding fall from his hands. He sank down onto Hest's bed and said quietly, 'With that much money, a man could go anywhere. He could live any way he liked and be above rebuke. Enough money will buy that. Respectability regardless of what you do.' He stared through the walls of the chamber into an invisible distance and dreamed.

  Hest's voice snapped him back to the here and now. 'Do you ever listen to a word I say? I like where I live and how I live now. No one rebukes me. Why would I risk the very comfortable life I have here? Idiocy! I have no desire to traffic in dragon body parts. That is something that I could well be rebuked for.'

  'We've trafficked in other articles far stranger for less money!' There were words that died in his throat unspoken. What that money could mean to him, to both of them. The life it could buy, far from Bingtown. Hest either could not or refused to consider the possibility.

  Hest was unswayed by Sedric's words. 'Just now you spoke of respectability. I am respectable now! Will that be so if people see my wife travelling alone to the Rain Wilds? What will they think she is really seeking? Do you think I don't know that people shake their heads and pity us, that she has not yet borne a child? And if she goes trotting off alone to the Rain Wilds, what will the gossip tongues wag then?'

  'Oh, for Sa's sake, Hest! She isn't the first Bingtown woman to have trouble conceiving! Why do you think they call this place the Cursed Shores? Hard enough for a family to keep its name alive here, let alone flourish. No one thinks anything about your still being childless, save to offer you sympathy! Look around the town. You're not alone! And as to her travelling by herself, well I've just shown you the solution: take her yourself. Or find her a companion then, if you will not take the time to escort her yourself. It's easily enough done!'

  'Fine, then!' Hest all but spat the words. As quickly as that, he had gone from trying to win Sedric with his antics to giving off sparks of anger. 'I shall let her go. I shall let her dash off to the Rain Wilds and content her poor little soul with dithering about dragons and Elderlings. I shall let her spill coins from my purse as if it has no bottom. And you are right, dear, dear Sedric. I shall have no trouble at all finding an appropriate companion for her. You've told me often enough this night what a wonderful friend she has been to you! So, you shall surely enjoy your trip to the Rain Wilds with her. Evidently you've become bored with being secretary to such a dishonourable, selfish man as myself. So serve Alise. Be her secretary. Scribble notes for her and carry her bags. Sniff about in the muck for a dro
pped dragon scale. It will spare me the bother of having to look at either of you for a month! I have a journey of my own to contemplate. And it seems that I must find some affable companions to share it with me.' As if that settled the matter completely, Hest crossed to the room and dropped back into the chair before his writing desk. He took up his pen and studied the pages before him as if Sedric did not exist.

  For a moment, Sedric could not speak. Then, 'Hest, you cannot mean that!' he gasped.

  But the other man ignored him, and Sedric knew with sudden certainty that he did.

  Day the 17th of the Growing Moon

  Year the 6th of the Independent Alliance of Traders

  From Erek, Keeper of the Birds, Bingtown

  to Detozi, Keeper of the Birds, Trehaug

  From the Bingtown Traders' Council to the Rain Wild Traders' Councils at Trehaug and Cassarick. An inquiry into recent rumours and speculations about the health and well-being of the young dragons, and their marketability as stock or as trade items, with references to our original contract with the Dragon Tintaglia.

  Detozi,

  It was delightful to meet your Uncle Beydon. He speaks highly of you and is obviously very knowledgeable about pigeons. I have sent with him two sacks of an excellent dried yellow pea, I have found that a regular feeding of it greatly enhances the plumage of my birds. I do hope the rumours that the dragons must he slaughtered due to a disease are false!

  Erek

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Interviews

  Thymara had never felt comfortable meeting new people. Inevitably, they ran their eyes over her and realized that she should not have survived. It was even more uncomfortable to stand alone before a committee of some of the most revered Rain Wild Traders and answer questions about herself. There were eight of them, mostly middle-aged and male, all dressed in their formal Trader robes. They sat in solid chairs made of dark wood in the opulent chamber at a long heavy table. The floor under her feet was built from thick plank. Even the walls and the ceiling of the room were made of wood. Never before had she been in a structure so heavy and substantial. She and her father had journeyed far down the trunks to reach this place. He was waiting for her outside. It was the Rain Wild Traders' Concourse, a structure so old and so close to the ground that it more resembled a Jamaillian mansion than a Rain Wilds house. Only this far down the trunk did such large and imposing constructions exist. She was oddly aware at all times of how massive it was; but instead of making her feel safe, the solidity of the structure seemed to threaten at any moment to crash to the earth below. Even the air seemed trapped and still inside it.