by Robin Hobb
Other than some boyish scuffles, Sedric had never been in a real fight. Sometimes Hest was rough with him, when he was in a mood to take their engagement in a harsher direction and enforce his dominance. In their early days together, Sedric had been aroused by such rough play. But in the last year or so, Hest had seemed to reserve it for times when Sedric had displeased him in some other arena. There had been a few times when the thrill of feeling Hest’s aggression had changed into the dread that his lover would do real damage to him in the throes of his tigerish play. Worse, Hest seemed to relish waking that fear in Sedric. Once, Hest had throttled him nearly unconscious yet had not paused in his own pursuit of pleasure. It was only when he had rolled away from him that Sedric had been able to shift to where he could get a clear breath. With black spots dancing before his eyes, he’d gasped out, “Why?”
“To see what it would be like, of course. Stop whining. You’re not hurt; you’ve just had your feelings ruffled.”
Hest had risen and left him there. And Sedric had accepted Hest’s judgment that he wasn’t truly hurt. The recollection flashed through his mind and with it, the resolution he’d buried shortly afterward. Never again. Fight back.
But Jess’s attack was beyond anything Hest had ever done to him. To be struck so hard in the face shocked him as much as stunned him. He hung in the hunter’s grip, trying to find the strength to lift his hands, let alone make fists of them. Then the man laughed aloud, and the sound filled Sedric with a panicky strength. He shot his fist forward as hard as he could into the center of the Jess’s body, just below his breastbone. Jess let out a sudden whuff of air and sat down hard in the boat.
For half a breath Sedric was on top of the hunter, raining blows on him, but he was dazed and could not put any strength behind them. Jess lunged up and wrapped his arms around Sedric. Then, as effortlessly as if Sedric were a child, he rolled with him, trapping him beneath his weight. Then the hunter’s heavy hands settled around his throat. Sedric’s own hands rose to catch at the man’s thick wrists. They were wet and cold and slickly scaled; he could not get a grip on them. The man forced him down and back across the seat in the middle of the boat, pushing him into the rancid bilgewater as the seat bit into his back. He kicked wildly, but his feet connected with nothing. He clawed at the man’s face, but the hunter’s skin seemed impervious to pain or penetration.
Sedric gave up trying to attack Jess or even to defend himself. All he wanted to do was escape. His flailing hands groped for the side of the boat. One hand gripped it, and he tried to pull himself out from under and away from Jess. But the man’s hands were locked on his throat and his weight pressed him down.
Sedric had never felt so powerless.
Not since the last time Hest had held him down and laughingly told him, “I’ll decide how it’s going to be. You’ll like it. You always do.”
But he didn’t. Not always. And suddenly all the anger he’d ever felt at Hest for not caring if he enjoyed it or not, for laughing at him when he dominated him, rushed through him just as his desperately groping hand found the handle of the hatchet.
It was stuck firmly in the hard dry log that floated beside the boat, but his was the strength of desperate anger. He jerked at it spasmodically. Luck, not intent, decreed that as it suddenly bucked loose, the heavy blunt end of it connected with the back of Jess’s skull.
It startled the hunter more than stunned him. His grip slacked and through a red mist, Sedric saw Jess roll his head to one side as if to look for an unsuspected attacker. Fight him. Fight him. The dragon’s furious thoughts fed him strength. He swung the hatchet again, awkwardly, but with deliberate force and direction. It connected, this time with the hunter’s jaw, knocking it sideways with a loud crack. Jess shrieked. Sedric dragged a deep breath, then half of a second one into his lungs. Jess was making noises, but Sedric’s ears were ringing and Jess’s diction was ruined by the hatchet hitting him yet again. And suddenly Sedric heard himself croaking out, “I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you.”
I’ll kill for you. That thought bounced back to him, a reptilian echo.
A last flailing strike hit the hunter between the eyes, and that did stun him. Sedric dropped the heavy hatchet into the bottom of the boat. He pushed hard at Jess and the man flopped off him with a groan, half over the low side of the boat. He was only unconscious for a moment. “You bas—!” he croaked. He drew back his arm, and all Sedric could see was a meaty fist headed toward him.
Then an immense splash rocked the boat. Relpda’s head and shoulders shot up out of the matted debris to tower momentarily over the boat. Hunter food! she announced and bent her head. Sedric had never really seen the inside of a dragon’s maw before. She opened her jaws impossibly wide, and he could see inside, see the immense swallowing muscles at the sides of her throat, and the row of sharp teeth that curved inward. Her mouth came down over the hunter’s head and shoulders like a poacher popping a sack over a rabbit. He had one brief glimpse of Jess’s eyes so wide that the whites showed all around them. Then Relpda closed her jaws.
There was a sound, a sound between a shearing of bone and a crushing of meat. Relpda’s head rose, and she pointed her muzzle at the sky. Her head jerked twice as she swallowed.
Jess’s bloody hips and legs fell into the boat beside Sedric. He kicked at them in reflexive horror and the pelvis flopped over the side, followed by the legs. Relpda gave a squeal of protest and dived after them. The wave of her passage rocked the boat wildly. Blood and water mingled in the bottom of the boat, sloshing back and forth around the dropped hatchet.
Sedric leaned over the side of the boat, staring after them. “That didn’t happen,” he slurred. He lifted the back of his hand to his mouth and then took it away. Bloody. He turned his head and looked at the hatchet in the boat’s bilgewater. Blood streamed from it in tiny threads and mingled with the water. There was hair on it, too. Jess’s hair. “I killed him,” he said aloud. The words came strangely to his ears.
Delicious.
THE AFTERNOON PASSED without incident. Thymara and Tats didn’t talk much. She didn’t have much to say, and keeping up with her left Tats short of wind. She made sure of that.
The way her feelings about him vacillated bothered her more than her actual emotions. When she was around the others, it was easier to pretend that nothing had changed between them. Did that mean that perhaps nothing really had changed? Was she angry at him or not? And if she was, what was the reason? Sometimes, she could see that she had no real basis for her anger. There had been no mutual understanding between them. He had not broken any promise to her. Surely he was free to do as he pleased, just as she was. She could be dispassionate about it. He’d mated with Jerd. That was their business, not hers. And now that Jerd was with Greft, it had even less to do with her.
But then her hurt would break through, and she’d feel indignant and slighted all over again. The least he could have done was let her know sooner. If Rapskal had known of it, how private could it have been? Why had he let her be ignorant of it so long? It made her feel so stupid, so naive. My pride, she thought. It’s my pride that’s broken, not my heart. I’m not in love with him. I don’t want an exclusive claim on him. I don’t want him to claim me. We are just friends, friends who have known each other for a long time. And he kept a secret from me and made me feel stupid. Just her pride. That was all.
It might be true, but it wasn’t what it felt like.
Spurred by emotion, she climbed higher and more swiftly through the trees than she usually would, making Tats struggle to keep up with her. She found food and by the time he caught up with her, she had gathered most of it. Tats had fashioned his shirt into a crude carry-sack. As soon as he arrived, she packed whatever she had found into it and moved on. Other than discussing what food she had found and what they might next look for, there had been little conversation. She could see that Tats was aware she wasn’t really talking to him, but he seemed content to leave the situation alone.
They
returned to the floating morass that was their current sanctuary just as it became too dark to see under the trees. On the river, there was still some light from a distant sunset. The others had been successful, both in raising a small shelter on their raft, and in creating another platform for their floating fire. The yellow light it cast was cheering. As Alise had suggested, it was tethered to their sleeping raft in such a way that it could be quickly shoved away if the fire began to spread. For now, the welcome light and warmth it gave off cheered everyone. Boxter and Kase were tending it, stripping branches of leaves and tossing them on the fire to create a haze of smoke to drive insects away. Thymara was not certain that she preferred eye-watering smoke to stinging insects, but she was too weary to argue with them about it.
The dragons had returned for the night. It was somewhat comforting to see their hulking silhouettes braced against the trees that barred them from entering the flooded forest. They were becoming more adept at capturing their own timbers and hooking their rib cages over them to float. She wondered if they had come back because they missed the humans, or only because they knew their keepers would help shore them up and keep them afloat for the night. Sylve and Harrikin seemed to have devised a technique for trapping several logs under a dragon’s chest. The dragons were not thrilled with their night’s lodgings, but it was better than treading water. The acid-killed fish had proven both a boon and a liability to the dragons. They had eaten to satiation, but their bulging bellies were uncomfortable, and more so when braced against a log.
“And they’re tired of being in the water. Really tired. Some are complaining that their claws are getting soft,” Sylve said as she sat next to Thymara when they ate that night. To her surprise there had been meat to cook as well as the fruit and vegetation that she and Tats had foraged. A disoriented riverpig, half drowned and stupid with weariness, had climbed right out on their raft. Lecter had clubbed it. It had not been a large animal, but it had been fat, and it tasted delicious to Thymara.
Greft walked behind them on his way to sitting down and commented, “There’s no use their complaining about soft claws. No one can do anything about it.”
Thymara rolled her eyes at Sylve, and the girl bent her head over her plate to hide a smile. “I’m sure the dragons will take that thought to heart,” Thymara muttered to her, and they both laughed softly. She glanced up just in time to see Greft giving her a dark look. She returned his gaze with a flat stare and then went on with her eating. She didn’t respect him, and she refused to quail before him.
The sleeping shelter was small, and the floor was very uneven despite a layer of leafy branches. The positive side of that was that everyone was a bit warmer when packed so closely together, but it also meant that no one could shift positions without disturbing two others. It had been decided that they would keep a watch on the fire outside, adding wood to feed it and adding leaves for smoke. “Flames to signal anyone who might be trying to find us. Smoke to keep the insects away,” Greft had needlessly informed them all.
The task was trickier than Thymara had thought it would be. There was a layer of matted leaves and mud between the fire and the mass of floating wood that made its platform. When it was Thymara’s turn to keep the watch, Sylve came to wake her and showed her how to feed the fire without letting it burn down deep into the lower part of its raft. Sylve left her sitting on the edge of the main raft with a plentiful supply of leafy branches and a stack of broken dry wood for the fire.
Thymara sighed as she settled into her task. Her back hurt, in a way that was different from her aching muscles. She’d pushed herself as well as Tats today; she had only herself to blame for her weariness. But she was very tired of the injury along her spine and the dull ache she endured at all hours.
Night had passed into its quietest hours. The evening birds had stopped their calls and swooping insect hunts and settled for the night. Even the buzzing, stinging insects seemed less prevalent. She watched the reflection of the firelight on the water. Occasionally, a curious fish would make a slow shadowy pass beneath the mirroring water, but for the most part, all was still and calm. The river lapped placidly against the logs as if it had not tried to kill all of them only a day and a half ago. The dragons looked like strange ships as they dozed, heads bent and half their bodies hanging under the water. She tried simply to enjoy the night without thinking, but her thoughts ranged from Rapskal to the silver dragon and back to Alum and Warken. Three of the keepers were missing and probably dead, and three dragons, all female. That was a blow. Veras had still not appeared; Mercor had told Sylve that he had not felt her die but that she should not take that as an assurance that Veras was still alive. It was maddening news to Jerd, and she had seemed more weepy rather than less after hearing it.
“I need to talk to you.”
Thymara startled and then felt angry she had done so. Greft had ghosted up behind her; she hadn’t even felt the raft rock as he approached her. It hadn’t been an accident that she’d been unaware of him; he’d wanted to surprise her. She glanced up at him, keeping her face expressionless, and asked, “Do you?”
“Yes. For the good of us all, I need some answers from you. We all do.” He hunkered down beside her, closer than she wanted him to be. “I’ll put it simply. Is it to be Tats?”
“Is what to be Tats?” The question irritated her and she let him hear it in her voice. If he wanted to be mysterious and officious, then she could be obtuse.
His scaled face, always a study in flat planes, hardened. His lips were so narrow, it was hard to tell if he clenched his jaw or not. She suspected so. He crouched down beside her and spoke in a low growl. “Look. No one understood why you chose Rapskal, but I told them all that it didn’t matter. You’d made your choice and we had to respect that. A few wanted to challenge him. I forbade it. You should appreciate that. I respected your first choice and kept the peace for you.
“But Rapskal is gone now. And for all our sakes, the sooner the matter is settled, the better it is for all of us. So choose and make it clear.”
“I don’t know what you’re trying to say. But I think I prefer not to know. This is my watch and I’m doing my task. Go away.” She spoke flatly, torn between anger and fear. Greft seemed somehow inevitable tonight, a force she must deal with, and a force she seemed unlikely to defeat. His words were either mysterious, or made a horrible sense. She didn’t want to know which.
But he wouldn’t spare her ignorance. “Don’t pretend,” he said harshly. “You aren’t good at it. You heard me warn Nortel earlier today. If you’ve chosen Tats, well, then, you’ve chosen him. Make that choice plain to the others and there won’t be any problems. I’ll see to that. Tats isn’t what I would have picked for you, but even in a time and place of new rules, I respect some of our oldest traditions. I was largely raised by my mother, and she kept the old rules, the rules from when the Rain Wilds were first settled. Back then the Traders agreed that a woman could stand on an equal footing with her husband and make her own choices. That I am alive today is due to my mother’s choice. She kept me, and she demanded that others respect her right to do so. And so I see the wisdom of letting women have a say in their lives, and I’m willing to respect it. And to demand that others respect it also.”
“And who made you the king?” she demanded. She was afraid now. Had she been blind to this, as well? Did the others accept him as leader, and beyond leader, as someone to set the rules and dictate their lives to them?
“I put myself in charge when it became plain to me that no one else was equal to the task. Someone has to make the decisions, Thymara. We can’t all blithely go our own ways, letting things fall out as they may. Not if we hope to survive.” He annoyed her by picking up wood and putting it on her fire. It caught almost immediately. She retaliated by poking it off the fire into the river, where it hissed and then bobbed next to the fire raft. He got her message.
“Fine. You can defy me. Well, you can try. But life and fate are what you can’t defy. Fate ha
s given us a bad balance here. Even with three males out of the picture, the ratio of keepers is still badly skewed. Do you want men to fight over you? Do you want to see our fellows injure one another, create lifelong vendettas with one another, so that you can feel valuable?” He turned his head and looked at her, his eyes dark and unreadable in the night. “Or are you waiting to be raped? Does that sort of thing excite you?”
“I don’t want that! That’s despicable!”
“Then you need to choose who you will accept as a partner. Now. Before all the males start competing for you. We are a small company. We can’t afford to have boys hurting one another over you. Nor can we allow anyone to force you. Where that would lead, I can imagine only too well. Choose a mate and have it be over.”
“Jerd didn’t choose. She mated where she wanted.” She flung it at him as the only weapon she could find. “Or didn’t you know that?”
“I know that all too well!” he snarled back. “Why do you think I had to step in and take charge of her? She was being foolish, setting the men against one another. A black eye here, a bruised face there. It was starting to escalate. So I took her and made her mine, to keep the others from quarreling. She wasn’t my first choice, if you want to hear me say that. I don’t think she’s as intelligent as you are. Nor as competent to survive. I let you know of my interest from the very beginning, but you preferred Rapskal the no-wit to me. I forced myself to accept that decision, even though I thought it was a poor one. Well, he’s gone now. And I’m with Jerd, for better or worse, at least until the child is born. Because that is the only way I could force the others to stop striving to win her regard. I can’t very well claim you as well. So before the rivalry and competition for your attention become violent, you’d best make a choice and stick to it.”