Rain Wilds Chronicles

by Robin Hobb

  For the dragons, it was different. The dragons had prospered since they had gained access to as much warmth as they wanted. After soaking in the baths, they had gone on to recall and visit other sites in the city that had been created for the enjoyment of their kind. At the crest of one of the hills, there was a structure where sections of stone wall alternated with glass beneath a domed roof. The ceiling was a strange patchwork of glass and stone as well, while the heat-radiating floor contained shallow pits of sand in varying degrees of coarseness.

  The building would have been incomprehensible to her a few years ago. Now she knew at a glance that it was a place for dragons to sprawl on heated sand while watching the life of the city below them or the slow wheeling of the stars by night. She had first seen it when Sintara had summoned her there a few days ago, much to Thymara’s surprise, and bade her search through the cupboards and shelves to see if the tools for dragon grooming remained in their old storage places. While she had looked, Sintara had writhed and wallowed in the sand, near burying herself in the hot particles. She had emerged gleaming like molten blue metal fresh from a furnace.

  Time had rendered most of the grooming tools into rust and dust, but a few remained intact. There were small tools with metal bristles of something that rust had not eaten, and brushes like scrubbing brushes, but with the handles crafted of stone and the metal bristles set in clusters. There were metal rasps with the wooden handles long gone, glass flasks with a thickened residue of oil in the bottom, and a gleaming black case that held an assortment of black metal needles and other items she did not comprehend. Specialized tools for grooming dragons, she supposed, and she wondered if one day all the niceties of that lost skill would be recalled.

  With the smaller brushes, Thymara had performed the delicate grooming around Sintara’s eyes, nostrils, and ear holes, scrubbing away the remnants of messy meals. They had not spoken much, but Thymara had noticed many things about her dragon. Her claws, once blunted from walking and cracked by too much contact with water and mud, were now longer and harder and sharper. Her colors were stronger, her eyes brighter, and she had grown, not just putting on flesh, but gaining length in her tail. Her shape was changing as her muscles took on the duties of flight and forgot the long earthbound years of slogging through mud. This was no great lizard that she groomed, but a raptor, a flying predator that was both as lovely as a hummingbird and as deadly as a living blade. Thymara privately marveled that she dared touch such a being. It was only when she noticed Sintara’s eyes whirling with pleasure that she realized the dragon was a party to all her thoughts and was relishing her wonder.

  As she realized it, the dragon acknowledged it. “I awe you. Perhaps you cannot sing my praises with your voice, but reflected in you, I know I am the most magnificent of the dragons you have ever seen.”

  “Reflected in me?”

  Dragons did not smile, but Thymara felt Sintara’s amusement. “Do you fish for compliments?”

  “I don’t understand,” Thymara replied both honestly and resentfully. The dragon’s response had somehow implied she was vain. About what? About having the most beautiful of the queen dragons? One that alternated ignoring her with mocking or insulting her?

  “The most beautiful of all the dragons,” Sintara amended her thought for her. “And the most brilliant and creative, as is clearly reflected in my having created the most dazzling Elderling.”

  Thymara stared at her wordlessly. The brush hung forgotten in her hand.

  Sintara gave a small snort of amusement. “From the beginning, I saw you had the most potential for development. It was why I chose you.”

  “I thought I chose you,” Thymara faltered. Her heart was thundering. Her dragon thought she was beautiful! This soaring she felt, was it merely Sintara’s beguilement of her? She tried to ground herself but was certain this was not the dragon’s effortless glamourizing of her. This was what Sintara actually thought of her. Extraordinary!

  “Oh, doubtless you thought you chose me,” Sintara went on with casual arrogance. “But I drew you to me. And as you see, I have employed a keen eye and a sure skill to make you the loveliest and most unusual of the Elderlings that now live. Just as I am the most glorious of the dragons.”

  Thymara was silent, wishing she could deny the dragon’s self-aggrandizing, but knowing only a fool would claim to have lied in her thoughts. “Mercor gleams like liquid gold,” she began, but Sintara snorted contemptuously.

  “Drakes! They have their colors and their muscles, but when it comes to beauty, they have no patience for detail. Look at Sylve’s scaling some time and then compare it to your own. Plain as grass she is. Even in coloring their own scales, the other dragons lag far behind me.” She shook herself and then came suddenly to her feet, erupting out of the hot sand and opening her wings in a single motion. “Look at these!” she commanded proudly, flourishing her wings so that the wind from them sent particles of sand flying into Thymara’s face. “Where have you seen such intricacy, such brilliance of color, such design?”

  Thymara stared. Then wordlessly, she dragged her tunic up and over her head, to unfold her own wings. A glance over her shoulder told her that she had not imagined it. The differences were of scale only. She mirrored Sintara’s glory. Dragons did not laugh as humans did, but the sound Sintara made was definitely one of amusement.

  The dragon settled herself onto the sand, leaving her wings open over the heated beds. “There. Next time you are moaning and sniveling that your dragon has no time for you, look over your shoulder and realize you already wear my colors. What more could any creature ask?”

  Thymara had looked back at her basking dragon, torn between emotions. Did she dare trust any display of kindliness from her? “You seem different,” she ventured hesitantly and wondered what the dragon would read more strongly, her suspicion or her hope. She braced herself for mockery. It did not come.

  “I am different. I am not hungry. I am not cold. I am not a crippled, pitiable thing. I am a dragon. I don’t need you, Thymara.” Sintara shook herself, and excess sand that had been trapped beneath her scales went runneling down her sides in streams. Without being asked, Thymara found a long-handled brush. The handle was of a strangely light metal, as were the bristles. She studied them for a long moment; they gleamed like metal but flexed at her touch. More Elderling magic, she supposed. She began to apply it to Sintara, working from the back of her head down, dislodging particles of sand that had wedged at the edges of her scaling. Sintara closed her eyes in pleasure. By the time she reached the end of her tail, Thymara had formed her question. “Needing me made you dislike me?”

  “No dragon likes to be dependent. Even the Elderlings came to realize that.”

  “Dragons were dependent on Elderlings?” She sensed that she trod in dangerous territory, but she formed the question anyway. “For what?”

  The dragon looked at her for a long moment and she wished she had not dared to ask, sensing how resentful Sintara was of her question. “For Silver.” She spoke the word and stared at Thymara, eyes whirling as if the girl would deny what she said. Thymara waited. “For a time Silver ran in the river here and was easy to find. Then, there was an earthquake, and things changed. The Silver ran thinly for a time. Some dragons could find it by diving into the shallows and digging for it. Sometimes it welled up abruptly and showed as a silver streak in the river. But mostly it did not. Then we could get it only from the Elderlings.”

  “I don’t understand.” Thymara kept her words as soft and neutral as she could. “Silver? A treasure of some kind?”

  “Neither do I understand!” In a fury, the dragon erupted fully from the sandpit. “It’s not a treasure, not as humans think of such. Not metal made into little rounds to trade for food, nor decorations for the body. It’s the Silver, precious to dragons. It’s here. It was here, first in the river near this city, and then, when the Elderlings lived, here in the city, somewhere. Everything else we can find here. All the pleasures we recalled from Ke
lsingra are here: the hot water baths, the winter shelters, the sand grooming places—everything else we recall so clearly is here. So the Silver should be here too. Somewhere. But not one of us can find it. There were places in the city where the Elderlings helped us get the Silver. None of us recall them clearly. All of us find that strange, as if a memory has been deliberately withheld from us.” Sintara lashed her tail in frustration. “One place, we think, is gone with the collapsing street along the riverside. Another may be where the earth split open and the river flowed in. Gone and lost. Baliper tried to dive for it there, but that chasm is deep, and the water got colder the deeper he went. There is no Silver there for us.

  “There were other places. We think. But those memories are lost to us, lost since we hatched, along with all manner of information we cannot even guess at. We will not be full dragons, nor you real Elderlings, until we can find the Silver wells. But you refuse to remember! No Elderling dreams of the wells. And try as I may, I cannot even make you dream of a Silver well!”

  With these words, Sintara had given a final shudder and a lash of her tail. Thymara jumped back and watched her wade out of the sandpit and then stalk out of the doors that opened for her and then closed behind her, leaving Thymara staring after her.

  Thymara had pondered the dragon’s words in the days that followed. Sintara had spoken true. She had often encountered a dragon wandering the streets, snuffing and searching. Thymara’s curiosity was piqued. She had asked Alise if she knew of any silver wells in Kelsingra, but Alise had only looked puzzled. “There is a fountain called Golden Dragon Fountain. I read of that, once, in a very old manuscript. But if it remains intact, I haven’t found it yet.” She had smiled and then commented as if vaguely amused, “But I dreamed a few nights ago that I was looking for a silver well. Such an odd dream.” She had cocked her head and furrowed her brow with the faraway look of someone who tinkers with the threads of a mystery. A strange thrill ran through Thymara. It was the same look Alise had worn so often earlier in the expedition, when she had been putting pieces together to understand something about Elderlings or dragons. She had not seen it on her face for some time.

  Alise mused aloud, “There are odd mentions in some of the old manuscripts, things I was never able to make sense of. Hints that there was a special reason for Kelsingra to exist, something secret, something to guard . . .” A slow look of wonder had dawned on her face. She spoke more to herself than to Thymara as she muttered, “Not so useless, perhaps. Not if I can ferret out what they mean.”

  Alise’s look had gone distant. Thymara had known that any further conversation with her that day would consist of her own questions and the Bingtown woman’s distracted replies. She had thanked her, decided she had delivered the mystery to someone better suited to handle it, and put silver wells out of her mind.

  But Sintara’s remark about dependence she did not forget. She watched the other dragons grow and yes, change, some becoming more affable and others more arrogant as they gained independence of their keepers. It was odd to watch the ties between them loosen. Different keepers adapted to the dragons’ dwindling interest in them in various ways. Some relished having leisure time and a beautiful city to explore. Suddenly the keepers could put their own well-being first. They made their first priority comfortable lodging. Although the city offered a vast array of empty dwellings, Thymara was amused that she and her fellows ended up in three buildings that fronted onto what they had begun to call the Square of the Dragons after a very large sculpture in the middle of it. They could have moved into what Alise called villas or mansions, structures that were larger than the Traders’ Concourse back in Trehaug. Instead, most of them had chosen the smaller, simpler quarters above the dragon baths, housing obviously designed for those who tended dragons. It was wonder enough to Thymara to have as her own room a chamber twice as large as her family home had been. It was wealth to possess a bed that softened under her, a large mirror, drawers and shelves of her own. She could soak in a steaming bath as often as she wished and then retire to a room so comfortably warm that she needed no blankets or garments at all. She had time to study herself in the mirror, time to braid and pin up her hair, time to wonder who and what she was becoming.

  But such luxuries did not mean that daily life was all leisure. There was no game in the city, and few green growing plants and no dry wood for cooking fuel. Gathering those demanded daily hikes to the outskirts of the sprawling city. Carson had suggested that they needed to create some sort of a dock for Tarman. The liveship would need a safe place to tie up when he returned, and they needed a place for unloading the supplies they hoped he would bring. “We will need docks and wharves, too, for our own vessels. We can’t always assume Tarman and Captain Leftrin will ferry our supplies for free.”

  That comment had drawn startled looks from the gathered keepers. Carson had grinned. “What? Do you think we are reclaiming this city for only five years, or ten? Talk to Alise, my friends. You may well live a hundred years or more. So what we build now, we had best build well.” With that, Carson had begun to sketch out the tasks before them. Hunting and gathering for their daily needs, building a dock for the city, and, to Thymara’s surprise, sampling the memories stored in stone to try to understand the workings of the city.

  Thymara had volunteered to bring in food and hunted almost daily. As early spring claimed the land, the forested hills behind the city yielded greens and some roots, but their diet was still mostly flesh. Thymara was heartily weary of it. She did not relish the long hike to the edge of the city, nor the return journey burdened with firewood or bloody meat. But her days in the hills with her bow or gathering basket were now the only simple times in her life.

  On the days when she remained in the city, she contended with both Tats and Rapskal. Their rivalry for her attention had eclipsed the friendship they once had shared. They had never come to blows, but when they could not avoid each other, the awkwardness between them froze any hope of normal conversation. Several times she had been trapped between them, besieged by Rapskal’s endless chattering from one side as Tats sought to win her attention with small articles he had made for her or stories of his discoveries in the city. The intensity of the attention they focused on her made it impossible for her to speak to anyone else, and she winced whenever she thought of how it must appear to the others, as if she deliberately provoked their rivalry. If Tats had noticed something about the city and wondered about it, Rapskal was sure to claim knowledge of what it was and explain it endlessly while Tats glowered. As the keepers still gathered for most of their meals, it had begun to cause a rift in the group. Sylve sided with Thymara, sitting with her no matter which of her suitors claimed the spot on her other side. Harrikin made no effort to disguise his support for Tats, while Kase and Boxter were firmly in Rapskal’s camp. A few of the others expressed no preference and some, such as Nortel and Jerd, resolutely ignored the whole issue when they were not making snide comments on it.

  If one had work duty, the other took advantage of his absence to woo her. When Tats worked on the docks, Rapskal would insist on going hunting with her, even if Harrikin was her assigned partner for the day. Worse were the days when both she and Rapskal were free. He would lurk outside her chamber door. The moment she appeared, he would beg her to accompany him back to the villa and the memory columns, to join him in learning more of their Elderling forebears.

  She felt a trace of shame when she thought how often she surrendered and joined him there. It was an escape to a gloriously elegant time. In that dream world she danced gracefully, partook of extravagant feasts, and attended plays, living a life such as she had never imagined. But Amarinda’s passing observations of life allowed Thymara to gain an understanding through the eyes of an Elderling of old about how the city had once worked. Conservatories had furnished fruits and greens year-round, while the humans in outlying settlements and across the river had traded what they manufactured, raised, and grew with the Elderlings for their magical item
s. With Carson and Alise she had visited several of the immense greenhouses. They were sized for a dragon to stroll through, with chest-high beds for soil and gigantic pots for trees. Yet whatever had once flourished there had perished long ago, leaving only a shadowy tracery of long-vanished leaves on the floor and hollow stumps in the soil. The earth in the containers looked usable, and water still spilled from leaks in the system of pipes that had once heated and irrigated the plant beds.

  “But without seeds or plant stock, we cannot start anything here,” Alise observed sadly.

  “Perhaps in spring,” Carson had said. “We might move wild plants here and tend them.”

  Alise had nodded slowly. “If we can find seeds or take cuttings from plants we know, then the new Elderlings could begin to farm for themselves again. Or if Leftrin could bring seeds and plant starts to us.”

  In other memory walks, Thymara glimpsed gauntleted Elderlings at work. They stroked sculpture from stone, imbued wood with mobility, and persuaded metal to gleam, sing, and heat or cool water. Their shops lined some of the narrow streets and they called greetings to Amarinda as she passed. Thymara felt an odd kinship with them, an almost recall of what they did but not how. Amarinda merely strolled past amazing feats with scarcely a glance, accepting them as part of her everyday world. But there were other places and times when Amarinda focused her attention intently and relentlessly, drowning Thymara in her emotions and sensations. The Elderling woman’s infatuation with Tellator continued, deepened, and became a lifelong passion. In the space of a single afternoon of memory walking, Thymara experienced months of her life. She would emerge from those hours with dimmed eyes and dulled senses, her hand clasping Rapskal’s as he sprawled on the steps beside her. She would turn her head and see him wearing Tellator’s smile, and the thumb that rubbed sensuously against the palm of her hand was not Rapskal’s at all. Only slowly would his gaze become Rapskal’s again, and she wondered who he saw when he looked at her, which parts he remembered as they rose, stiff and chilled. Rapskal always wanted to speak of the shared memories afterward. And she always refused. After all, they were only memories. Dreams.