Rain Wilds Chronicles

by Robin Hobb

  “They worked in Silver,” she guessed and he nodded.

  “Silver was the great secret treasure of the Elderlings and the tonic that made both Elderlings and dragons what they became.” He halted at a door hole. “Lack of it will kill us all,” he said conversationally, and he stepped inside the empty door frame of the shop. She followed him reluctantly.

  “It’s dark in here,” she complained and felt his assent.

  “They did not use the Silver everywhere. Even then, it was a precious commodity. Where many might gather, they used it for light and for warmth. For art that all shared. But in the small personal spaces, they used far less of it.” He reached into his pouch and drew forth light. He held something out to her, shaking it free. A necklace with a moon-face charm on it. It brightened as he shook it, filling the room with a thin silvery light. It looked oddly familiar.

  “Put it on,” he urged her, and when she did not, he stepped closer to push back her hood and loop it around her neck. The gleaming moon rested on her bosom and she looked around the shop. Little remained of the humble wooden furnishings, but there were things among the rubble that she recognized. An anvil of a kind she had never seen, yet she knew it for what it was. A stone table with grooves and drains in the surface: for working Silver. Reflexively, she lifted her eyes to where tools had once hung on a rack. The rack was gone, the tools a jumble on the floor where they had hung. A battered ladle tangled with a pair of shears. A sudden urge to pick them up, to tidy her workspace came to her.

  “Let’s go outside,” she said abruptly.

  “We could,” he agreed. “But it wouldn’t help. You can’t run away from it. I don’t want to force you, but time is running out. For all of us.”

  Cold filled her. She turned to look at Rapskal, and the reflected light from the moon charm made his eyes silver. “What do you mean?”

  “You know,” he coaxed her gently. “I’ve been waiting for you to admit it. You do know.” He paused and looked at her accusingly. “Amarinda knew. And so you know.”

  You know, Sintara echoed his words. And it is time for you to stop being stubborn.

  “I don’t know,” she insisted to both of them. It hurt her feelings that they would close ranks against her and force her to this. Whatever “this” was. She spoke frankly to the man with the gleaming silver eyes. “You are scaring me. Tellator, go away. I want my friend Rapskal back.”

  He sighed and spoke reluctantly. “The need is great. I love you. Then, and now, I love you. You know that. I have waited as long as I can, as long as any of us can. But we are Elderlings, and ultimately, we serve the dragons. Will you let Tintaglia die? Will you let Malta and Reyn and their baby die because you want to cling so strongly to who you were born? Thymara, I know you are frightened by this. I have tried to let you go as slowly as ever you wished. But tonight is our last chance. Please. Choose this. Choose this for me, for Rapskal. Because I would not force you. But Tellator would.”

  She was shaking, fighting a battle inside herself as well as withstanding the crushing fear he woke in her. Memories were stirring, ones she did not want to acknowledge. She looked around her. “This was her little shop. She made things here.”

  He nodded. “Not a shop, really. She sold the things she made, but she gave as many away. This was where she created her art. This was where you worked Silver with your hands.”

  “I don’t remember it.” She spoke flatly.

  “Not easily, no. Silver was too precious. The memories of working it were not saved in stone. Some secrets are too precious to be entrusted to anyone except the heir to your trade. Those secrets were passed only from master to apprentice. The locations of the wells could not be kept completely secret, not when the dragons came to drink from them. How the wells were managed, season to season, that was a guild secret.”

  He took her arm suddenly, and she almost pulled away from him. But he was walking her to the door and she was too grateful to be leaving the building. Amarinda had worked there. She knew it now, recalled the busy little street of artisans as it had been. Not from memory stone; it had not been used in this part of the city, but from the residue of memories that her time as Amarinda had left in her mind.

  “Ramose had his studio there. The sculptor. Remember?” His voice had gone colder.

  She glanced at the empty sockets of windows in the wall. “I remember,” she admitted grudgingly. Something else popped into her mind. “You were jealous of him.”

  Rapskal nodded. “He had been your lover before I was. We had a fight once. Foolish of me, not to know that a man who wields a hammer and chisel all day builds up an arm.”

  She shied away from those memories. Too close, she thought, too close to something. And then they turned a corner, and she was in a familiar place. There was the well plaza, just as they had left it, beams stacked to one side, broken mechanisms to another, tools in a third. The ship’s crew had put some hours in on the chain. There was a mended length of it by the well’s lip, the end fastened to the stub of one ancient post that had once supported the well’s cover. Heeby was there, too, standing quietly in the darkness. A sense of dread rose in Thymara.

  “Why did we come here?” she asked breathlessly.

  “So you could get the Silver. So Tintaglia can live. So all the dragons can become all they were meant to be, and their Elderlings as well.” The light from the locket she wore did not reach his eyes here in the open. They were the lambent blue they had always been, but the silvery sheen the jewelry gave turned his face to a ghost mask. She did not know him.

  He spoke softly but firmly. “Amarinda, you have to go down the well. You are the only one who knows how to bring back the Silver.”

  “My love?”

  Reyn spoke the words softly as if he thought she could be asleep. She wasn’t. Couldn’t be, wouldn’t be, and might never sleep again. She huddled by her dragon’s face, her baby on her lap. Her hand rested by Tintaglia’s nostril where she could feel the slow sigh as the dragon continued to breathe. “I’m here,” she told Reyn.

  He hitched closer to her. “I’m trying to make sense of what I’m feeling. When I was a boy and Tintaglia was a shadowy presence underground, trapped in her wizardwood case, I was fascinated with her. Then she all but enslaved me, and I hated her. I loved her when she helped me recover you. And then, off she went, and for years we heard nothing, felt nothing from her.”

  “I was as angry with her as you were. To leave us the care of the young dragons, to go off without a word. To send Selden off to Sa knows where, never to return to us.” She caressed the dragon’s snout. She sighed. “Do you think he’s dead, Reyn? My little brother?”

  Reyn shook his head wordlessly.

  The night had turned clear, the clouds blown aside, yet it was not as cold as it had been. Spring was in the air. Above them, the moon sailed on and the stars shone, heedless of mortals below. Their Elderling cloaks kept them warm. The stones were hard beneath them. Malta had her husband and his firstborn son at her side and the dragon who had shaped all their lives. Life and death merged at this spot, an untidy tangle of endings. The dragon’s breath flowed over their son. The smell of her infected wounds hung in the damp air.

  “She is still so incredibly beautiful,” Malta said. She willed her voice not to choke in her tight throat. “Look at these scales, every one a tiny work of art. It’s even more a wonder when you realize she determined their decoration, every one of them. Look at these, around her eyes.” Her fingers walked to them, traced the intricate pattern of white, silver, and black that framed the dragon’s closed eyes. “No dragon will ever be as glorious as she was. The young queen Sintara flaunts herself, but she will never be as blue as our Tintaglia. Fente and Veras are plain as tree snakes compared to her. My conceited beauty, you had every right to be vain.”

  “She did,” Reyn conceded. “I hate that she dies like this, broken and flawed. Such a waste to lose her. I could feel the hope in the other dragons surge when she appeared in the skies
. They need her; they need what she remembers.”

  “We all do,” Malta said quietly. “Especially Phron.”

  The baby stirred in her lap, perhaps at the mention of his name. Malta lifted the corner of her cloak that covered him. He still slept. She bent close to study his face in the moonlight. “Look,” she said to her husband. “I never realized it before. The tiny scales on his brows? They are the same pattern as hers. Even without her presence, he carries her marks on him. Her artistry would have lived on in him. If he were to live.” The baby stirred at her touch as she traced his face, and he whimpered more strongly. “Hush, my little one.” She lifted him from her lap. His thin arm and scrawny hand sprawled from his wrappings. She put the little hand on the dragon’s brows, held it there between Tintaglia’s scales and her still soft, still human palm. “She would have been your dragon, too, my darling. Touch her once, before you both go. Imagine how beautiful you would have been if she could have guided you.” She guided the baby’s hand down the dragon’s scaling in a caress. “Tintaglia, if you must go, give him something of yourself first. Give him a memory of flight, give him a thought of your beauty to carry into the dark.”

  “I don’t know anything about Silver or about this well. I’m not Amarinda and I don’t know. And I’m not going down that well. Not now, not ever. I hate places like that, dark and small. Go down there in the night, alone? That’s crazy.” Her heart was pounding at the mere thought of it. She crossed her arms, hugging herself. Tats. Why hadn’t she wakened Tats and made him come too? No one knew they’d gone out walking.

  He insisted relentlessly, in such a gentle voice. “Tintaglia is dying. Now is all we have. Thymara or Amarinda, it doesn’t matter. You have to go down the well. I’ll go with you. You won’t be alone.”

  She tried to fight her way back to her own reality. He was just Rapskal, just strange Rapskal, and she didn’t have to let him bully her. “I won’t! I’m tired of this, Rapskal. And I’m tired of trying to help you. I’m going back to the hall and get some sleep. You are being too strange even for me.”

  She turned to go, but he seized her arm in a grip of iron. “You have to go down the well. Tonight.”

  She slapped at his hands and tried to twist free of his grip. Could not. When had he become so strong? He did not even appear to be making an effort to hold her as she fought his hold on her. She could not bear the gaze of the stranger looking out of his eyes at her. “Let me go!”

  Wings flapped, and a gust of air washed over her. The paving stones of the square shook as the dragon’s claws met them and skidded to a halt. Sintara! Thymara knew her scent as well as she knew her mind’s touch on hers. Be calm, Thymara. I am here. All will be fine.

  Relief washed through her, bringing icy anger with it. She met Tellator’s stare coldly and stopped struggling. “Let go of me now.” She suggested it calmly. “Or my dragon may do you harm.”

  Heeby had advanced on them as she spoke, the spikes on her neck rising at the perceived threat to Rapskal. Thymara caught her breath. This could be bad. She had no desire to see the two dragons fight each other, especially not with her in the middle of it.

  Neither did he. His hand dropped away from her arm. “You’re right. It’s better this way.” He turned away from both of them.

  Hurt choked her voice as she rubbed her bruised arm. “Rapskal. I loved you. Now I don’t think I ever want to see you again. You’re not my friend anymore. I don’t know who or what you are now, but I don’t like it.”

  She turned to go.

  “Thymara,” Sintara said gently. “It will be all right. We have not always trusted each other. But now you must.”

  Thymara walked slowly to the well’s mouth and looked down. An unnamable dread rose in her, a horror of confined dark places. She shuddered. Rapskal had followed her. He did not try to touch her but knelt on the other side of the well. He seized the fastened chain, pulled a length free, and dropped it in the hole. It clanked against the side. He pushed another loop after it, and then another, and suddenly the links were rattling over the stone lip as the chain paid out and down into the darkness. It stopped, taut against the pole, and Rapskal said to himself, “Not long enough.” He stood up and walked off into the darkness.

  Thymara remained by the well, staring down into it. An eternity of blackness. And she would go down into it.

  She lifted her eyes to her dragon. “Don’t,” she pleaded. “Don’t.”

  Sintara only looked at her. Thymara felt the compulsion building in her. But this was not the dragon pushing her to go hunting when she wanted to sleep, or encouraging her to groom every single scale on her face. This was different.

  “If you force me, it will never be the same between us,” she warned the dragon.

  “No,” Sintara agreed. “It won’t. Just as I haven’t been the same since you left me hungry, with no choice but to face my fear and try to fly.”

  “That was different!” Thymara protested.

  “Only from your point of view,” the dragon replied. “Thymara. Go down the well.”

  She shook her head. “I can’t.” But she walked stiffly around to the other side of the well and knelt by the chain. She put a hand on it. It was cold. The links of it were big, big enough to slip a hand into. Or the toe of her boot.

  “I’ll go first.” Did Tellator or Rapskal make that offer? He stood next to her, a coil of line over his shoulder.

  “You can do no good down there,” Sintara objected, and Heeby whiffled nervously.

  “I won’t send her alone,” he said. He looked at Thymara, his eyes unreadable. “Like this. It won’t be easy, but you’re strong.” He cocked his head at her, and for an instant he was Rapskal again, telling her that one day she would fly. “You can do it. Just follow me.”

  She moved out of his way as he knelt beside her. He clambered over the lip of the well, his hands snugged tight to the chain. She saw him grope with his feet, find a toehold in the chain for one and then reach for another. He gave her a strained smile. “I’m scared, too,” he admitted. He moved his hands and slowly he walked down the chain and away from her. She watched until his upturned face had vanished in the darkness.

  She glanced at her dragon and made a final plea. “Don’t make me.”

  “You have to go down there. You are the only one who might be able to find the Silver. You knew how the well worked, you knew how to touch Silver and not die. It has to be you, Thymara-Amarinda.”

  She wet her lips, felt them dry and then crack in the chill. She could hear the chain working against the lip of the well. He was still going down. She was furious with Tellator and possibly hated him, but she would not let Rapskal go alone. “I’ll do it,” she conceded. “But let me be the one to do it. Please.”

  “Do you think you can make yourself ?”

  “I can make myself do it,” she said.

  She felt Sintara lift the glamour from her mind. It peeled away, making her skin stand up in goose bumps and leaving the night darker around her. She blinked her eyes, becoming accustomed to her lesser human vision and then the gleam of the locket she wore. She did not speak and did not let herself think. She inserted her hands into the links of the chain and positioned herself on the edge of the well. The chain vibrated with Rapskal’s weight. He was still moving down it.

  She closed her eyes and remembered her childhood days in the treetops of Trehaug. Climbing had been far more familiar to her than running. She took a breath and stripped her Elderling boots from her feet. She levered her body around and groped for the links of the chain. Her clawed toes found them. She began her descent.

  Darkness swallowed her as she went down, and then the gleam of the moon medallion seemed to grow stronger. Her eyes adjusted. The walls of the well were not as blank as they appeared from up above. When the gleam of the medallion met the black, there were markings engraved into the smooth face. There were not many, and it took time for her to realize they were dates and levels. The Elderling system of measuring time
meant nothing to her. But Amarinda recalled that the Silver had risen and fallen, sometimes seasonally and also over the years. Sometimes the Silver was scant; sometimes it flowed so strong that the well must be capped, lest Silver flow through the streets. She passed a notation scribed by Amarinda’s hand, for those who could work the Silver tended the wells also.

  And regulated them.

  The deeper she went, the less she felt like Thymara. She was no stranger to the inside of this well, though climbing a chain down was not how she usually descended. There had been levers and chains and gears. A carefully fitted platform with a hatch once traveled up and down in the shaft, just for visits such as this. She could recall the tediously slow process of turning the crank to travel down or up the shaft, and the loud clanking of the chain as it had moved through the mechanism.

  She stopped. It was getting colder as she descended. Amarinda had never liked coming here, had never shrugged off as routine the task of managing the Silver. It was not the danger of the volatile stuff. The Silver was always dangerous whether confined to a vial on her workbench or flowing in threads down the street. Casual contact with Silver was always eventually deadly for everyone. Amarinda knew the dangers of the Silver and chose to work with it anyway. Slowly she began descending again. But she had never liked the confinement of this shaft. Nor the dark. Nor the cold.

  She stepped on his hand. Tellator cursed, the language foreign to her ears.

  “Wait!” He commanded her. “I’m at the end of the chain. I’m trying to tie the line to the last few links so we can get down the rest of the way. It’s not easy.”

  She didn’t respond. She clung to the cold chain in the dark, felt it vibrate with his motions. It swung slightly with their weight. No different from holding tight to a skinny tree, she told herself, and waited.