The Dragon Keeper (51 page)

Reflexively, she found the strength to snatch him up out of the water. It was part accident, part intent that when her strength failed her, she managed to dash him against the fallen log in the river. For an instant, he hung loose in her grip. When he suddenly began to struggle and squeal again, she slammed him against the snag hard. She braced his momentarily still body against the log, and in the fraction of a second she gained opened her jaws wide and then closed them again. He gave one final spasm and then her kill hung limp from her jaws.

She’d killed! She’d made her first kill!

She pinned the meat against the snag with one front foot while she tore into it. She had never tasted anything so delicious. The blood was liquid and warm, the meat flopping fresh. She gulped and tore mouthfuls of guts, and crunched bones. When pieces of the pig dropped into the river, she plunged her head in to retrieve them.

It was only when every last bit of the animal had been devoured that she became cognizant of the scene around her. Many of the dragons had caught prey. Veras had pursued her pig up onto the bank and killed it there. Two of the smallest dragons had a squealing pig stretched between them, tugging at it until the creature’s body suddenly gave way. Kalo was gulping the last of one pig while he had another pinned under his great clawed foot. That sight sent her looking for more pigs.

“The herd scattered,” Mercor said quietly. She found the golden dragon cleaning his claws. He licked them and then nibbled a scrap of meat from under one. He had obviously hunted successfully. As she had. The memory rocked her again. She had killed! She, Sintara, had killed her own meat. And eaten it. How could she not have known how important it was to do this? It suddenly changed everything. She looked around at the river and the other dragons. Why was she mindlessly following the others, like a cow in a herd? This was not what dragons did. Dragons didn’t have keepers or depend on humans to kill for them. Dragons hunted alone and killed for themselves!

Instinctively she flexed her shoulders and raised her wings. The drive to fly away from here, to return to hunting, to make another kill and devour it and then find a sunny hillside or a good rocky ledge and take a long nap filled her. It wasn’t the meat that had awakened this in her, though the meat had been very good. It had been the struggle to kill, and above all, the triumph of killing and eating the riverpig. She couldn’t wait to do it again.

But her spread wings were pathetic things that slapped wetly against her back. There was no strength in them. Angrily, she recalled how hard it had been to battle even such stupid prey as a riverpig. Killing it hadn’t felt the way it should have, hadn’t matched any of her dragon memories of a kill. She was a weakling, not fit to live. She’d been kept like a cow in a pen. It was time to end that life.

“And that,” said Mercor, as calmly as if he had heard and followed all her thoughts, “is exactly why we had to leave that place. It is why we have to travel together, upriver to find Kelsingra. So that we can become dragons along the way. Or die trying.”

He lifted his head and gave a trumpeting cry. “Time to move on!” Then, without waiting to see if the others followed him or not, he moved out into the depths of the river and around the long snag.

Sintara followed him.

Year the 6th of the Independent Alliance of Traders

From Detozi, Keeper of the Birds, Trehaug

To Erek, Keeper of the Birds, Bingtown

Enclosed, in a doubly sealed scroll case dipped in wax, a missive from Jess to Merchants Begasti Cored and Sinad Arich at the Sailpoint Inn, Bingtown. Fees paid for prompt and confidential delivery, with a bonus to be paid if the message is delivered in less than four days from the sending date.

Erek,

I have chosen Kingsly for this task! If any bird can earn us the bonus money, he can!

Detozi

P.S. Any chance of a squab or two from Kingsly’s line? I would trade you some of my Speckle’s offspring. She is not as fast as Kingsly, but has flown through many a storm for me.

N
ightfall found all the keepers sleeping in a row on the deck of the
Tarman
. Thymara had chosen a spot by the ship’s railing. She pillowed her head on her arms and stared toward the riverbank. Except for their dying campfire on shore and the single light from the barge window, the darkness was absolute and hard to get used to. Every time they stopped for the night, it was the same. They had left Cassarick far behind them. There were no friendly lights from a tree-built city to pierce the blackness of night under the great trees, no sounds from neighboring houses. Thymara skirted the edges of sleep but could not seem to enter. Too much had happened too fast in the last few days. She swatted at a mosquito buzzing near her ear and asked the darkness, “Why are we doing this? It’s crazy. We don’t know where we’re going or what to expect. There’s no end in sight. Why are we doing this?”

“For money,” Jerd whispered back. She sighed contentedly and rolled over in her blanket. “To be doing something new.”

“’Cause we haven’t got anything better to do?” Rapskal asked from the dimness on her left. “And because it’s the best time I ever had in my life.” He sounded deeply satisfied with his day.

“To get away from everything else and start something new,” Greft asserted grandly. Thymara gritted her teeth.

“I need to sleep!” Tats complained. “Could you all keep it down?” Tonight, he had thrown his blanket down on the deck next to Rapskal. He’d seemed in a foul temper about something.

Someone, possibly Harrikin, chuckled. Silence fell again. The river lapped at the barge. On the shore, one of the dragons grunted loudly in its sleep and then was still again. Thymara pulled her blanket up over her head to block out the mosquitoes and stared into a smaller darkness.

Nothing was as Thymara had expected it to be. There was no grand adventure to this journey. So quickly the days had settled into a routine. They woke early and the keepers breakfasted together, usually on ship’s bread and dried fish or porridge. They refilled their water bottles from the sand wells they’d dug the night before. The hunters left camp before dawn each day, paddling upriver. They needed to go before the dragons’ noise and activity frightened all the game. The dragons went next, as soon as they roused; then the keepers set out in their small boats, followed by the barge.

The others traded off partners in their boats, but no one else ever offered to partner with Rapskal. Several of the other keepers had expressed interest in sharing a boat with her. Warken had asked her, and Harrikin. Sylve had suggested twice that they might travel together the next day. But each morning, there was Rapskal, sitting expectantly in the boat by the shore, waiting for her. She had thought of partnering with someone else, knowing that if she did someone would be forced to share a boat with him. But so far, she hadn’t. Part of it was that they moved a boat very well together. And part of it was that his good nature and optimism were cheering to her at a time when she felt very much alone. Conversations with him might be odd and wandering, but he was not the lackwit that some of the others seemed to think he was. He simply came at life from a different angle. That was all.

And he was, after all, rather pleasant to look at.

Her body was becoming more accustomed to a full day of paddling the boat, but she still ached each night. The blisters on her hands were turning into calluses. The sunlight glinting on the water no longer seemed as harsh as it first had to her canopy-trained eyes. Her hair felt more like straw each day, and she had the uneasy sensation that her scaling was progressing faster than it had when she lived in the trees. But that was to be expected. Rain Wilders always seemed to scale more as they aged. Those things she could accept, but the physical monotony of paddling, day after day, was beginning to tell on her spirits.

Today had provided no exception. The morning had passed slowly, with little change in the endless foliage along the riverbank. In early afternoon, the keepers had been dismayed to hear wild trumpeting from the dragons ahead. When they caught up to them, some sort of disaster seemed to have befallen them, for the dragons were splashing wildly and sometimes immersing themselves completely in the water.

After several near disastrous accidents among the keepers in their canoes, they had made the discovery that the dragons had simply intercepted a thick run of fish and had made the most of their chance to gorge. Shortly after that, the dragons had hauled themselves out onto a long, low, reedy bank and promptly gone to sleep. By the time the keepers caught up with them there had still been plenty of daylight left. They could have traveled farther upstream, but the sleeping dragons refused to be prodded along. Their keepers had had little choice save to pull their small boats up into the shallows and stop for the rest of the day.

Skymaw had plainly got her share of the fish. Her belly bulged with it, and her somnolence was that of a sated predator. She had not wanted to be bothered by cleaning and grooming. Not only had she refused to awaken, but she had growled in her sleep, baring teeth that looked longer and sharper for the fresh blood on her muzzle.

Fente was the only dragon social enough to tell them about it. She was very excited and insisted on telling the tale over and over as Tats groomed her. She made the process more exciting for him as she became caught up in her bragging, and she acted out how she had darted in her head, seized a huge fish, and broke his spine with a single snap. “And I ate him, gulping him down whole. Now you see that I am a dragon to reckon with, not a penned cow to be fattened with bad meat. I can kill. I have killed a riverpig, and I have eaten a hundred fish of my own catching. Now you see that I am a dragon, and I do not need to be kept by any human!”

Thymara and several of the others had clustered around to hear her words and watch Tats attempt to groom the lively little green. The small dragon had smears of blood on her face, and several long threads of sticky guts stuck to her jaw and throat. Tats energetically scrubbed at her scaled face, smiling indulgently at her brags and her insistence that dragons had no need of human intervention. He was obviously infatuated with her. Thymara knew of the reputation the dragons had for charisma; she did not doubt that the ever pragmatic Tats was more than a little under the glamour of the creature.

She suspected that even she herself was under Skymaw’s spell. It had hurt her feelings more than a little that Skymaw had not even wakened enough to tell her of her triumphant kill. She felt excluded from her dragon’s life, and a bit jealous of Tats. At the same time, there was a tickling of unease at the back of her mind, as a perception she was reluctant to recognize became clearer for her. No matter how Tats might smile as he washed the blood and guts from Fente’s face, she was not a cute or even remotely masterable creature. She was a dragon, and even if her boasting sounded childish, she was swiftly discovering what it meant to be a dragon. Her declarations that she had no need for humans were not idle brags. The dragons tolerated the keepers and their attentions for now, but perhaps not for always.

Somehow, she had expected all dragons to be somewhat alike. In her early fancies about her new career, she had imagined them as noble and intelligent with generous natures. Well, perhaps Sylve’s golden could live up to that concept, but the others were as diverse as their keepers. Tats’s green was a nasty bit of work when she wished to be. Nortel’s lavender dragon was shy, until one approached too close and then he might take a snap. Good-natured Lecter and the large blue male he had befriended seemed well matched, right down to the spikes both were growing on their necks. The cousins Kase and Boxter’s orange dragons seemed as like-minded as their keepers.

Ever since she had witnessed the hatching, Thymara had seen the dragons as creatures that needed humans to survive. That perception of them had blinded her to how lethal they could be. She had, of course, always known that any of them were large enough to kill a human easily. Some were quick and clever enough that if they desired to become man-eaters, they’d be deadly and cunning enemies. Their disdain for humanity and sense of superiority had, until today, seemed an annoying but merely dragonish trait. Now her gaze wandered from the lively and occasionally good-natured Fente past her own sleeping Skymaw to Kalo.

The largest and most aggressive of the dragons had made himself a rough nest in the coarse reeds. His large claws had raked up damp earth and the reeds that had grown there to make a sleeping place. He dozed there, his massive head cushioned on his front feet, his wings folded against his back in sleep. Like all the dragons, he lacked the ability to fly, but in every other way, he looked fully formed. When she focused both her gaze and her thoughts on him, it seemed to her that he seethed with anger and frustration, as if his immense blue-black body concealed a simmering cauldron of rage. Greft, his keeper, sat on the ground not far from Kalo. The great dragon was clean, his scales gleaming. Thymara had wondered if his keeper had done that, or if Kalo had cleaned himself. Greft’s eyes were almost closed. He looked, she thought, like a man warming himself at a fire. For a moment, she had a sense of Greft enjoying the simmering heat of Kalo’s aggression and anger. Even as the image came to her, Greft opened his eyes. She caught a flash of gleaming blue in them and cast her gaze aside, trying to seem as if she had been staring past him. She felt uncomfortable that he should know she had been watching him.

Nonetheless, he smiled and made a small gesture, beckoning her to come closer. She pretended not to notice it. In response, his grin widened. He put out a hand to caress his sleeping dragon. His hand moved slowly, sensually over the dragon’s shoulder, as if he would point out to her how strong the creature was. The whole show unsettled her; she turned her head quickly as if she had been distracted by something Rapskal had said. Greft might have chuckled.

It was actually Sylve’s comment that caught her attention. “I am glad they had some luck hunting for themselves. At least they’ve had some food. Hadn’t we best try to do some hunting or fishing here now, for ourselves? Because I think they’ve settled for the night.”

She was right, of course. The boat carried some provisions, but fresh meat was always welcome. The hunters had been doing a good job so far of making daily kills. Every day there was some fresh meat for the dragons, even if it was not enough to fill them. The keepers had not been as successful. They spent most of their short hours of shore time each evening in grooming the dragons or doing what fishing they could. Today they’d have part of an afternoon as well as an early evening. Thymara saw that realization settle over the others. Most of them chose to try for fish; Thymara guessed that the rushes and reeds of this section of bank would offer habitat to lots of fish, but she doubted that any would be large enough to be truly useful in feeding a dragon. And she was tired of the water and the muddy riverbanks. She needed time alone in her forest and up in the trees.

She equipped herself with her bow and a quiver of arrows, a knife, and some rope and headed off into the gloom under the immense trees. She did not move randomly, nor did she stay long on the ground. She paralleled the river for a short way, looking for game trails. When she struck one, she studied it briefly. The paw marks of some of the smaller denizens of the forest had been trodden over by the deeper imprints of cloven hooves. Most of the tracks were small; she knew they belonged to what the Rain Wilders called dancer deer. Small and light-footed, they were creatures that moved quickly and silently through the forest, taking advantage of low browse and whatever dry land they could find under the trees. Some had been seen to scramble up low branches and actually run along them. One of them would not make much of a dent in a dragon’s appetite, and they were so wary that even if she found a group of them drowsing, she would not be able to kill more than one before the others had fled.

But a few of the tracks were larger and deeper, the cloven hooves splayed wider. Marsh elk would be traveling alone this time of year. If she had the great good fortune to kill one, she’d be able to carry maybe a quarter of it back to camp. But perhaps Tats would help her fetch the rest back in return for a share. Today, he had shared a boat with Warken instead of Jerd. Perhaps that meant that tonight he’d have time to do something besides sit and listen to Jerd talk. Thymara shook her head to banish thoughts of him. He’d made his choice for companionship. There was no reason it should bother her.

She set her hopes for an elk even as she was resigned to the fact that she’d be fortunate even to get a dancer. It was more likely that she’d encounter one of the pawed omnivores that lived along the riverbank. Their meat was edible, though not something she relished, but she doubted that Skymaw would turn her nose up at it.

As soon as she found an opportunity, Thymara left the ground and moved up into the lower branches of the trees. Here, her clawed feet helped her move efficiently and quietly. She did not travel directly above the game trail, but to the side of it where she could watch it while, she hoped, not alerting any creatures to her presence.

Light dimmed as she moved away from the open spaces along the river’s edge. The sounds of the forest changed too, as the rushing of the river was hushed by the intervening of the layers of foliage. Birds called to one another, and up above her, she heard the rustling passage of squirrels, monkeys, and other small creatures. Something very much like peace settled over her. Her father had always been right; this was what she was made for. She smiled at the familiar sounds of the tree creatures and moved deeper into the forest. She would travel only so far into the woods as she deemed she could carry a kill back; if at that point she’d still had no luck, she’d turn her deadly skills on the little animals she could see and hear and hope to take back a game sack full of them. Meat was meat whether it came in a large or small packet.

She had almost reached that turning point when she first smelled and then heard the elk. He was an old fellow, energetically and noisily enjoying scratching his hump against an overhanging branch. Like most of his kind, he was not accustomed to looking up for danger; he was a large animal, and most creatures that could threaten him would be landbound as he was. Thymara felt almost sorry for him as she silently maneuvered her way from tree to tree until she was directly above him. She shifted, moving silently, until she had a vantage with a clear shot at him. She drew the arrow back, took a breath and held it, and then let it fly. She shot her arrow directly down, aiming for a place just behind his humped shoulders, hoping it would penetrate his rib cage and hit his lungs if not his heart. Her missile struck solidly with a sound like someone hitting a thick drum skin.