The Dragon Keeper
Page 15

Thymara spoke. “But we made a deal with Tintaglia. And a Trader’s word is his bond. We said we’d help Tintaglia take care of them if she kept the Chalcedeans away from our shores. And she has done that.”
Rogon ignored her. Rogon always ignored her. He never treated her as badly as some of the others did, but he never looked directly at her or replied to her words. She was accustomed to that. It wasn’t personal. She glanced away from the men, caught herself cleaning her claws on the tree’s bark, and stopped. She looked back at them. Her father had black nails. So did Rogon. Sometimes it seemed such a small difference to her, that her father had been born with black nails on his hands and feet and that she had been born with claws, like a lizard. Such a small difference on which to base a life-or-death decision.
“My daughter speaks the truth,” her father said. “Our Council agreed to the bargain; they have no choice but to live up to it. They thought their promise to aid the dragons would end with the hatching. Obviously, it isn’t going to.”
Thymara resisted the impulse to squirm. She hated it when Da forced his comrades to acknowledge her existence. It was better when he allowed them to ignore her. Because then she could ignore them as well. She looked aside and tried not to listen to the men as they discussed the difficulties of hunting enough meat to feed that many dragons, and the impossibility of simply ignoring the newly hatched dragons at the base of the city. There were ruins beneath the swampy grounds of Cassarick. If the Rain Wilders wanted to excavate them for Elderling treasure, then they’d have to find some way to keep these young dragons fed.
Thymara yawned. The politics of the Rain Wild Traders and the dragons would never have anything to do with her and her life. Her father had told her that she should still care about things like that, but it was hard to force herself to be interested in situations she would never have a say in. Her life was apart from such things. When she considered her future, she knew she was the only one she could ever rely on.
She looked down at the dragons and suddenly felt queasy. Her father had been right. And Rogon was right. Below her, young dragons were dying. Their fellows were not killing them, though they did not hesitate to ring the ones who had collapsed, eagerly waiting for them to shudder out a final breath. So many of them, she thought, so many of the hatched dragons had emerged unfit to face the harsh conditions of the Rain Wilds. What had gone wrong? Was Rogon right?
Tintaglia paid another swooping visit. Another carcass plummeted from above, narrowly missing the young dragons who had gathered at her approach. Thymara didn’t recognize the beast Tintaglia had dropped. It was larger than any deer she had ever seen and had a rounded body with coarse hair. She glimpsed a thick leg with a split hoof before the mob of dragons hid it from her view. She didn’t think that was a deer; not that she had seen many deer. The swampy tussocks that characterized the forest floor of the Rain Wilds were not friendly to deer. One had to journey days and days to get to the beginning of the foothills that edged the wide river valley. Only a fool hunted that far from home. Such hunters consumed food on the way there and had to eat from their kill on the way back. Often the meat that survived the journey was half spoiled, or so little of it remained that the hunter would have been better off to settle for a dozen birds or a good fat ground lizard closer to home. The dropped creature had a glossy black hide, a big hump of flesh on its shoulders, and wide sweeping horns. She wondered what it was called, and then a brief touch of dragon mind told her. Food!
A rising note of anger in Rogon’s voice drew her unwilling attention back to the men’s conversation. “All I’m saying, Jerup, is that if those creatures don’t get up on their legs and learn to fly and hunt for themselves within the year, they’ll either die or become menaces to folk. Bargain or no, we can’t be responsible for them. Any creature that can’t feed itself doesn’t deserve to live.”
“That wasn’t the bargain we struck with Tintaglia, Rogon. We didn’t barter for the right to decide if those creatures would live or die. We said we’d protect them in return for Tintaglia protecting the river mouth from Chalcedean ships. The way I see it, we’d be wise to keep our end of the bargain and give those youngsters a chance to grow and survive.”
“A chance.” Rogon pursed his mouth. “You’ve always cared too much about giving chances to things, Jerup. One day it will be the death of you. It nearly was today! Did that creature think about giving you ‘a chance’ to live? No. And we won’t even speak of what sort of fortune you bought for yourself eleven years ago with the last thing you gave ‘a chance’ to live. ”