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The workers had come running, some trundling barrows, others bearing slopping buckets of silvery-grey clay. She had drawn her head in as far as it would go and lidded her eyes. The young Elderling outside her case shouted his orders, bidding them, ‘Now! Don’t wait for Tintaglia! Now, her skin and eyes are drying too fast. Pour it in. That’s it! And more! Another bucket! Fill that barrow again. Hurry, man!’
The stuff sloshed over her, drenching and sealing her. Her own toxins, present in the sections of the case she had woven, were affecting her now. She felt herself sinking into something that was not sleep. It was rest, however. Blessed, blessed rest.
She sensed Tintaglia standing close by her. She felt the sudden weight of warm, regurgitated slurry, and knew with gratitude that the dragon had sealed her case for her. For a moment, toxins rich with memories stung her skin. Not just dragon-memories from Tintaglia, but a share of serpent lore from the one Tintaglia had recently devoured enriched her case. Dimly she heard Tintaglia directing the scurrying workers. ‘Her case is thin here. And over here. Bring clay and smooth it on in layers. Then bank her case with leaves and sticks. Cover it well from the light and the cold. They cocoon late. They must not feel the sun until summer is full upon them, for I fear they will not have fully developed when spring comes. And when you are finished here, come to the east end of the grounds. There is another one struggling there.’
The Elderling’s voice reached into Sisarqua’s fading consciousness. ‘Did we seal it in time? Will she survive to hatch?’
‘I do not know,’ Tintaglia replied gravely. ‘The year is late, the serpents old and tired, and half of them are next to starved. Some from the first wave have already died in their cases. Others still straggle in the river or struggle to pass the ladder. Many of them will die before they even reach the shore. That is for the best; their bodies will nourish the others and increase their chances of survival. But there is small good to be had from those who die in their cocoons, only waste and disappointment.’
Darkness was wrapping Sisarqua. She could not decide if she was chilled to her bones or cosily warm. She sank deeper, yet still felt the uneasy silence of the young Elderling. When he finally spoke, his words came to her more from his thoughts than from his lips. ‘The Rain Wild people would like to have the casts of the ones who die. They call such material “wizardwood” and have many valuable uses for—’
‘NO!’ The emphatic denial by the dragon shocked Sisarqua back to a moment of awareness. But her depleted body could not long sustain it and she almost immediately began to sink again. Tintaglia’s words followed her down into a place below dreams. ‘No, little brother! All that is of dragons belongs only to dragons. When spring comes, some of these cases will hatch. The dragons that emerge will devour the cases and bodies of those that do not hatch. Such is our way, and in such a way is our lore preserved. Those who die will give strength to those who live on.’
Sisarqua had but a moment to wonder which she would be. Then blackness claimed her.
Day the 17th of the Hope Moon
Year the 7th of the Reign of the Most Noble and Magnificent Satrap Cosgo
Year the 1st of the Independent Alliance of Traders
From Detozi, Keeper of the Birds, Trehaug to Erek, Keeper of the Birds, Bingtown
Attached you will find a formal appeal from the Rain Wild Council for a just and fair payment of the additional and unexpected expenses incurred by us in the care of the serpent cases for the Dragon Tintaglia. A swift reply is requested by the Council.
Erek,
A spring flash-flood has hit us hard. Tremendous damage to some of the dragon cases, and some are missing entirely. Small barge overturned on the river, and I fear it was the one carrying the young pigeons I was sending you to replenish the Bingtown flock. All were lost. I will allow my birds to set more eggs, and send you the offspring as soon as they are fledged. Trehaug does not seem like Trehaug any more, there are so many Tattooed faces! My master has said that I must not date things according to our Independence, but I defy him. Rumour will become a reality, I am sure!
Detozi
CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_ed061a3b-0843-53ec-839c-510b9b969c21)
The Riverman (#ulink_ed061a3b-0843-53ec-839c-510b9b969c21)
It was supposed to be spring. Damn cold for spring. Damn cold to be sleeping out on the deck instead of inside the deckhouse. Last night, with the rum in him and a belt of distant stars twinkling through an opening in the rain forest canopy, it had seemed like a fine idea. The night hadn’t seemed so chilly, and the insects had been chirring in the tree tops and the night birds calling to one another while the bats squeaked and darted out in the open air over the river. It had seemed a fine night to lie back on the deck of his barge and look up at the wide world all around him and savour the river and the Rain Wilds and his proper place in the world. Tarman had rocked him gently and all had been right.
In the iron-grey dawn, with dew settled on his skin and clothes and every joint in his body stiff, it seemed a damn-fool prank more suited to a boy of twelve than a riverman of close to thirty years. He sat up slowly and blew out a long breath that steamed in the chill dawn air. He followed it with a heart-felt belch of last night’s rum. Then, grumbling under his breath, he lurched to his feet and looked around. Morning. Yes. He walked to the railing and made water over the side as he considered the day. Far above his head, in the tree tops of the forest canopy, day birds were awake and calling to one another. But under the trees at the edge of the river, dawn and daylight were tenuous things. Light seeped down, filtered by thousands of new leaves and divested of its warmth before it reached him. As the sun travelled higher, it would shine down on the open river and send fingers under the trees and through the canopy. But not yet. Not for hours.
Leftrin stretched, rolling his shoulders. His shirt clung to his skin unpleasantly. Well, he deserved to be uncomfortable. If any of his crew had been so stupid as to fall asleep out on the deck, that’s what he would have told them. But they hadn’t been. All eleven of his men slumbered on in the narrow, tiered bunks that lined the aft wall of the deckhouse. His own more spacious bunk had gone empty. Stupid.
It was too early to be awake. The fire in the galley stove was still banked; no hot water simmered for tea, no flatcakes bubbled on the grill. And yet here he was, wide awake, and of a mind to take a walk back under the trees. It was a strange impulse, one he had no conscious rationale for, and yet he recognized it for the kind of itch it was. It came, he knew, from the unremembered dreams of the night before. He reached for them, but the tattered shreds became threads of cobweb in his mind’s grasp, and then were gone. Still, he’d follow their lingering inspiration. He’d never lost out by paying attention to those impulses, and almost inevitably regretted it the few times he’d ignored them.
He went into the deck-house, past his sleeping crew and through the little galley and forward to his cabin. He exchanged his deck shoes for his shore boots. The knee boots of greased bull-hide were nearly worn through; the acidic waters of the Rain Wild River were not kind to footwear, clothing, wood or skin. But his boots would survive another trip or two ashore, and as a result, his skin would, too. He caught up his jacket from its hook and slung it about his shoulders and walked aft past the crew. He kicked the foot of the tillerman’s bunk. Swarge’s head jolted up and the man stared at him blearily.
‘I’m going ashore, going to stretch my legs. Probably be back by breakfast.’
‘Aye,’ Swarge said, the only acceptable reply and close to the full extent of Swarge’s conversational skills. Leftrin grunted an affirmation and left the deckhouse.
The evening before, they had nosed the barge up onto a marshy bank and tied it off to a big leaning tree there. Leftrin swung down from the blunt-nosed bow of the barge onto mud-coated reeds. The barge’s painted eyes stared off into the dimness under the trees. Ten days ago, a warm wind and massive rainstorms had swelled the Rain Wild River, sending the waters rushing up above their normal banks and over the low shores. In the last two days, the waters had receded, but the plant life along the river was still recovering from being underwater for several days of silt-laden flooding. The reeds were coated with filth and most of the grasses were flattened beneath their burdens of mud. Isolated pockets of water dotted the low bank. As Leftrin strode along, his feet sank and water seeped up to fill in his tracks.
He wasn’t sure where he was going or why. He let his whim guide him as he ventured away from the river bank into the deeper shade beneath the vine-draped trees. There, the signs of the recent flooding were even more apparent. Driftwood snags were wedged among the tree trunks. Tangles of muddy foliage and torn webs of vines were festooned about the trees and bushes. Fresh deposits of river-silt covered the deep moss and low growing plants. The gigantic trunks of the enormous trees that held up the roof of the Rain Wilds were impervious to most floods, but the undergrowth that rioted in their shade was not. In some places the current had carved a path through the underbrush; in others the slime and sludge of the flood burdened the foliage so heavily that the brush bent in muddied hummocks.
Where he could, Leftrin slogged in the paths that the river current had gouged through the brush. When the mud became too soft, he pushed through the grimy undergrowth. He was soon wet and filthy. A branch he pushed aside sprang back, slapping him across the brow and spattering his face with mud. He hastily wiped the stinging stuff from his skin. Like many a river man, his arms and face had been toughened by exposure to the acidic waters of the Rain Wild River. It gave his face a leathery, weathered look, a startling contrast to his grey eyes. He privately believed that this was why he had so few of the growths and less of the scaliness that afflicted most of his Rain Wilds brethren. Not that he considered himself a thing of beauty or even a handsome man. The wandering thought made him grin ruefully. He pushed it from his mind and a dangling branch away from his face and forced his way deeper.
There came a moment when he stopped suddenly. Some sensory clue he could not pin down, some scent on the air or some glimpse he had not consciously registered told him he was near. He stood very still and slowly scanned the area all around him. His eyes went past it and then the hair on the back of his neck stood up as he swivelled his gaze back suddenly. There. Mud-laden vegetation draped over it, and the river’s raging flood had coated it in mud, but a single streak of grey showed through. A wizardwood log.
It was not a huge one, not as big as he had heard that they could be. Its diameter was perhaps two-thirds of his height, and he was not a tall man. But it was big enough, he thought. Big enough to make him very wealthy. He glanced back over his shoulder, but the undergrowth that blocked his view of the river and his moored barge would also shield him from spying eyes. He doubted that any of his crew would be curious enough to follow him. They’d been asleep when he left, and no doubt were still abed. The secret trove was his alone.
He pushed his way through the vegetation until he could touch the log. It was dead. He had known that even before he had touched it. When he was a boy, he’d been down to the Crowned Rooster chamber. He’d seen Tintaglia’s log before she had hatched from it, and had known the crawly sensation it had wakened in him. The dragon in this log had died and would never hatch. It didn’t much matter to him if it had died while the log still rested on the banks of the cocooning beach, or if the tumbling it had taken in the flood had killed it. The dragon inside it was dead, the wizardwood was salvageable, and he was the only one who knew where it was. And by his great good fortune, he was one of the few who knew how best to use it.
Back in the days when the Khuprus family had made part of its vast fortune from working wizardwood, back before anyone had ever known or admitted what the ‘wood’ really was, his mother’s brothers had been wizardwood workers. He’d been just a lad, wandering in and out of the low building where his uncles’ saws bit slowly through the iron-hard stuff. He’d been nine when his father had decided he was old enough to come and work on the barge with him. He’d taken up his rightful trade as bargeman, and learned his trade from the deck up. And then, when he had just turned twenty-two, his father had died and the barge had come to him. He’d been a riverman for most of his life. But from his mother’s side, he had the tools of the wizardwood trade, and the knowledge of how to use them.
He made a circuit of the log. It was heavy going. The flood waters had wedged it between two trees. One end of it had been jammed deep into mud while the other pointed up at an angle and was wreathed in forest-flood debris. He thought of tearing the stuff clear so he could have a good look at it and then decided to leave it camouflaged. He made a quick trip back to the barge, moving stealthily as he took a coil of line from the locker, and then returned hastily to secure his find. It was dirty work but when he had finished he was satisfied that even if the river rose again his treasure would stay put.
As he slogged back to his barge, he felt the heavy felt sock inside his boot becoming damp. His foot began to sting. He increased his pace, cursing to himself. He’d have to buy new boots at the next stop. Parroton was one of the smallest and newest settlements on the Rain Wild River. Everything there was expensive, and bull-hide boots imported from Chalced would be difficult to find. He’d be at the mercy of whoever had a pair to sell. A moment later, a sour smile twisted his mouth. Here he had discovered a log worth more than ten years of barge-work, and he was quibbling with himself over how much he was going to have to pay for a new pair of boots. Once the log was sawn into lengths and discreetly sold off, he’d never have to worry about money again.
His mind was busy with logistics. Sooner or later, he’d have to decide who he would trust to share his secret. He’d need someone else on the other end of the crosscut saw, and men to help carry the heavy planks from the log to the barge. His cousins? Probably. Blood was thicker than water, even the silty water of the Rain Wild River.
Could they be that discreet? He thought so. They’d have to be careful. There was no mistaking fresh-cut wizardwood; it had a silvery sheen to it, and an unmistakable scent. When the Rain Wild Traders had first discovered it, they had valued it solely for its ability to resist the acid water of the river. His own vessel, the Tarman, had been one of the first wizardwood ships built, its hull sheathed with wizardwood planks. Little had the Rain Wild builders suspected the magical properties the wood possessed. They had merely been using what seemed to be a trove of well-aged timber from the buried city they had discovered.
It was only when they had built large and elaborate ships, ships that could ply not just the river but the salt waters of the coast, that they had discovered the full powers of the stuff. The figureheads of those ships had startled everyone when, generations after the ships had been built, they had begun to come to life. The speaking and moving figureheads were a wonder to all. There were not many liveships, and they were jealously guarded possessions. None of them were ever sold outside the Traders’ alliance. Only a Bingtown Trader could buy a liveship, and only liveships could travel safely up the Rain Wild River. The hulls of ordinary ships gave way quickly to the acid waters of the river. What better way could exist to protect the secret cities of the Rain Wilds and their inhabitants?
Then had come the far more recent discovery of exactly what wizardwood was. The immense logs in the Crowned Rooster chamber had not been wood; rather they had been the protective cocoons of dragons, dragged into the shelter of the city to preserve them during an ancient volcanic eruption. No one liked to speak of what that really meant. Tintaglia the dragon had emerged alive from her cocoon. Of those other ‘logs’ that had been sawed into timber for ships, how many had contained viable dragons? No one spoke of that. Not even the liveships willingly discussed the dragons that they might have been. On that topic, even the dragon Tintaglia had been silent. Nonetheless, Leftrin suspected that if anyone learned of the log he had found, it would be confiscated. He couldn’t allow it to become common knowledge in Trehaug or Bingtown, and Sa save him if the dragon herself heard of it. So, he would do all that he could to keep the discovery private.
It galled him that a treasure that he once could have auctioned to the highest bidder must now be disposed of quietly and privately. But there would be markets for it. Good markets. In a place as competitive as Bingtown, there were always traders who were willing to buy goods quietly without being too curious about the source, an aspiring Trader willing to barter in illegal goods for the chance to win favour with the Satrap of Jamaillia.
But the real money, the best offers would come from Chalcedean traders. The uneasy peace between Bingtown and Chalced was still very young. Small treaties had been signed, but major decisions regarding boundaries and trades and tariffs and rights of passage were still being negotiated. The health of the ruler of Chalced, it was rumoured, was failing. Chalcedean emissaries had already attempted to book passage up the Rain Wild River. They had been turned back, but everyone knew what their mission had been: they wished to buy dragon parts; dragon blood for elixirs, dragon flesh for rejuvenation, dragon teeth for daggers, dragon scales for light and flexible armour, dragon’s pizzle for virility. Every old wife’s tale about the medicinal and magical powers of dragon parts seemed to have reached the ears of the Chalcedean nobility. And each noble seemed more eager than the last to win his duke’s favour by supplying him with an antidote to whatever debilitating disease was slowly whittling him away. They had no way of knowing that Tintaglia had hatched from the last wizardwood log the Rain Wilders possessed; there were no embryonic dragons to be slaughtered and shipped off to Chalced. Just as well. Personally, Leftrin shared the opinion of most Traders: that the sooner the Duke of Chalced was in his grave, the better for trade and humanity. But he also shared the pragmatic view that, until then, one might as well make a profit off the diseased old war-monger.
If he chose that path, he need do no more than find a way to get the ponderously heavy log intact to Chalced. Surely the remains of the half-formed dragon inside it would fetch an amazing price there. Just get the cocoon to Chalced. If he said it quickly, it almost sounded simple, as if it would not involve hoists and pulleys just to move it from where it was wedged and load it on his barge. To say nothing of keeping such a cargo secret, and also arranging secret transport from the mouth of the Rain Wild River north to Chalced. His river barge could never make such a trip. But if he could arrange it, and if he was neither robbed nor murdered on the trip north or on his way home, then he could emerge from his adventure as a very wealthy man.
He limped faster. The stinging inside his boot had become a burning. A few blisters he could live with; an open wound would quickly ulcerate and hobble him for weeks.
As he emerged from the undergrowth into the relatively open space alongside the river, he smelled the smoke of the galley stove, and heard the voices of his crew. He could smell flatcakes cooking and coffee brewing. Time to be aboard and away before any of them wondered what their captain had been up to on his morning stroll. Some thoughtful soul had tossed a rope ladder down the bow for him. Probably Swarge. The tillerman always was two thoughts ahead of the rest of the crew. On the bow, silent, hulking Eider was perched on the railing, smoking his morning pipe. He nodded to his captain and blew a smoke ring by way of greeting. If he was curious as to where Leftrin had been or why, he gave no sign of it.
Leftrin was still pondering the best way to convert the wizardwood log into wealth as he set his muddy foot on the first rung of the ladder. The painted gaze of Tarman’s gleaming black eyes met his own, and he froze. A radical new thought was born in his mind. Keep it. Keep it, and use it for myself and my ship. For several long moments, as he paused on the ladder, the possibilities unfolded in his mind like flowers opening to the early dawn light.
He patted the side of his barge. ‘I might, old man. I just might.’ Then he climbed the rest of the way up to his deck, pulled off his leaking boot and flung it back into the river for it to devour.
Day the 15th of the Fish Moon
Year the 7th of the Reign of the Most Noble and Magnificent Satrap Cosgo
Year the 1st of the Independent Alliance of Traders
From Detozi, Keeper of the Birds, Trehaug to Erek, Keeper of the Birds, Bingtown
Within the sealed scroll, a message of Great Importance from the Rain Wild Traders’ Council at Trehaug to the Bingtown Traders’ Council. You are invited to send whatever representatives you wish to be present on the occasion of the Rain Wild Dragons emerging from their cases. At the direction of the most exalted and queenly Dragon Tintaglia, the cases will be exposed to sunlight on the 15th day of the Greening Moon, forty-five days hence. The Rain Wild Traders’ Council looks forward with pleasure to your attendance as our dragons emerge.
Erek!
Clean your nesting boxes and paint the walls of your coop with fresh limewash. The last two birds I received from you were infested with lice and spread it to one of my coops.
Detozi
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_045367ce-0714-515e-99ac-9bd5fe74dace)
The Hatch (#ulink_045367ce-0714-515e-99ac-9bd5fe74dace)
Luck brought Thymara to the right place at the right time. It was the best good luck that had ever favoured her, she thought to herself, as she clung to the lowest branch of a tree at the edge of the serpents’ beach. She did not usually accompany her father down to the lower levels of Trehaug, let alone make the journey to Cassarick. Yet here she was, and on the very day that Tintaglia had decreed that the dragon cocoons be uncovered. She glanced at her father, and he grinned at her. No. Not luck, she suddenly knew. He had known how much she would enjoy being here, and scheduled their jaunt accordingly. She grinned back at her father with all the confidence of her eleven years and then returned her gaze to the scene below her. Her father’s cautioning voice reached her from where he perched like a bird on a thicker branch closer to the trunk of the immense tree that they shared.
‘Thymara. Be careful. They’re newly hatched. And hungry. If you fell down there, they might mistake you for just another piece of meat.’
The scrawny girl dug her black claws deeper into the bark. She knew he was only half-teasing. ‘Don’t worry, Da. I was made for the canopy. I won’t fall.’ She was stretched out along a drooping branch that no other experienced limbsman would have trusted. But she knew it would hold her. Her belly was pressed to it as if she were one of the slender brown tree lizards that shared her perch. And like them, she clung with the full length of her body, fingers and toes dug into the wide cracks in the bark, thighs hugging the limb. Her glossy black hair was confined to a dozen tight braids that were knotted at the back of her neck. Her head was much lower than her feet. Her cheek was pressed tight to the rough skin of the tree as her gaze devoured the drama unfolding below her.
Thymara’s tree was one of uncounted thousands that made up the Rain Wild Forest. For days and days in all directions, the forest spread out on either side of the wide, grey Rain Wild River. Close to Cassarick and for several days upriver, picket trees predominated. The wide-spread horizontal branches were excellent for home building. Mature picket trees dropped questing roots from their branches down to the earth far below, so that each tree established its own ‘picket fence’ around its root structure, anchoring the tree securely in the muddy soil. The forest that surrounded Cassarick was much denser than that around Trehaug. The horizontal branches of the picket trees were far more stable than those Thymara was accustomed to. They made climbing and moving from tree to tree almost ridiculously easy. Today she had ventured out onto the unsupported end branch of one, to gain an unobstructed view of the spectacle below her.
Before her, on the other side of the mud flats, the panorama of moving water stretched flat and milky. She had a foggy glimpse of the distant, dense forest on the opposite side of the river. Summer had awakened a million shades of green there. The sound of the river’s rush, of gravel churning beneath its opaque waters, was the constant music of her life. Closer to the shore, on Thymara’s side of the river, the waters were shallow, and strips of exposed gravel and clay broke up the current’s access to the flat clay banks below her tree. Last winter, this section of the river bank had been hastily reinforced with timber bulkheads; the floods of winter had not been kind to them, but most of the logs remained.
For several acres, the bare riverbank was littered with serpent cases like drift logs. Once the area had been covered with tufts of coarse grass and prickly brush, but all that had been destroyed with the wave of sea serpents that had arrived last winter. She had not seen that migration, but she had heard about it. No one who lived in the tree cities of the Rain Wild had escaped the telling of that tale. A herd, a tangle of more than one hundred immense serpents, had come up the Rain Wild River, escorted by a liveship and shepherded by a glorious blue-and-silver dragon. The young Elderling Selden Vestrit had been there to greet the serpents and welcome them back to their ancestral home. He had supervised the ranks of Rain Wilders who had turned out to assist the serpents in forming their cases. For most of that winter, he had remained in Cassarick, checking on the dormant serpents, seeing that the cases were kept well covered with leaves and mud to insulate them from cold and rain and even sunlight. And today, she had heard, he was here again, to witness the hatch.
She hadn’t seen him, much as she would have liked to. Chances were good that he was over at the central part of the hatching grounds, on the raised dais that had been set up for the Rain Wild Council members and other important dignitaries. It was crowded over there, with robed Traders mobbed around the dais, and many of the general population festooning the trees like a flock of migratory birds. She was glad her father had brought her here, to the far end of the hatching area, where there might be fewer cases but also fewer people to block her view. Still, it would have been nice to be close enough to the dais to hear the music and hear the speeches, and to see a real Elderling.
Just to think of him swelled her heart with pride. He was Bingtown stock, of Trader descent, just like her, but the dragon Tintaglia had touched him and he had begun to change into an Elderling, the first Elderling that any living person had ever seen. There were two other Elderlings now, Selden’s sister Malta and Reyn Khuprus, himself of the Rain Wilds. She sighed. It was all like a fairy tale, come true. Sea serpents and dragons and Elderlings had returned to the Cursed Shores. And in her lifetime, she would see the first hatch of dragons within anyone’s memory. By this afternoon, the young dragons would have emerged and taken flight.
The dull grey cases that now littered the riverbank for as far as Thymara could see each held what had been a serpent. The layers of leaves, twigs and mulch that had covered them all winter and spring had been cleared away from them. Some of the cases were immense, as long as a river barge. Others were smaller, like log sections. Some of the cases gleamed fat and silvery. Others, however, had collapsed or sagged in on themselves. They were a dull grey colour and to Thymara’s sensitive nose, they stank of dead reptile. The serpents that had entered those cases would never emerge as young dragons.
As the Rain Wild Traders had promised Tintaglia, they had done their best to tend the cocooned serpents under Selden’s supervision. Additional layers of clay had been smoothed over any case that seemed thin, and then leaves and branches had been heaped protectively over them. Tintaglia had decreed that the cases had to be protected not just from winter storms, but from the early spring sunlight, too. The dragons had cocooned late in the year. Light and warmth would stimulate them to hatch, and so she had wished them to remain covered until high summer, to give the dragons more time to develop. The Rain Wild guardians and the Tattooed – former Jamaillian slaves, now freed – had done their best. That had been part of the bargain the Rain Wilds Traders had struck with the dragon Tintaglia. She had agreed to guard the mouth of the Rain Wilds River against incursions by the Chalcedeans: in return, the Traders had promised to help the serpents reach their old cocooning grounds and tend them while they matured inside the cases. Both sides had kept their bargains. Today would see the fruit of that agreement as a new generation of dragons, dragons allied with Bingtown and the Rain Wilds, rose in their first flight.
The winter had not been kind to the dragon cases. Tearing winds and pounding rains had taken their toll on them. Worst, once the storm-swollen river had swept through the cocooning grounds, damaging many of the cases as it rolled them up against others or ate away at the protective clay. The count taken after the flood had subsided showed that a full score of the cocoons had been swept away. Of the seventy-nine cocooned dragons, only fifty-nine remained, and some were so battered that it was doubtful the occupants had survived. Flooding was a familiar hazard of living in the Rain Wilds, but it grieved Thymara all the same. What, she wondered, had become of those missing cases and the half-formed dragons within them? Had they been eaten by the river? Washed all the way to the salt sea?
The river ruled this forested world. Wide and grey, its current and depth fluctuated wildly. No real banks confined it. It flowed where it wished, and nowhere in Thymara’s world was ‘dry ground’ a meaningful phrase. What was forest floor today might be swamp or slough tomorrow. The great trees alone seemed impervious to the river’s shifting flow, but even that was not a certainty. The Rain Wilders built only in the largest and stoutest trees; their homes and walkways bedecked the middle branches and trunks of the forest trees like sturdy garlands. Their swaying bridges spanned from tree to tree, and closer to the ground, where the trunks and limbs were thickest, sturdy structures housed the most important markets and provided dwelling space for the wealthiest families. The higher one went in the trees, the smaller and more lightweight the structures became. Rope-and-vine bridges joined the neighbourhoods, and staircases spiralled up the main trunks of the huge trees. As one ascended, the bridges and walkways became flimsier. All Rain Wilders had to have some level of limbsmen skills to move throughout their settlement. But few had Thymara’s skill.
Thymara had no trepidations about her precarious roost. Her mind was occupied and her silver-grey eyes filled with the wonders unfolding below her.
The sun had risen high enough that its slanting rays could reach over the tall branches of the forest and rest on the serpent cocoons littering the beach. It was not an exceedingly warm day for summer, but some of the cases had begun to steam and smoke as the sun warmed them. Thymara focused her attention on the large case directly below her. The rising steam reached her, carrying a reptilian stink with it. She narrowed her nostrils and gazed in rapture. Below her, the wizardwood of the log was losing its solidity.
Thymara was familiar with wizardwood; for years her people had used it as exceptionally strong timber. It was hard, far beyond what other people called ‘hardwood’. Working it could blunt an axe or dull a saw in less than a morning. But now the silvery-grey ‘wood’ of the dragon case below was softening, steaming and bubbling, sagging to mould around the still form within it.
As she watched, the form twitched and then gave a lively wriggle. The wizardwood tore like a membrane. The liquefied cocoon was being absorbed by the skeletal creature inside the log. As Thymara watched, the dragon’s meagre flesh plumped and colour washed through it. It was smaller than she had expected it to be, given the size of the case and what she had heard of Tintaglia. A cloud of stink and moisture wafted up and then the blunt-nosed head of a dragon thrust clear of the sagging log.
Outside!
Thymara felt a wave of vertigo as the dragon-speak touched her mind. Her heart leapt like a bird bursting into upward flight. She could hear dragons! Ever since Tintaglia had appeared, it had become clear that some folk could ‘hear’ what a dragon said, while others heard only roaring, hissing and a sinister rattling. When Tintaglia had first appeared in Trehaug and spoken to the crowd, some had heard her words right away. Others had shared nothing of her thoughts. It thrilled Thymara beyond telling to know that if a dragon ever deigned to speak to her, she would hear it. She edged lower on the branch.
‘Thymara!’ her father warned her.
‘I’m careful!’ she responded without even looking at him.
Below her, the young dragon had opened a wide red maw and was tearing at the decaying fibres of the log that bound her. Her. Thymara could not say how she knew that. For a newly-hatched thing, her teeth were certainly impressive. Then the creature ripped a mouthful of the sodden wizardwood free, tossed her head back and swallowed visibly. ‘She’s eating the wizardwood!’ she called to her father.
‘I’ve heard they do that,’ he called back. ‘Selden the Elderling said that when he witnessed Tintaglia’s emergence, her cocoon melted right into her skin. I think they derive strength from it.’
Thymara didn’t reply. Her father was obviously right. It did not seem possible that an enclosure that had held a dragon would now fit inside the belly of one, but the dragon below her seemed intent on trying to consume it all. She continued to struggle free of the confining case as she ate her way out of it, ripping off fibrous chunks and swallowing them whole. Thymara grimaced in sympathy. It seemed tragic that something so newly born could be so ravenously hungry. Thank Sa she had something she could eat.
A collective gasp from the watching crowd warned Thymara. She clutched her tree limb more tightly just in time. The gush of pushed air that swept past her nearly tore her loose and left her branch swaying wildly. An instant later, there was a huge thump that vibrated through her tree as Tintaglia landed.
The queen dragon was blue and silver and blue again, depending on how the sunlight struck her. She was easily three times the size of the young dragons that were hatching. Watching her fold her wings was like watching a ship lower its sails. She tucked them neatly to her body; then folded them tight to fit as closely against her as a bird’s wings so that her scaled feathers seemed a seamless part of her skin. She dropped the limp deer that hung from her jaws. ‘Eat,’ she instructed the young dragons. She did not pause to watch them, but moved off to the river. She lowered her great head and drank the milky water. Sated, she raised her head and partially opened her wings. Her powerful hindquarters flexed; she sprang high, and two battering beats of her wide wings caught her before she could plummet back to earth. Wings beating heavily, she rose slowly from the river bank and flew off, up river, hunting again.
‘Oh.’ Her father’s deep voice was heavy with pity. ‘What a shame.’
The dragon below Thymara was still tearing sticky strips of wizardwood free from her case and devouring them. A grey swathe of it stuck to her muzzle. She pawed at it with the small claws on her stubby front leg. To Thymara, she looked like a baby with porridge smeared on its cheeks and hair. The dragon was smaller than she had expected, and less developed, but surely she would grow to fulfil her promise. Thymara glanced at her father in puzzlement, and then followed his gaze.
While she had been focused on the hatchling right beneath her tree, other dragons had been breaking free of their cases. The fallen deer and the reek of its fresh blood now summoned them. Two dragons, one a drab yellow and the other a muddy green, had staggered and tottered over to the carcass. They did not fight over it, being too intent on their feeding. The fighting, Thymara suspected, would come when it was time to seize the last morsel. For now, both squatted over the deer, front feet braced on the carcass, tearing chunks of hide and flesh free and then throwing their heads back to gulp the warm meat down. One had torn into the soft belly; entrails dangled from the yellow dragon’s jaws and painted stripes of red and brown on his throat. It was a savage scene, but no more so than the feeding of any predator.
Thymara glanced at her father again, and this time she caught the true focus of his gaze. The feeding dragons, hunched over the rapidly diminishing carcass, had blocked her view. The young dragon her father was watching could not stand upright. It wallowed and crawled on its belly. Its hindquarters were unfinished stubs. Its head wobbled on a thin neck. It gave a sudden shudder and surged upright, where it teetered. Even its colour seemed wrong; it was the same pale grey as the clay, but its hide was so thin that she could glimpse the coil of white intestines pushing against the skin of its belly. Plainly it was unfinished, hatched too soon to survive. Yet still it crawled toward the beckoning meat. As she watched, it gave too strong a push with one of its malformed hind legs and crashed over on its side. Foolishly, or perhaps in an effort to catch itself, it opened its flimsy wings. It landed on one, which bent the wrong way and then snapped audibly. The cry the creature gave was not as loud as the bright burst of pain that splashed against Thymara’s mind. She flinched wildly and nearly lost her grip. Clinging to her tree branch, eyes tightly shut, she fought a pain-induced wave of nausea.
Understanding slowly came to her; this was what Tintaglia had feared. The dragon had sought to keep the cocoons shielded from light, hoping to give the forming dragons a normal dormancy period. But although they had waited until summer, they had still emerged too soon, or perhaps had been too worn and thin when they went in. Whatever the reason for their deformities, they were wrong, all wrong. These creatures could scarcely move their own bodies. She felt the confusion of the young dragon mixed with its physical pain. With difficulty, she tore her mind free of the dragon’s bafflement.
When she opened her eyes, a new horror froze her. Her father had left the tree. He was on the ground, threading his way among the hatching cases, heading directly toward the downed creature. From her vantage, she knew it was dead. An instant later, she realized it was not that she could see it was dead so much as that she had felt it die. Her father, however, did not know that. His face was full of both trepidation and anxiety for the creature. She knew him. He would help it if he could. It was how he was.
Thymara was not the only one who had felt it die. The two young dragons had reduced the deer to a smear of blood and dung on the trodden, sodden clay. They lifted their heads now and turned toward the fallen dragon. A newly-hatched red dragon, his tail unnaturally short, was also making his tottering way toward it. The yellow let out a low hiss and increased his pace. The green opened its maw wide and let out a sound that was neither a roar nor a hiss. Feeble globs of spittle rode the sound and fell to the clay at his feet. The target had been her father. Thank Sa that the creature was not mature enough to release a cloud of burning toxin. Thymara knew that adult dragons could do that. She had heard about Tintaglia using her dragon’s breath against the Chalcedeans during the battle for Bingtown. Dragon venom ate right through flesh and bone.
But if the green did not have the power to scald her father with his breath, his act of aggression had directed the short-tailed red dragon’s attention to her father. Without hesitation, both yellow and green dragons closed in on the dead hatchling and began snarling threats at one another over its fallen body. The red began his stalk.
She had thought that her father would realize that the hatchling had died and was beyond his help. She had expected him to retreat sensibly from the danger the young dragons presented. A hundred times, a thousand times, her father had counselled her to wariness where predators were concerned. ‘If you have meat and a tree cat wants it, leave the meat and retreat. You can get more meat. You cannot get another life.’ So surely, when he saw the red dragon lurching toward him, its stubby tail stuck straight out behind him, he would retreat sensibly.
But he wasn’t watching the red. He had eyes only for the downed hatchling, and as the other two dragons closed on it, he shouted, ‘No! Leave it alone, give it a chance! Give it a chance!’ He waved his arms as if he were shooing carrion birds away from his kill and began to run toward it. To do what? she wanted to demand of him. Either of the hatchlings was bigger than he was. They might not be able to spit fire yet, but they already knew how to use their teeth and claws.
‘Da! No! It’s dead, it’s already dead! Da, run, get out of there!’
He heard her. He halted at her words and even looked up at her.
‘Da, it’s dead, you can’t help it. Get out of there. To your left! Da, to your left, the red one! Get clear of it!’
The yellow and the green were already preoccupied with their dead fellow. They dived on it with the same abandon they had showed toward the deer. Strengthened by their earlier feast, they seemed more inclined to quarrel with one another over the choicest parts. Thymara had no interest in them, except that they kept one another busy. It was the red she cared about, the one that was lurching unevenly but swiftly toward her father. He saw his danger now. He did what she had feared he would do, a trick that often worked with tree cats. He opened his shirt and spread it, holding the fabric wide of his body. ‘Be large when something threatens you,’ he had often told her. ‘Take on a shape it doesn’t recognize and it will become cautious. Present a larger aspect and sometimes it will back down. But never turn away. Keep an eye on it, be large, and move back slowly. Most cats love a chase. Don’t ever give them one.’
But this was not a cat. It was a dragon. Its jaws were wide open and its teeth showed white and sharp. Its hunger was the strongest thing in it. Although her father became visually larger, it showed no fear. Instead, she heard, no, felt its joyful interest in him. Meat. Big meat. Food! Hunger ripped through it as it staggered after the retreating man.
‘Not meat!’ Thymara shouted down at it. ‘Not food. Not food! Run, Da, turn and run! Run!’
The two miracles happened simultaneously. The first was that the young dragon heard her. Its blunt-nosed head swivelled toward her, startled. It threw itself off-balance when it turned to look at her and staggered foolishly in a small circle. She saw then what had eluded her before. It was deformed. One of its hind legs was substantially smaller than the other. Not food? She felt a plaintive echo of her words. Not meat? No meat? Her heart broke for the young red. No meat. Only hunger. For that moment of oneness with it, she felt its hunger and its frustration.
But the second miracle tore her from that joining. Her father had listened to her. He had lowered his arms, turned away and was fleeing back to the trees. She saw him dodge away from a small blue dragon who reached after him with yearning claws. Then her father reached the tree trunk and with the experience of years, ascended it almost as swiftly as he had run across the ground. In a few moments he was safely out of any dragon’s reach. A good thing, for the small blue had trotted hopefully after him. Now it stood at the foot of the tree, snorting and sniffing at the place where her father had climbed up. It took an experimental nip at the tree trunk, and then backed away shaking its head. Not meat! it decided emphatically, and wobbled off, charting a weaving path through the hatching grounds where more and more young dragons were emerging from their wizardwood logs. Thymara didn’t watch the blue go. She had already slithered up onto the top of her branch. She came to one knee, then stood and ran up it to the trunk of the tree. She met her father as he came up. She grabbed his arm and buried her face against his shoulder. He smelled of fear sweat.
‘Da, what were you thinking?’ she demanded, and was shocked to hear the anger in her voice. An instant later, she knew that she had every right to be angry. ‘If I had done that, you’d be furious with me! Why did you go down there, what did you think you could do?’
‘Up higher!’ her father panted, and she was glad to follow him as he led the way to a higher branch. It was a good branch, thick and almost horizontal. They both sat down on it, side by side. He was still panting, from fear or exertion or perhaps both. She pulled her water skin from her satchel and offered it to him. He took it gratefully and drank deeply.
