The Dragon Keeper (21 page)

“Can I see you tomorrow?” he called after her.

“Probably!” she replied. “When my chores are done.”

She went down the trunk swiftly, ignoring the safety line and the foot notches to dig in her claws and rapidly descend. When she reached the two outstretched branches that supported her family’s home, she scuttled along them and then swung down to slip in her bedchamber window. She landed on the fat leaf-stuffed cushion that was her bed; it completely occupied the floor of the chamber. A moment later she was in the main room. “I’m home,” she announced breathlessly.

Her mother was sitting cross-legged in the center of the small room. “What are you trying to do to me?” she demanded furiously. “Is this your idea of revenge, after your father all but forbade me to speak about the offer? Do you seek to shame your whole family? What will folk think of us? What will they think of me? Will you be happy when they drive us all away from Trehaug completely? Isn’t it bad enough that because of you we have to live as close to the edge as we possibly can? Is that why you think it’s fine for you to shame us completely?”

There was a flower in the canopy Tops called an archer bloom. It was lovely and fragrant, but at the slightest touch to the stem, tiny thorns launched to pepper the assailant. Her mother’s questions stung her like a storm of thorns, each striking her and giving her no chance to react. When her mother paused for breath, her chest was heaving and her cheeks were pink.

“I did nothing wrong! I did nothing to shame myself or my family!” Thymara was so shocked she could scarcely get the words out.

Her words only woke more outrage in her mother’s eyes. They seemed to bulge from their sockets. “What! Will you sit there and lie to me? Shameless! Shameless! I saw you, Thymara! Everyone saw you, sitting up there in plain sight, so cozy with that man. You know it is forbidden to you! How can you let him call on you, how can you let him keep company with you, unchaperoned?”

Thymara’s mind scrambled to make sense of her mother’s words. Then, “Tats? You mean Tats? He works for Da, sometimes, at the market. You’ve seen him, you know him!”

“I do indeed! Tattooed across his face like a criminal, and all know him as the son of a thief and a murderer! Bad enough that one such as you allows a man to call on her, but you have to pick the lowest of the low to dally with!”

“Mother! I . . . he is just the boy who helps Father sometimes at the trunk market! Just a friend. That’s all. I know that I can never . . . that no one can ever court me. Who would want to? You’re being unfair. And foolish. Look at me. Do you really think that Tats came to court me?”

“Why not? Who else would have him? And he is probably thinking that you’ll get no better offer, so you’ll take what pleasure you can get, with whomever you can get! Do you know what our neighbors would do to us if you became pregnant? Do you know what the Council would decree, for all of us? Oh, I tried to warn your father, from the very beginning, that it would come to this. But no, he never listens to a word I say! What can it come to, I asked him, what kind of life can she have? And he said, ‘No, no, I’ll look after her, I’ll keep her from being a burden, I’ll keep her from bringing shame on us.’ Well, where is he now? Turned down the offer I had for you, without ever hearing me out, and then off he goes and leaves me here alone to deal with you, while you go flaunting yourself through the byways!”

“Mother, I did nothing wrong. Nothing. We sat and we talked. That was it. Tats was not courting me. We had a conversation, and as you yourself said, we were out in plain sight of everyone. Tats was not courting me, he doesn’t think of me that way. No one will ever think of me that way.” Thymara’s voice had started out low and controlled, but by her final words her throat was so tight that she could scarcely squeeze the words out in a high-pitched whisper. Tears, rare for her and painfully acid, squeezed from the corners of her eyes and stung the scaled edges of her eyelids. She dashed them away angrily. Suddenly, she couldn’t stand to be in the same room with the woman who had given birth to her and hated her ever since. “I’m going to go sit outside. Alone.”

“Stay where I can see you” was her mother’s harsh reply.

Thymara didn’t deign to give her a response.

But neither did she defy her. She climbed up onto the branch that was the main support for their home and walked out toward the end. That, she knew, would satisfy her mother. The branch led nowhere, and if her mother truly wanted to be sure she was alone, all she had to do was look out of the window. Thymara went farther out than she usually ventured and then sat down, both legs on the same side of the branch. She swung her feet and looked down, daring herself. If she focused her eyes one way, she became aware of the bright lights that sparkled below her. Each light was a lit window. Some were as bright as lanterns; others were distant stars in the depths of the forest below her.

If she focused her eyes another way, she saw the bars and stripes of darkness that latticed the forest below her. A falling body would not plummet straight down to the distant forest floor. No. Her body would strike and rebound and, despite all her resolves, snatch and cling, however briefly, to every branch she struck on the way down. There was no swift plummet to an instant death there.

She’d learned that when she was eleven. It was strange. She remembered that day in fragments. It had begun with an encounter at the trunk market. As she recalled it now, it was the last time she had ever brought her mother flowers from the Top to sell at the market and accompanied her there. The trunk markets were the best places to sell. Close to the trunk of the trees, the platforms were large and they were often the crossroads for hanging bridges from other trees. The traffic was good, and of course, the farther down one went, the wealthier the passing customers. The flowers she had gathered were deep purple and brilliant pink, as large as her head and brimming with fragrance. Their petals were thick and waxy, and bright yellow stamen and sepals extended past them. They were bringing a good price and twice her mother had smiled at her as she pocketed silver coins.

Thymara had been squatting beside her mother’s trading mat when she noticed that a pair of slipper-shod feet below a blue Trader’s robe had remained in front of her, unmoving, for quite a time. She looked up into an old man’s face. He scowled at her and took a step back, but his blunt, scolding words were for her mother. “Why did you keep such a girl? Look at her, her nails, her ears—she will never bear! You should have exposed her and tried for another. She eats today but offers us no hope for tomorrow. She is a useless life, a burden upon us all.”

“It was her father’s will that she live, and he prevailed in it,” her mother said briefly. She lowered her eyes in shame before the old man’s rebuke. By chance, her gaze met Thymara’s. She had been staring up at her, hurt that her mother offered so poor a defense of her. Perhaps her look stabbed a drop of pity from her mother’s shriveled heart. “She works hard,” she told the old man. “Sometimes she goes with her father to gather some days, and when she does, she brings home almost as much as he does.”

“Then she should go out daily to gather,” he replied severely. “So that her efforts may replenish the resources she consumes. Everything is dear here in the Rain Wilds. Have you lost sight of that?”

“And a child’s life is most dear of all,” her father had said, coming up behind the old man. He had come down to meet them at the end of their day’s trading. He had just come from the canopy; his clothes were bark smeared and leaf stained from his climbing. Thymara was far too old to be carried, but her father had scooped her up and carried her off with him as he strode away from the market. The carry basket on his other shoulder was half full. Her mother had hastily rolled up her mat with their unsold wares inside it and hurried along the walkway to catch up with them.

“Stupid, sanctimonious old man!” her father growled. “And what, I’d like to know, does he do to be worth what he eats? How could you let him speak of Thymara like that?”

“He was a Trader, Jerup.” Her mother glanced back, almost fearfully. “It wouldn’t do to offend him or his family.”

“Oh, a
Trader
!” Her father’s voice was scathing with feigned awe. “A man born to position, wealth, and privilege. He earned his place here exactly as any eldest child did; he was wise enough to be first to grow in the right woman’s belly. Is that it?”

Her mother was panting as she tried to keep up with them. Her father was not a large man but he was wiry and strong as were most gatherers. Even carrying her, he crossed the bridges and climbed the winding stairs that circled the trees’ big trunks with ease. Her mother, burdened only with her market bag, could scarcely keep pace with his angry stride.

“He saw her claws, Jerup, black and curved like a toad’s. She is only eleven, and already she is scaled like a woman of thirty. He saw the webbing of her toes. He knew she had been marked from birth and it offended him that you had—kept her. He isn’t the only one, Jerup. He simply happened to be old enough and arrogant enough to speak the truth aloud.”

“Arrogant indeed,” her father said brusquely, and then he had stepped up his pace again, leaving her mother behind.

On that long ago evening, Thymara had finished her day alone on their tiny veranda, fingering the budding wattles that fringed her jawline. Her knees were drawn up to her chest. Occasionally she flexed her webbed toes, regarding the thick black claws that ended each of her toes. Inside the house, all was silent, the silence that was her mother’s most potent anger. Her father had fled it, to do late bartering with what he had brought home. One could argue with words, but her mother’s silence denied everything. The silence left plenty of room for the old man’s words to echo in her mind.

Around her, the canopy of the rain forest rustled and bustled with life. Leaves stirred in the wind. Iridescent insects crawled on bark or flew from twig to leaf. The subtle colored lizards and the jewel-toned frogs basked or crawled or simply sat still, pulsing with life. All the living beauty of her forest home surrounded her. Thymara looked out past her curved toenails to the shadowed distance of the swamp that floored her world. She could not see the ground. In the thicker, safer branches below them, the sturdy homes of wealthy people clustered, offering their yellow window light to the gathering night. That, too, was a sort of living beauty.

She had tried to imagine living somewhere else, some city where the houses were built on the ground and the bright, hot sunlight touched the earth. A place where the ground was hard and dry, and people grew crops in the earth and rode on horses to travel instead of poling a raft or boat. Bingtown, perhaps, where people kept huge animals to pull wheeled carts for them, and no proper lady would think of climbing a tree, let alone spending most of her life in one. Thymara thought of that fabled city and imagined running away to it, but as swiftly as her smile came at the thought, it faded away. Rain Wilders seldom visited Bingtown. Even those of them who were not marked strongly by the Wilds knew that their appearances would attract stares. If Thymara ever went there, she’d have to go cloaked and veiled at all times. Even so, people would stare at her and wonder what she looked like beneath her shrouds. No. That would not be a life to dream about. Strong as her imagination was, Thymara still could not imagine a beautiful or even an ordinary face and body for herself. She had sighed.

And then, it seemed to her, she had simply leaned forward too far. She remembered that first moment with an odd kind of ecstasy. She had spread out her limbs to the wind’s rush past her, and almost, almost recalled flying. But then the first branch slapped her face stingingly, and then another thicker branch slammed into her midsection. She curled around it, gasping for air, but flipped past a hold and fell, back first, onto the next lower branch. It caught her across the small of her back, and she would have screamed if she’d had air in her lungs. The branch gave and then sprang up, flinging her into the air.

Instinct saved her life. Her next plummet was through a swathe of finer branches. She clutched at them, hand and foot, as she passed through them, and they sagged down with her, giving her grasping hands time to clamp tight on them. There she clung, mindless but alive, gasping and then panting, and finally weeping hopelessly. She was too frightened to seek for a better hold, too frightened to open her eyes and look for help or open her mouth and cry out.

A lifetime later, her father had found her. He had roped up to reach her, and when finally he could touch her, he had tied her body to his, and then painstakingly cut the thin branches that she would not let go of. Even when they no longer served any purpose, she had held tight to those handfuls of twigs and continued to clutch them until she fell asleep that night.

At dawn her father had woken her and taken her with him for the day’s gathering. That day and every day after, she was always with him. She thought on that now and a chill question rose in her. Had he done so because he thought she had tried to kill herself? Or because he thought her mother had pushed her?

Had her mother pushed her?

She tried to recall that moment before the fall. Had a touch from behind given her momentum? Or was it only her own despair drawing her down? She couldn’t decide. She blinked her eyes and ceased trying to recall the truth. The truth didn’t matter. It was a thing that had happened to her, years ago. Let it go.

She felt the branches of her perch give and smelled her father’s pipe as he ventured out to join her. She spoke without looking at him. “Has she said any more about the offer for me?”

“No. But I visited down branch, and Gedder and Sindy asked me what decision you had made. I had suspected your mother would brag to Sindy before she had even spoken to you and me about it. The offer is a bad one, Thymara. It’s not for you, and I’m angry that your mother even considered you for it. It’s more than dirty and hard; it’s dangerous to the point of no return.” Her father was scowling, and his words came faster with his cascading anger. “I’m sure you’ve heard talk. The Rain Wild Council has long been weary of pouring resources into feeding the dragons. Tintaglia ceased keeping her end of the bargain long ago, and yet here we are, paying taxes to hire hunters or, worse, bring in sheep and cattle to keep the dragons fed. There is no end in sight to it, either, for all have heard tales of the longevity of dragons, and it is obvious to all that these dragons will never be able to feed themselves. When Selden of the Khuprus and Vestrit Traders was present, he kept the Council soothed by promising them that Tintaglia and her new mate must eventually come and help with the problem. And he bullied them a bit by saying that if they neglected the dragons or were deliberately cruel to them, Tintaglia would certainly be angered. Well, Selden has been called away to Bingtown. The Elderlings Reyn and Malta Khuprus have spoken out on the dragons’ behalf, but they are not as persuasive as young Selden. The entire city is tired of living with a horde of hungry dragons nearby, and who can blame them?