City of Dragons

staggering steps and then dropped down on her front feet and slid to a halt, her tail lashing for purchase. Rapskal took it all with aplomb, but Thymara clutched tight to him, her face hidden on his back. The moment that they were still, she began her slide down Heeby’s shoulder.

With all his heart, Tats wanted to dash forward and catch her in his arms. But he did not. He was not sure that she would have welcomed such an action.

“They’re wearing Elderling garb!” The words burst from Alise in wonder mingled with horror. As Rapskal slid down to join Thymara, Tats heard cries of wonder and a scattering of laughter from the other keepers. The bright colors were ludicrous on a man; that was Tats’s first scornful reaction. But then as Rapskal made a showy bow to all of them, they suddenly seemed not only appropriate to his tall and slender form, but elegant as well. They were clothes fit for an Elderling, as colorful as Rapskal himself had become. And had he become more scarlet since last Tats had seen him?

He transferred his gaze to Thymara and knew that his initial impression was correct. Overnight, she had changed, and it was not just the gown she wore. The bluish tone of the scaling on her face was now indigo traced with silver. She was looking around the circle of welcome, and when her gaze came to Tats, their eyes met. And he knew. She looked away from him.

There was a roaring in his ears and a minute trembling ran through him. He felt that he swayed in the wind like a tree about to crash to the earth. He knew, and yet it did not seem possible that it could be true. She had given herself to Rapskal. All the years they had known each other, the accumulated closeness of friendship, and his desperate courtship of her in the last few months, it had all meant nothing to her. She had chosen Rapskal over him. He tried to veer his thoughts away from imagining their bodies tangled together. He did not want to wonder if she had kissed Rapskal first, did not want to imagine that they had been flung together in passion or, worse, come together in slow and delicious delays.

Heeby moved off, ignoring the gathered keepers and the other dragons to go down to the river and drink, but Tats stood where he was, staring and numb, unmoving, as the other keepers swept forward to engulf the pair in questions.

“What happened in the city last night?”

“Was it a fire in the streets? We saw lights everywhere!”

“Where is Sintara? Can she truly fly now?”

“Why didn’t Sintara return?”

“Where did you get those clothes?”

The questions rained down on them, and Rapskal and Thymara were both talking at once. Tats watched Thymara open a bundle she had carried between them and began to pull out tunics and gowns and trousers and shoes. No one seemed to notice that the rain was getting harder and the wind was rising. Thymara was handing out the garments as swiftly as she could shake them out, and keepers were exclaiming in excitement and joy. All was exhilaration until Alise suddenly lifted her voice and shouted, “STOP! Stop tugging them about and handling them so roughly! Put them down this instant!” The excited gabble died away, and all eyes turned to the Bingtown woman as she abruptly advanced on the huddle of keepers. There were bright red spots of anger on her cheeks, and her voice shook with fury as she asked, “Thymara and Rapskal, what were you thinking to take things from the city? I must know exactly where you found them, and we have to measure them, and. .”

“Alise. Please.” Thymara’s voice was lower pitched and almost calm. “I know what the city means to you. I know you want to know its every secret, and that you think we must not disturb so much as the dust on the floors until you have written about it. I understand that-”

“You can’t possibly understand.” Alise’s voice was strained as she controlled herself. “You’re half a child still, with no experience of the world save the forest you grew up in. If you’d lived in Bingtown, if you had seen the stream of Elderling treasures and artifacts that passed through the market, to be scattered and lost in the wide world. . Wondrous things, treated as novelties to be enjoyed only by the very wealthy and collectors. Half the time, the people who ended up owning those things cared nothing for where they came from, only that they could astonish others with a new possession.”

Thymara stood silent against the onslaught of words. Her face remained impervious. Tats saw that rattle Alise, heard a small shaking in her voice as she spoke on in the silence.

“I’ve studied the Elderlings for years, working with the scattered bits that the ravagers and scavengers left for the scholars to try to interpret. Time after time, I’ve been frustrated with a few pages from a manuscript, a section of a long tapestry that obviously celebrated an important event, or a few tools that, if I had known where they were found, I might discover their purpose. We have a chance, and I fear it will be a very brief chance, before the hordes will descend on Kelsingra and reduce it to stripped stone and rubble. Will you start to destroy it before they even get here? Care you nothing for your heritage?”

A silence followed her words. Tats felt empty. This is a day for things to break, he thought. My heart. The fellowship of the folk who had come here together. We all move apart from one another today.

Alise spoke to the keepers from a shared history, one in which his people barely mattered. He had no Rain Wild ancestry to claim. That he was becoming as scaled as the rest of them and taking on the attributes of an Elderling body was due to the affection of his dragon. Alise’s words reminded him that he’d come to this expedition as an outsider, the sole keeper who had not been marked heavily by the Rain Wilds. He felt he had no right to speak, and then a new pang smote him as he wondered if that was why Thymara had chosen Rapskal over him. Was that shared background more important to her than their years of companionship?

“No one will destroy Kelsingra,” Rapskal said suddenly. He had been so silent that Tats had thought he was hiding from Alise’s disapproval by pushing Thymara to the fore. But now, when he spoke, he sounded so certain that even Alise was silenced by his words. “We won’t let them,” he added. “Because it is our heritage. Kelsingra is an Elderling city. Yes. But it isn’t a dead thing to be studied. Leaving the city as it is now would be as big a neglect as tearing it apart to try to discover its secrets. Alise, you only have to be open to the city to know that it does not want to keep secrets from you. Everything you want to know, it is willing to tell you. It wants to share itself with you. The city is alive and waiting for us to return to it. The presence of the dragons woke it. I do not know what Sintara did that Heeby had not done before; perhaps she recalls more of the city and how it is supposed to function than my Heeby does. Perhaps she recalled for the city what it needed to know to awaken. I cannot say for sure. But the city did awaken and it waits for us.

“Let me tell you what we found there, Thymara and I. I want you to know every bit of it. Write it all down, if you will, even though there is no need. I want you all to know what we know now! And we know so much more than cold stone walls and broken tools can tell you! There is a building that was a bathhouse for dragons. Inside, the rooms are warm, and the beds are soft. We found clothing that seems to shape itself to our forms. Thymara and I may be hungry, but we are clean and warm right now, something I haven’t been for weeks. And when our dragons soaked in the hot water, they grew again, just as they did when they found the get-warm spot in the river on the way here. This morning, when Sintara awoke, she took flight and went off to hunt. She hunts for her own meat now, as a dragon should, and she flies, as a dragon should.”

It was not only the keepers drawing close in rapt silence to hear Rapskal. The eager listening of the dragons was almost palpable.

Rapskal tried to make his voice gentler and did not completely succeed. “Alise, instead of trying to preserve a dead city, we must think of how to get the other dragons and all the keepers over to the other side of the river. We need to be there, if we are to become full Elderlings. And we need you to be there. Once we are settled there, you may study our living city as much as you wish. But you must not try to keep from us the things that we need to become Elderlings. What you should document and record is how we came to the city and woke it and brought it back to life. That should be your task now.”

It was hard for Tats to focus on the words and take the sense of them in. It was not that the concepts were difficult; jealousy and envy roared in his ears. He is my friend, he reminded himself. But it did little to calm his emotions. With Thymara at his side, Rapskal stood before all of them, dressed like a king and with a man’s calm bearing as he unfolded the future for them all. His words were bold. It was not just how Thymara looked at him, nor how Alise plainly gave deep consideration to what he had told them. If Sa himself had put a mantle of leadership on Rapskal’s shoulders, it could not be clearer. Rapskal had seen their future and meant to guide them to it. Everything that Tats had ever hoped to possess or to be, Rapskal had and was. Tats had come so far, hoping to finally feel that he belonged. But the place that he had hoped to occupy had been claimed by someone