The Dragon Keeper

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.

“They could have killed you.”

He took his mouth from the bag’s nozzle, capped it and gave it back to her. “They’re babies still. Clumsy babies. I would have got away. I did get away.”

“They’re not babies! They weren’t babies when they went into their cocoons and they’re full dragons now. Tintaglia could fly within hours of hatching. Fly, and make a kill.” As she spoke, she pointed up through the foliage to a passing glint of blue and silver. It suddenly plummeted as the dragon dived. The wind of wildly beating wings assaulted both tree and Rain Wilders as the dragon halted her descent. A deer’s carcass fell from her claws to land with a thump on the clay and without a pause her wings carried her up and away, back to her hunt. Squealing dragon hatchlings immediately scampered toward it. They fell on the food, tearing chunks of meat free and gulping them down.

“That could have been you,” Thymara pointed out to her lather. “They may look like clumsy babies now. But they’re predators. Predators that are just as smart as we are. And bigger than we are, and better at killing.” The charm of the hatching dragons was fading rapidly. Her wonder at them was being replaced with something between fear and hate. That creature would have killed her father.

“Not all of them,” her father observed sadly. “Look down there, Thymara. Tell me what you see.”

From this higher vantage point, she had a wider view of the hatching grounds. She estimated that a fourth of the wizardwood logs would never release young dragons. The dragons that had hatched were already sniffing at the failed cases. As she watched, one young red dragon hissed at a dull case. A moment later, it began to smoke, thin tendrils of fog rising from it. The red set its teeth to a wizardwood log and tore off a long strip. That surprised Thymara. Wizardwood was hard and fine-grained. Ships were built from it. But now the wood seemed to be decaying into long fibrous strands that the young dragons were tearing free and eating greedily. “They are killing their own kind,” she said, thinking that was what her father wished her to see.

“I doubt it. I think that in those logs, the dragons died before they could break free of their cases. The other dragons know that. They can smell it, probably. I think something in their saliva triggers a reaction to soften the logs and make them edible. Probably the same reaction that makes the logs break down as the youngsters are hatching. Or maybe it’s the sunlight. No, that wasn’t what I was talking about.”

She looked again. Young dragons wandered unsteadily on the clay beach. Some had ventured down to the water’s edge. Others clustered around the sagging cases of the failed dragons, tearing and eating. Of the deer that Tintaglia had brought and of the dead hatchling, scarcely a smear of blood remained. Thymara watched a dragon with stubby forelegs sniffing at the sand where it had been. “He’s badly formed.” She looked at her father. “Why are so many of them badly formed?”

“Perhaps…” her father began but before he could speak on, Rogon dropped down from a higher branch to join them. Her father’s sometime hunting partner was scowling.

“Jerup! You’re unharmed then! What were you thinking? I saw you down there and saw that thing go for you. From where I was, I couldn’t see if you’d made it up the trunk or not! What were you trying to do down there?”

Her father looked down, half smiling, but perhaps a bit angry as well. “I thought I could help the one that was being attacked. I didn’t realize it was already dead.”

Rogon shook his head contemptuously. “Even if it wasn’t, there would be no point. Any fool could see it wasn’t fit to live. Look at them. Half of them will be dead before the day is out, I should think. I had heard rumours that the Elderling boy was concerned something like this might happen. I was just over at the dais; no one knows how to react. Selden Vestrit is visibly devastated. He’s watching, but not saying a word. No music playing now, you can bet. And half of those important folks clutching scrolls with speeches on them won’t give them now. You never saw so many important people with so little to say. This was supposed to be the big day, dragons taking to the skies, our agreement with Tintaglia fulfilled. And instead, there’s this fiasco.”

“Does anyone know what went wrong?” Her father asked his question reluctantly.