Robin Hobb: Dragon Haven

The mist burned off as if it had never been. A landscape appeared around them, a place so different that at first Thymara wondered if somehow they’d made a mystical passage to another world. To their right was a river rushing past them, tossing up and carrying off the debris of what had been still swamp but an hour before. The rush of its passage was a loud and joyous noise. To their left, there was a narrower strip of river, rapidly closing as Tarman worked his way closer to the bank. The dragons were moving hastily now, stringing out in a glittering line as they hurried upstream.

But it was the riverbank that Thymara stared at. The land rose. It was not just the trees that towered. The land rose in a way that Thymara had never seen before. She had heard of hills and even mountains and thought she had imagined how they must be. But to stare at land that hummocked upward, higher and higher, was almost more than she could grasp. “Dry land!” Alise breathed beside her. “Tonight we’ll camp on dry land. And build a fire! And walk about without getting muddy! Oh, Thymara, have you ever seen anything so beautiful?”

“I’ve never seen anything so strange,” Thymara whispered in awe.

A wild shrill cry startled everyone aboard the ship. Thymara looked up. Heeby’s scarlet wings were stretched wide against a blue crack in the cloudy sky. She swooped lower and ever closer. Rapskal’s thin shout reached them. “This way! This way!”

“I have never seen anything so beautiful as that,” she whispered, and Alise leaned closer to hug her.

“We’re nearly there. We’re nearly home,” she said, and it did not seem at all a strange thing for her to say.

AT LEAST SIX times that day, Rapskal and Heeby flew with them, urging them on and tantalizing them with shouts of “It’s not far now! A pity you can’t fly!” and other useful bits of information.

As they followed, the land to either side became firmer. The reed beds gave way slowly to ferns and grasses, to boggy meadows and then to low, rolling grasslands that met forested foothills in the distance. The river became wider, and stronger, fed by streams and rivulets as the land rose up around it. The young Rain Wilders had looked out in wonder at vistas and hilly horizons they had heard of in old tales but never seen. They had exclaimed over rocky cliffs seen in the distance, and then shores with sand and rock along the edges. A different sort of forest edged closer to the river, one of small deciduous trees with random groves of evergreen. On one sunny day, a row of toothy mountains had appeared in the distance. And that afternoon they had come to the outskirts of Kelsingra.

Leftrin had nosed Tarman up to the sandy bank. The barge crawled, exhausted, to rest half on the shore and half on the water. The dragons had emerged from the shallows, clambering out and looking around as if they could not believe their good fortune. Most of them promptly found sunning spots and stretched out to rest. Mercor had not paused but had left the water behind, climbing ever higher up the grassy slopes. Sylve had run after him, barely keeping pace with her dragon. The other keepers had climbed down from the barge almost hesistantly and stared around at a landscape completely foreign to them. High up the slope behind them, Mercor had suddenly reared up on his hind legs and trumpeted out his triumph. On the riverbanks below him, the other dragons had lifted their heads and wearily returned his challenge. And Alise had stared, torn between triumph and heartbreak, at the towering ruins of Kelsingra…

On the other side of the swift-flowing river.

“I’M WRITING IT down for posterity. Just as we know from the journals and letters of the time how Trehaug was founded, so will my journal one day tell our descendants how Kelsingra was rediscovered. By you and Heeby. You want your descendants to know that, don’t you?”

She’d had a night and part of a day to recover from her initial disappointment. The city was not that far away. As soon as he could, Leftrin would find a way to get her there. In the meanwhile, he had other duties to his ship, his crew, and the keepers. And so did she. She’d practically had to strong-arm Rapskal to pull him away from the other keepers, but she had insisted. “It has to be recorded, while it is still fresh in your mind. There are so many things that we think we’ll remember clearly, or we think that everyone will ‘always’ know. It won’t take long, Rapskal, I promise. And then whoever comes after us will always know the tale about what you did.”

Now she waited while the boy shifted restlessly and tried to order his thoughts. He had changed so much, and yet so little. His skin was scarlet, scaled fine as a brook trout, and he seemed to have grown. He was leaner and more muscled and completely unaware of how his tattered clothes scarcely covered his flesh.

Rapskal’s uplifted eyes followed Heeby’s flight. The dragon was hunting the hills and cliffs across the river. Alise followed his gaze with longing. It was all there, just as she had seen it in the Elderling tapestry on the walls of the Traders’ Concourse. The sun touched the glittering stone of the map tower and glinted off the domes of the majestic buildings. She longed to be there, to walk the wide streets, to ascend the steps and see what wondrous artifacts the Elderlings had left for them to discover. Leftrin had explained to her a dozen times that the current swept deep and wild along that shore. On this side of the river, it had been easy to nose Tarman ashore. Over there, the current ran swift and deep, and there was nothing to tie the barge to. They’d found the remains of the stone piers that had once run out into the river, but time had worn them and the river had eaten them. Tarman did not trust them, and Leftrin would not ignore his ship’s uneasiness. He had promised Alise that once the ancient docks of Kelsingra had been restored, it would be a fine place to tie up a boat. But for now, for a short time, she was doomed to look on the Elderlings’ side of Kelsingra with longing.

“Well, I guess I’ve told you everything, right?” Rapskal was standing up again. He was looking down the hillside now to where the other keepers were walking along the shore or exploring the stony, skeletal remains of the town. Hundreds of foundations were scattered along the shore; a few standing structures remained, enough for the keepers to take shelter in by night. Leftrin had climbed up the hill and discovered the intact shepherd’s hut and insisted it was perfect for them. She tended to agree with him. It was the most privacy they had ever had. The first night, he’d built a crackling fire in the old hearth and discovered that, once he removed an old bird’s nest from it, the chimney drew as well as ever. Golden firelight had filled the single room of the cottage. They’d spread their bedding on the floor in front of it and hung a blanket where once a wooden door had swung. She’d felt, for the first time in her life, that she was truly mistress of this tiny home. The very next morning, she’d brought her journals and notes up from the barge. Now she sat on the stone doorstep of the little house and surveyed her domain. From here, she had a wide view of the sweep of the river’s bend and Leftrin’s ship. She had the vista of all of old Kelsingra to tempt and taunt her.

She called her thoughts back to the moment at hand. Her four remaining sheets of good paper rested on her battered lap desk. “You haven’t really told me anything, Rapskal.”

He took a breath that lifted his narrow shoulders. He smiled at her, his white teeth showing strangely in his red-scaled face. “Well. Here’s how it was. I was talking to Tats and he was mad at me for telling Thymara that I’d like to do to her what Jerd had taught me to do with her…Why aren’t you writing?”