Robin Hobb - The Dragon Keeper

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!”