dragons. It’s just not … just not something she’d ever do.’ At the stern look on Tats’s face, he added, ‘You know, the real problem is that your dragons don’t fly. If they would fly, they could make their own kills and I’m sure they’d love it as much as Heeby does. You need to teach them to fly.’
Tats stared at him. Sparks of anger lit his eyes. ‘Thanks for telling me the obvious, Rapskal. My dragon can’t fly.’ He rolled his eyes in exasperation. ‘That’s a real insight into the problem. So useful to know. Now, I need to go hunting.’ He turned abruptly and stalked off.
Thymara watched him go, open-mouthed. ‘Tats!’ she called. ‘Wait! You know we aren’t supposed to hunt alone!’ Then she turned back to Rapskal. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know what made him so angry.’
‘Yes, you do,’ he cheerily called her on her lie. He caught up her hand and held it as he spoke on. ‘And so do I. But it doesn’t matter. You were the one I wanted to talk to anyway. Thymara, when Heeby wakes up from her gorge, do you want to go to Kelsingra? There’s something there I want to show you. Something amazing.’
‘What?’
He shook his head, his face full of mischief. ‘It’s us. That’s all I’m going to tell you. It’s us. You and me. And I can’t explain it; I just have to take you there. Please?’ He was bouncing on his toes as he spoke, incredibly pleased with himself. His grin was wide and she had to return his smile even as she reluctantly shook her head.
Kelsingra. Temptation burned hot. He would have to ask Heeby to fly her over. Riding on a dragon! Up in the air over the river. It was a terrifying yet fascinating thought.
But Kelsingra? She was not as certain about that part.
She’d been to the Elderling city exactly once and only for a few hours. The problem had been the river crossing. The river was rain-full now, swift and deep. It wandered in its wide riverbed during the summer, but now it filled it from bank to bank. A wide curve in the river meant that the current swept most swiftly and deeply right past the broken docks of ancient Kelsingra. Since they’d arrived, the Tarman had made two forays for the far shore. Each time, the current had swept the barge swiftly past the city and downriver. Each time, the liveship and his crew had battled their way back to the other side of the river and then back to the village. It had been horribly frustrating for all of them, to have come so far seeking the legendary city, and then not be able to dock there. Captain Leftrin had promised that when he returned from Cassarick he’d bring sturdy line and spikes and all else needed to create a temporary dock at Kelsingra.
But the young keepers had been unable to wait that long. Thymara and a handful of the other keepers had made the crossing once in two of the ship’s boats. It had demanded a full morning of strenuous rowing to cross the river. Even so, they had been pushed far downstream of the city’s broken stone docks and had to make their tedious way back. They’d arrived in late afternoon with only a few hours of rainy daylight left in which to explore the massive city of wide streets and tall buildings.
Thymara had always lived in a forest. That had been a strange thing to realize. She’d always thought of Trehaug as a city, a grand city at that, the largest in the Rain Wilds. But it wasn’t.
Kelsingra was a real city. The hike from the outskirts to the old city dock, portaging their boats, had proved that to her. They had left their small boats stacked there and ventured into the city. The streets were paved with stone and incredibly wide and empty of life. The buildings were made of immense blocks of black stone, much of it veined with silver. The blocks were huge and she could not imagine how they had been cut, let alone transported and lifted into place. The buildings had towered tall, not as tall as the trees of the Rain Wilds but taller than any human-created thing had a right to be. The structures were straight-sided, uncompromisingly man-made. Windows gaped above them, dark and empty. And it had been silent. The wind had whispered as it crept through the city as if fearful of waking it to life. The keepers who had made the crossing had kept to their huddle as they trudged through the streets and their voices had been muted and swallowed by that silence. Even Tats had been subdued. Davvie and Lecter had gripped hands as they walked. Harrikin had peered about as if trying to wake from a peculiar dream.
Sylve had slipped close to Thymara. ‘Do you hear that?’
‘What?’
‘Whispering. People talking.’
Thymara had listened. ‘It’s just the wind,’ she had said, and Tats had nodded. But Harrikin had stepped back and taken Sylve’s hand. ‘It’s not just the wind,’ he had asserted, and then they hadn’t spoken of it again.
They’d explored the portion of the city closest to the old docks and ventured into a few of the buildings. The structures were on a scale more suited to dragons than humans. Thymara, who had grown up in the tiny chambers of a tree-house home, had felt like an insect. The ceilings had been dim and distant in the fading afternoon light, the windows set high in the walls. Inside, there lingered the remnants of furnishings. In some, that had been no more than heaps of long-rotted wood on the floor, or a tapestry that crumbled into dangling, dusty threads at a touch. Light shone in colours through the streaked stained-glass windows, casting faded images of dragons and Elderlings on the stone floors.
In a few places, the magic of the Elderlings lingered. In one building, an interior room sprang to light when a keeper ventured into the chamber. Music, faint and uncertain, began to play, and a dusty perfume ventured out into the still air. A sound like distant laughter had twittered and then abruptly faded with the music. The group of keepers had fled back to the open air.
Tats had taken Thymara’s hand and she had been glad of that warm clasp. He had asked her quietly, ‘Do you think there’s even a chance that some Elderlings survived here? That we might meet them, or that they might be hiding and watching us?’
She’d given him a shaky smile. ‘You’re teasing me, aren’t you? To try to frighten me.’
His dark eyes had been solemn, even apprehensive. ‘No. I’m not.’ Looking around them, he had added, ‘I’m already uneasy and I’ve been trying not to think about it. I’m asking you because I’m genuinely wondering.’
She replied quickly to his unlucky words, ‘I don’t think they’re here still. At least, not in the flesh.’
His laugh had been brief. ‘And that is supposed to reassure me?’
‘No. It’s not.’ She felt decidedly nervous. ‘Where’s Rapskal?’ she had asked suddenly.
Tats had halted and looked around. The others had ranged ahead of them.
Thymara had raised her voice. ‘Where’s Rapskal?’
‘I think he went ahead,’ Alum called back to them.
Tats kept hold of her hand. ‘He’ll be fine. Come on. Let’s look around a bit more.’
They had wandered on. The emptiness of the broad plazas had been uncanny. It had seemed to her that after years of abandonment, life should have ventured back into this place. Grasses should have grown in the cracks in the paving stones. There should have been frogs in the green-slimed fountains, bird nests on building ledges and vines twining through windows. But there weren’t. Oh, there had been tiny footholds of vegetation here and there, yellow lichen caught between the fingers of a statue, moss in the cracked base of a fountain but not what there should have been. The city was too aggressively a city still, still a place for Elderlings, dragons and humans, even after all these years. The
