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 father. ‘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.
His friend tossed his wide shoulders in a shrug. ‘Something about not enough time in the cocoons, and not enough dragonspit to go around. Bad legs, crooked backs – look, look at that one there. It can’t even lift its head. The sooner the others kill it and eat it, the kinder for it.’
‘They won’t kill it.’ Thymara’s father spoke with certainty. She wondered how he knew it. ‘Dragons don’t kill their own kind, except in mating battles. When a dragon dies, the others eat them. But they don’t kill one another for food.’
Rogon had sat down on the tree limb next to her father. He swung his bare callused feet lazily. ‘Well, there’s no problem that doesn’t benefit someone. That’s what I was coming to talk to you about. Did you see how quickly they ate that deer?’ He snorted. ‘Obviously they can’t hunt for themselves. And not even a dragon like Tintaglia can possibly hunt enough to feed them all. So I’m seeing an opportunity for us here, old friend. Before this day is out, it’s going to dawn on the Council that someone has to keep those beasties fed. Can’t very well leave a hungry little herd of dragonlings running wild at the base of the city, especially not with the excavation crews going back and forth all the time. That’s where we come in. If we approach the Rain Wild Council to hire us to hunt to feed the dragons, they’ll be no end of work for us. Not that we could keep up with the demand, but while we can, the pay should be good. Even with the big dragon helping us kill for them, we’ll quickly run short of meat animals for them. But for a while, we should do well.’ He shook his head and grinned. ‘I don’t like to think of what will happen when the meat runs out. If they don’t turn on one another and eat their kin, well, I fear that we’ll be the closest prey. These dragons were a bad bargain.’
Thymara spoke. ‘But we made a deal with Tintaglia. And a Trader’s word is his bond. We said we’d help Tintaglia take care of them if she kept the Chalcedeans away from our shores. And she has done that.’
Rogon ignored her. Rogon always ignored her. He never treated her as badly as some of the others did, but he never looked directly at her or replied to her words. She was accustomed to that. It wasn’t personal. She glanced away from the men, caught herself cleaning her claws on the tree’s bark, and stopped. She looked back at them. Her father had black nails. So did Rogon. Sometimes it seemed such a small difference to her, that her father had been born with black nails on his hands and feet and that she had been born with claws, like a lizard. Such a small difference on which to base a life-or-death decision.
‘My daughter speaks the truth,’ her father said. ‘Our Council agreed to the bargain; they have no choice but to live up to it.
Thymara resisted the impulse to squirm. She hated it when her Da forced his comrades to acknowledge her existence. It was better when he allowed them to ignore her. Because then she could ignore them as well. She looked aside and tried not to listen to the men as they discussed the difficulties of hunting enough meat to feed that many dragons, and the impossibility of simply ignoring the newly-hatched dragons at the base of the city. There were ruins beneath the swampy grounds of Cassarick. If the Rain Wilders wanted to excavate them for Elderling treasure, then they’d have to find some way to keep these young dragons fed.
Thymara yawned. The politics of the Rain Wild Traders and the dragons would never have anything to do with her and her life. Her father had told her that she should still care about things like that, but it was hard to force herself to be interested in situations she would never have a say in. Her life was apart from such things. When she considered her future, she knew she was the only one she could ever rely on.
She looked down at the dragons and suddenly felt queasy. Her father had been right. And Rogon was right. Below her, young dragons were dying. Their fellows were not killing them, though they did not hesitate to ring the ones that had collapsed, eagerly waiting for them to shudder out a final breath. So many of them, she thought, so many of the hatched dragons had emerged unfit to face the harsh conditions of the Rain Wilds. What had gone wrong? Was Rogon right?
Tintaglia
