The Dragon Keeper

  Tats dismissed her fears with a shrug. He glanced around at the leafy branches that screened her from their neighbors and from a clear view of either sky above or earth below. “You never seemed poor to me,” he said quietly. “I always thought you had it pretty good, living up here. ”

  “It’s not so bad, for me. It’s harder for my mother. She was used to a fancier way of life, with parties and pretty clothes and fine things. But there are other things I miss about where we used to live. Maybe it was just the age I was. But back then, down there, I had a lot more friends. When we were little, I guess no one cared so much about claws or nails. We just all played on the landings between levels. My father paid for me to be schooled; he bought my books, even though most of the other children paid by the week to borrow them. People thought he really spoiled me, and it made my mother furious about the wasted money. And we used to go places. I remember that once we traveled way down trunk to a play put on by actors from Jamaillia. I couldn’t understand what it was about, but the costumes were beautiful. Once we went to a grand entertainment, music, and a play, and jugglers and singers! I loved that. The stage was suspended in an opening among several trees, with the platform that supported it and the seating cross-roped and netted for sturdiness. That was the first time I realized just how big a city Trehaug really was. Leaves and branches hid most of the ground below us, but there was one vista of the river, and overhead, through the hole in the canopy, I could see a huge patch of black sky and all sorts of stars. But the lights of thousands of homes twinkled, too, in the trees surrounding us, and the lanternlit walkways reminded me of jeweled necklaces reaching from tree to tree. ” Thymara closed her eyes and turned her face up, recalling that sight.

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  “And back then, once a month, as a family, we’d go out for an evening meal in Grassara’s Spice Bazaar, and we’d have meat as our main course. A whole piece of meat to eat myself, and one for my mother and one for my father. ” She shook her head. “My mother was discontented even then. But I guess she always was and always will be. No matter how much we have, she wants more. ”

  “Sounds pretty normal to me,” Tats said quietly. She opened her eyes and was surprised to see that he had edged closer to her perch without her even feeling it. He was getting better at moving through the branches. Before she could compliment him on it, he asked, “So when did it all change?”

  “It changed when my father started putting more of his time into trying to grow things. Seems like every year we had to move a bit higher and farther out. ” She glanced at Tats. He sat astride the limb, with one ankle locked around his other leg. He looked secure if a bit uncomfortable. His attention to her face made her self-conscious. Was he staring at her scaling? At the tiny scales that outlined her lips, at the nub of fringe that ran along her jawline? She turned her face away from him and spoke to the trees. “The last place we lived before we came to the Cricket Cages was the Bird Nests. Those used to be the poorest part of Trehaug. But then the Tattooed came and then other newcomers, and we got pushed out of there. ”

  The houses in the Bird Nests had consisted of small rooms, woven of vine and lath, with airy narrow pathways that led down several levels before one reached the good wide walkways and branch paths. “We lived in the Bird Nests for only a couple of years before we saw a flood of artists and artisans moving in. A lot of them were Tattooed, new to the Rain Wilds and needing cheaper rents and neighborhoods where their neighbors would not complain about noise and parties and strange lifestyles. ” Thymara smiled to herself. She had loved living in the Bird Nests as much as her mother had despised it. Artists displayed their creations on every branch. The poorest section of the city became rich in beauty. Wind chimes hung at every crossroads, the safety walls along the paths were tapestries of colored string and beads, and faces were painted on the rough bark of the tree branches that supported the flimsy homes. Even her family’s chambers became bright with color, for her father often was offered only barter for the small crops he managed to grow. Long before Diana earned a reputation as an inspired weaver, Thymara wore a sweater and scarf made by her clever fingers and the carved chest that held her clothing had been made by Raffles himself. She loved those things not because they were valuable, but because they were daring and new. It was only later that her mother would be able to sell them for prices that amazed them all, but did not console Thymara for their loss.

  As always happens, or so her father said, the wealthy patrons of the artists began to frequent the Bird Nests. Not content to purchase merely what the artists made, the patrons began to buy their lifestyles as well. Soon the sons and daughters of the wealthier Rain Wild Trader families were living among them, behaving as if they were artists but creating nothing save noise, traffic, and a wild reputation for the Bird Nests. Their families were able to pay much higher rents than her father could afford. The wealthy folk who had holiday homes among them demanded safer walkways and wider branch roads, and so they were taxed accordingly. Shops and cafés moved into adjacent trees. The artists who had established themselves were delighted. They were becoming wealthy and well known. “But the high rents pushed us right out. We couldn’t afford to pay the taxes anymore, let alone eat in the cafés. We had to sell off all the art my father had received as barter, take what coin we could get, and move up again. ” She craned her head and looked up. A few yellow lights in tiny cottages flickered above. “I suppose the next time we get pushed out we’ll end up in the Tops. You get light every day up there, but I hear the rooms rock in the wind almost all the time. ”

  “I don’t think I’d like all that swaying,” Tats agreed.

  “Well, no. But I like it here in the Cricket Cages. We get plenty of rainwater, so we don’t have to haul it ourselves or buy it from the water carriers. My mother wove us a bathing hammock when we first moved here, and it’s lovely in the summer when the water is naturally warm. Moss grows along the edges, and we get visits from little frogs and butterflies and basking lizards. And it isn’t so far to climb to find the flowers that reach for the sunlight. When I can get those, my mother takes them down trunk to sell, in the markets where they hardly ever see the flowers from the Tops.

  As if the mention of her had summoned her, her mother’s voice, sharp and angry, split the peace of the evening. “Thymara! Come in this minute. Now!”

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  Thymara flowed to her feet. There was something in her mother’s voice, something beyond ordinary irritation. A note of fear or danger that set Thymara’s teeth on edge.

  “Give me a moment,” Tats said and began to untangle himself from the tree limb.

  “Thymara!”

  “I have to go now!” she exclaimed. She took two swift steps toward him. She heard Tats’s gasp as she braced her hands on his shoulders and leaped lightly over him, landed on the still-swaying branch, and then scampered across it to the trunk. Something her father had once said of her came back to her. You were made for the canopy, Thymara. Never be ashamed of that! Yet this was the first time she had ever felt a strange pride. Her agility had shocked Tats. His shoulders had been warm when she touched them.

  “Can I see you tomorrow?” he called after her.

  “Probably!” she replied. “When my chores are done. ”

  She went down the trunk swiftly, ignoring the safety line and the foot notches to dig in her claws and rapidly descend. When she reached the two outstretched branches that supported her family’s home, she scuttled along them and then swung down to slip in her bedchamber window. She landed on the fat leaf-stuffed cushion that was her bed; it completely occupied the floor of the chamber. A moment later she was in the main room. “I’m home,” she announced breathlessly.

  Her mother was sitting cross-legged in the center of the small room. “What are you trying to do to me?” she demanded furiously. “Is this your idea of revenge, after your father all but forbade me to speak about the offer? Do y
ou seek to shame your whole family? What will folk think of us? What will they think of me? Will you be happy when they drive us all away from Trehaug completely? Isn’t it bad enough that because of you we have to live as close to the edge as we possibly can? Is that why you think it’s fine for you to shame us completely?”

  There was a flower in the canopy Tops called an archer bloom. It was lovely and fragrant, but at the slightest touch to the stem, tiny thorns launched to pepper the assailant. Her mother’s questions stung her like a storm of thorns, each striking her and giving her no chance to react. When her mother paused for breath, her chest was heaving and her cheeks were pink.

  “I did nothing wrong! I did nothing to shame myself or my family!” Thymara was so shocked she could scarcely get the words out.

  Her words only woke more outrage in her mother’s eyes. They seemed to bulge from their sockets. “What! Will you sit there and lie to me? Shameless! Shameless! I saw you, Thymara! Everyone saw you, sitting up there in plain sight, so cozy with that man. You know it is forbidden to you! How can you let him call on you, how can you let him keep company with you, unchaperoned?”

  Thymara’s mind scrambled to make sense of her mother’s words. Then, “Tats? You mean Tats? He works for Da, sometimes, at the market. You’ve seen him, you know him!”

  “I do indeed! Tattooed across his face like a criminal, and all know him as the son of a thief and a murderer! Bad enough that one such as you allows a man to call on her, but you have to pick the lowest of the low to dally with!”

  “Mother! I . . . he is just the boy who helps Father sometimes at the trunk market! Just a friend. That’s all. I know that I can never . . . that no one can ever court me. Who would want to? You’re being unfair. And foolish. Look at me. Do you really think that Tats came to court me?”

  “Why not? Who else would have him? And he is probably thinking that you’ll get no better offer, so you’ll take what pleasure you can get, with whomever you can get! Do you know what our neighbors would do to us if you became pregnant? Do you know what the Council would decree, for all of us? Oh, I tried to warn your father, from the very beginning, that it would come to this. But no, he never listens to a word I say! What can it come to, I asked him, what kind of life can she have? And he said, ‘No, no, I’ll look after her, I’ll keep her from being a burden, I’ll keep her from bringing shame on us. ’ Well, where is he now? Turned down the offer I had for you, without ever hearing me out, and then off he goes and leaves me here alone to deal with you, while you go flaunting yourself through the byways!”

  “Mother, I did nothing wrong. Nothing. We sat and we talked. That was it. Tats was not courting me. We had a conversation, and as you yourself said, we were out in plain sight of everyone. Tats was not courting me, he doesn’t think of me that way. No one will ever think of me that way. ” Thymara’s voice had started out low and controlled, but by her final words her throat was so tight that she could scarcely squeeze the words out in a high-pitched whisper. Tears, rare for her and painfully acid, squeezed from the corners of her eyes and stung the scaled edges of her eyelids. She dashed them away angrily. Suddenly, she couldn’t stand to be in the same room with the woman who had given birth to her and hated her ever since. “I’m going to go sit outside. Alone. ”

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  “Stay where I can see you” was her mother’s harsh reply.

  Thymara didn’t deign to give her a response.

  But neither did she defy her. She climbed up onto the branch that was the main support for their home and walked out toward the end. That, she knew, would satisfy her mother. The branch led nowhere, and if her mother truly wanted to be sure she was alone, all she had to do was look out of the window. Thymara went farther out than she usually ventured and then sat down, both legs on the same side of the branch. She swung her feet and looked down, daring herself. If she focused her eyes one way, she became aware of the bright lights that sparkled below her. Each light was a lit window. Some were as bright as lanterns; others were distant stars in the depths of the forest below her.

  If she focused her eyes another way, she saw the bars and stripes of darkness that latticed the forest below her. A falling body would not plummet straight down to the distant forest floor. No. Her body would strike and rebound and, despite all her resolves, snatch and cling, however briefly, to every branch she struck on the way down. There was no swift plummet to an instant death there.

  She’d learned that when she was eleven. It was strange. She remembered that day in fragments. It had begun with an encounter at the trunk market. As she recalled it now, it was the last time she had ever brought her mother flowers from the Top to sell at the market and accompanied her there. The trunk markets were the best places to sell. Close to the trunk of the trees, the platforms were large and they were often the crossroads for hanging bridges from other trees. The traffic was good, and of course, the farther down one went, the wealthier the passing customers. The flowers she had gathered were deep purple and brilliant pink, as large as her head and brimming with fragrance. Their petals were thick and waxy, and bright yellow stamen and sepals extended past them. They were bringing a good price and twice her mother had smiled at her as she pocketed silver coins.

  Thymara had been squatting beside her mother’s trading mat when she noticed that a pair of slipper-shod feet below a blue Trader’s robe had remained in front of her, unmoving, for quite a time. She looked up into an old man’s face. He scowled at her and took a step back, but his blunt, scolding words were for her mother. “Why did you keep such a girl? Look at her, her nails, her ears—she will never bear! You should have exposed her and tried for another. She eats today but offers us no hope for tomorrow. She is a useless life, a burden upon us all. ”

  “It was her father’s will that she live, and he prevailed in it,” her mother said briefly. She lowered her eyes in shame before the old man’s rebuke. By chance, her gaze met Thymara’s. She had been staring up at her, hurt that her mother offered so poor a defense of her. Perhaps her look stabbed a drop of pity from her mother’s shriveled heart. “She works hard,” she told the old man. “Sometimes she goes with her father to gather some days, and when she does, she brings home almost as much as he does. ”

  “Then she should go out daily to gather,” he replied severely. “So that her efforts may replenish the resources she consumes. Everything is dear here in the Rain Wilds. Have you lost sight of that?”

  “And a child’s life is most dear of all,” her father had said, coming up behind the old man. He had come down to meet them at the end of their day’s trading. He had just come from the canopy; his clothes were bark smeared and leaf stained from his climbing. Thymara was far too old to be carried, but her father had scooped her up and carried her off with him as he strode away from the market. The carry basket on his other shoulder was half full. Her mother had hastily rolled up her mat with their unsold wares inside it and hurried along the walkway to catch up with them.

  “Stupid, sanctimonious old man!” her father growled. “And what, I’d like to know, does he do to be worth what he eats? How could you let him speak of Thymara like that?”

  “He was a Trader, Jerup. ” Her mother glanced back, almost fearfully. “It wouldn’t do to offend him or his family. ”

  “Oh, a Trader!” Her father’s voice was scathing with feigned awe. “A man born to position, wealth, and privilege. He earned his place here exactly as any eldest child did; he was wise enough to be first to grow in the right woman’s belly. Is that it?”

  Her mother was panting as she tried to keep up with them. Her father was not a large man but he was wiry and strong as were most gatherers. Even carrying her, he crossed the bridges and climbed the winding stairs that circled the trees’ big trunks with ease. Her mother, burdened only with her market bag, could scarcely keep pace with his angry stride.

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  “He saw her claws, J
erup, black and curved like a toad’s. She is only eleven, and already she is scaled like a woman of thirty. He saw the webbing of her toes. He knew she had been marked from birth and it offended him that you had—kept her. He isn’t the only one, Jerup. He simply happened to be old enough and arrogant enough to speak the truth aloud. ”

  “Arrogant indeed,” her father said brusquely, and then he had stepped up his pace again, leaving her mother behind.

  On that long ago evening, Thymara had finished her day alone on their tiny veranda, fingering the budding wattles that fringed her jawline. Her knees were drawn up to her chest. Occasionally she flexed her webbed toes, regarding the thick black claws that ended each of her toes. Inside the house, all was silent, the silence that was her mother’s most potent anger. Her father had fled it, to do late bartering with what he had brought home. One could argue with words, but her mother’s silence denied everything. The silence left plenty of room for the old man’s words to echo in her mind.

  Around her, the canopy of the rain forest rustled and bustled with life. Leaves stirred in the wind. Iridescent insects crawled on bark or flew from twig to leaf. The subtle colored lizards and the jewel-toned frogs basked or crawled or simply sat still, pulsing with life. All the living beauty of her forest home surrounded her. Thymara looked out past her curved toenails to the shadowed distance of the swamp that floored her world. She could not see the ground. In the thicker, safer branches below them, the sturdy homes of wealthy people clustered, offering their yellow window light to the gathering night. That, too, was a sort of living beauty.