The Rain Wild Chronicles: The Complete 4-Book Collection. Robin Hobb
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She was almost pleading with him. She had been so sure. ‘You are telling me the truth?’
Sedric took a ragged breath. ‘There are no other women in Hest’s life, Alise. None at all.’
He looked down at his hands, embarrassed, and she saw that the ring she had seen on Hest’s hand last night was now on Sedric’s. Shame scalded her. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered.
Hest thought she spoke to him. ‘Sorry? You insult me and humiliate me in front of Sedric, and “sorry” is the best you can manage? I think I’m owed substantially more than that, Alise.’
She had come to her feet, but she felt unstable. Suddenly she just wished to be out of the room and away from this horrible man who had somehow come to dominate her life. All she wanted now was the quiet of her room, and to lose herself in ancient scrolls from another world and time. ‘I don’t know what else I can say.’
‘Well. There’s isn’t much you can say, after such a grave insult. You’ve apologized, but it scarcely mends the matter.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said again, surrendering to him. ‘I’m sorry I ever brought it up.’
‘That makes two of us. Now let this be an end of this. Don’t ever accuse me of something like that again. It’s beneath you. It’s beneath both of us to have conversations like this.’
‘I won’t. I promise.’ She nearly knocked her chair over as she left the table and hurried toward the door.
‘I will hold you to that promise!’ Hest called after her.
‘I promise,’ she repeated dully, and fled from the room.
Night was closing in. Even in summer, the days seemed short. The towering trees of the rain forest carpeted the wide flat valley and gave way only to the river’s grey swathe. Daylight trickled down only when the sun was high enough for its light to strike the narrow alley of water and land between the brooding walls of trees that hemmed the river. Evening began its slow creep when the sun moved past it. Bright daylight was short and twilight dominated their lives. Four years had passed since the summer she had emerged from her case. Four years of thwarted hopes, poor food and neglect. Four summers of too much shade, four winters of rainy, grey days. Four years of no life save eating and then sleeping, sleeping far too many hours of every day. Instead of feeling as if she slept too much, Sintara always felt vaguely weary. Swampy land and dimness were the province of newts, not dragons. Dragons, she thought to herself, were creatures of strong sunlight, dry sand and long hot days. And flight. How she longed to fly. Fly away from the mud and the crowded conditions and the gloomy riverbank.
She craned her neck to nuzzle at a patch of gritty mud that had dried behind her wing. She rubbed at it, then stretched her stunted wing and slapped it several times against her body in an attempt to dislodge the irritation. Most of it went trickling down her side in a cascade of dust. It was a minor relief. She longed to bathe herself in a pool of hot, still water, to emerge into strong sunlight to dry, and then to roll and scratch in abrasive sand until her scales gleamed. None of those things existed in her current life. Only her ancestral dreams informed her of them.
It was not the only dragon memory that taunted her. She had many dreams. Dreams of flight, of hunting, of mating. Memories of a city with a well of liquid silver where a dragon could slake that thirst no water could quench. Many memories of gorging on hot, freshly-killed meat. Memories of mating in flight, of hollowing out a sandy beach nest for her eggs. Many, many frustrating memories. Yet for all that, she knew she did not have a full complement of memories. It was maddening that she knew enough to know she was missing whole areas of knowledge, but could not reconstruct for herself exactly what that missing knowledge was. It was an additional cruelty that the dragon memories she did have showed her so clearly all her physical body lacked.
The memories were a heritage denied her. It was the way of her kind. In the serpent stage of their lives, they retained access to an ancestral hoard of serpent memories. Migration routes, warm currents and fish runs were not the only information; there was also the knowledge of the gathering places and the songs and the structure of their society as serpents. When a serpent entered the cocoon, such memories faded until by the time the dragon emerged from its case, its life as a serpent was only a hazy recollection. Replacing those memories were the hereditary wealth of a dragon’s proper knowledge. How to fly by the stars, and where the best hunting was to be found in each season, the traditional challenges for a mating duel, and what beach was best for the laying of eggs were some of those memories. But each dragon also could claim the more distant but personal memories of a dragon’s particular ancestry. The memories came, not just from the serpent’s changing body, but from the saliva of the dragons that helped the serpents shape their cocoons. There had been precious little of that when this generation of serpents cocooned. Perhaps that was what they were all lacking now. Perhaps that was why some of their number were as dull-witted as cattle.
The sun must have reached the unseen horizon. The stars were beginning to show in the narrow stripe of sky over the river. She looked up at the band of night and thought it a good metaphor for her truncated and restricted existence. This muddy beach by the river bounded by the immense forest behind her was the only existence she had known since she hatched into this life. The dragons could not retreat into the forest. The picket trees fenced them onto the shore as effectively as their namesake. Although the immense trees had been well spaced out by nature, their supplementary roots and all manner of underbrush, vines and plants grew in the swampy spaces between them. Not even the much smaller humans could travel easily on the rain forest floor. Paths pushed through the brush soon became sodden trails and eventually swampy fingers of mud. No. The only way out of this forest for a dragon was up. She flapped her useless wings again and then folded them onto her back. Then she lowered her head from her stargazing and looked around her. The others were huddled together beneath the trees. She despised them. They were stunted and misshapen things, sickly, quarrelsome, weak and unworthy.
Just as she was.
She plodded through the mud to join them. She was hungry but she scarcely noticed that any more. She had been constantly hungry since the day she hatched from her case. Today she’d been fed seven fish, large if not fresh, and one bird. The bird had been stiff. Sometimes she dreamed of meat that was warm and limp with the blood still running. It was only a dream now. The hunters were seldom able to find large game close by; when they did get a marsh elk or a riverpig, the creatures had to be chopped into pieces before they could be transported back to the dragons. And the dragons seldom got the best parts of the beasts. Bones and guts and hide, tough shanks and horned heads, but seldom the hump from a riverpig’s back or the meat-rich hind haunch of a marsh elk. Those parts went to the humans’ tables. The dragons were left with the scraps and offal like stray dogs begging outside a city’s gate.
The boggy ground sucked at her feet each time she lifted them and her tail seemed permanently caked with mud. The land here suffered as much as the dragons did; it never had a chance to harden and heal. All the trees that bordered the clearing were showing the effects of the dragons’ residence. The lower trunks were scarred and scraped. Dragons scratching vermin from their skin had eroded bark from some of the trees, and the roots of others had been exposed by the traffic of clawed feet. She had overheard the humans worrying that even trees with trunks the size of towers would eventually die from such treatment. And what would happen when such a tree fell? The humans had somewhat wisely moved their homes out of the treetops of the affected trees. But didn’t they realize that if one of the trees fell, it would doubtless crash through the branches of neighbouring trees? Humans were stupider than squirrels in that regard.
Only in the summer months did the muddy beach approach a level of firmness that made walking less strenuous. In winter, the smaller dragons struggled to lift their feet high enough to walk. At least, they had struggled. Most of them had died off last winter. She thought of that with regret. She had anticipated each of the weaklings dying, and had been swift enough, twice, to fill her belly with their meat and her mind with their memories. But they were all gone now, and barring accidents or disease, her mates looked as if they would survive the summer.
She approached the huddled mass of dragons. That was not right.