The Rain Wild Chronicles: The Complete 4-Book Collection

‘I didn’t,’ Sintara admitted quietly. ‘But I remember landing in the river, and going down into the water until it was dark. The bottom was sandy. And I remember wading out, up onto the bank. There were always some Elderlings waiting for us when we arrived.’

She halted, hoping someone else would say something. But no one did, and Mercor trudged stoically on.

‘I remember that something pleasant came next. Some special welcome …’ She let the thought trail away invitingly. No one spoke. The only sounds were the eternal hiss of the river’s motion, and the splashes of the dragons and their heavy breathing as they moved against it. Another snag, not quite as large as the first, loomed ahead of them. Sintara knew a moment of deep discouragement. She was already tired.

Suddenly Mercor lifted his head. His nostrils flared and then he halted in mid-stride. He looked all around himself, surveying the wide expanse of river to his right and the dense forest to his left. Then he gave a sudden huff of breath. An abbreviated ruff of toxic quills around his neck stood out, blue-white against the gold of his body.

‘What is it?’ Veras demanded. Then she, too, halted and looked around.

‘Riverpig,’ Sestican said. ‘I smell riverpig dung.’

As if by naming them he had summoned them, the creatures suddenly burst from the water. Their hides were grey as the river water, their hair long and straggling as roots. They had been clustered in the lee of the snag, their hairy, rounded backs in the sun, sheltered from the current’s push by the fallen trunk.

Sintara made no conscious decision. Some other dragon, ancient beyond reckoning, prompted her. Her head shot out on the end of her neck, mouth wide. She’d targeted the largest one she could reach. The riverpig reacted an instant before her teeth sank into him. He tried to dive under the water. Her teeth sank into him and her jaws latched shut, but she had not bitten him as deeply as she’d meant to. A correct bite would have sent her teeth sinking into his vertebrae, paralysing him. Instead, she gripped a layer of fat, thick hide and hair. The heady succulence of fresh, hot blood in her mouth nearly dazed her.

Then the riverpig in her jaws erupted in a savage struggle for his life.

All around her, other dragons were similarly engaged. Some still pursued pigs, trumpeting as they darted their heads after the squealing prey. Fast in the water, the round-bellied creatures were less agile in the shallows and up on the foliage-tangled riverbank. Dragons slammed against her as they sought prey of their own, and she was nearly knocked off her feet when three river pigs rammed into her, trying to get past her to deeper water.

Those events barely registered on her mind. Never before had she gripped live prey in her jaws. Her ancestral memories of hunting were mostly of diving onto cattle or other prey, slamming them to the earth so they were half stunned when she darted her head in for the killing bite. The creature in her jaws was desperate, very alive, and in his home element. He struggled madly so that her head whipped from side to side on the end of her long neck. The weight of his body dragged her head into the water. She instinctively closed her nostrils and lidded her eyes. She braced her front feet in the mucky river bottom and struggled to lift her prey out of the water. For an instant, she succeeded. He dangled from her jaws, squealing wildly, his sharp cloven hooves striking out wildly at her. He waved his head with its diminutive tusks at her, but couldn’t reach her. She caught a breath.

But she could barely hold him up.

She should have been stronger. Her neck should have been thick with the developed muscles of a hunting predator, her shoulders heavy. Instead, she thought with disgust, she was as slack-muscled as a grain-fed cow. She should not have any problem with prey of this size. But if she opened her jaws for a better grip, he would break free of her, and while she gripped him as she did, he was battering her with his struggles. She needed to stun him. He pulled her head under the river’s surface and she was not quick enough to close her nostrils. She snorted in water.

Reflexively, she found the strength to snatch him up out of the water. It was part-accident, part-intent that when her strength failed her, she managed to dash him against the fallen log in the river. For an instant, he hung loose in her grip. When he suddenly began to struggle and squeal again, she slammed him against the snag hard. She braced his momentarily still body against the log, and in the fraction of a second she gained opened her jaws wide and then closed them again. He gave one final spasm and then her kill hung limp from her jaws.

She’d killed! She’d made her first kill!

She pinned the meat against the snag with one front foot while she tore into it. She had never tasted anything so delicious. The blood was liquid and warm, the meat flopping fresh. She gulped and tore mouthfuls of guts, and crunched bones. When pieces of the pig dropped into the river, she plunged her head in to retrieve them.

It was only when every last bit of the animal had been devoured that she became cognizant of the scene around her. Many of the dragons had caught prey. Veras had pursued her pig up onto the bank and killed it there. Two of the smallest dragons had a squealing pig stretched between them, tugging at it until the creature’s body suddenly gave way. Kalo was gulping the last of one pig while he had another pinned under his great clawed foot. That sight sent her looking for more pigs.

‘The herd scattered,’ Mercor said quietly. She found the golden dragon cleaning his claws. He licked them and then nibbled a scrap of meat from under one. He had obviously hunted successfully. As she had. The memory rocked her again. She had killed! She, Sintara, had killed her own meat. And eaten it. How could she not have known how important it was to do this? It suddenly changed everything. She looked around at the river and the other dragons. Why was she mindlessly following the others, like a cow in a herd? This was not what dragons did. Dragons didn’t have keepers or depend on humans to kill for them. Dragons hunted alone and killed for themselves!

Instinctively she flexed her shoulders and raised her wings. The drive to fly away from here, to return to hunting, to make another kill and devour it and then find a sunny hillside or a good rocky ledge and take a long nap filled her. It wasn’t the meat that had awakened this in her, though the meat had been very good. It had been the struggle to kill, and above all, the triumph of killing and eating the riverpig. She couldn’t wait to do it again.

But her spread wings were pathetic things that slapped wetly against her back. There was no strength in them. Angrily, she recalled how hard it had been to battle even such stupid prey as a riverpig. Killing it hadn’t felt the way it should have, hadn’t matched any of her dragon memories of a kill. She was a weakling, not fit to live. She’d been kept like a cow in a pen. It was time to end that life.

‘And that,’ said Mercor, as calmly as if he had heard and followed all her thoughts, ‘Is exactly why we had to leave that place. It is why we have to travel together, upriver to find Kelsingra. So that we can become dragons along the way. Or die trying.’

He lifted his head and gave a trumpeting cry. ‘Time to move on!’ Then, without waiting to see if the others followed him or not, he moved out into the depths of the river and around the long snag.

Sintara followed him.

Day the 7th of the Grain Moon

Year the 6th of the Independent Alliance of Traders

From Detozi, Keeper of the Birds at Trehaug, to Erek, Keeper of the Birds at Bingtown

Enclosed, in a doubly sealed scroll case dipped in wax, a missive from Jess to Merchants Begasti Cored and Sinad Arich at the Sailpoint Inn, Bingtown. Fees paid for prompt and confidential delivery, with a bonus to be paid if the message is delivered in less than four days from the sending date.

Erek,

I have chosen Kingsly for this task! If any bird can earn us the bonus money, he can!

Detozi

P.S. Any chance of a squab or two from Kingsly’s line? I would trade you some of my Speckle’s offspring. She is not as fast as Kingsly, but has flown through many a storm for me.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN (#ulink_1fe611e4-72c2-5337-9790-b9912fdea40c)

Community (#ulink_1fe611e4-72c2-5337-9790-b9912fdea40c)

Nightfall found all the keepers sleeping in a row on the deck of the Tarman. Thymara had chosen a spot by the ship’s railing. She pillowed her head on her arms and stared toward the riverbank. Except for their dying campfire on shore and the single light from the barge window, the darkness was absolute and hard to get used to. Every time they stopped for the night, it was the same. They had left Cassarick far behind them. There were no friendly lights from a tree-built city to pierce the blackness of night under the great trees, no sounds from neighbouring houses. Thymara skirted the edges of sleep but could not seem to enter. Too much had happened too fast in the last few days. She swatted at a mosquito buzzing near her ear and asked the darkness, ‘Why are we doing this? It’s crazy. We don’t know where we’re going or what to expect. There’s no end in sight. Why are we doing this?’

‘For money,’ Jerd whispered back. She sighed contentedly and rolled over in her blanket. ‘To be doing something new.’

‘’Cause we haven’t got anything better to do?’ Rapskal asked from the dimness on her left. ‘And because it’s the best time I ever had in my life.’ He sounded deeply satisfied with his day.

‘To get away from everything else and start something new,’ Greft asserted grandly. Thymara gritted her teeth.

‘I need to sleep!’ Tats complained. ‘Could you all keep it down?’ Tonight, he had thrown his blanket down on the deck next to Rapskal. He’d seemed in a foul temper about something.

Someone, possibly Harrikin, chuckled. Silence fell again. The river lapped at the barge. On the shore, one of the dragons grunted loudly in its sleep, and was still again. Thymara pulled her blanket up over her head to block out the mosquitoes and stared into a smaller darkness.

Nothing was as Thymara had expected it to be. There was no grand adventure to this journey. So quickly the days had settled into a routine. They woke early and the keepers breakfasted together, usually on ship’s bread and dried fish or porridge. They refilled their water bottles from the sand-wells they’d dug the night before. The hunters left camp before dawn each day, paddling upriver. They needed to go before the dragons’ noise and activity frightened all the game. The dragons went next, as soon as they roused; then the keepers set out in their small boats, followed by the barge.

The others traded off partners in their boats, but no one else ever offered to partner with Rapskal. Several of the other keepers had expressed interest in sharing a boat with her. Warken had asked her, and Harrikin. Sylve had suggested twice that they might travel together the next day. But each morning, there was Rapskal, sitting expectantly in the boat by the shore, waiting for her. She had thought of partnering with someone else, knowing that if she did someone would be forced to share a boat with him. But so far, she hadn’t. Part of it was that they moved a boat very well together. And part of it was that his good nature and optimism were cheering to her at a time when she felt very much alone. Conversations with him might be odd and wandering, but he was not the lackwit that some of the others seemed to think he was. He simply came at life from a different angle. That was all.

And he was, after all, rather pleasant to look at.

Her body was becoming more accustomed to a full day of paddling the boat, but she still ached each night. The blisters on her hands were turning into calluses. The sunlight glinting on the water no longer seemed as harsh as it first had to her canopy-trained eyes. Her hair felt more like straw each day, and she had the uneasy sensation that her scaling was progressing faster than it had when she lived in the trees. But that was to be expected. Rain Wilders always seemed to scale more as they aged. Those things she could accept, but the physical monotony of paddling, day after day, was beginning to tell on her spirits.

Today had provided no exception. The morning had passed slowly, with little change in the endless foliage along the river-bank. In early afternoon, the keepers had been dismayed to hear wild trumpeting from the dragons ahead. When they caught up to them, some sort of disaster seemed to have befallen them, for the dragons were splashing wildly and sometimes immersing themselves completely in the water.

After several near disastrous accidents among the keepers in their canoes, they had made the discovery that the dragons had simply intercepted a thick run of fish and had made the most of their chance to gorge. Shortly after that, the dragons had hauled themselves out onto a long, low, reedy bank and promptly gone to sleep. By the time the keepers caught up with them there had still been plenty of daylight left. They could have travelled farther upstream, but the sleeping dragons refused to be prodded along. Their keepers had had little choice save to pull their small boats up into the shallows and stop for the rest of the day.

Skymaw had plainly got her share of the fish. Her belly bulged with it, and her somnolence was that of a sated predator. She had not wanted to be bothered by cleaning and grooming. Not only had she refused to awaken, she had growled in her sleep, baring teeth that looked longer and sharper for the fresh blood on her muzzle.

Fente was the only dragon social enough to tell them about it. She was very excited and insisted on telling the tale over and over as Tats groomed her. She made the process more exciting for him as she became caught up in her bragging, and acted out how she had darted in her head, seized a huge fish and broke his spine with a single snap. ‘And I ate him, gulping him down whole. Now you see that I am a dragon to reckon with, not a penned cow to be fattened with bad meat. I can kill. I have killed a riverpig, and I have eaten a hundred fish of my own catching. Now you see that I am a dragon, and I do not need to be kept by any human!’