The Dragon Keeper

“Dragon keepers,” Thymara said softly. She looked away from Tats and tried to imagine what it would be like. From what she had seen of the dragons, they were not easily managed creatures. “I think it would be dangerous work. And that’s why they’re looking for orphans or people without family. So that no one complains when a dragon eats you.”



Tats squinted at her. “Seriously?”



“Well . . .”



“Thymara!” Her mother’s sharp call broke the night. “It’s getting late. Come in.”



She was startled. Her mother seldom called her name in public, let alone desired her presence. “Why?” she called down to her. Perhaps her father had come home and wanted her. She couldn’t recall that her mother had ever called her back into the house.



“Because it’s late. And I said so. Come inside.”



Tats eyes had widened. He spoke in a whisper. “I knew she didn’t like me. I’d better go, before I get you in trouble.”



“Tats, it’s nothing to do with you. I’m sure of it. You don’t have to go. She probably just has some chores for me.” In truth, she had no idea why her mother would suddenly summon her back to the house. She knew she should probably go down to where their small dwelling swung gently from the branches that supported it. But she wasn’t inclined to go. When her father wasn’t home, the little rooms seemed uncomfortably small, filled with her mother’s disapproval. A sudden obstinacy, very unlike her usual subservience to her mother, suddenly filled her. She’d go, but not right away. After all, what could her mother do? She’d never come up on the flimsy branches where Thymara and Tats now perched. Her mother disdained even the tree-ways in this part of Trehaug. The Cricket Cages, as this district of tiny homes perched high in the upper reaches of the canopy was called, relied on lightweight bridges and fine trolley lines to ferry its populace from branch to branch. Her mother hated living in such a poor section of Trehaug, but the dangling cottages were affordable. Almost everything was cheaper up here in the higher reaches of the canopy.



“Aren’t you going in?” Tats asked her quietly.



“No,” she said decisively. “Not just yet.”



“What were you thinking about, just then?”



She shrugged. “About how much everything has changed.” She looked over the branch and down at the glittering lights of Trehaug. Their gleams were scattered and broken by the massive trunks and wide-reaching branches of the rain forest. “My family wasn’t always poor. Before I was born, when my parents were first married, they lived down there. Way down there. My father was the third son of a Rain Wild Trader. His family had a share of a claim in the old buried city, and they were fairly well-to-do. But then my grandfather died. My father has two older brothers. The eldest inherited the claim, and the next son had the knowledge of how best to manage it. But there really wasn’t enough there to support three families, and my father had to strike out on his own. Sometimes I think that made my mother bitter, even before I was born. I think she’d expected to live an easy life with pretty things and have handsome children who married well.”



A strange smile twisted her face. “One little detail, and it might have been different for everyone. I think that if my father had been the eldest son and inherited, someone would have offered to marry me by now, even if I had a tail like a monkey and squeaked like a tree rat.”



A bubble of laughter burst from Tats, startling her. After a moment, she joined in.



“Would you have liked that life better than what you have now?” His question seemed genuine.



She snorted at how silly he was. “Well, I liked it better when I was younger and we weren’t as poor as we are now.”



“Poor?”



“You know. Hand to mouth. Living in the highest reaches of Trehaug where the branches are thin and the paths so narrow; we didn’t always live up here.”



“You don’t seem poor to me,” Tats protested.



“Well. We’ve been richer. That’s for sure.” Thymara’s mind roved back over her early childhood. They had lived well enough, then. “My da was a hunter back then, and a pretty good one. He did that for a time. And he hunted meat for the dragons for a while, until the Council stopped paying decent wages. That was when he decided to try being a grower.”



“A grower? Where? There’s no land you can plant in the Rain Wilds.”



“Not all food plants grow on land. That’s what he always says. Lots of the plants that we harvest for food actually grow in the canopy, in pockets of soil in the bends of the trunk, or with air roots, or as parasites on the trees.” She tried to explain it to Tats, even though the idea of it always made her weary. Instead of wandering the branches, treetops, and byways of the Rain Wilds, taking meat as he saw it and gathering whatever the canopy offered, her father began to attempt to cultivate a section of the canopy. It was an old idea, but no one had ever been able to make the forest yield predictably for any length of time. But every now and then, someone like her father would think he had it figured out. He had brought together the various food plants and tried to persuade them to grow in the locations he had chosen rather than where Sa had sown them.