The Dragon Keeper
She listened, caught between amazement and horror. She had wanted someone to recognize her studies as more than an amusement, but now that he did, she felt humiliated that he knew how serious she was about them. It suddenly seemed a foolish, no, an almost insane fixation rather than a legitimate study. Was it any better than letting oneself obsess about clamshells? What had she to do with dragons, what were they to her, really, other than an excuse not to engage with the life fate had given her? She felt first hot, then faint. How could she have ever imagined that anyone would consider her an expert on dragons? How foolish she must appear to him.
She had not turned to him nor made any reply. She heard him sigh again. “I should have known that you were not an idle dilettante, waiting for someone else to come give shape and purpose to your life. Alise, I apologize. I’ve treated you badly in this regard. My intentions were good, or so I thought them. Now I perceive that I have been only serving my own ends, and trying to fit you into a space in my life where I thought you best should go. I’ve experienced the same sort of treatment from my own family, so I know what it is to have one’s dreams trampled.”
There was so much emotion in his voice that she felt shamed by it. “Please,” she said in a small voice. “Please, don’t let it concern you. It was an idle fancy, a cobweb dream that I have built too large. I shall be fine.”
“Please, come back and sit down. And let me give it to you. I fear you will find it more bitter than sweet.”
But for now, the dictates of society directed that she must feign that she did. She would not make herself any more of a fool before him than she already had. She fixed her mind on the thought that whatever she might do or say to him now might become the humorous little tale that he told at a dinner years from now, when he had a true and appropriate wife at his side to laugh sweetly at his story of a foolish courtship before he’d met her. She schooled her face to a calm expression; she knew she could not manage to smile pleasantly yet, and she walked with a measured step back to her chair. She sat down and took up her cooling cup of tea. “Are you certain that you would not like me to freshen your tea for you?”
“Absolutely certain,” he replied brusquely. The beast. He wasn’t going to let her find refuge in polite small talk. She took a sip from her own cup to cover the flash of anger she felt toward him.
He opened the satchel. His brief introduction had focused all her attention on the satchel. Trehaug was the major city of the Rain Wilds, built high in the trees in the swampland. But below it the Rain Wild Traders had found and plundered an ancient buried Elderling city. Similar mound formations at Cassarick near the serpents’ cocooning beach had seemed to promise a similar buried treasure city. Little had been heard since the trumpeting of the discovery, but that was not unexpected or unusual. The Rain Wild Traders were a short-spoken lot, keeping their secrets close even from their Bingtown kin. Her heart sank at Hest’s news. She had dreamed of them uncovering a library or at least a trove of scrolls and art. In her dreams, she had been there, lingering after the dragon hatch, and she had imagined herself saying, “Well, I’ve studied everything I could lay my hands on from Trehaug. I can’t translate all of this, but there are words I can pick out. Give me six months, and perhaps I’ll have something for you.” They would have been dazzled by her knowledge and grateful to her. The Rain Wild Traders would have recognized her worth; a translated scroll was worth hundreds of times the value of an undeciphered one, not just in terms of knowledge but in trade appraisal. She would have stayed on in the Rain Wilds, and been valued there. So she had imagined it a hundred times in her darkened room at night. On a summer afternoon, here in the parlor, her dream faded to a child’s self-indulgent imagining. It had, she thought again, all been a dream built of vanity and cobwebs.