The Dragon Keeper
“Good day,” she began and then halted, tongue-tied. Was that how one addressed a liveship? Should she call him “sir” or “Paragon”? Treat him as a man or a ship?
At that moment, he twisted his torso and neck to look back at her. “Good day, Alise Kincarron. I’m pleased to finally meet you.”
His eyes were a pale blue, startling in his weathered face. She could not look away from him. He had the coloring of a man but the fine grain of his wizardwood showed in his face. It looked as flexible as skin but obviously was not. She realized she was staring and looked aside. “Actually, my name is Alise Finbok,” she began, and she then wondered how he had known her maiden name at all. She pushed the unsettling thought aside and decided to be both bold and blunt. “I’m so pleased to speak with you as well. I felt shy about coming forward to meet you; I wasn’t quite sure of the protocol. Thank you so much for inviting me.”
As if he had read her thoughts, Paragon turned his head and bared his white teeth in a smile. It sent a shiver up her spine. She recalled that his original boyish face had been damaged, chopped to pieces; some said by pirates, while others believed his own crew had done it. But someone had recarved the splintered wood into the visage of a handsome if scarred young man. The youthfulness of that human face collided with her mental image of Paragon as a wise and ancient dragon. The contrast unsettled her. As a result, her words were more stiffly formal than she intended when she asked, “Of what did you wish to speak to me?”
Gossip? she wanted to ask him. Instead she replied, “Yes. That’s true. I’m something of a scholar of dragons and Elderlings, and the purpose of my journey is to see the young dragons for myself. I wish to study them. I hope to be able to interview them and ask them what ancestral memories they have of Elderlings.” She smiled, pleased with herself as she added, “I’m actually a bit surprised to discover that no one before me has thought to do this.”
“They probably have, but discovered it was a waste of time to try to speak to those wretched animals.”
“They’re no more dragons than I am,” Paragon replied carelessly. When he glanced back at her this time, his eyes were storm-cloud gray. “Haven’t you heard? They’re cripples, one and all. They were badly formed when they emerged from their cases and time has not improved them. The serpents were too long in the sea, far, far too long. And when they did finally migrate, they arrived badly nourished at the wrong time of the year. They should have come up the river in late summer, encased, and had plenty of fat and all of winter to change. Instead they were thin, tired, and old beyond counting. They arrived late and spent too short a time in their cases. More than half of them are already dead from what I hear, and the rest soon to follow. Studying them will teach you nothing about real dragons.” He was looking away from her, staring upriver. When he shook his head, his curling black hair danced with the motion. In a lower voice he added, “True dragons would scorn such creatures. Just as they would scorn me.”