They seem unlikely to make it, but if they do, the Rain Wilds will have a new source of riches. Killing two birds with one stone, they encourage the most malformed of their youths to become dragon keepers, and to lead an expedition to the elderling city. They long to go there, and the Rain Wilders are only too happy to encourage them to leave, but the dragons cannot fend for themselves. Seeing the state they are in, and hearing of a possible mate unearthed under the ice in the frozen north, Tintaglia abandons the new dragons, leaving them as a burden on the Rain Wild Traders.īut the dragons have a memory of another elderling city, where they believe things will be better. The ones that live are weak, small, and unable to fly. They were too old, they cocooned at the wrong time of year, they did not have the help of dragons and elderlings as they would have in years gone by. The dragons that hatch from the cocoons are as malformed as Thymara. With her clawed hands and scaled skin, you might think she was well-adapted to her acidic, tree-living lifestyle, but most Rain Wilders don’t see it that way. Thymara should have been exposed at birth, but her father spared her.
The most mutated children are quietly exposed at birth, in the knowledge that their ‘defects’ will only increase as they grow older, that their lives will almost certainly be short anyway, and that they would be forbidden to breed if they reached adulthood. The environment has also warped its inhabitants, causing odd growths, mutation, and a low life expectancy. They build their cities amongst the trees, as the water from the Rain Wild River is so corrosive at certain times of the year that it will eat through practically anything except wizard wood (and, one presumes, the trees in which they build their cities). Rain Wilders live in an environment of swamp, magic, and acid.
Although told from a variety of different viewpoints, the two central storylines follow Thymara (presumably the ‘Dragon Keeper’ of the title) and Alise. This novel concerns how the people of the Rain Wilds and Bingtown will deal with their new responsibility, their guilt, and their greed. Now the dragons are due to emerge from their cocoons. In exchange for protecting their cities, the traders made a deal with the dragon, Tintaglia, to help make a way for the serpents up the river.
They made their yearly migrations without knowing why, only a few retaining any memory of being dragons, and unable to navigate the Rain Wild River to their cocooning grounds. But the serpents had been too long in their larval stage. On hatching she was desolate to find herself alone in the world, and set out to locate and save any remaining sea serpents, with the aim of reviving her race. They took the cocoons of the dragons for ‘logs’ of the strange and magical wizard wood, which they used to build their Liveships, discarding any withered dragon hatchlings they found in the process.īut one dragon survived the centuries, and was saved by the young Bingtown trader girl, Marta. A few precious dragon cocoons had been hidden in the cities, and were unearthed, hundreds of years later by the Rain Wild Traders as they looted the deserted elderling cities. The cities of the elderlings who had tended and served the dragons were abandoned and lost in landslides. The accompanying earthquakes changed the shape of the landscape and the flow of the river, making it impossible for the sea serpents that form the larval stage of the dragon lifecycle to reach their cocooning and hatching grounds. Plot: The story follows a number of characters as they deal with the personal and wider implications of the return of dragons to the already rich and politically complex world of the Rain Wilds and the down-river trading hub of Bingtown.ĭragons have a complex life-cycle which was almost irrevocably disrupted by an ancient volcanic eruption. Price: £8.99 (RRP), used prices on Amazon Market Place start from 98p at time of posting
Robin hobb dragon keeper series series#
Series/Standalone: Series – The Rain Wild Chronicles (same world as the Farseer, Liveship, and Tawny Man trilogies)
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