“Do any ever get away completely?” Dumery asked.
Kensher admitted reluctantly, “Sometimes, yes.”
Dumery looked down across the edge of the plateau toward the forests below.
“So there are wild dragons out there?”
“Maybe. I don’t know if they survive-after all, they’ve never learned to hunt for their food, and there isn’t much game around here, and they can’t fly. Most of them probably don’t last long.”
Dumery didn’t find that very comforting. He remembered that he had come up the path through those woods alone and unprotected, without ever giving the possibility of being eaten by a wild dragon any serious thought.
Then, finally, they came to the slaughterhouse, where Dumery gawped at the tangle of huge iron chains and heavy beams, used to restrain and support dragons while their throats were cut and their blood drained.
“We cull most of them when they’re six or seven months old,” Kensher explained. “That’s where we get most of the blood. By then we know which ones we want for breeding stock, so we dispose of the rest here. If there’s any sign of illness or anemia, or if they’re unusually vicious, or if we just don’t like their looks, we weed them out then. The others we keep until they’re about four or five years old, and then they have to go, too.” He gestured at the restraints. “A healthy dragon’s about eighteen or twenty feet long by then, weighs maybe a ton, but the growth is slowing down, so it’s not worth keeping them any longer. Besides, any bigger and they get really dangerous, and we can’t handle them any more. They aren’t just bigger and stronger, either, they’re smarter. A hatchling’s no smarter than a kitten, and a yearling maybe as bright as a wolf, but by the time a dragon’s five or six years old it’s smarter than any other animal except people. A really smart one might start learning to talk when it’s seven or eight, and we can’t have that.”
“Why not?” Dumery asked, puzzled.
Kensher blinked. “Ah... because if... if it can talk, then it’s not just an animal any more, boy, and it wouldn’t be right to kill it.” He frowned. “It’s bad enough killing the breeding stock as it is.”
Dumery considered that for a moment.
How did learning to talk make a dragon a person? It was still a dragon, after all.
But he could sort of see Kensher’s point. If you could hold a conversation with something, it wasn’t just an animal any more.
But if a talking dragon shouldn’t be killed, then was it really all right to kill the immature ones? Did that mean that it would be all right to kill a human baby that hadn’t yet learned to talk? Maybe it did mean that; he had heard that sometimes girls did exactly that when they had babies they didn’t want.
Dumery decided he didn’t want to think about that just now.
But if the dragons were killed when they were still babies, too young to talk...
“How old do they have to be to lay eggs?” he asked.
“Oh, they’ll start breeding as yearlings, if we let them,” Kensher said. “We don’t, though; that’s why there are three separate cages for yearlings instead of one big one.”
“Three?”
“Well, we don’t usually get nice even numbers of male and female,” Kensher explained. “We usually have more males than females. And we don’t want them to breed until they’re about three; the young are healthier that way. So we have two cages for males and one for females.”
Dumery nodded, staring at the ironmongery.
The killing knife hung by the door, a huge saw-toothed blade the size of a broadsword, its metal polished and gleaming. The bottles used for the blood stood ranged on shelves against one wall, all of them empty and sparkling clean.
He hadn’t thought about the actual killing when he asked for an apprenticeship. He hadn’t thought about feeding almost a hundred hungry dragons every day, about raising the cattle to feed them. He hadn’t thought about breaking wings every year, or watching for fire-breathers and killing them young, or losing fingers or hands or arms in a moment’s carelessness around the livestock. There was far more to raising dragons than he had considered.
It looked like a dull, dirty, difficult, and dangerous business. It meant cruelty and killing.
Dumery didn’t like any of that.
All the same, Dumery thought, what else could he do? He had come this far; he was reluctant to throw that away. Besides, for as long as he could remember, all he had wanted out of life was magic, and he had been denied that. There was nothing else he wanted to do. Dragon-farming might not be magic, but it wassomething, anyway, and if it meant he could rub Thetheran’s nose in the dirt, then itwas what he wanted to do.
Now all he had to do was convince Kensher to let him do it.
Chapter Twenty-Six
“You know,” Dumery remarked between bites of Pancha’s baked pudding, “my father’s a wealthy man.”
“Oh?” Kensher said, not particularly interested. Kinner looked up from his plate, but said nothing.
Dumery nodded. “He’d pay well to buy me an apprenticeship, enough to cover all the costs with some left over.”
Kensher shook his head. “No apprenticeship,” he said. “I told you that. We have plenty of money as it is, and if we need more we just raise our prices; we don’t need your father’s gold.” He scooped up another heaping spoonful.
Dumery looked down to hide his annoyance. He had thought he had a chance, that he would at least be able to put up an argument, but how could he counter that flat refusal?
He looked up again and glanced down the dinner table, taking in all the faces.
Most of them, he knew, didn’t understand Ethsharitic, so they had no idea what he and Kensher had just said. For all Dumery could tell, most of them might not even know that hewanted an apprenticeship.
And did all of them want to stay here and learn the family business? Maybe he could replace one, somehow.
He caught a glimpse of Wuller of Srigmor, the shepherd who had married Seldis of Aldagmor, the eldest granddaughter.That was a possibility-Wuller had married into the family, and there were still five other granddaughters, presumably all unmarried and probably not spoken for yet. There were not a lot of eligible suitors up here in the mountains.
There was Shatha, and Tarissa, and Kirsha, and Shanra, and Kinthera. Shanra and Kinthera were a few years older than Dumery was-not that that really mattered.
None of them particularly appealed to him, though. Seldis was pretty-but she was already married, andmuch too old.
And besides, he didn’t really want to commit himself to marryinganyone yet.
Of course, he could lie andsay that he wanted to marry Shanra; nobody would expect him to make good on that until he was sixteen, at the earliest, by which time he ought to know all there was to know about raising dragons for their blood.
But the knowledge wouldn’t do him much good if he angered the owners of the only dragon farm in the World.
And besides, he didn’t like the idea of lying about it. It wouldn’t be proper to get an apprenticeship that way. And in all likelihood his lies wouldn’t be believed in any case; these people weren’t stupid, and they knew what he wanted, since he had foolishly admitted it already. They wouldn’t accept him into the family just to give him an apprenticeship, and they would know that was thereal reason he wanted to marry in.
Besides, there was no guarantee that Shanra or any of the others would be interested in marryinghim, now, was there?
No, marrying into the family was not going to be his answer. At least, not in and of itself.
If he could find some way to stay, then in fact he really might eventually marry one of the girls. After all, if he stayed here for a few years he wouldn’t see anyother girls, and sooner or later, he supposed, he would want to get married.