To build a new society, you must understand what worked (and didn’t) about the old
Dragon Haven is, at its heart, a meditation on self-determination, both on the level of the individual, and society more broadly. (In fact, both Dragon Keeper and Dragon Haven are organized around that idea, but I wanted to talk about other things last month, so we’re going to pretend that this theme is specific to this book.) When last we left our little band of adventurers, Alise had accomplished her heart’s dream, to accompany dragons in a quest for the lost dragon city of Kelsingra. She embodies the ideal of this book's thematic messaging: someone who rejects a role thrust upon her, creates her own role in the world, and thrives therein. At pivotal moments throughout this series, she will encounter people who compare the new self she has constructed to the old self she left behind. Although the comparison is complicated, in a Hobbian way, overall it turns out as well as is possible in the Rain Wilds. Alise is no longer the cultured society lady that she was at the start of the book: her hair and skin are roughened, and the man she comes to love is coarse and dirty. Nor does she grow into an elegant Elderling, the way the other dragon keepers start to do; and there are moments of tension that emerge as a result, a growing us-vs.-them sprouting between the dragon keepers and the still-humans. In every external metric, her transformation is a downward one. She loses money, power, even whatever physical charms she ever had. Her scholarship of those lost wonders is no longer valuable in a world with dragons and Elderlings returned, and Elderling cities rediscovered, with memory devices sharing their secrets with anyone and everyone who passes by. And yet, internally, she is happy and she is loved. And she has the strength of character to recognize those things as paramount. This is as close to a happy ending as you’ll get in a Hobb book.
The dragon keepers themselves have a less straightforward trajectory. They have no difficulties casting off their old life. Indeed, their old life cast them off first, by assigning them this one-way mission to take the dragons away. But people are people, and although they revel in the opportunity to build a new kind of life among themselves, nevertheless they reproduce, in microcosm, the same societal tensions that plague every society. Thymara, young and naive, basks at first in the feeling of having friends and peers, released from the strictures of a society that thinks she should have died as an infant. The other, older dragon keepers, clock immediately that this freedom from social constraint means that they can start getting down with each other. Back in the cities, people as heavily marked as them were allowed to reproduce, but here there’s no such constraint. Jerd, a young woman, sleeps around with most of the young men, before eventually settling down with Greft, the oldest and most cynical of the keepers. It’s made reasonably clear that this decision is not about personal preference or connection, but instead is because she becomes pregnant with (probably) his child. It’s not quite a life of hedonistic abandon, since the dragons keep them working pretty hard to feed and care for them, but it’s a lot more freedom than they’ve known.
But sex comes with consequences, and those consequences lay bare the problems inherent in building a new society. We’ve already talked about why they kill babies back in Trehaug. Jerd’s pregnancy and subsequent miscarriage is one of the most compelling demonstrations of how a society can get to that point. At every stage, I found myself nodding along: yes, I agree with Thymara that Jerd’s behaviour has directly resulted in her inability to pull her share of the work. Yes, I agree with Bellin that the work of caring for a sick pregnant woman falls on other people, and if you don’t have a committed partner willing to take on that task, then you are imposing it on other people who didn’t agree to be liable for it. Yes, if you die in childbirth and leave behind an infant who must be cared for, you have deprived the group of your labour, and left them with only a burden. There are reasons why casual unprotected sex outside of committed relationships is discouraged, and it’s not (only) thoughtless puritanical conservatism.
But what is the solution? So far, societies have tried constraining women’s sexual agency (Bingtown) or murdering babies (Rain Wilds). Neither seems like a good solution. These dragon keepers are not going to arrive at a better one on their own, but they have a much better understanding now of why the rules that they want to break so freely were put there in the first place.
Or rather, some of them do. Greft, Jerd’s cynical paramour, seems to think he has a much better understanding of human nature than the rest of them. In fact, his ideas about how society should be—based on power and enforced hierarchies—are fed to him by a Chalced spy who’s snuck into the expedition, and even that little detail is a beautiful example of the macrocosm rendered small into this group of explorers. Sooner or later, there is always war with Chalced, even if that war means a single Chalced spy stirring up discord in the Rain Wilders.
Hobb uses Greft’s adoption of these odious Chalced ideas as a means to have her say in a conversation that will be depressingly familiar to fantasy fans over the age of, say 25: namely, the need for “realism” in one’s worldbuilding. But in this conversation, “realism” somehow has less to do with complications of exchange rates and currency devaluation and tariffs (unless you’re Daniel Abraham or Seth Dickinson), and more to do with the insistence that it’s more “realistic” to write a world in which women should be childbearing machines and settle down with men to protect them from sexual violence perpetrated by other men. I’ve had to wade through this Disc Horse myself in my own family, multiple times. Hobb, in her turn, allows it to play out between Thymara, who’d rather not choose a man, thanks very much, and Greft, who insists that she must. She represents the argument faithfully enough, but at the very end of that conversation, she does something very satisfying. Thymara says that she will not choose any man, and walks away. And in her mind, her dragon Sintara says, Now you are thinking like a queen. There may be hope for you yet.
In other words, Hobb ends the conversation by reminding her readers, We’re in a world with DRAGONS. Who cares about your stinking “realism”? It’s an elegant way of integrating the meta-discourse into the dialogue of her book, and I enjoyed the smackdown immensely.
Oh, yes, dragons! We’ve got dragons too! And like the humans, the dragons are working on building their own society. Because unlike their forbears, who were ruthlessly individualistic, these dragons require some degree of social cohesion to survive. Not all of them have the memories that a dragon needs to be properly draconic; some seem properly half-witted. Heeby, Rapskal’s dragon, seems more like a beloved pet in Rapskal’s care than the magnificent, overpowering marvel that a true dragon should be. And yet it is Heeby who manages to recover the power of flight first. The dragon who recovers what all the rest of them aspire to is the one who is willing to let go her thoughts of what she should be, and instead make use of what she has: Rapskal’s clumsy, good-hearted, unfailing encouragement. Yes, it’s undignified to run around flapping her wings, trying and failing over and over again. Yes, OG dragons did not do anything as pathetic as failure. But—in a choice reminiscent of what we saw with the Liveship Traders—these dragons cannot have it all. They need to choose which element of dragonhood they will preserve. Sintara chooses dignity, and stays earthbound in the mud. Heeby releases dignity, and flies.
And then there is Relpda, who is more animal even than Heeby at the start of the book. She’s the one that Sedric targets when he eventually builds up the courage to steal scales and blood in his wildly foolish and politically unwise agreement to provide dragon parts for the Duke of Chalced. To Sedric, all the dragons are mere beasts. He cannot even hear their voices as anything other than animal noises. But he drinks some of Relpda’s blood, more out of curiosity than any other reason, and so forces a connection with her. She did not consent to this act of blood-sharing, but the connection is forged nonetheless, and what follows is one of the most beautiful elements of the story. In contact with Sedric’s mind, Relpda awakens. And their relationship—which is the beginning of Sedric’s redemption arc—deepens during a deadly flood of the river, in which she saves his life (multiple times). Why? he wonders. Why would she save someone who had so wronged her? And she responds, Less lonely. You make sense of the world. To me.
That thought is so enlightening. What must it be like to be a stunted, half-conscious dragon? Sintara is frustrated and furious because she knows what she should be. Relpda didn’t know even that. But she knew she was lonely. And then along comes Sedric, and wrongs her in a way that is the worst possible way a human can wrong a dragon. And yet, in his presence, she is no longer lonely.
It’s the same setup that allowed Hest to ensnare Sedric in his net: Sedric was lonely. Hest made him not lonely, even though he is unkind and cruel. But where Hest takes advantage of that power dynamic and uses it to control Sedric, Sedric does not do anything like that to Relpda. Perhaps it’s because even a half-awakening dragon is immune to mere human manipulation. Perhaps it’s because Sedric’s deeply buried but still present decency manages to struggle to the front. Whatever the reason, the two of them develop together, and forge a new kind of relationship, one built not on domination but understanding and gratitude and genuine affection. This new society will not be like the old, either the purely human, or the human-dragon partnerships of the past. OG Dragons could never. But these ones can, and must. And do.
Reference: Hobb, Robin. Dragon Haven [Harper Voyager, 2010].
CLARA COHEN lives in Scotland in a creaky old building with pipes for gas lighting still lurking under her floorboards. She is an experimental linguist by profession, and calligrapher and Islamic geometric artist by vocation. During figure skating season she does blather on a bit about figure skating. She is on Mastodon at wandering.shop/@ergative, and on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/ergative-abs.bsky.social
