The opening novel of the Rain Wild Chronicles returns to the world of the Liveship Traders, following a group of misfit dragon keepers tasked with accompanying a flight of damaged and diminished dragons upriver to find the lost Elderling city of Kelsingra. The dragons, hatched from cocoons buried in the Rain Wild riverbed, are stunted and malformed, unable to fly and dependent on the keepers assigned to them. Thymara, a Rain Wild girl born with too many of the physical changes the river inflicts on its inhabitants, is the central protagonist alongside Alise Finbok, a Bingtown scholar whose expertise in Elderling lore has been the purpose of a constrained life. Dragon Keeper establishes the chronicle's central concern - the relationship between the keepers and their charges, and the question of what both must become to find Kelsingra.