The Ale Boy's Feast (16 page)

He pressed his fingertip more determinedly against the back of her hand as if he could engrave the tattoo on her skin by sheer willpower. He would not let himself think of Queen Thesera’s daughter. Cyndere lived in a different world, with different demands and responsibilities. She belonged to House Bel Amica. He had been a fool even to consider the possibility.

He closed his eyes.

“I feared,” he said determinedly, “that we would not separate ourselves from the Bel Amicans. I feared we’d never see all that we had fought for. Consider what you and I might do for these people, Brevolo.”

Our family could rise as a pillar of New Abascar
.

“And you?” he asked hesitantly. “What would you hope to find up there?”

“Room to raise an army,” she said. “The great army that you deserve to lead, Captain.”

He looked at her, half expecting to find that she was joking. But before he could see her expression clearly, she was kissing him. Then she whispered, “Forgive
me. I let myself become distracted by a liar. I feel like a fool. I’ve just been so … so helpless since …”

“I know.” He touched her first tears as if they were rare gemstones.

“I wanted to be part of something strong. But when I saw you walking with the Bel Amican royals after you spoiled the conspiracy, I woke up. And when I heard you were planning this journey, I remembered how rare it is to find a principled man. A man faithful to his friends and to his house. A man who suffers so that others will be safe. A man who is everything my father failed to be. I saw that I still have something to lose. Someone I want to protect.”

Krawg’s story went on. He spoke of the girl sewn by the magician, the girl who came to life and flew. The listeners were enthralled.

Tabor Jan looked at the glassmakers. Obrey was grinning as if the story were coming true before her eyes. But as she listened, her hands were busy. She’d taken a branch and planted it in the ground. In each rising, coiling offshoot, she had set a stick of wax, making a candlestand out of materials she’d found in the Cragavar.

What would it take to bring these artists to Abascar? To give them enough peace that they could remember how to play?

Milora was distracted—transfixed—by Krawg’s narrative. Her face seemed bruised, troubled as the old Gatherer went on. When Krawg spoke of the girl flying back into her maker’s arms, she stood, face wet with tears, and slipped away. Frits watched her go, visibly worried.

Tabor Jan did not go after her. Brevolo was asleep on his arm, and she was warm. He decided to wait awhile and quietly pulled bits of bark and insect wings from her hair.

Just as Krawg reached the part where the disgruntled young boy rebelled, breaking away from his maker and taking a group of children with him beyond the border of safety, a sound began to spread through the boughs over their heads. Rain. In this thick cover of branches, no one had noticed clouds coming down from the north.

Brevolo awoke with a start, and Tabor Jan stood. “Time for the tents, everyone. You’ll have to dream the rest of the story.” At the rising chorus of complaints,
he added, “And I’ve said it before—Krawg needs shorter stories. A few characters we like, a few we don’t, and the bad ones are beaten at the end. That would help us sleep.”

Krawg growled and groaned. “Ballyworms! I’ll never finish this story. And I want to know how it ends!”

In his tent Krawg tossed and turned.

Every time sleep took hold, he saw Cal-raven fighting a monster in a cave, Warney strung up by his ankles in trouble, and Auralia locked in a prison, waiting for rescue.

“Auralia!” he shouted. That drew the attention of Jes-hawk, who was on patrol.

“Help me,” the archer said, restraining the excited, slobbering Hagah on a leash. “Frits says Milora’s wandered off again.”

Krawg knew Jes-hawk’s deep distrust of strangers and his rage against deserters.

Jes-hawk gave him a crooked torch, and they decided to walk a wide circle around the camp, going in opposite directions. Krawg hadn’t gone far when something stopped him.

“Pssst.”

It was Obrey, hiding just out of the light, huddled at the base of a tree. “Don’t tell the soldier,” she said, “but I’m looking for Milora.”

“Oh no you’re not,” Krawg insisted. “You’re goin’ back to camp. Leave the lookin’ to me. What’s she doin’, runnin’ away again? What’s got her rotten as a winter plum?”

Obrey crawled out on all fours, cautious as a fox. “It’s her memory. Sometimes it starts coming back. It scares her.”

“Is that why she wouldn’t play?”

Obrey sighed as if she were carrying the burdens of an adult. “She says it hurts too much—makin’ things no one’s got time to see. It makes her feel … invisible.”

“I see.”

Obrey stood, brushing off her hands. “And when somebody does slow down and really look, well … they always say nice things. But then they start askin’ for stuff. Gifts and favors.”

Yes, yes, that’s how it was for Auralia
. Krawg felt trapped. He wanted to back away, wanted to lean in and ask questions.

“One woman asked her for a statue. She was a small, scowling, jealous woman, and when Milora made the sculpture, it looked just right. The woman smashed it.”

Krawg nodded, amazed.
It has to be Auralia
, he thought.

“Most of the time, though, she says that people are just waiting for her to find a man. As if that’s all that matters.” Obrey crumpled her face as if trying to imitate Milora’s expression. “Why is it that way? And who made it so?”

Those two questions, spoken in that particular tone, struck Krawg like a slap in the face. He staggered, and sparks rained down from the torch.

“There’s no man alive who deserves her,” Obrey sulked. “Nobody lets her be herself. Nobody sees her.”

Krawg remembered Milora’s confession about Cal-raven. “Surely there’s somebody.”

Obrey scowled forcefully and turned away. “If there was, I wouldn’t tell.”

Krawg looked off into the darkness. “You’re a special kinda friend, that she’d feel safe to say such stuff to you. Have you watched her make things?”

“She only makes stuff in certain … conditions.”

“Like?”

“Quiet. No interruptions. Nobody payin’ attention. Play, she says. It’s hard to do.”

“Is that why she wanders off?”

Obrey folded her arms. “You’re just tryin’ to spoil things, aren’t you? I’m going back to my tent.” She stomped away.

“I found her last time.” Gripping the torch, he moved out into the dark.

At first all he heard was the occasional unsettling creak, like a door hinge, among the branches overhead. But then an unnatural clatter, like teeth shaken in a
bowl, attracted his attention. He raised the torch and stalked through the tangled brush, cringing as his passage sent nocturnal crawlers—rabbit-sized crickets and hundred-legged serpents—scuttling and slithering through the ground cover. What he found made him forget his purpose.

Hanging from a low branch, a mobile of seven crisscrossing twigs, carefully balanced, spun slowly. Krawg’s knuckle-nut half shells hovered from strings at the end of all fourteen spokes. They fluttered on leafy wings. The shells were hung with the cavities down, and inside their concave shape hung tiny pebbles. Each winged half shell clattered like a bell.

Just below that, at the end of a blunt, eight-fingered branch, hung a scrap of twisted, textured bark. Yellow flower petals were pressed into the bark’s swirling grooves to create bright spirals and lines. At intervals along the winding yellow line, the wood was embedded with gemstones as if to mark treasure along a trail.

Krawg had no idea what it meant. But it all seemed to hum with meaning.

He reached out to take the bark from the branch. The eight fingers of the branch tightened their grip on it. Krawg scowled. He took the piece by the edge again.

The wooden fingers opened, releasing the bark. Then they lunged forward and caught Krawg’s forearm in a piercing grip.

He yelped and threw himself backward. The branch, holding him fast, broke from the trunk like an arm tearing free at the shoulder. But its clutch of sharp twigs tightened.

Krawg clawed at the wooden hand, trying to tear it free. Its sharp fingertips pierced his skin. He roared and rolled toward the smoldering torch, then waved the torn end of the attacking arm into its flame. The claws came out of his wrist, and he scrambled free, clasping his hand over the bloodied punctures.

Back at the camp, there was a commotion. Someone had heard him. Hagah began to bark.

Krawg took the torch and scanned the ground for his attacker. He did not have to find it—it came running for him, its fingers sturdy as insect legs, dragging its broken-branch body along.

He thrust with the torch as if the flame were a dagger. The aggressor reared up, twig-legs flailing, as fire engulfed its spindly wooden spine. It tumbled onto its back, and from its kicking legs came a high-pitched whine like the sizzle of a roast as something within burned into clouds black as oil smoke. Then the twigs curled inward like a dead spider’s legs. The creature crumbled into ash, leaving a stench in the air.

Krawg looked up at the vast ceiling of interlaced branches above him. And now it seemed that all of them were restless, like fighters cracking their knuckles before a riot. He began to tiptoe back toward the camp. A few steps later he gave up any concern about quiet, hurrying in leaping strides.

esylle had never ascended more difficult stairs than those that led him up Queen Thesera’s tower on this, the twentieth day since he became a wanted man.

Sought by soldiers throughout House Bel Amica’s alleys, markets, and evacuated farms, and hunted by east-riding patrols in the Cragavar forest, he took every step with a growing sense that it might be his last. The air weighed heavy as water.

But ascend he did, with a bundle of maps—diagrams of the city’s tunnel systems—rolled under his arm and the hood of a black wall-patcher’s cloak pulled up to darken his face. His mind was set. He would visit the chambers he had shared with Emeriene and their sons. Risky, yes. Probably a death walk. But if he could warn them about the next stage of the Seers’ plot, perhaps they would escape Bel Amica with their lives.

He passed a cacophonous corridor, a spring of noise fed by gossip that flowed from the sisterlies’ chambers. As Thesera’s attendants readied carts of supplies for her imminent tour of the new island colonies, he did not hear Emeriene shouting instructions—only anxious chatter about the recent tensions. With criminals on the loose, assassinations foiled, and a conspiracy narrowly averted, Bel Amica was in shock.

Someone had drawn curtains aside from the window at the corridor’s end, affording him a glimpse of the morning fog that muffled the chants of protesters
far below. Some Bel Amicans were outraged that Queen Thesera had pronounced the Seers’ potions illegal. Their refrain—“Restore Bel Amica!”—was a demand that the queen make them comfortable, not a cry for real healing. They wanted to go back to a way of life that had pleased them, ignoring any damage such comforts had caused. So they eagerly embraced any lies about the queen’s character. It was easier to slander and complain than to inconvenience themselves with the truth.

Many of these chanters had been forced into the city from their farms. Deathweed struck Bel Amican pastures and barns and disrupted trade routes every day. Herds of chumps and grazers vanished overnight. Traveling merchants failed to arrive for appointed trade.

So much dissension
, Cesylle thought.
We’ll fall quickly when the Seers unleash their final curse
.

In the neighboring spire, the Heir’s Tower, a man and a woman sang a delicate harmony. Cesylle recognized Partayn’s melodic tones. House Bel Amica had rejoiced to learn of the heir’s return from slavery. He’d been freed by the beastman that his widowed sister, Cyndere, had befriended and reformed. He’d reclaimed his prominent place.

Thinking Partayn was dead, the Seers had positioned Captain Ryllion to be Cyndere’s suitor and Bel Amica’s future king. With Partayn’s return, Cyndere was no longer heir to the throne. So the Seers had prepared a more violent endeavor, conspiring to unleash beastmen during a royal ceremony. Behind the scenes Ryllion would slay Queen Thesera, Partayn, and Cyndere. But then he would appear before the crowd and slaughter the rampaging beastmen in full view, thus presenting himself as House Bel Amica’s savior. By merit of the people’s gratitude, the throne would be his.