"Over_9780307446138_oeb_c03_r1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Jeffrey Overstreet - Cynderes Midnight)
3
RESCUE ON BALDRIDGE HILL
It’s getting darker.” The boy peered from beneath the broad leaves of a shield fern. “Are you watching this,’Ralia?”
He always listened, just in case she might answer him.
It was a chilly evening in the Cragavar’s southernmost fringe, and halfway up an overgrown incline the ale boy watched a predator with yellow eyes and a crocodile grin dip arrows into poison and laugh quietly to herself.
The boy had been searching for the Keeper’s tracks, just as Auralia had instructed him before her sudden farewell many months ago. The trail of that elusive creature had led him back into House Abascar’s fiery collapse and all about the surrounding region. He had never caught up with the Keeper, but he had pulled hundreds from the ruins, found many more wandering distraught. He led them southward to join the assembly of displaced people hiding at the Cliffs of Barnashum, leaving them in the care of Abascar’s new king, Cal-raven.
The once-thriving Underkeep was a haunted graveyard now. Abascar’s embers were cold and signs of survivors scarce. Even the marks of beastmen, scavengers, and plunderers had vanished, first beneath blankets of red and gold, then a season of heavy snows. Spring made a timid approach, but winter rose up and drove it back, leaving the ale boy to wonder if Abascar’s fall was only one stage in some greater collapse. Perhaps the Keeper had gone away for good, leaving the Expanse to its troubles.
Still, he could not shake off that compulsion to bring rescue wherever it was needed. He traveled in a frenzied state, returning again and again to those places where wondrous and terrible things had transpired. Once, he came upon the remains of some Bel Amicans deep within the Underkeep and wondered if they might have been a rescue party arriving too late to do any good. But that was months ago now, and he was too busy to search for answers. He braced himself for horrors over every hill, around every corner, and clung to his sense of purpose.
When he discovered the prints of small, clawed toes and the mark of a heavy tail sliding along behind, he followed. A familiar despair set in when the predator’s tracks turned sharply onto a twig-littered path, following the fresh ruts of wagon wheels. Merchants, most likely, had passed through today.
“Last time I saw one of them monsters up close, you stepped outta the trees. You protected me, ’Ralia.” He pulled up the hood of the concealing cloak Auralia had draped across him on the day they first met. He touched a tight band of braided colors that kept the chill from his brow. “Abascar soldiers appeared. Remember? They shot the monster down. Right smack in the forehead.” He wiped sweat from the cracked skin of his scalp, his tousled hair but a memory after the fires of Abascar. “I could use your help right now. Folks are in trouble.”
The beastwoman returned the short arrows to a quiver strapped to her leg and laughed as if she knew he was there, as if she knew how useless his efforts had been when compared to the number of lives lost. He could not fathom the appetites that drove her. Better to die, he thought, than to be twisted into something that laughs in anticipation of bloodshed.
“If I’d taken a different path, maybe I’d have made some difference,” he muttered. “But what good are two hands, two feet, when there’s so many monsters like that running loose? I told you I’d do what I could, ’Ralia. But what we need is somebody who can wipe these creatures out of the Expanse forever.”
Behind him something cracked and splintered in the trees. The beastwoman turned, cast her bow aside, and then her jaw sagged open. Her eyes crossed, staring at the arrow newly buried in her forehead.
“Again?” The ale boy stood up, almost believing his pleas had been heard. He turned, hoping to see King Cal-raven riding in triumphant on a vawn. But he quickly ducked.
Four beastmen, like a pack of wild dogs, charged up from the deep forest below, their woodscloaks flapping like dark wings behind them. Huge and ferocious, they passed him. In a moment, they had finished the beastwoman. The smallest, a hairless creature with a hound’s muzzle, nosed the wagon’s trail, his skin drawing in the surrounding colors like a disguise. The brindled giant with the golden mane, standing upright, barked instructions. Two more, almost identical—red-brown fur, coal black manes—consulted in muffled growls. And then all four moved on hungrily in the merchants’ direction.
The silence that settled around the ale boy was somehow worse than violence. He turned and trudged down the hill, wiping his sleeve across his eyes. When he found his vawn leashed to a tree in the shadowed lee of a jutting stone, he leaned against her scaly hide, clung to her reins, and fought to catch his breath. “You’re…you’re safe.”
She trilled, relieved by his return.
“You’re not gonna like this,” he said, climbing into her saddle. “But we’re going after them.”
“Heartless, wicked beasts.” From his precarious perch on a rickety branch ladder, Krawg gestured in sign language that any predator could understand, even the precipice birds glowering down at him from the cliff edge above. “Do you know who I am? Begone with you.”
Black wings spread, bellies cherry red, the precipice birds only clucked amongst themselves, kicking frosty debris down on Krawg so that he had to look away. He bared his teeth at them, knowing the power of his crooked snarl to repulse. “We’re House Abascar,” he coughed, spittle black with grit. “These cliffs don’t belong to you anymore. We’re not carnage nor carrion. Since you don’t lay any eggs good for eatin’, I’d like to skewer you and leave you for the howlers.”
Unruffled, the birds embraced the sunset as if they could gather heat from its wintry beams before their evening flight north and west to their nests in the Cragavar forest.
Clinging to the sheer face of the wall, Krawg turned his gaze to look across that vast descending stairway of stone, the tiers of the Cliffs of Barnashum, where Abascar survivors collected leaves, seeds, and berries. Harvest packs on their shoulders, they moved about like sipperbugs searching for moisture after a desert rain. Far, far below some picked through the dead scrubweed and huskerbrambles that blanketed the plains from the base of the cliffs to the southern edge of the forest.
Krawg had become a defender of this place. Here on the edge of the known world, the remnant of Abascar had dug in to survive the long winter. Even hungry birds could ignite his temper and cause him to claim this rise of rock for Abascar’s young king.
On the fourteenth step of his flimsy ladder, only three from the top, Krawg groped toward a hollow high in the cliff wall. He had built this ladder of crooked birch branches, binding them with reedrope, so he could investigate possibilities like this—the bristled edge of a nest. Probably a canyonhawk’s.
“Ballyworms!” came a shrill voice from the narrow ledge below. “Lookit that, Krawg!”
Krawg sighed. “If you interrupt me again, Warney, you’ll pay for it. I’m gonna take a bad step and crush you when I fall. We’re s’posed to be workin’. Not gazin’ at sunsets.”
“No. It’s not the sun I’m seein’, Krawg. I’m lookin’ at that bare hill in the woods. Abascar’s got visitors comin’. Haulin’ a couple of wagons. Merchants, likely.”
Krawg lifted his right foot, scraped the tip of his leather slipper along the wall to toe a rough edge and test his weight. Holding fast to the ladder with his left hand, he spidered the fingers of his right hand along the rockface until he gripped an edge. He glanced up at the sky beyond the precipice birds, worried that the mother hawk would return and find him splayed there like a wasp.
“Lookit, Krawg. By the bottomless belly of Wenjee, those merchants have climbed right up into plain view. Why would they do that? Don’t they know that beastmen might be prowlin’ about? Smart as a pair of boots, they are.”
“Baldridge Hill?” Krawg snorted. “Merchants are strange folk. Slept in a patch of madweed, prob’ly, and lost all sense. Now, hush and let me work. I’m reachin’ for the day’s best catch.”
“If you don’t look now, you’ll miss it, Krawg. Sun’s goin’ down.”
Indeed, the shadowtide had engulfed the cliff’s lower tiers, rising to Krawg’s knees. He lifted his left foot from the ladder and dug his toe into a rocky notch. As he let the ladder go, it wobbled, spun on one of its crooked wooden feet, and clattered to the ground. Krawg laughed, clinging to the rockface.
He laughed because a year ago he would not have been able to climb a ladder, much less make his way along a cliff. He had been feeble, worn out by the hard life of exile among House Abascar’s Gatherers.
After Abascar’s collapse, autumn had seen the assembling of survivors in the Blackstone Caves within the Barnashum Cliffs. As winter’s first waves dealt harshly with the traumatized gathering, Krawg had grown confident and strong. Abascar’s new king had given him responsibility because of his experience in finding food. He worked with others every day to harvest stores that would feed them through the worsening freeze. Without the Gatherers the remnant of Abascar might not survive. While those accustomed to comfort and warmth nursed their wounds in the labyrinth of caves, Gatherers flourished, already toughened by hardships.
The people needed him. It was a joy Krawg did not deserve, and it filled him with a resolve to please them.
He heard Warney scratch at the wall-winding vines on the cliff face. Thick-skinned wintergrapes tumbled onto blankets spread along the ridge. But Warney was easily distracted. “I see the merchants, Krawg. One’s tendin’ to his vawns, and another’s wavin’ at…at two children He’s chasin’ them back into the wagon.”
“Warney, we’re losin’ light. Rake some more grapes.”
“He’s chasin’ them into the wagon.”
“And don’t talk to me about children.”
“Mercy, Krawg! That merchant’s wavin’ some kind of flag. Maybe we should wave back.”
Krawg pressed his forehead against the stone. “Here’s a plan for you, Warney. You wave back, and I’ll throw you off this ledge! Has the cold frozen your potato?”
“They must be awful hungry for trade. Or they wouldn’t bring wagons this far south.”
“And what’ll we feed them, Warney? We fill our own bowls with stews made outta weeds. And besides, King Cal-raven will never bargain with merchants so close to the hideaways. Nobody can know where we go in and out. We’re long-ears hunkered in a warren, and someday the foxes will snoop us out.”
“So you’re just gonna ignore them?”
“Cal-raven has watchers in the trees, remember? They’ll look out for the merchants.” But now Krawg was curious. He glanced over his shoulder. Dusk engulfed Baldridge Hill, and he couldn’t see the merchants’ wagons.
But he could see the low sun—a bright eye staring through the purple miasma that polluted the western sky over the Cent Regus wasteland. He felt exposed, as if the sun were judging him for plotting to take an egg from this nest. “This ain’t thieving,” he muttered. “Those days are over. I’ve got my pardon.” Darkness rose to his shoulders. He would grab that nest with what light he had left.
“Oh, Krawg. It’s just gone worse.”
“It’ll go even worser, Warney, when I break these eggs on your empty head!” Krawg leaned, reached, clasped the prickly nest. “Got it!” He walked his fingers up over the edge, felt for the shells.
Something sharp pinched his thumb. He drew back, then reached in again and closed his hand around a bundle of feathers. “A baby,” he said as if in a game of Blindfold. “A baby bird in winter!”
“Fire!” Warney whispered. “The merchant wagon! Krawg, it’s on fire!”
Krawg chanced another glance back and almost lost his grip. In the pooling dark over Baldridge Hill, flames flowered.
“Burrow in!” It was a sharp order from Brevolo, the swordswoman appointed to scan the land for witnesses. “Burrow in! Now!”
“What’s happening?” asked Warney.
“Beastmen,” Brevolo shouted back. “Attacking merchants on Baldridge Hill. Too close.”
Krawg’s hand cradled the trembling bird. He bewildered himself with his decision—taking a baby canyonhawk from its mother. But he was compelled by the chick’s vulnerability. He wanted to protect something.
He pulled the bird to his chest as it fluttered in a frantic fit. “It’s gonna be fine. Trust me. I’ve been taken from my home too. But by my crackin’ knees, know this—I’ll make you safe.” He held the chick above night’s rising tide into the light. It thrust out its puff of a head. It blinked its eyes as if for the first time. He could see that it was not a canyonhawk at all, but an owl.
“Oh, no, Krawg. The merchants, they’re—”
“Didn’t you hear the woman? Burrow in, you rangy crook!”
“You’re gonna ignore what’s happening?” Warney was shrieking hysterically.
“What makes you think you’d fare better than merchants against those beastmen?”
“What if it was ’Ralia in that burning wagon?”
“Then Auralia would be dead, Warney. Auralia is dead.”
Brevolo gave the final order for all harvesters to retreat into the Blackstone Caves. What happened next—a flurry of noise as Abascar’s survivors scrambled into concealed tunnels, and then silence—left Krawg choking on a hard fact. With this little feathered life in one hand, and the other clinging to a tenuous edge on the cliff wall, he was stuck. The ladder lay flat on the ledge below.
“Warney? Put the ladder up.”
There was no reply.
“Warney? Brevolo?”
Krawg’s appeal was answered by a breath of wind, the first pulse of the night’s hard freeze. His bones began to ache in dread. He might not survive a night in the open. And his weakening fingers could not hold him up much longer.
“Don’t you worry,” he told the bird.
He thought of another risk he had taken, gathering a life into his hands without any sense of the future. For almost sixteen years he had counted that his finest decision. And then House Abascar had swallowed her.
Somewhere above, he heard the screech of the mother owl signaling her approach.
“Well, just saw me in two with a tree branch,” he muttered.
As the ale boy climbed the brambled slope, smoke erupted from the top of Baldridge Hill. Gorrels fled past, seeking refuge in the forest. The boy pressed on, faster, braver.
Emerging from the bushes, he heard the beastmen gnarring at one another. He could see their hunched, hulking shapes leaping in and out of the smokestorm, probably trying to salvage treasure. They did not see him. A tree of darkness grew above the flames, and when the smoke caught in the crisscrossing winds, that tree sprouted billowing branches.
Hurrying toward the burning wagons, he felt a pulse in his forehead. The scar. The mark he had worn since that night when Northchildren cast a strange, protective covering over him in his burning crib. He felt a prickling in his skin. Emboldened, he strode to a curtain of flame and parted it with his hands. He climbed into one of the wagons.
Under the burning canvas canopy, among stacks of sparking and blackening crates, a small boy sat hunched with arms wrapped protectively around an even smaller girl, who lay limp in his arms. The boy did not look up. He stared through the surrounding fires, wild-eyed, listening to the predators’ voices, which sounded like saws grinding deep into old wood.
The ale boy did not want to see the beastmen. Nor did he want to see the parents of these children fighting for their lives. And he certainly could not let the children stay here while all the cargo they had gathered through so many seasons in the cold and the wet exploded into flame and ash.
He reached forward and tapped the boy on the shoulder. The boy looked up at him, incredulous. “Follow me,” he said. “I’m not a beastman.” The flames lashed at his back but did not catch his cloak or his cap.
Everything wavered, illusory, as the wagon’s canvas cover was transformed into curtains of flame. The ale boy knew he must be a fearsome sight. “What’s your name?” he asked.
“Wynn.”
“Wynn, follow me. Or they’ll eat the girl for dessert.”
The firestorm swallowed the wagon, howling, and the wheels splintered with loud cracks. But the ale boy did not look back, diving into the night’s deep tide with the girl slung over his shoulder and her brother running behind them.
“Mummy,” he heard the boy whisper. “Pa. Mummy. Pa.”
Down in the maze of dead huskerbrambles, they burrowed into a patch of frosted boughs. In the center they found the ancient trunk of a fallen tree overrun with weeds. The ale boy laid the girl alongside it and wiped soot from her brow. “She’ll live.” He pulled back his hood. “You hurt?”
Wynn looked at him with such wild bewilderment that the ale boy wished for a mirror. He was something from an oven. His clothes glittered with sparks. And while his voice was still as quiet as it had ever been, his skin had changed, red as sunburn, tough and cracked like a roasted potato. Wynn’s eyes flickered, reflecting a tongue of flame. The ale boy pulled off his cap and found a flame like a candle’s flare wavering on the crown.
“How come you don’t burn?”
The ale boy puffed out the light, and brushed sparks from his clothes until it was dark. “What’s your sister’s name?”
“Cortie. My sister. She…she worked so hard. We both worked so hard. And now it’s all burning. And Mummy and Pa—”
“Listen closely, Wynn. We’ll cry for them in a little while. All of us. They’re gone. I wanted to save them. But I…I’m not big enough to fight beastmen.” The ale boy felt that familiar bitterness rising in his throat, the resentment of insufficiency. “Your parents, they’re not hurting. Not anymore. Northchildren are gentle. They’ll be kind. I’ve seen them.”
“Northchildren?” Wynn scowled. “Northchildren aren’t actual, are they? Pa says they’re just spooks from stories.”
“They gave me this gift. And they’ve helped others too. I’ve seen them.”
“Are you the one they call Rescue?” Wynn shuddered. “They say the Keeper walks beside you. They say you saved all kinds of folks from the Abascar fires.”
“Rescue?” The ale boy looked up. “I’m the ale boy. That’s what folks call me. And if the Keeper is walking beside me, well, tell me when you see it.”
Wynn’s eyes filled with further questions. But there was a sound in the bushes nearby, and the ale boy held out his hands with a clear message—Be quiet. Be still. Then he crawled back through the thorns.
One of the beastmen came stalking through the huskerbrambles. The ale boy heard him huffing and puffing. The creature did not need to bring a torch. He could see in the dark. Peering through the branches, the ale boy studied him, darker than dusk, a giant draped in a woodscloak, spiked club in hand. The ale boy crawled further on, winding his way between the bursts of dead branches, avoiding the monster’s gaze. But when he looked back again, the beastman was just a few paces from the children’s patch.
The ale boy sprang up and feigned a startled cry. The beastman turned, advancing without hesitation. He brandished the club and showed his teeth. The boy backed into a hedge of thorns. “Northchildren,” he whispered. “I’m ready.”
The beastman did not strike. Instead, the creature sniffed the air as if sensing something invisible between them. He set down the club, reached forward with massive hands and grasped the ale boy’s shoulders. Lifting him up, the beastman drew him up close to his leathery, pockmarked visage. He did not meet the boy’s gaze, but stared at something just above it. Panting like a rabbit in the eagle’s talons, the boy squirmed.
“O-raya?” The beastman’s question caught the boy by surprise. Holding him firmly with his left hand, the beastman reached up, pushed off the ale boy’s hood, and hooked the colored headband with a shiny black claw to draw it off his head. He held it up to the fading light as if it were a treasure and announced, “rrO-raya!”
“Auralia?” The boy nodded. “Yes. Auralia. She made that. I found it. You like it? You can have it! There’s much more where that came from.”
He stared into the beastman’s face, discerning only the faintest details in the frame of the shaggy mane.
“O-raya!” the beastman declared, and his breath was so foul that the ale boy sneezed in his face. The beastman dropped him and growled.
From the top of the hill came a sonorous bellow. The ale boy’s captor turned. Clearly disgruntled, he folded Auralia’s colored band into his massive hand, snatched the club, and with a grumble that sounded like regret, bounded away, back up through the huskerbrambles, toward the smoke at the hill’s crest.
Wynn crawled to the edge of the thicket. “Why didn’t he kill you?”
Stunned, the ale boy touched his exposed forehead and crawled back into the bramble. “Let’s get Cortie and make a run for the trees. Now. Before he changes his mind.”
He gathered the girl into his arms. She coughed, said “Papa,” but did not wake. He laid her head on his shoulder and rose.
By the time they stood in the forest, anger was darkening Wynn’s voice. “Where will we go, Rescue? What do we do now?”
“I’ll take you to Abascar. Quickly. Before that beastman changes his mind.”
“Abascar? But there’s nothing there. Abascar’s collapsed!”
“House Abascar’s not a place,” said the ale boy. “House Abascar’s just people. They’re hiding not far from here.”
“I don’t understand. Why didn’t that beastman tear you to pieces?”
“Auralia saved me. Again.” A blurred memory stirred—the silhouette of a broad-shouldered monster lumbering up the long corridor into the chambers where Auralia worked. Mystified by the creature’s attraction to her colors, the girl had let him bask in their illumination.
“Did you know Auralia?” Wynn blinked. “We knew her too. Where is she?”
“I used to ask as many questions as you,” the ale boy sighed. “Learning the answers didn’t make things much better.”
Something shifted in the trees.
“Beastman!”
“No, Wynn. Hush. It’s not a beastman.”
Wynn gasped. “The Keeper?”
“Didn’t you hear me?” The ale boy almost shouted. “The Keeper is gone. That’s just my vawn, Rumpa. She wouldn’t come out of the trees when she smelled the smoke. It reminds her too much of the Abascar fires. But she’ll carry us to King Cal-raven. He’ll help you.”
Wynn quieted, following as the ale boy approached the timid vawn. The farther they moved into the trees, the more it felt as if a blanket had been cast over them, and all sounds of the dangerous world beyond were erased.
The large, cautious lizard walked out of hiding on her sturdy, clawed hind feet and lowered her gooselike head to the ale boy, muttering and swishing her scaly tail.
“Will you stay with us?” whispered Wynn as the ale boy lifted Cortie to sit at the base of the vawn’s neck. “When we get to Abascar’s gate?”
The ale boy did not answer.
“I’m tired,” said Wynn, his voice fading.
The ale boy whispered into Rumpa’s ear and stroked her yellow neck.
“Are you one of those people who can speak the animals’ language?” Wynn asked.
“I’m not a wildspeaker. But I know a man who is. He visited me at the caves by Deep Lake. I told him all about Auralia, and he was so glad about what I told him that he gave me this vawn, Rumpa, and commanded her to obey me.” He climbed up behind Wynn and took the vawn’s reins. “Go,” he shouted.
Rumpa sighed, abruptly dropped to her knees, and began to snuffle about in the dirt for rockbeetles.
“Are you sure she obeys you?” Wynn was unimpressed.
“She gets a little confused, that’s all. Rumpa, go!” The ale boy dug in his heels, and the vawn lurched to her feet. “You should have seen what happened last time I told her to put me down.”
Rumpa strode away in a steady rhythm, and her trembling subsided.
“They almost sold us once, Mummy and Pa.” Wynn confessed this quietly, perhaps to Cortie, perhaps to the ale boy. Perhaps to himself. “They were gonna trade us to Bel Amican Seers. But then they didn’t. They packed up their things, real fastlike. We rode away. We were hungry. But we were together.” He embraced Cortie tight.
The ale boy felt his resistance failing. Emotion swelled in his throat, even though he could not fathom what the boy was feeling.
“Can I cry now?” Wynn whispered.
The ale boy patted him on the shoulder. “Of course,” he said, choking. “I’ll cry with you.”
Krawg cringed as the angry mother owl shrieked nearby. The furious bird had retreated after she’d swiped deep scratches into the back of his bald head. He clung to the wall, his grip failing bit by bit. Below him, silence. The laborers had retreated into the caves long ago.
He was left to weigh his options. To jump, hear his feeble knees snap, and lose the baby owl. Or to keep holding and hoping.
He thought back over his life and how this ridiculous end seemed inevitable. “Stealing,” he muttered bitterly. “A thief to the end.” He held the owl to his chest. “I should have learned by now. I meant to change, you know. But I’m weak. Now I’m out of second chances.”
Krawg heard footsteps. Footsteps along the ledge below him.
Beastmen.
Before Krawg could let go of his remaining hopes, he heard the Late Evening verse of House Abascar being sung. He began to sing along.
The singer stopped, apparently surprised. Krawg felt a ripple of heat move through the stone under his hand. And then the stone shifted. Beneath his toes, the thin lip expanded until he could stand flatfooted. He released his grip as tremors shook the wall. The change continued. In the faint moonlight he saw rugged steps emerging from the cliff wall, an easy path for him to follow down to where a hooded figure waited.
“You owe me,” said the shadow. Cal-raven, king of Abascar, stonemaster, removed his hands from the wall.
“Thank you, master!” Krawg fell to his knees, more of a baffled collapse than a gesture of servitude. “I’ll do anything you ask.”
“Oh, I wasn’t serious.” The king walked a few paces but turned back as Krawg got to his feet. “Then again, there is something you can do.”
“Anything, my king.”
“Be our storyteller tonight. Remind the people of how you found Auralia and what she grew to become. They need her now.”
“I’ll tell the story in such detail it’ll be as if she’s standin’ in the middle of our circle. But, well, not in the bonfire, of course.”
“Just tell the story. It’ll do its work.” The king smiled, and Krawg, forgetting he had already done so, dropped again to his knees.
“Let’s burrow in and get something to eat,” he whispered to the owl. “We’re in the care of the king now.”
3
RESCUE ON BALDRIDGE HILL
It’s getting darker.” The boy peered from beneath the broad leaves of a shield fern. “Are you watching this,’Ralia?”
He always listened, just in case she might answer him.
It was a chilly evening in the Cragavar’s southernmost fringe, and halfway up an overgrown incline the ale boy watched a predator with yellow eyes and a crocodile grin dip arrows into poison and laugh quietly to herself.
The boy had been searching for the Keeper’s tracks, just as Auralia had instructed him before her sudden farewell many months ago. The trail of that elusive creature had led him back into House Abascar’s fiery collapse and all about the surrounding region. He had never caught up with the Keeper, but he had pulled hundreds from the ruins, found many more wandering distraught. He led them southward to join the assembly of displaced people hiding at the Cliffs of Barnashum, leaving them in the care of Abascar’s new king, Cal-raven.
The once-thriving Underkeep was a haunted graveyard now. Abascar’s embers were cold and signs of survivors scarce. Even the marks of beastmen, scavengers, and plunderers had vanished, first beneath blankets of red and gold, then a season of heavy snows. Spring made a timid approach, but winter rose up and drove it back, leaving the ale boy to wonder if Abascar’s fall was only one stage in some greater collapse. Perhaps the Keeper had gone away for good, leaving the Expanse to its troubles.
Still, he could not shake off that compulsion to bring rescue wherever it was needed. He traveled in a frenzied state, returning again and again to those places where wondrous and terrible things had transpired. Once, he came upon the remains of some Bel Amicans deep within the Underkeep and wondered if they might have been a rescue party arriving too late to do any good. But that was months ago now, and he was too busy to search for answers. He braced himself for horrors over every hill, around every corner, and clung to his sense of purpose.
When he discovered the prints of small, clawed toes and the mark of a heavy tail sliding along behind, he followed. A familiar despair set in when the predator’s tracks turned sharply onto a twig-littered path, following the fresh ruts of wagon wheels. Merchants, most likely, had passed through today.
“Last time I saw one of them monsters up close, you stepped outta the trees. You protected me, ’Ralia.” He pulled up the hood of the concealing cloak Auralia had draped across him on the day they first met. He touched a tight band of braided colors that kept the chill from his brow. “Abascar soldiers appeared. Remember? They shot the monster down. Right smack in the forehead.” He wiped sweat from the cracked skin of his scalp, his tousled hair but a memory after the fires of Abascar. “I could use your help right now. Folks are in trouble.”
The beastwoman returned the short arrows to a quiver strapped to her leg and laughed as if she knew he was there, as if she knew how useless his efforts had been when compared to the number of lives lost. He could not fathom the appetites that drove her. Better to die, he thought, than to be twisted into something that laughs in anticipation of bloodshed.
“If I’d taken a different path, maybe I’d have made some difference,” he muttered. “But what good are two hands, two feet, when there’s so many monsters like that running loose? I told you I’d do what I could, ’Ralia. But what we need is somebody who can wipe these creatures out of the Expanse forever.”
Behind him something cracked and splintered in the trees. The beastwoman turned, cast her bow aside, and then her jaw sagged open. Her eyes crossed, staring at the arrow newly buried in her forehead.
“Again?” The ale boy stood up, almost believing his pleas had been heard. He turned, hoping to see King Cal-raven riding in triumphant on a vawn. But he quickly ducked.
Four beastmen, like a pack of wild dogs, charged up from the deep forest below, their woodscloaks flapping like dark wings behind them. Huge and ferocious, they passed him. In a moment, they had finished the beastwoman. The smallest, a hairless creature with a hound’s muzzle, nosed the wagon’s trail, his skin drawing in the surrounding colors like a disguise. The brindled giant with the golden mane, standing upright, barked instructions. Two more, almost identical—red-brown fur, coal black manes—consulted in muffled growls. And then all four moved on hungrily in the merchants’ direction.
The silence that settled around the ale boy was somehow worse than violence. He turned and trudged down the hill, wiping his sleeve across his eyes. When he found his vawn leashed to a tree in the shadowed lee of a jutting stone, he leaned against her scaly hide, clung to her reins, and fought to catch his breath. “You’re…you’re safe.”
She trilled, relieved by his return.
“You’re not gonna like this,” he said, climbing into her saddle. “But we’re going after them.”
“Heartless, wicked beasts.” From his precarious perch on a rickety branch ladder, Krawg gestured in sign language that any predator could understand, even the precipice birds glowering down at him from the cliff edge above. “Do you know who I am? Begone with you.”
Black wings spread, bellies cherry red, the precipice birds only clucked amongst themselves, kicking frosty debris down on Krawg so that he had to look away. He bared his teeth at them, knowing the power of his crooked snarl to repulse. “We’re House Abascar,” he coughed, spittle black with grit. “These cliffs don’t belong to you anymore. We’re not carnage nor carrion. Since you don’t lay any eggs good for eatin’, I’d like to skewer you and leave you for the howlers.”
Unruffled, the birds embraced the sunset as if they could gather heat from its wintry beams before their evening flight north and west to their nests in the Cragavar forest.
Clinging to the sheer face of the wall, Krawg turned his gaze to look across that vast descending stairway of stone, the tiers of the Cliffs of Barnashum, where Abascar survivors collected leaves, seeds, and berries. Harvest packs on their shoulders, they moved about like sipperbugs searching for moisture after a desert rain. Far, far below some picked through the dead scrubweed and huskerbrambles that blanketed the plains from the base of the cliffs to the southern edge of the forest.
Krawg had become a defender of this place. Here on the edge of the known world, the remnant of Abascar had dug in to survive the long winter. Even hungry birds could ignite his temper and cause him to claim this rise of rock for Abascar’s young king.
On the fourteenth step of his flimsy ladder, only three from the top, Krawg groped toward a hollow high in the cliff wall. He had built this ladder of crooked birch branches, binding them with reedrope, so he could investigate possibilities like this—the bristled edge of a nest. Probably a canyonhawk’s.
“Ballyworms!” came a shrill voice from the narrow ledge below. “Lookit that, Krawg!”
Krawg sighed. “If you interrupt me again, Warney, you’ll pay for it. I’m gonna take a bad step and crush you when I fall. We’re s’posed to be workin’. Not gazin’ at sunsets.”
“No. It’s not the sun I’m seein’, Krawg. I’m lookin’ at that bare hill in the woods. Abascar’s got visitors comin’. Haulin’ a couple of wagons. Merchants, likely.”
Krawg lifted his right foot, scraped the tip of his leather slipper along the wall to toe a rough edge and test his weight. Holding fast to the ladder with his left hand, he spidered the fingers of his right hand along the rockface until he gripped an edge. He glanced up at the sky beyond the precipice birds, worried that the mother hawk would return and find him splayed there like a wasp.
“Lookit, Krawg. By the bottomless belly of Wenjee, those merchants have climbed right up into plain view. Why would they do that? Don’t they know that beastmen might be prowlin’ about? Smart as a pair of boots, they are.”
“Baldridge Hill?” Krawg snorted. “Merchants are strange folk. Slept in a patch of madweed, prob’ly, and lost all sense. Now, hush and let me work. I’m reachin’ for the day’s best catch.”
“If you don’t look now, you’ll miss it, Krawg. Sun’s goin’ down.”
Indeed, the shadowtide had engulfed the cliff’s lower tiers, rising to Krawg’s knees. He lifted his left foot from the ladder and dug his toe into a rocky notch. As he let the ladder go, it wobbled, spun on one of its crooked wooden feet, and clattered to the ground. Krawg laughed, clinging to the rockface.
He laughed because a year ago he would not have been able to climb a ladder, much less make his way along a cliff. He had been feeble, worn out by the hard life of exile among House Abascar’s Gatherers.
After Abascar’s collapse, autumn had seen the assembling of survivors in the Blackstone Caves within the Barnashum Cliffs. As winter’s first waves dealt harshly with the traumatized gathering, Krawg had grown confident and strong. Abascar’s new king had given him responsibility because of his experience in finding food. He worked with others every day to harvest stores that would feed them through the worsening freeze. Without the Gatherers the remnant of Abascar might not survive. While those accustomed to comfort and warmth nursed their wounds in the labyrinth of caves, Gatherers flourished, already toughened by hardships.
The people needed him. It was a joy Krawg did not deserve, and it filled him with a resolve to please them.
He heard Warney scratch at the wall-winding vines on the cliff face. Thick-skinned wintergrapes tumbled onto blankets spread along the ridge. But Warney was easily distracted. “I see the merchants, Krawg. One’s tendin’ to his vawns, and another’s wavin’ at…at two children He’s chasin’ them back into the wagon.”
“Warney, we’re losin’ light. Rake some more grapes.”
“He’s chasin’ them into the wagon.”
“And don’t talk to me about children.”
“Mercy, Krawg! That merchant’s wavin’ some kind of flag. Maybe we should wave back.”
Krawg pressed his forehead against the stone. “Here’s a plan for you, Warney. You wave back, and I’ll throw you off this ledge! Has the cold frozen your potato?”
“They must be awful hungry for trade. Or they wouldn’t bring wagons this far south.”
“And what’ll we feed them, Warney? We fill our own bowls with stews made outta weeds. And besides, King Cal-raven will never bargain with merchants so close to the hideaways. Nobody can know where we go in and out. We’re long-ears hunkered in a warren, and someday the foxes will snoop us out.”
“So you’re just gonna ignore them?”
“Cal-raven has watchers in the trees, remember? They’ll look out for the merchants.” But now Krawg was curious. He glanced over his shoulder. Dusk engulfed Baldridge Hill, and he couldn’t see the merchants’ wagons.
But he could see the low sun—a bright eye staring through the purple miasma that polluted the western sky over the Cent Regus wasteland. He felt exposed, as if the sun were judging him for plotting to take an egg from this nest. “This ain’t thieving,” he muttered. “Those days are over. I’ve got my pardon.” Darkness rose to his shoulders. He would grab that nest with what light he had left.
“Oh, Krawg. It’s just gone worse.”
“It’ll go even worser, Warney, when I break these eggs on your empty head!” Krawg leaned, reached, clasped the prickly nest. “Got it!” He walked his fingers up over the edge, felt for the shells.
Something sharp pinched his thumb. He drew back, then reached in again and closed his hand around a bundle of feathers. “A baby,” he said as if in a game of Blindfold. “A baby bird in winter!”
“Fire!” Warney whispered. “The merchant wagon! Krawg, it’s on fire!”
Krawg chanced another glance back and almost lost his grip. In the pooling dark over Baldridge Hill, flames flowered.
“Burrow in!” It was a sharp order from Brevolo, the swordswoman appointed to scan the land for witnesses. “Burrow in! Now!”
“What’s happening?” asked Warney.
“Beastmen,” Brevolo shouted back. “Attacking merchants on Baldridge Hill. Too close.”
Krawg’s hand cradled the trembling bird. He bewildered himself with his decision—taking a baby canyonhawk from its mother. But he was compelled by the chick’s vulnerability. He wanted to protect something.
He pulled the bird to his chest as it fluttered in a frantic fit. “It’s gonna be fine. Trust me. I’ve been taken from my home too. But by my crackin’ knees, know this—I’ll make you safe.” He held the chick above night’s rising tide into the light. It thrust out its puff of a head. It blinked its eyes as if for the first time. He could see that it was not a canyonhawk at all, but an owl.
“Oh, no, Krawg. The merchants, they’re—”
“Didn’t you hear the woman? Burrow in, you rangy crook!”
“You’re gonna ignore what’s happening?” Warney was shrieking hysterically.
“What makes you think you’d fare better than merchants against those beastmen?”
“What if it was ’Ralia in that burning wagon?”
“Then Auralia would be dead, Warney. Auralia is dead.”
Brevolo gave the final order for all harvesters to retreat into the Blackstone Caves. What happened next—a flurry of noise as Abascar’s survivors scrambled into concealed tunnels, and then silence—left Krawg choking on a hard fact. With this little feathered life in one hand, and the other clinging to a tenuous edge on the cliff wall, he was stuck. The ladder lay flat on the ledge below.
“Warney? Put the ladder up.”
There was no reply.
“Warney? Brevolo?”
Krawg’s appeal was answered by a breath of wind, the first pulse of the night’s hard freeze. His bones began to ache in dread. He might not survive a night in the open. And his weakening fingers could not hold him up much longer.
“Don’t you worry,” he told the bird.
He thought of another risk he had taken, gathering a life into his hands without any sense of the future. For almost sixteen years he had counted that his finest decision. And then House Abascar had swallowed her.
Somewhere above, he heard the screech of the mother owl signaling her approach.
“Well, just saw me in two with a tree branch,” he muttered.
As the ale boy climbed the brambled slope, smoke erupted from the top of Baldridge Hill. Gorrels fled past, seeking refuge in the forest. The boy pressed on, faster, braver.
Emerging from the bushes, he heard the beastmen gnarring at one another. He could see their hunched, hulking shapes leaping in and out of the smokestorm, probably trying to salvage treasure. They did not see him. A tree of darkness grew above the flames, and when the smoke caught in the crisscrossing winds, that tree sprouted billowing branches.
Hurrying toward the burning wagons, he felt a pulse in his forehead. The scar. The mark he had worn since that night when Northchildren cast a strange, protective covering over him in his burning crib. He felt a prickling in his skin. Emboldened, he strode to a curtain of flame and parted it with his hands. He climbed into one of the wagons.
Under the burning canvas canopy, among stacks of sparking and blackening crates, a small boy sat hunched with arms wrapped protectively around an even smaller girl, who lay limp in his arms. The boy did not look up. He stared through the surrounding fires, wild-eyed, listening to the predators’ voices, which sounded like saws grinding deep into old wood.
The ale boy did not want to see the beastmen. Nor did he want to see the parents of these children fighting for their lives. And he certainly could not let the children stay here while all the cargo they had gathered through so many seasons in the cold and the wet exploded into flame and ash.
He reached forward and tapped the boy on the shoulder. The boy looked up at him, incredulous. “Follow me,” he said. “I’m not a beastman.” The flames lashed at his back but did not catch his cloak or his cap.
Everything wavered, illusory, as the wagon’s canvas cover was transformed into curtains of flame. The ale boy knew he must be a fearsome sight. “What’s your name?” he asked.
“Wynn.”
“Wynn, follow me. Or they’ll eat the girl for dessert.”
The firestorm swallowed the wagon, howling, and the wheels splintered with loud cracks. But the ale boy did not look back, diving into the night’s deep tide with the girl slung over his shoulder and her brother running behind them.
“Mummy,” he heard the boy whisper. “Pa. Mummy. Pa.”
Down in the maze of dead huskerbrambles, they burrowed into a patch of frosted boughs. In the center they found the ancient trunk of a fallen tree overrun with weeds. The ale boy laid the girl alongside it and wiped soot from her brow. “She’ll live.” He pulled back his hood. “You hurt?”
Wynn looked at him with such wild bewilderment that the ale boy wished for a mirror. He was something from an oven. His clothes glittered with sparks. And while his voice was still as quiet as it had ever been, his skin had changed, red as sunburn, tough and cracked like a roasted potato. Wynn’s eyes flickered, reflecting a tongue of flame. The ale boy pulled off his cap and found a flame like a candle’s flare wavering on the crown.
“How come you don’t burn?”
The ale boy puffed out the light, and brushed sparks from his clothes until it was dark. “What’s your sister’s name?”
“Cortie. My sister. She…she worked so hard. We both worked so hard. And now it’s all burning. And Mummy and Pa—”
“Listen closely, Wynn. We’ll cry for them in a little while. All of us. They’re gone. I wanted to save them. But I…I’m not big enough to fight beastmen.” The ale boy felt that familiar bitterness rising in his throat, the resentment of insufficiency. “Your parents, they’re not hurting. Not anymore. Northchildren are gentle. They’ll be kind. I’ve seen them.”
“Northchildren?” Wynn scowled. “Northchildren aren’t actual, are they? Pa says they’re just spooks from stories.”
“They gave me this gift. And they’ve helped others too. I’ve seen them.”
“Are you the one they call Rescue?” Wynn shuddered. “They say the Keeper walks beside you. They say you saved all kinds of folks from the Abascar fires.”
“Rescue?” The ale boy looked up. “I’m the ale boy. That’s what folks call me. And if the Keeper is walking beside me, well, tell me when you see it.”
Wynn’s eyes filled with further questions. But there was a sound in the bushes nearby, and the ale boy held out his hands with a clear message—Be quiet. Be still. Then he crawled back through the thorns.
One of the beastmen came stalking through the huskerbrambles. The ale boy heard him huffing and puffing. The creature did not need to bring a torch. He could see in the dark. Peering through the branches, the ale boy studied him, darker than dusk, a giant draped in a woodscloak, spiked club in hand. The ale boy crawled further on, winding his way between the bursts of dead branches, avoiding the monster’s gaze. But when he looked back again, the beastman was just a few paces from the children’s patch.
The ale boy sprang up and feigned a startled cry. The beastman turned, advancing without hesitation. He brandished the club and showed his teeth. The boy backed into a hedge of thorns. “Northchildren,” he whispered. “I’m ready.”
The beastman did not strike. Instead, the creature sniffed the air as if sensing something invisible between them. He set down the club, reached forward with massive hands and grasped the ale boy’s shoulders. Lifting him up, the beastman drew him up close to his leathery, pockmarked visage. He did not meet the boy’s gaze, but stared at something just above it. Panting like a rabbit in the eagle’s talons, the boy squirmed.
“O-raya?” The beastman’s question caught the boy by surprise. Holding him firmly with his left hand, the beastman reached up, pushed off the ale boy’s hood, and hooked the colored headband with a shiny black claw to draw it off his head. He held it up to the fading light as if it were a treasure and announced, “rrO-raya!”
“Auralia?” The boy nodded. “Yes. Auralia. She made that. I found it. You like it? You can have it! There’s much more where that came from.”
He stared into the beastman’s face, discerning only the faintest details in the frame of the shaggy mane.
“O-raya!” the beastman declared, and his breath was so foul that the ale boy sneezed in his face. The beastman dropped him and growled.
From the top of the hill came a sonorous bellow. The ale boy’s captor turned. Clearly disgruntled, he folded Auralia’s colored band into his massive hand, snatched the club, and with a grumble that sounded like regret, bounded away, back up through the huskerbrambles, toward the smoke at the hill’s crest.
Wynn crawled to the edge of the thicket. “Why didn’t he kill you?”
Stunned, the ale boy touched his exposed forehead and crawled back into the bramble. “Let’s get Cortie and make a run for the trees. Now. Before he changes his mind.”
He gathered the girl into his arms. She coughed, said “Papa,” but did not wake. He laid her head on his shoulder and rose.
By the time they stood in the forest, anger was darkening Wynn’s voice. “Where will we go, Rescue? What do we do now?”
“I’ll take you to Abascar. Quickly. Before that beastman changes his mind.”
“Abascar? But there’s nothing there. Abascar’s collapsed!”
“House Abascar’s not a place,” said the ale boy. “House Abascar’s just people. They’re hiding not far from here.”
“I don’t understand. Why didn’t that beastman tear you to pieces?”
“Auralia saved me. Again.” A blurred memory stirred—the silhouette of a broad-shouldered monster lumbering up the long corridor into the chambers where Auralia worked. Mystified by the creature’s attraction to her colors, the girl had let him bask in their illumination.
“Did you know Auralia?” Wynn blinked. “We knew her too. Where is she?”
“I used to ask as many questions as you,” the ale boy sighed. “Learning the answers didn’t make things much better.”
Something shifted in the trees.
“Beastman!”
“No, Wynn. Hush. It’s not a beastman.”
Wynn gasped. “The Keeper?”
“Didn’t you hear me?” The ale boy almost shouted. “The Keeper is gone. That’s just my vawn, Rumpa. She wouldn’t come out of the trees when she smelled the smoke. It reminds her too much of the Abascar fires. But she’ll carry us to King Cal-raven. He’ll help you.”
Wynn quieted, following as the ale boy approached the timid vawn. The farther they moved into the trees, the more it felt as if a blanket had been cast over them, and all sounds of the dangerous world beyond were erased.
The large, cautious lizard walked out of hiding on her sturdy, clawed hind feet and lowered her gooselike head to the ale boy, muttering and swishing her scaly tail.
“Will you stay with us?” whispered Wynn as the ale boy lifted Cortie to sit at the base of the vawn’s neck. “When we get to Abascar’s gate?”
The ale boy did not answer.
“I’m tired,” said Wynn, his voice fading.
The ale boy whispered into Rumpa’s ear and stroked her yellow neck.
“Are you one of those people who can speak the animals’ language?” Wynn asked.
“I’m not a wildspeaker. But I know a man who is. He visited me at the caves by Deep Lake. I told him all about Auralia, and he was so glad about what I told him that he gave me this vawn, Rumpa, and commanded her to obey me.” He climbed up behind Wynn and took the vawn’s reins. “Go,” he shouted.
Rumpa sighed, abruptly dropped to her knees, and began to snuffle about in the dirt for rockbeetles.
“Are you sure she obeys you?” Wynn was unimpressed.
“She gets a little confused, that’s all. Rumpa, go!” The ale boy dug in his heels, and the vawn lurched to her feet. “You should have seen what happened last time I told her to put me down.”
Rumpa strode away in a steady rhythm, and her trembling subsided.
“They almost sold us once, Mummy and Pa.” Wynn confessed this quietly, perhaps to Cortie, perhaps to the ale boy. Perhaps to himself. “They were gonna trade us to Bel Amican Seers. But then they didn’t. They packed up their things, real fastlike. We rode away. We were hungry. But we were together.” He embraced Cortie tight.
The ale boy felt his resistance failing. Emotion swelled in his throat, even though he could not fathom what the boy was feeling.
“Can I cry now?” Wynn whispered.
The ale boy patted him on the shoulder. “Of course,” he said, choking. “I’ll cry with you.”
Krawg cringed as the angry mother owl shrieked nearby. The furious bird had retreated after she’d swiped deep scratches into the back of his bald head. He clung to the wall, his grip failing bit by bit. Below him, silence. The laborers had retreated into the caves long ago.
He was left to weigh his options. To jump, hear his feeble knees snap, and lose the baby owl. Or to keep holding and hoping.
He thought back over his life and how this ridiculous end seemed inevitable. “Stealing,” he muttered bitterly. “A thief to the end.” He held the owl to his chest. “I should have learned by now. I meant to change, you know. But I’m weak. Now I’m out of second chances.”
Krawg heard footsteps. Footsteps along the ledge below him.
Beastmen.
Before Krawg could let go of his remaining hopes, he heard the Late Evening verse of House Abascar being sung. He began to sing along.
The singer stopped, apparently surprised. Krawg felt a ripple of heat move through the stone under his hand. And then the stone shifted. Beneath his toes, the thin lip expanded until he could stand flatfooted. He released his grip as tremors shook the wall. The change continued. In the faint moonlight he saw rugged steps emerging from the cliff wall, an easy path for him to follow down to where a hooded figure waited.
“You owe me,” said the shadow. Cal-raven, king of Abascar, stonemaster, removed his hands from the wall.
“Thank you, master!” Krawg fell to his knees, more of a baffled collapse than a gesture of servitude. “I’ll do anything you ask.”
“Oh, I wasn’t serious.” The king walked a few paces but turned back as Krawg got to his feet. “Then again, there is something you can do.”
“Anything, my king.”
“Be our storyteller tonight. Remind the people of how you found Auralia and what she grew to become. They need her now.”
“I’ll tell the story in such detail it’ll be as if she’s standin’ in the middle of our circle. But, well, not in the bonfire, of course.”
“Just tell the story. It’ll do its work.” The king smiled, and Krawg, forgetting he had already done so, dropped again to his knees.
“Let’s burrow in and get something to eat,” he whispered to the owl. “We’re in the care of the king now.”
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