"Over_9780307446138_oeb_c04_r1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Jeffrey Overstreet - Cynderes Midnight)

Cyndere’SMidnight

 

4

JORDAM’S SECRET

Someone would be punished. Jordam was sure of it. Mordafey’s tantrums always ended with a thrashing.

He listened intently while his brother ranted beside the fire. He listened for the moment when the anger would find a focus, when the gold-maned brute would choose a weapon and a target. He hoped it wouldn’t be him.

But there were other reasons to listen. Mordafey had a plan, an ambition that he kept to himself. Occasionally, in his anger, he let details slip.

Jordam suspected that his brother meant to overthrow the Cent Regus chieftain. And it could happen. Mordafey was stronger and smarter than any Cent Regus in the wild. But even Mordafey would need loyal, familiar, ferocious accomplices to help him overcome the chieftain. So Jordam obeyed. He wanted to live. He wanted to remain Mordafey’s trusted helper—indeed, to become indispensable—for the privileges he might win when his brindled brother claimed the throne.

Tonight, infuriated by mistakes made on Baldridge Hill, Mordafey fumed about how he could not trust his brothers, how they were not yet ready to make any dangerous moves. The merchants’ cargo, which would have won them greater reward from the Cent Regus chieftain, had gone up in flames. That was Jorn’s fault. Young and a glutton for chaos, the striped savage had torched the wagons too early.

Worse, the merchants’ children, whom Mordafey had hoped to sell to the chieftain as slaves, had escaped. Jordam knew that was his mistake. He was reasonably certain Mordafey had no idea how they had slipped away, and that he would not be punished for failing to apprehend them. But his scars from past failures prompted him to worry.

Mordafey was distracted, glancing about at the dark forest beyond the reach of the fireglow. Their noisy meal had an audience, observers with jealous eyes that reflected the emberlight. Slitted eyes of viscorcats, shining like gold coins. Glittering black orbs of a low-bellied, eight-legged scissorjaw. Bloodshot simian eyes of a hairless, tree-climbing rawblood. Most wildlife seemed to be slipping away from the Cragavar forest in a mysterious exodus, but these predators, perverted by the poisons of the Cent Regus lands, remained to make meals of each other or whatever they could find.

Jorn, too, was distracted by these ravenous observers. Any one of them might become a tasty second course. He seemed especially interested in the restless rawblood that swung from branch to branch above, its pink face fading in and out of the light’s reach. He leapt from the gory bones to the loot that the brothers had pulled from the wagon fire and snatched up a sharp Bel Amican spear, laughing, “Hel hel hel…”

“Forget the rawblood, Young Brother.” Goreth struggled with a faulty memory. Jordam was the only brother whose name he could sometimes recall. “Get burnstuff. For the fire.”

Jorn, glowering, tossed the spear aside and rummaged some more. He drew out a broad span of canvas and dragged it to the smoky, glowing coals.

Noticing the cloth’s bright colors, Jordam cast aside the vawn bone he had cleaned and lurched to his feet. “rrNo!” Spitting a chunk of gristle, he stepped between Jorn and the embers, firmly seizing an edge of the fabric.

Thrusting out his tusk-pronged jaw, Jorn nodded toward Jordam’s twin. “Goreth told Jorn—get burnstuff.”

“Burn branches. Not this.” Jordam yanked the fabric free of his brother’s clutches and spread it, examining its decoration. It was the sort of drape travelers would stretch across a makeshift frame for shelter. Firelight glowed dimly through it, illuminating spirals of blue, green, and purple.

As Jorn took the spear and walked bowlegged to find firewood, Jordam studied the designs as though they formed a map.

“We’ll get good payment,” said Goreth to his twin. “We’ve got enough now to go and see him, yes? Him with the Essence? Garr, what do we call him?”

“rrChieftain,” Jordam mumbled absently.

“Chieftain,” Goreth laughed. “Yes. Give him a spear, canvas, rope, saddles. Then give him stuff we took from Bel Amicans at Abascar. So many prizes. Chieftain will thank us.” He licked his nose and stood up, staring off into the trees. “Rockbeetles! Do I smell honey?”

“So many prizes,” Mordafey grumbled. “Brothers could have taken much more. But Mordafey is thirsty for Essence. Brothers must go to Skell Wra. Soon.”

Mordafey refused to ascribe the title of “chieftain” to Skell Wra. That dominant manipulator had survived for generations, sustained by perpetual absorption of the Essence, gaining power over the wills of the scattered Cent Regus people. Mordafey coveted the chieftain’s power and longevity and insisted on calling him by his name.

The oldest brother also referred to himself by name, stamping it in the minds of others like a threat. “All part of Mordafey’s plan,” he insisted, pacing on the flat surface of a massive boulder that jutted into the clearing from the crowded trees. “Four brothers take all of the Bel Amican prizes to Skell Wra. Canvas, weapons, everything. Get bigger payment in Essence. Get stronger. Better for the plan.”

Jordam could almost smell the boiling broth that would renew his strength, enhance his senses, make him even more dangerous. He licked his teeth. The more days that passed between helpings of that murky soup, the more anxious the brothers became, and the pain waves in Jordam’s head worsened.

And yet Jordam knew that Essence would only interrupt his misery. After another drink and a season of strength, he would weaken, succumbing again to pain as his intoxication subsided.

Jagged bolts of light flashed behind his eyes. Essence would numb this pain, replacing it with power. But O-raya’s colors had eased the pain too, diverting his attention by opening his eyes to new things, new pleasures. This Bel Amican canvas was not O-raya’s work, but it would serve. For now.

Jordam first encountered O-raya on the night he fell and broke his browbone.

Three years before House Abascar’s fall, Jordam had bounded through the woods under a moon-bright springtime sky, pursuing a horse and rider.

In the forest south of Deep Lake, the four brothers had ambushed a caravan of traveling entertainers. A horse escaped during the attack. From the rhythm of the run, Jordam discerned that the horse had a rider.

He got the jump on his brothers, off on all fours like a viscorcat. He liked nothing more than a chase. To run—alone—after the scent of hot blood.

The mare was fast, but this was unfamiliar wilderness. When she turned to check her pursuer’s progress, Jordam saw her terror. He howled to unsettle her. A cry like a wolf’s.

The rider, a small boy, tainted the air with salty tears. Then he suddenly let go of the horse’s mane, grasping at his side where Jordam’s throwing knife had lodged. The mare’s sudden turn threw the boy sideways, and his head thudded against a low tree branch.

Jordam pulled off the boy’s silver bracelet, slipped it on his thumb as a ring, and tore open the boy’s shoulder bag. Glowstones—the sort mined deep within Abascar’s Underkeep—spilled into his leathery palm.

The boy wheezed a name, staring skyward.

“rrOnly one name matters to you now,” Jordam laughed in the crude Cent Regus speech. “Skell Wra. Cent Regus chieftain. He’ll make you work.”

The hoofbeats grew faint. Jordam wanted the mare. But another scent teased his nostrils. Another of the weakerfolk. A girl, with berries on her breath, nearby.

He looked about for strands with which to tie the boy to the tree. But the boy was coughing blood. He would not be going anywhere. “rrSister?” Jordam asked the boy, a word in the weakerfolk speech. But his interrogation stopped there; the boy was no longer breathing.

Pulling his woodscloak around him, Jordam slipped a curved blade from his belt and crept up a steep bramble incline. He emerged on the stone shoulders of a ridge high above Deep Lake. The full moon’s face shone red on the waters that rippled up to the base of the cliff. He flattened against the ground.

Twenty paces away a young girl swung her legs over the cliff and sang, “Guard me from danger, guard me from lies, guard me from claws and from hearts that despise. Guard me from nightmares, threats to my health. Keeper, come rescue me, yes, from myself.”

That brilliant blue cloak of hers—it would make a fine prize to show his brothers.

The girl sighed, said, “Save me from House Abascar,” and stared at the moon’s reflection. Slowly she laid her head down on a folded cloth and settled into sleep.

Jordam felt her feeble breath on his whiskers when he leaned over her. He drew an imaginary line along her throat for the cut, but then he thought better of it. He would gain a greater reward if he took her as a hostage.

A sound like a wind uprooting trees turned him around in time to see a massive shadow clambering up the slope. Vast, leathery wings spread wide to blot out the sky. Eyes flared, big as bonfires. A chasm of a mouth yawned open.

Jordam whimpered in surprise and threw himself backward off the cliff.

Through cold space Jordam fell. He shattered the moon’s wavering reflection, and the shards of light found each other again above him. He sank in deep, murky water. His lungs convulsed. Slippery lakeweed tendrils grasped at his arms and legs.

When his head struck a boulder at the bottom, his browbone split down the middle. A jagged piece broke away, disappearing in the slithering bed of green. He went limp, limbs splayed, collapsing into the clutches of the weeds.

A surge pulled him free, a disturbance caused by the creature as it plunged into the lake. The current carried him far and fast. He broke the surface, pumped water from his lungs, and blinked into the cruel light of the sky’s red eye.

In the lake before him, the winged behemoth tilted its head. Fire lined the rows of teeth on that long, terrible face. And then it made a strange sound. An announcement. A verdict. The creature’s tentacle tail coiled about Jordam’s body, pulling him mightily downward. It released him into a powerful undertow, and he was carried away.

When he surfaced again, Jordam struggled to determine which way he should swim. But then his feet found purchase, and he scrambled shoreward. He fled into a cave that stretched deep beneath the cliffs, moving upward and inward. Staggering into darkness, he turned a corner and stumbled into a chamber shimmering with light.

Colors emanated from a cloth draped across a stone table in the center of the room. They burnt his eyes just as the water had burnt his lungs. He fell forward onto his hands, cowering before the strange illumination—hues of spring, summer, autumn, winter, and seasons he did not recognize.

In the glow, Jordam’s body felt heavier. His strength left him. He slumped into a corner. His hands explored the new shape of his broken browbone, and he found, as his breathing slowed and his panic lessened, that with the breakage his vision was clearer.

He lay gazing at the radiant, simmering pools on the ceiling. Fear subsided. Hunger vanished. The ache began to fade. He felt suspended in the light.

Later, while he hovered in a half sleep, Jordam heard faint footsteps pause in the chamber and then retreat. He knew, somehow, that they belonged to the girl. And as he drifted into a strange, contented dream, he discerned that the child, the colors, and the behemoth were connected, pieces in some great mystery. Inexplicably, he felt safe.

Jordam woke to hear ducks laughing and splashing on the lake. He fingered the break in his browbone. The injury had split his mind in two. Eyes open, Jordam saw that the colors remained. Eyes closed, he could see Mordafey ranting back in the brothers’ den.

Despite his desire to stay there in the glory, Jordam moved to the cave entrance. Lakewaters lapped quietly on the shore. There was no sign of the girl.

Jordam hesitated. He could take the colorful weaving with him. But he would have to explain this discovery to his brothers. That would aggravate Mordafey, who would take it straight to the chieftain in trade for Essence. He chose to leave it in the cave, where it seemed to be safe.

Besides, Jordam had no way to be sure that the lake creature was not watching him, lying in wait.

He bounded all the way back to his brothers’ den, surprised and exhilarated to find that he could run faster, see farther, now that the burdensome browbone was broken. He ran without stopping, taking a path south and west through the Cragavar forest, across open, hilly ground. Half a day later, climbing through a stony canyon to the four brothers’ hideaway, he was home.

Mordafey met him with anger, suspicion, and questions. Jordam’s lies were enough to help him escape permanent scars, at least for a while.

That was the beginning of Jordam’s visits to the girl’s mysterious caves. He would frequently creep in and watch her, hypnotized.

She extracted colors from leaves, roots, even stones. She blended dyes and painted them across bark, skins, and webbing. Her nimble hands wove a gallery of wonders. O-raya, she would call herself, scolding her own mistakes. After vowing to bring a work to completion, whatever she touched became a more vivid and dazzling version of itself. Then she would bundle the pieces she had made and venture into the woods to deliver them.

Mordafey’s suspicions increased. He soon forbade Jordam, Goreth, and Jorn to make solitary excursions. But Jordam was not going to give up his discovery. He found ways to visit her, again and again, season after season. “O-raya,” he would say to himself in her absence, running his hands over the most extravagant work of all—the cloth laid upon the broad stone table. The more he basked in the light of that particular weave, the more he felt like a different version of himself.

One day the colors were missing, and O-raya with them. The many months since then had dragged Jordam into a long, slow decline, a return to his reckless, ravenous state.

At the campfire, Jordam opened his hand, looked at the crumpled band he had torn from the boy’s head on the slope of Baldridge Hill. Hope surged within him. Perhaps O-raya was still out there. Perhaps he might find her colors again.

It unsettled him, the return of his willingness to risk punishment for a mysterious and colorful comfort. But the colors gave him something that Essence could not. The intoxication of the Cent Regus elixir could briefly satiate his appetites and slow the anxious pulse within his head. But in the luminous spectacle of O-raya’s colors, that cold, cruel grasp of appetite let go. He did not want the Essence when he took refuge there, for he found strength of another kind. He would do whatever he could to find that relief again.

Waiting for the pounding to subside, Jordam lay against the crux of a tree with two trunks—one seemed to strain against the earth’s pull with branches that clawed for a hold on the sky, the other surrendering to vines and weeds, winding serpentine along the ground.

Goreth was breaking vawn limbs at their hinges, fitting scraps of meat to the tips of cleaned branches, and roasting them over the flames. Jorn crouched on all fours and shoved his canine snout impatiently into the carcass.

“Why does Jordam eat vawn meat tonight?” Mordafey, sulking, threw debris from his rocky perch into the embers. Rushhh—ashes rose like a cloud of fireflies. In that flash, Jordam glimpsed contempt in Mordafey’s gold eyes. “Jordam didn’t kill anything today. What did he do, down there in the bushes?” Mordafey flung a dripping strand of vawn tail into Jordam’s face.

“You were killing vawns, Mordafey,” Jordam replied. “rrRunaways. I went after runaways.”

“But Jordam didn’t catch runaways.” Mordafey leapt off the stone and stalked around the firelight’s circle, passing behind Jordam. “Jordam came back with nothing. He let them go. Why? Did runaways beg? Did Jordam make some secret bargain?”

“I don’t talk with weakerfolk. I don’t like their jabber.”

“Jordam doesn’t talk with them. But he does talk like them. Doesn’t he, Goreth?” Jordam felt Mordafey’s fiery stare on the back of his head. “He barks the weakerfolk way. In his sleep. Three brothers have heard him.”

Jordam pricked his palms with his claws. How could he escape trouble if he betrayed himself in his sleep? “rrWeakerfolk in my dreams,” he argued. “I trick weakerfolk into traps. Call them with weakerfolk words. Just dreams, Mordafey.”

“Then why does Jordam cry about an Abascar girl? Why talk about secret caves? Jordam has a slave somewhere, and won’t tell Mordafey?” Mordafey leaned in, his voice like a rush of jagged stones. “Who’s O-raya?”

The question jolted Jordam to his feet. He immediately regretted this. Goreth cursed while Jorn cackled in glee, happy to watch Mordafey torment someone else.

“Found an Abascar girl called O-raya. Once. By the lake. Swam to catch her, to bring her back to brothers. rrNot fast enough. A gator got her. Gator ate the girl.” He snickered, pleased with his own embellishment. “I ate the gator.”

Jorn smacked his hands together. Murder stories amused him, the bloodier the better, so long as the blood belonged to someone else. Jordam’s tale shook his laughter loose.

Mordafey did not share Jorn’s amusement. “Cross Mordafey, Jordam, and you will meet him in a dark place.” He sealed this vow by knocking his knuckles against his broad browbone. “And you will not recognize him. He’ll be like…like…” He scowled, failing to find any appropriate comparison.

The rawblood in the trees behind them shrieked, anxious for the leftover vawn bones. Mordafey’s ears swiveled toward the sound. Circling Jordam, he grabbed the Bel Amican spear and launched it into the darkness. Something heavy fell into the bushes. A viscorcat yowled, and there was a scuffling in the dark.

“Mordafey killed the rawblood,” Mordafey hissed. “Mordafey eats the rawblood.” He hurried into the shadows to claim his prize. Jorn, thrilled, crawled after him to watch.

Goreth and Jordam exchanged a silent glance, a familiar expression of weariness. “Older Brother hates secrets,” said Goreth to his twin. “Older Brother wants everything. Takes everything.” The jagged blue scar across Goreth’s cheek wriggled wormlike. “Older Brother gets everything good.” He kicked a merchant skull with his foot.

“He doesn’t get everything good,” said Jordam.

In the shadows the viscorcat uttered a guttural threat. Mordafey replied. The viscorcat bounded away, whimpering, and left the fallen rawblood for Mordafey.

Apparently forgetting he had already made this discovery, Goreth stood up and announced, “I smell honey!” He strolled around the perimeter of the clearing in search of a hive.

From the pocket of his woodscloak, Jordam drew sharp shards of stone and glass, souvenirs from the ambush, and cast them across the canvas. He distracted himself by moving them with a long stick, aligning them with the spirals of blue in the fabric. It lacked the luminosity of the blue in O-raya’s colors, but the memory calmed him.

Mordafey emerged from the shadows, dragging his prey. Jorn scampered around him, barking, “Vawn tracks! Hel hel hel…Mordafey found vawn tracks!”

“They go north,” said Mordafey. Jordam did not like his triumphant, bloodied grin. “Jordam will prove that he did not let our prey escape. Jordam will lead the hunt. After Mordafey eats”—he cast the rawblood carcass onto the fire—“four brothers catch runaways.”

Jorn’s laughter turned to howls as Mordafey turned the lash against him, cursing him for burning the wagons too early. Jordam stared fixedly at the Bel Amican cloth. And then he smiled too. If he could find the boy, perhaps he could find O-raya…and relief.

Cyndere’SMidnight

 

4

JORDAM’S SECRET

Someone would be punished. Jordam was sure of it. Mordafey’s tantrums always ended with a thrashing.

He listened intently while his brother ranted beside the fire. He listened for the moment when the anger would find a focus, when the gold-maned brute would choose a weapon and a target. He hoped it wouldn’t be him.

But there were other reasons to listen. Mordafey had a plan, an ambition that he kept to himself. Occasionally, in his anger, he let details slip.

Jordam suspected that his brother meant to overthrow the Cent Regus chieftain. And it could happen. Mordafey was stronger and smarter than any Cent Regus in the wild. But even Mordafey would need loyal, familiar, ferocious accomplices to help him overcome the chieftain. So Jordam obeyed. He wanted to live. He wanted to remain Mordafey’s trusted helper—indeed, to become indispensable—for the privileges he might win when his brindled brother claimed the throne.

Tonight, infuriated by mistakes made on Baldridge Hill, Mordafey fumed about how he could not trust his brothers, how they were not yet ready to make any dangerous moves. The merchants’ cargo, which would have won them greater reward from the Cent Regus chieftain, had gone up in flames. That was Jorn’s fault. Young and a glutton for chaos, the striped savage had torched the wagons too early.

Worse, the merchants’ children, whom Mordafey had hoped to sell to the chieftain as slaves, had escaped. Jordam knew that was his mistake. He was reasonably certain Mordafey had no idea how they had slipped away, and that he would not be punished for failing to apprehend them. But his scars from past failures prompted him to worry.

Mordafey was distracted, glancing about at the dark forest beyond the reach of the fireglow. Their noisy meal had an audience, observers with jealous eyes that reflected the emberlight. Slitted eyes of viscorcats, shining like gold coins. Glittering black orbs of a low-bellied, eight-legged scissorjaw. Bloodshot simian eyes of a hairless, tree-climbing rawblood. Most wildlife seemed to be slipping away from the Cragavar forest in a mysterious exodus, but these predators, perverted by the poisons of the Cent Regus lands, remained to make meals of each other or whatever they could find.

Jorn, too, was distracted by these ravenous observers. Any one of them might become a tasty second course. He seemed especially interested in the restless rawblood that swung from branch to branch above, its pink face fading in and out of the light’s reach. He leapt from the gory bones to the loot that the brothers had pulled from the wagon fire and snatched up a sharp Bel Amican spear, laughing, “Hel hel hel…”

“Forget the rawblood, Young Brother.” Goreth struggled with a faulty memory. Jordam was the only brother whose name he could sometimes recall. “Get burnstuff. For the fire.”

Jorn, glowering, tossed the spear aside and rummaged some more. He drew out a broad span of canvas and dragged it to the smoky, glowing coals.

Noticing the cloth’s bright colors, Jordam cast aside the vawn bone he had cleaned and lurched to his feet. “rrNo!” Spitting a chunk of gristle, he stepped between Jorn and the embers, firmly seizing an edge of the fabric.

Thrusting out his tusk-pronged jaw, Jorn nodded toward Jordam’s twin. “Goreth told Jorn—get burnstuff.”

“Burn branches. Not this.” Jordam yanked the fabric free of his brother’s clutches and spread it, examining its decoration. It was the sort of drape travelers would stretch across a makeshift frame for shelter. Firelight glowed dimly through it, illuminating spirals of blue, green, and purple.

As Jorn took the spear and walked bowlegged to find firewood, Jordam studied the designs as though they formed a map.

“We’ll get good payment,” said Goreth to his twin. “We’ve got enough now to go and see him, yes? Him with the Essence? Garr, what do we call him?”

“rrChieftain,” Jordam mumbled absently.

“Chieftain,” Goreth laughed. “Yes. Give him a spear, canvas, rope, saddles. Then give him stuff we took from Bel Amicans at Abascar. So many prizes. Chieftain will thank us.” He licked his nose and stood up, staring off into the trees. “Rockbeetles! Do I smell honey?”

“So many prizes,” Mordafey grumbled. “Brothers could have taken much more. But Mordafey is thirsty for Essence. Brothers must go to Skell Wra. Soon.”

Mordafey refused to ascribe the title of “chieftain” to Skell Wra. That dominant manipulator had survived for generations, sustained by perpetual absorption of the Essence, gaining power over the wills of the scattered Cent Regus people. Mordafey coveted the chieftain’s power and longevity and insisted on calling him by his name.

The oldest brother also referred to himself by name, stamping it in the minds of others like a threat. “All part of Mordafey’s plan,” he insisted, pacing on the flat surface of a massive boulder that jutted into the clearing from the crowded trees. “Four brothers take all of the Bel Amican prizes to Skell Wra. Canvas, weapons, everything. Get bigger payment in Essence. Get stronger. Better for the plan.”

Jordam could almost smell the boiling broth that would renew his strength, enhance his senses, make him even more dangerous. He licked his teeth. The more days that passed between helpings of that murky soup, the more anxious the brothers became, and the pain waves in Jordam’s head worsened.

And yet Jordam knew that Essence would only interrupt his misery. After another drink and a season of strength, he would weaken, succumbing again to pain as his intoxication subsided.

Jagged bolts of light flashed behind his eyes. Essence would numb this pain, replacing it with power. But O-raya’s colors had eased the pain too, diverting his attention by opening his eyes to new things, new pleasures. This Bel Amican canvas was not O-raya’s work, but it would serve. For now.

Jordam first encountered O-raya on the night he fell and broke his browbone.

Three years before House Abascar’s fall, Jordam had bounded through the woods under a moon-bright springtime sky, pursuing a horse and rider.

In the forest south of Deep Lake, the four brothers had ambushed a caravan of traveling entertainers. A horse escaped during the attack. From the rhythm of the run, Jordam discerned that the horse had a rider.

He got the jump on his brothers, off on all fours like a viscorcat. He liked nothing more than a chase. To run—alone—after the scent of hot blood.

The mare was fast, but this was unfamiliar wilderness. When she turned to check her pursuer’s progress, Jordam saw her terror. He howled to unsettle her. A cry like a wolf’s.

The rider, a small boy, tainted the air with salty tears. Then he suddenly let go of the horse’s mane, grasping at his side where Jordam’s throwing knife had lodged. The mare’s sudden turn threw the boy sideways, and his head thudded against a low tree branch.

Jordam pulled off the boy’s silver bracelet, slipped it on his thumb as a ring, and tore open the boy’s shoulder bag. Glowstones—the sort mined deep within Abascar’s Underkeep—spilled into his leathery palm.

The boy wheezed a name, staring skyward.

“rrOnly one name matters to you now,” Jordam laughed in the crude Cent Regus speech. “Skell Wra. Cent Regus chieftain. He’ll make you work.”

The hoofbeats grew faint. Jordam wanted the mare. But another scent teased his nostrils. Another of the weakerfolk. A girl, with berries on her breath, nearby.

He looked about for strands with which to tie the boy to the tree. But the boy was coughing blood. He would not be going anywhere. “rrSister?” Jordam asked the boy, a word in the weakerfolk speech. But his interrogation stopped there; the boy was no longer breathing.

Pulling his woodscloak around him, Jordam slipped a curved blade from his belt and crept up a steep bramble incline. He emerged on the stone shoulders of a ridge high above Deep Lake. The full moon’s face shone red on the waters that rippled up to the base of the cliff. He flattened against the ground.

Twenty paces away a young girl swung her legs over the cliff and sang, “Guard me from danger, guard me from lies, guard me from claws and from hearts that despise. Guard me from nightmares, threats to my health. Keeper, come rescue me, yes, from myself.”

That brilliant blue cloak of hers—it would make a fine prize to show his brothers.

The girl sighed, said, “Save me from House Abascar,” and stared at the moon’s reflection. Slowly she laid her head down on a folded cloth and settled into sleep.

Jordam felt her feeble breath on his whiskers when he leaned over her. He drew an imaginary line along her throat for the cut, but then he thought better of it. He would gain a greater reward if he took her as a hostage.

A sound like a wind uprooting trees turned him around in time to see a massive shadow clambering up the slope. Vast, leathery wings spread wide to blot out the sky. Eyes flared, big as bonfires. A chasm of a mouth yawned open.

Jordam whimpered in surprise and threw himself backward off the cliff.

Through cold space Jordam fell. He shattered the moon’s wavering reflection, and the shards of light found each other again above him. He sank in deep, murky water. His lungs convulsed. Slippery lakeweed tendrils grasped at his arms and legs.

When his head struck a boulder at the bottom, his browbone split down the middle. A jagged piece broke away, disappearing in the slithering bed of green. He went limp, limbs splayed, collapsing into the clutches of the weeds.

A surge pulled him free, a disturbance caused by the creature as it plunged into the lake. The current carried him far and fast. He broke the surface, pumped water from his lungs, and blinked into the cruel light of the sky’s red eye.

In the lake before him, the winged behemoth tilted its head. Fire lined the rows of teeth on that long, terrible face. And then it made a strange sound. An announcement. A verdict. The creature’s tentacle tail coiled about Jordam’s body, pulling him mightily downward. It released him into a powerful undertow, and he was carried away.

When he surfaced again, Jordam struggled to determine which way he should swim. But then his feet found purchase, and he scrambled shoreward. He fled into a cave that stretched deep beneath the cliffs, moving upward and inward. Staggering into darkness, he turned a corner and stumbled into a chamber shimmering with light.

Colors emanated from a cloth draped across a stone table in the center of the room. They burnt his eyes just as the water had burnt his lungs. He fell forward onto his hands, cowering before the strange illumination—hues of spring, summer, autumn, winter, and seasons he did not recognize.

In the glow, Jordam’s body felt heavier. His strength left him. He slumped into a corner. His hands explored the new shape of his broken browbone, and he found, as his breathing slowed and his panic lessened, that with the breakage his vision was clearer.

He lay gazing at the radiant, simmering pools on the ceiling. Fear subsided. Hunger vanished. The ache began to fade. He felt suspended in the light.

Later, while he hovered in a half sleep, Jordam heard faint footsteps pause in the chamber and then retreat. He knew, somehow, that they belonged to the girl. And as he drifted into a strange, contented dream, he discerned that the child, the colors, and the behemoth were connected, pieces in some great mystery. Inexplicably, he felt safe.

Jordam woke to hear ducks laughing and splashing on the lake. He fingered the break in his browbone. The injury had split his mind in two. Eyes open, Jordam saw that the colors remained. Eyes closed, he could see Mordafey ranting back in the brothers’ den.

Despite his desire to stay there in the glory, Jordam moved to the cave entrance. Lakewaters lapped quietly on the shore. There was no sign of the girl.

Jordam hesitated. He could take the colorful weaving with him. But he would have to explain this discovery to his brothers. That would aggravate Mordafey, who would take it straight to the chieftain in trade for Essence. He chose to leave it in the cave, where it seemed to be safe.

Besides, Jordam had no way to be sure that the lake creature was not watching him, lying in wait.

He bounded all the way back to his brothers’ den, surprised and exhilarated to find that he could run faster, see farther, now that the burdensome browbone was broken. He ran without stopping, taking a path south and west through the Cragavar forest, across open, hilly ground. Half a day later, climbing through a stony canyon to the four brothers’ hideaway, he was home.

Mordafey met him with anger, suspicion, and questions. Jordam’s lies were enough to help him escape permanent scars, at least for a while.

That was the beginning of Jordam’s visits to the girl’s mysterious caves. He would frequently creep in and watch her, hypnotized.

She extracted colors from leaves, roots, even stones. She blended dyes and painted them across bark, skins, and webbing. Her nimble hands wove a gallery of wonders. O-raya, she would call herself, scolding her own mistakes. After vowing to bring a work to completion, whatever she touched became a more vivid and dazzling version of itself. Then she would bundle the pieces she had made and venture into the woods to deliver them.

Mordafey’s suspicions increased. He soon forbade Jordam, Goreth, and Jorn to make solitary excursions. But Jordam was not going to give up his discovery. He found ways to visit her, again and again, season after season. “O-raya,” he would say to himself in her absence, running his hands over the most extravagant work of all—the cloth laid upon the broad stone table. The more he basked in the light of that particular weave, the more he felt like a different version of himself.

One day the colors were missing, and O-raya with them. The many months since then had dragged Jordam into a long, slow decline, a return to his reckless, ravenous state.

At the campfire, Jordam opened his hand, looked at the crumpled band he had torn from the boy’s head on the slope of Baldridge Hill. Hope surged within him. Perhaps O-raya was still out there. Perhaps he might find her colors again.

It unsettled him, the return of his willingness to risk punishment for a mysterious and colorful comfort. But the colors gave him something that Essence could not. The intoxication of the Cent Regus elixir could briefly satiate his appetites and slow the anxious pulse within his head. But in the luminous spectacle of O-raya’s colors, that cold, cruel grasp of appetite let go. He did not want the Essence when he took refuge there, for he found strength of another kind. He would do whatever he could to find that relief again.

Waiting for the pounding to subside, Jordam lay against the crux of a tree with two trunks—one seemed to strain against the earth’s pull with branches that clawed for a hold on the sky, the other surrendering to vines and weeds, winding serpentine along the ground.

Goreth was breaking vawn limbs at their hinges, fitting scraps of meat to the tips of cleaned branches, and roasting them over the flames. Jorn crouched on all fours and shoved his canine snout impatiently into the carcass.

“Why does Jordam eat vawn meat tonight?” Mordafey, sulking, threw debris from his rocky perch into the embers. Rushhh—ashes rose like a cloud of fireflies. In that flash, Jordam glimpsed contempt in Mordafey’s gold eyes. “Jordam didn’t kill anything today. What did he do, down there in the bushes?” Mordafey flung a dripping strand of vawn tail into Jordam’s face.

“You were killing vawns, Mordafey,” Jordam replied. “rrRunaways. I went after runaways.”

“But Jordam didn’t catch runaways.” Mordafey leapt off the stone and stalked around the firelight’s circle, passing behind Jordam. “Jordam came back with nothing. He let them go. Why? Did runaways beg? Did Jordam make some secret bargain?”

“I don’t talk with weakerfolk. I don’t like their jabber.”

“Jordam doesn’t talk with them. But he does talk like them. Doesn’t he, Goreth?” Jordam felt Mordafey’s fiery stare on the back of his head. “He barks the weakerfolk way. In his sleep. Three brothers have heard him.”

Jordam pricked his palms with his claws. How could he escape trouble if he betrayed himself in his sleep? “rrWeakerfolk in my dreams,” he argued. “I trick weakerfolk into traps. Call them with weakerfolk words. Just dreams, Mordafey.”

“Then why does Jordam cry about an Abascar girl? Why talk about secret caves? Jordam has a slave somewhere, and won’t tell Mordafey?” Mordafey leaned in, his voice like a rush of jagged stones. “Who’s O-raya?”

The question jolted Jordam to his feet. He immediately regretted this. Goreth cursed while Jorn cackled in glee, happy to watch Mordafey torment someone else.

“Found an Abascar girl called O-raya. Once. By the lake. Swam to catch her, to bring her back to brothers. rrNot fast enough. A gator got her. Gator ate the girl.” He snickered, pleased with his own embellishment. “I ate the gator.”

Jorn smacked his hands together. Murder stories amused him, the bloodier the better, so long as the blood belonged to someone else. Jordam’s tale shook his laughter loose.

Mordafey did not share Jorn’s amusement. “Cross Mordafey, Jordam, and you will meet him in a dark place.” He sealed this vow by knocking his knuckles against his broad browbone. “And you will not recognize him. He’ll be like…like…” He scowled, failing to find any appropriate comparison.

The rawblood in the trees behind them shrieked, anxious for the leftover vawn bones. Mordafey’s ears swiveled toward the sound. Circling Jordam, he grabbed the Bel Amican spear and launched it into the darkness. Something heavy fell into the bushes. A viscorcat yowled, and there was a scuffling in the dark.

“Mordafey killed the rawblood,” Mordafey hissed. “Mordafey eats the rawblood.” He hurried into the shadows to claim his prize. Jorn, thrilled, crawled after him to watch.

Goreth and Jordam exchanged a silent glance, a familiar expression of weariness. “Older Brother hates secrets,” said Goreth to his twin. “Older Brother wants everything. Takes everything.” The jagged blue scar across Goreth’s cheek wriggled wormlike. “Older Brother gets everything good.” He kicked a merchant skull with his foot.

“He doesn’t get everything good,” said Jordam.

In the shadows the viscorcat uttered a guttural threat. Mordafey replied. The viscorcat bounded away, whimpering, and left the fallen rawblood for Mordafey.

Apparently forgetting he had already made this discovery, Goreth stood up and announced, “I smell honey!” He strolled around the perimeter of the clearing in search of a hive.

From the pocket of his woodscloak, Jordam drew sharp shards of stone and glass, souvenirs from the ambush, and cast them across the canvas. He distracted himself by moving them with a long stick, aligning them with the spirals of blue in the fabric. It lacked the luminosity of the blue in O-raya’s colors, but the memory calmed him.

Mordafey emerged from the shadows, dragging his prey. Jorn scampered around him, barking, “Vawn tracks! Hel hel hel…Mordafey found vawn tracks!”

“They go north,” said Mordafey. Jordam did not like his triumphant, bloodied grin. “Jordam will prove that he did not let our prey escape. Jordam will lead the hunt. After Mordafey eats”—he cast the rawblood carcass onto the fire—“four brothers catch runaways.”

Jorn’s laughter turned to howls as Mordafey turned the lash against him, cursing him for burning the wagons too early. Jordam stared fixedly at the Bel Amican cloth. And then he smiled too. If he could find the boy, perhaps he could find O-raya…and relief.