The Ale Boy's Feast

  “We’re bringing them with us?” exclaimed Kar-balter from the front. “Did you drop your sense in the river?”

  Jordam turned to the boy as if to ask for a better suggestion.

  “They’re still dangerous,” said Kar-balter.

  “rrYes,” Jordam agreed, and then he sighed. “Like me.”

  The other Abascar riders did not protest as Jordam helped the beastmen climb aboard his raft, but they did crowd onto other vessels to make room, while the ale boy, Nella Bye, and the young man Jaysin, who was quietly singing through Abascar’s hour songs, bravely stayed. The ale boy could see in the company’s expressions that old fears were returning like a fever.

  Jordam barked warnings to the two new riders. They cowered, fretful. But then the male’s ferocious face fixed on the ale boy, and he licked at the crimson stains of his fangs. Jordam growled again, and the monster turned to gaze instead at the ripe flesh of the female’s hairless belly. She whimpered, covering it with her red-fleshed hands. It rippled as if the unborn could sense danger.

  “What will we do if …” The boy held back the question. Then he wrapped his arms around his knees, peering anxiously ahead.

  Moments later he felt a brush of cold, damp feathers against his face. Strands of luminescent lichen swayed through the fog, trailing across the passengers’ heads. In the quiet the passengers all faced forward, helpless in the river’s swiftening momentum.

  The two-faced beastman howled a bloodcurdling lament from his dog face. Jordam snatched the last length of the rag-strips and bound it tightly about the creature’s muzzle, while the expression on the other, more human face seemed almost apologetic.

  The ale boy’s gaze shifted to the female, who seemed weaker, almost asleep, while her belly quivered.

  She’s dying.

  He put his head in his hands. This river. It’s endless. What if I’m wrong? What if we have to go all the way back? As they rounded a curve, he could hear a new sound—the thunder of crashing water.

  They raced toward a wall of vapor.

  “This is it!” shouted the boy, clutching the side of the raft just as the river, which had widened, plunged them down a rugged stair, threatening to break the bonds that kept their feeble vessels together. He yelled to hold on tight. The passengers needed no such instruction.

  Jordam jumped across to the foremost craft and swiped at the fog as if he could pull back its curtains. In his absence the two-faced beastman snarled and turned his savage face to the boy. The boy clutched the torch with its tremulous blue flame.

  The floats jerked, crashed, tipped, spun, and slammed against one another. One split almost in two, and passengers reached for each other.

  Boom, boom … boom.

  The beastwoman shrieked. The boy saw her try to leap from the raft as the male seized her by the leg. He dragged her back from the edge so that she fell, his claws digging ruts in her skin. She kicked and roared. His human face, wide-eyed and afraid, looked desperately about as if seeking an escape from its own body’s mad intent.

  Boom, boom!

  Jordam leapt upon the vicious beastman. The raft dipped sharply, its prow striking stone. Just as the beastwoman struggled to her feet, it spun around and flung her into the water.

  With the change in weight, the raft flipped sideways. The boy lost the torch and fell headfirst into the stream. The rush cast him against sharp stones again and again.

  Boom, boom … boom.

  Choking on sludge, he struggled to find a foothold. The river rushed over him, roaring in his ears, pummeling him with debris. His left hand was still closed fast around the strap of the water flask. He fought to get his head back above the tide. He heard muffled shouts. He saw nothing. A wave pushed him back under.

  A firm hand gripped his wrist. He was lifted up, trailing strands of sludge-weed, and laid across the raft. The beastmen were nowhere to be seen, but he heard screams fading quickly behind them.

  “Are you hurt?” Nella Bye was shouting as the raft scudded and bucked along the river’s descending stair. Blindly she reached for him, but he could not answer. He was still choking out mud and slapping at his tunic, for something wriggled against his chest.

  Boom, boom … boom. And then they sailed into open space, fell, and landed with a splash.

  He tore open his shirt, and the hot, slimy worm wriggled out and splashed into the water. He leaned over the edge and emptied back into the stream the sludge he had swallowed.

  Eventually the raft slowed, and he realized that the thudding had stopped. Nella Bye embraced his aching frame. The fog had thickened again, and he could no longer see the other passengers.

  With a jerk, the front of the raft tipped up as a heavy hand seized the back end. Jordam’s face appeared, dripping black sludge, his teeth gleaming through it. He pulled himself up among the other passengers.

  “Jordam,” the ale boy coughed. “The deeper river. We found it.”

  Jordam’s right arm was folded, cradling something that squirmed and kicked against his chest.

  It was a hairy, bloodied figure. A newborn creature. And Jordam’s furious expression made it clear that no questions would be welcome.

  The light began to change. The fog was warmer and painted with flickers of red light. Torchlight.

  Red faces emerged, ghostly in the mist. Figures standing on the riverbank. And then he heard glad voices, shouts, and other voices answering farther away.

  “rrBel Amicans,” Jordam whispered. Then he uttered something like a laugh. “Look, O-raya’s boy! They made rafts!”

  The rafts of the escaping Bel Amicans—eleven of them—were spread across the bank of this vast, swirling pool under a high, arched ceiling. They were larger, stronger, better, built by prisoners who had learned the craft back at their home in the Rushtide Inlet. The slaves had patched them together from wagon planks and scraps they had collected from the Cent Regus plunder.

  Some Bel Amicans had found this place during their years of labor, and the idea for a daring escape had begun. After the ale boy and Jaralaine had visited them, their courage had grown. They had collected the pieces slowly and buried them until rare occasions when they could work unobserved. In the Cent Regus Core’s unrest, their guards long absent, they had dared to make a hurried descent to the water, hoping it would offer them a way to escape.

  “This water,” Nella Bye sighed. “It smells like high, snow-crowned mountains.” Others agreed.

  The ale boy watched the frothy spill of the falls that had delivered them here. Behind that rushing curtain, there was a deep and echoing darkness—a wider river pouring out into this pool. Those waters were warmer and cleaner than the current that flowed from above ground. And he was certain that if they could move upstream, they’d pass the place where Jordam had found him at the bottom of the abyss.

  One of the Bel Amicans had even caught a fish that almost looked fit to eat; he was pulling off a few scales to see if the meat might be good.

  More than fifty Bel Amicans, clad in rags and skins as frail as autumn leaves in midwinter, welcomed the Abascar survivors into their midst as if they were old friends. Though the beastmen had kept them separate, their sufferings united them.

  Some embraced the boy who had visited them with food and water in days past, and their leader, Mad Batey, tousled his hair. Batey, a muscular builder who had been captured with Partayn several years earlier, also opened his arms to embrace Jordam, but the beastman turned and moved to the edge of the crowd, settling by the swirling pool with the fussing newborn.

  Mad Batey rubbed at his chin. “Shouldn’t he kill that thing?”

  Kar-balter agreed. “It’ll be bloodthirsty. Or miserable. Both, probably. That is, if it doesn’t die by morning.”

  Batey’s mind was an engine of perpetual plotting, seemingly powered by the fitful flexing of his grey-stubbled jaw. Chewing problems apart, he had planned his way out of circumstances that would have made anyone else despair. When he got an idea, his eyes went wild and wh
ite, all the brighter for the blue stripes tattooed beneath them, and the scar lines from his left eyebrow to behind his left ear deepened. “We could send it on ahead to test for traps and predators.”

  “Jordam knows what he’s doing,” said the ale boy, eying the Bel Amican rafts with rekindled hope. The Bel Amicans had pillaged the abandoned loot in the Cent Regus’s unguarded treasure caves. He saw crudely fashioned spears, quivers of arrows, and old shields emblazoned with symbols from both Bel Amica and Abascar.

  “These are some of the best Cent Regus spoils.” Batey poked through a pile. He explained how back in Bel Amica he had made a name for himself as a metalworker, buying scrap and crafting it into something useful. “In the Core,” he said, “I’ve learned more about building things than anywhere.”

  He stopped with an exclamation of delight and, pawing through the salvage, pocketed a few coins, his mustache twitching. “Very rare,” he muttered. “Fetch a fortune back home. They’ll buy me and my lady Raechyl a nice place with a view of the sea.” He glanced over his shoulder and exchanged a smile with a tall, elegant woman.

  Batey went on to describe with pleasure the weapons they’d collected—stone-flingers for heavy stones, primitive arrowcasters, wrist-daggers for close combat, and decoy daggers with hilts that would bristle with razorpins when seized.

  “It’s hard to believe you found us in time,” he said, sitting down to scratch his chin’s grey grizzle and comb his thick mustache. “We were almost on our way. We might not have dared it without you, Rescue.” He opened his broad, hardened hands in gratitude. “You walked through fire to help us.” He nodded to Jordam. “Beastmen bow to you. The queen of Abascar asked you for counsel. And they say you called down power from the sky that ruined most of the Strongbreed army. We were all too afraid, too beaten down for hope. But you …” He paused and cleared his throat. “You brought us enchanted waters. You gave us dreams of what might yet be possible. So tell me, what do we do now?”

  The question astonished the boy. He looked around at the talkative crowd and began to notice that all of them were glancing in his direction as if sure he was about to make some kind of speech. Even Jordam turned to watch him.

  Mist swirled around the falls at the dark mouth of the warmer river.

  I have nothing to say, he thought. I’m not a leader. I don’t know how. All I knew was to find the people in trouble and help them out. What more can I do?

  “This,” he heard himself say. “This deeper river—it’s warmer.”

  “Yes,” said Batey. “Yes, it is.”

  “And slower. Shallower.”

  “Seems that way.”

  “So … we can probably row against it.”

  “In shifts,” said Batey, “yes. But why not go downstream? It must reach the sea eventually, and then we can travel up the coast.”

  “Well.” The boy felt himself straining for words. “This water is warmer. And cleaner. It comes … from somewhere else. A better place. Probably closer to Bel Amica.”

  Batey nodded. “Harder work, but it could take us home faster.”

  The boy considered the debris-strewn bank. “There’s green on these branches. And there.” A dark cavebird hopped onto a rock and ogled him with bulging eyes. “What do cavebirds eat?”

  “Berries. Green leaves. They must have ways to get out.” Batey grinned, his eyes flaring. “Oh, to bring my Raechyl back up to the sun-touched skin of the world.”

  “So,” the boy continued, “that bird probably came from above ground, somewhere north of here.” He pointed to the flow that came from beneath the falls.

  “If we go far,” said Batey, “we might find water clear enough to drink.”

  “Or bathe in,” said Nella Bye. “Trust me, if we’re going to spend much time crowding these rafts, we’ll all need to wash up soon.”

  The cheer in their voices encouraged the ale boy, and they began to push the rafts out into the water. But then he caught sight of Jordam. The beastman was muttering to himself at the water’s edge, the newborn in one hand, the other hand pressed to his forehead where the browbone scar remained. The boy went down to sit beside him.

  Jordam lifted the perfect skeleton of a strange eel.

  “The baby. It ate that?”

  “rrFast.”

  The boy was amazed. “He looks like a normal baby. Except for the webbed toes. And the grey stripes.” He frowned. “And the face. Kinda like a frog’s, I guess. A frog with a striped, fuzzy mask on. Those teeth look sharp. But otherwise …”

  “rrFast,” said Jordam again. “Go fast, O-raya’s boy. rrKeep torches fired. Watch for feelers.”

  “Of course. But you’ll help us with that.”

  Jordam looked away at nothing but shadows. “rrMust find Abascar’s king. Must … must … say things.”

  “You’re … not coming with us?”

  “rrMust find the Abascar king.” He pulled his hand from his forehead and touched his chest. “It burns. Here.”

  “You come with us.” The boy spoke it like a command. “You can find Cal-raven later.”

  Jordam looked at the striped face peering up at him. “Bel might have water. Water from O-raya’s well. rrMust try to help … help this.”

  The boy looked at Jordam’s face as though seeing it for the very first time.

  This was the beastman who had hunted him on Baldridge Hill. But that creature had worn a fearsome and furious mask of appetite and anger, rough with scars and framed in bristling black hair. That face seemed to fade before his eyes. In its place he saw the broad, rugged visage of a powerful man, his flesh a map of islands red and brown on a grey sea. Those eyes, once blazing coals, had cooled. Bulging tusks had crumbled and fallen away. The hands that held the mewling infant were not the clawed and hairy hands of a forest ape; the barbs and bristles had disappeared, revealing large, soft, red flesh that held the newborn with tenderness.

  A flicker caught the corner of his eye, and he looked up. High on a jutting ledge, shimmering figures gazed down at them. Northchildren.

  On an impulse, he spoke a strange name aloud: “Deuneroi.”

  The figures faded at once, as if alarmed they’d been visible.

  “rrWhat’s that?”

  “Nothing,” said the boy, but now he was anxious. And angry. He could sense a change coming, and he did not like what he felt.

  A shout drew his attention. Kar-balter, having climbed up on the pillage, brandished a bottle in the air like a prize. “I don’t believe it!” he crowed. “Abascar ale!” The scattered prisoners began to crowd around him.

  The ale boy put his arms around Jordam. “Don’t go,” he whispered.

  He felt the familiar brush of the beastman’s hand upon his head. “rrNo sadness,” said Jordam. “You know the way now. You’ve … grown.”

  “Jordam, I haven’t told you. Auralia. The Northchildren told me that she’s come back. When I get above ground again, I’m going to find her.”

  “O-raya?” Jordam’s eyes grew wide. “The caves. rrBy the lake.”

  “Yes,” said the boy. “Will you look for her? If you find her, will you keep her safe?”

  “rrFind O-raya. I keep her safe. Never leave her.”

  “I’ll look for you there. When I’ve fulfilled my promise to them.” The ale boy, eyes closed, felt a tremor run through him. In his memory the Keeper loomed in a whirlwind beneath House Abascar. It was taking Auralia up in its hands, lifting her while the Northchildren watched. He grasped the edge of Jordam’s wrist so tightly that the beastman grunted. “I’ve gotta tell you something. In case … in case I don’t see you again.”

  “rrNo bad talk.”

  “Listen.”

  Clutching the bundle to his chest, Jordam leaned low to the ale boy’s ear.

  “Not even ’Ralia knows my real name,” said the boy. Then he pressed his forehead against the rough bristles above Jordam’s ear and whispered.

  The beastman grunted. “But … why?”

  As the boy
began to whisper again, Nella Bye arrived at his side and took his hand. “Come along, Rescue. You were an ale boy once. If anybody knows what to do with this bottle that Kar-balter’s found, it’s you.”

  Pulled toward the crowd where Kar-balter still held the bottle high like a trophy, the ale boy took one look back to wave farewell to the beastman.

  But Jordam was already gone, beginning his long, last climb through the dark of the Cent Regus Core.

  8

  FRAUGHTENWOOD

  ou lookin’ to die?” came a boy’s voice from the base of the tree. “Everybody’s in except you.”

  Losing his balance on a high bough, Krawg caught the branch above his head and held on, wheezing. His shoulder bag full of knuckle-nut shells clattered as it swung against his side.

  “The whistle’s blown.” It was that bothersome merchant boy Wynn, standing with his hands on his hips. His younger sister, Cortie, one of the few who had narrowly escaped slaughter in the calamitous escape from Cent Regus slavery, was strapped to his back. “Everyone’s waiting.”

  “I heard, you intolerable skeeter-bite.”

  “You’re ungrateful,” Wynn growled. “I single-handedly saved House Bel Amica from a swarm of beastmen. Or have you forgotten?”

  “Forgotten? It’s the only story you know how to tell. Bigger every time too. A swarm? Single-handedly?”

  Since his heroic burst of courage in Bel Amica that had put rampaging beastmen to sleep in an instant, the boy had become increasingly unruly. Praise had inflated his pride. He objected when he was denied a place in secret conferences, when he was not given assignments with soldiers, when he was named among “the children.” Tabor Jan had assigned him to protect the Abascar people who remained in Bel Amica while this small company set out to find Cal-raven’s foundation for New Abascar; but Wynn had sensed the charade. Insulted, he’d taken Cortie and stolen an Abascar colt from Bel Amican stables to make a reckless escape and catch up with Tabor Jan in the wild.