“Out here? How would it come to us?”
“He’s alive,” Milora insisted.
“I reckon you’re right.” Krawg tried to smile kindly, as if to reassure a troubled child. But then he remembered seeing his smile in a Bel Amican mirror and decided against it. “Come with me. Tomorrow we’re takin’ you and Obrey back where you came from.”
“If you know where I came from, you know more than me.”
He led her uphill toward the trees. “Thought that glass mine in the mountains was your home. And you went to House Bel Amica because you had a fever.”
“I was poisoned. The Seers wanted to bring the glass miners to Bel Amica and control them. Frits refused. And suddenly I got sick.”
“Cruel, them Seers.”
She shrugged. “They said I had bad blood and that they’d cure me. Said they’d bring back my memories too.”
“But they didn’t, did they?”
Milora pulled something off the edge of her cloak—a scamperpinch. It scissored the air with curved, shiny claws, and its many legs flailed. “Look,” she said, strangely unoffended by the ugly marsh-dweller, curious as a child. “He wants a hold on something.”
“How many years you spent?” Twenty-five, he thought.
“What would you guess?”
“Nineteen,” he said. He’d learned it was wise to subtract.
“Wish I knew.” Milora touched a finger to her temple. “Crack in my head. Lots of years have spilled right out somewhere along the way.”
They walked on in silence, back into the trees, where Krawg beat at the bracken in search of the path he’d made. Then he turned to offer the staff as a walking stick. “Surely your papa knows.”
“Perhaps. I can’t … I can’t remember him.”
Krawg began to chew at his lip. Wasn’t Frits waiting for them just ahead in the camp?
“All I can tell you,” she said, “is that Frits found me on a mountainside. That way.” She pointed northeast. “He woke me and asked me questions. I reached for what any head should hold. But the shelves were bare. I could only tell him this: I’d been looking for somebody. But that, too, was gone.”
“You still don’t remember?”
She smiled on a secret. “I do remember. It came back.”
He kicked at bracken. “Don’t leave me strung up in the hangers, now! Who was it?”
Milora raised her fists up high, stretching, and the front of her dark woolen cloak parted to reveal her gown, which glittered as if it were made of dark scales. She had woven it from silky flakes brushed from the outer layers of brownstalks. She sighed, smiling softly, and whispered, “Cal-raven. King of House Abascar. I recognized him in the Bel Amican glassworks.”
Krawg opened his mouth, silent as if a bristlefly blocked his throat.
“You’re wondering why. Well, I felt a rush of heat when I saw him, like I had hold of something for a moment. But it slipped away. And what would it matter? Cal-raven’s a king. To him, I’m just a homeless stranger whose memories were knocked from her head.”
Krawg shrugged. “We’re all homeless out here in these wicked woods.”
“I certainly agree with you there,” she replied.
Krawg wondered again where Warney had gone. He took a swipe at a hollow mudpod, an abandoned owl’s nest that swung like a pendulum on a dead vine. “Everything’s gone but those puffdragons, darting about and chewing up the peelin’ bark.”
“Kindling for their bellies,” she said. “Aren’t they marvelous?”
Krawg flinched.
Faint red flowered in the distance—torches circling the cluster of tents.
“Milora!” Obrey came hurtling through the bracken in mad excitement. “They all thought you’d gotten lost! But I knew you were—”
“What’re you doing alone away from camp?” shouted Krawg. “It’s too dangerous for little girls!”
Obrey, smug, folded her arms. “I escaped.”
Milora laughed. “Who—or what—are you supposed to be?” Even in the dusk it was evident that the girl had been braiding coils of red bark into her hair.
“I’m House Abascar’s queen,” Obrey announced. “If King Cal-raven comes back, he’ll need a queen to make him happy.”
“Well, little queen of Abascar, I hope you’ll pardon me for being late.” Milora gave Obrey a playful shove. “Go on. Tell the others we’re coming.”
“It’s straight to the dungeon for you!” Obrey shouted, striving unsuccessfully to look serious. “That’s where crooks belong!” Then she burst into giggles and happily fought her way back through the winding weeds.
“Somebody’s been dreaming,” Milora sighed. “Comes so easily to her.”
“A few more nights and you and your daughter’ll be home in the glass mine.” Krawg stepped up to the edge of the camp’s broad clearing.
“It’ll be good to see the workshops again,” she said. “But you’ve got me all wrong. Frits’s glassworks aren’t my home. I wandered there. He calls me Milora because that was his daughter’s name. She died.”
“Milora’s not your true name?” He scowled. “Somebody must’ve knocked you on the head with a rock.”
“Well, maybe when I sleep, you’ll hit me with another. Bring everything back.” She took his arm and rested her head on his shoulder. “Thanks for rescuing me from that vicious dragon,” she laughed, her voice warm with affection. “You’re a good man, Krawg. You feel like … family.”
Krawg was so startled he didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
Milora pulled away to chase after Obrey, but Krawg paused to examine his thorn-shredded leggings. As he dabbed at the crisscrossing scratches on his legs, a memory suddenly seized him. He didn’t have his picker-staff. And Milora wasn’t carrying it.
He turned around in dismay, afraid that he’d lost it. But, no, there it was.
He went back several strides, uprooted it from the ground, and then gasped, holding it out before him with two hands.
The picker-staff was no longer a dull, dark wood. It sparkled, glazed with some kind of glittering golden dust. Flourishes of red grass tassled the ends. And at its base … was it sprouting roots to become a tree?
He searched the shadows between the tents for another look at his new friend, and a surge of wild hope blazed up behind his ribs like a flame within a lantern.
1
THE WAYWARD MAGE
ike anxious road-sweepers, dust columns whirled between the purple dunes, brushing bones, branches, and snakeskins aside in their hurry.
The muskgrazers, shaggy as haystacks, ignored the whirlwinds. They hung their hairy heads and thrust curly, sinuous tongues into the grit, probing for burrow-birds and redthistle bulbs. After the dust phantoms passed, the cattle shook clouds of debris from their golden hair.
A large and featherless dust-owl raised a taloned foot, seeking to snatch flea-mice from a muskgrazer’s matted hair. If the owl was quick, she could catch one as it scurried around a haunch or a knee. The muskgrazers, yearning to be free of the itchy, tickling pests, permitted the owl’s attention.
Watching from beneath his black, wide-brimmed hat, the carriage driver lounged in the shade of a dead parch-tree at the herd’s edge, waiting for his pursuer.
In this bleak and barren country, hunter and hunted could, using farglasses, track each other’s movements more than a half-day’s travel away. When the driver had noticed the stranger approaching, he determined to wait. No sane man would pursue a carriage across the desert on foot unless he was desperate.
A sleek red hiss-lizard perched anxiously on his shoulder, watching the top of the northernmost dune. When the stranger appeared, wrapped in a bright red tent of a cloak, stark against the curling wave of evening storm clouds, the reptile tasted the air with her forked tongue.
Few things amused the driver more than muskgrazers interrupted while grazing. This bright-robed newcomer bothered them. Or maybe it was the advancing storm. Whatever the trouble, they were suddenly eag
er to move off, skating on the long, bone-railed feet that kept them from sinking in sand. But their tongues were still deeply rooted in the ground. Stuck, the muskgrazers choked as they sought to retract those thick, purple lines.
Rain began to fall as the approaching stranger slid down the dune. “A ride!” he shouted. “I must drink at Mad Sun’s.”
The driver’s voice was made of dust. “I’m bound for House Jenta.” He raised a Bel Amican rain canopy as if to shield himself, but his mind was on the hidden blade in its rod.
“Take me to Mad Sun’s, and I’ll buy you all you can drink. Then take me to the Jentan harbor, and I’ll give you more besides.”
“Boating to Wildflower Isle? Is it true those lonely Jentan ladies are anxious to find good husbands?”
“Don’t presume to know a mage’s business.” There was a growl behind the mesh of the stranger’s dark, featureless mask. “I’m not asking you why you’re off to bother with those Aerial tyrants.”
Nervous, the driver’s lizard wriggled down between his vest and his shirt. “You don’t consider yourself one of the Jentan Aerial?” The driver laughed quietly. “Are you the infamous mage who turned against his brothers?”
The stranger brushed sand from the sleeves of his cloak. “You would have abandoned them too. Who could live among such villains? The Jentan mages tricked their own people into moving off the mainland, then stranded them on that island.”
“You’re off to join the island uprising?” The driver knelt and tugged the wooden wedges out from under the carriage wheels.
The stranger didn’t answer. Instead, he pointed to the departing muskgrazers. “I’ve traveled for days without a glimpse of a creature. But down here, they’re still moving in herds. Is the desert discouraging the spread of the Deathweed?”
The dust-owl remained, her head turned sideways, her gaze shifting from the stranger to the driver and back.
“That owl knows me,” said the stranger.
The driver sensed a smug smile behind the mask. “Maybe.” He shrugged. “Or maybe she’s just hungry. But who am I to doubt you? You’re just like the tales say. You travel alone. You commune with the animals. What an honor to meet you, Scharr ben Fray. And out here, on the hairless chest of nowhere.”
The owl blinked her apple-sized eyes, opened her leathery wings, then rose awkwardly into a zephyr and was gone.
“An Abascar man, then?” said the stranger. “The accent says so. But I don’t remember you from my years of counseling King Cal-marcus.”
“I lived there. Once. Before the collapse.” The driver stood and urged the stranger up the rope-ladder steps and into the carriage. “You must have been too busy to notice.” He followed into the shelter.
As the canvas closed, muffling the sound of the rain, the stranger spoke softly as if casting a spell. “A hundred years I’ve been away from my homeland, counseling kings, questioning birds, digging up mysteries. I’ve missed Mad Sun’s. My stories will buy my drinks. You’ll see.” He did not remove his mask.
“You talk like I should pay for the privilege of carryin’ you.” The driver could see the stranger’s boastful smile now; the glowstone’s light caught the glint of teeth behind the mask’s dark mesh. “If you’re the prodigal mage of House Jenta, you’d better be ready to prove it. At Mad Sun’s they’re rough on posers.”
He climbed through the slit in the canvas at the carriage front to seat himself on the driving bench, then affixed his rain canopy to shelter him and seized the storm-slick reins.
“You’re carrying a lot of bricks,” the passenger mused. “Building something?”
The driver ignored the question. Soon he heard the stranger rustling around in the carriage, unstacking and restacking the bricks to see what might be concealed in the piles. He smiled and spurred the horses on.
The horses flinched at the lightning that smote the sand. The storm pummeled the desert until it ran out of rain. They pressed on for a day, which would have been silent but for the passenger’s snoring, and then through another cool night, watching stars streak across the sky as if frightened by the moon. They passed between pillars of stone upon which desert monkeys danced and screeched, and sand-spiders scurried out of the horses’ way.
By sunrise they were moving among mirages of ghostly green trees and deep blue pools. They steered around vast mirrors of new glass formed by lightning strikes. And they crossed the paths of two more carriages, whose drivers glared at them suspiciously.
At midday they paused in the lee of a massive stone tooth, and the horses slurped from the water stored in the heavy pouches of skin at their throats. The driver shared a packet of grains and seeds with the passenger but never glimpsed his face.
That afternoon they came alongside a swarm of writhing dust-vipers just beneath the sand’s surface forming a turbulent line that wound between the dunes. The vipers were poisonous and violent; travelers did not dare cross a snake-stream without a bridge.
So they rode on until they sighted a simple stone arch—not a natural span, but a stonemaster’s bridge—that offered safe passage. Beyond, they descended a slope toward a cluster of stone huts. Horses, vawns, and beasts of burden were bowed low by the heat outside a large pavilion of bricks and branches. A storm of voices, a clamor of dishes, and the heavy autumn scents of cider and beer wafted from the windows.
The hiss-lizard returned to the driver’s shoulder to whisper in his ear. He stroked the creature’s rugged back, dampening his finger with the cooling oils that oozed out between the scales, and then drew lines across his burning brow.
“Sharpen your stories,” he called to the passenger. “We’ve come to Mad Sun’s.”
Jayda Weese, manager of Mad Sun’s, rose from beneath the blankets spread in the shade of a flourishing parch-tree behind his bar. He rolled and lit a leafwrap, clenched it between his teeth, and muttered, “Yup. More customers.”
“Someday the youngsters will do the work for us.” The leisurely yawn under the covers belonged to Meladi, his wife. “And you’ll get to kiss me all day long.”
Weese shrugged himself into his leather vest and tied his curtain of yellow hair into a cord. “Yup,” he said.
He opened the back door, went inside, and passed through the steamy kitchen with a nod to his workers—Hunch, the hulking custodian and carpenter who only ever asked him questions, and Rik-pool, his singing, fast-handed dishwasher.
“Two,” he said, referring to the customers he’d heard approaching.
He thrust a heavy curtain aside and stepped into the narrow span behind the bar, inhaling the heavy haze of beer, sweat, dust, and hot grease from fried gorrel strips. The sensation always caused a few moments of blissful dizziness. Every afternoon the place became an oven, heated by the sun and the flaring tempers of the angry drinkers who circled the five round tables. So long as it was hot, so long as they were engrossed in debate, they’d keep on drinking, and Weese would be happy. He hummed an old Jentan soldiers’ song as he gathered empty clay mugs from the bar.
Two travelers pushed through the swinging doors and crossed the sand-swept floor to the bar. They drew glances from all directions.
The one wrapped from head to toe in red—even his face concealed in a mask—paused and pondered the tables as the glances became gazes. The other newcomer, a carriage driver with a wide-brimmed hat, slumped against the bar and stared wearily down at its polished wood.
Weese sensed that the driver deserved pity for having drawn this garish passenger across the desert. He gave him a mug of dark, foamy ale. “First one’s free for drivers,” he said in his very best attempt to sound welcoming.
“You sound as bad as I feel,” said the driver. “Hard times for soldiers out of work?”
Weese sighed.
It was, he supposed, obvious. He still wore his long yellow hair tied back in a tail in the tradition of Jentan Defenders. But his days of swords and shields were behind him. The word freedom tattooed down his arm declared that he had broken awa
y from dependence on the Aerial—the society of mages who ruled the Jentan School.
House Jenta’s Defenders had once fought beastmen and thieves. But three generations ago the mages had changed history. Promising their people that they would flourish if they separated themselves from the Expanse and its corruption, the Aerial led everyone out of the desert settlement and took them in ships to Wildflower Isle on the southern horizon.
Then, as Jenta’s island settlement grew, the mages had combined their powers to contain their people there. Returning to the School to pursue their meditations and studies in solitude, they kept only a small company of servants.
In time, the mages’ need for protectors dried up. They were powerful enough to defend themselves and too self-absorbed to care about sustaining any kind of society.
So the Defenders, men with no society to protect, became self-reliant, hiring themselves out to defend the scattered clans of herdsmen in the desert—cattlemen and shepherds who were similarly abandoned by the house they had once served.
In these days of independence, Weese had become known throughout the southern dustlands as a brewer, a cactus hog roaster, and a club-wielding punisher of reckless inebriates. (A collection of blunt instruments decorated the wall behind the bar.) He was the most beloved brewer in the region, for since the mages had lost any care for the art, he seemed to be the only brewer left. So he shipped generous amounts of his beer off to Wildflower Isle, hoping to cheer the angry, troubled settlers there.
Thus, Weese was the largest sponge for news and rumors in the Jentan territory. He earned as much for his information as he did for his unremarkable drink.
As the driver reached for the mug, Weese pulled it back. “Who’s yer smug, prancing passenger, driver?”
The red-robed stranger had settled on a bench at a crowded round table where herdsmen were placing bets on a tabletop duel between two broad-shelled, grappling sandpinchers. The herdsmen regarded the masked visitor quietly, studying his sensational costume.