The Ale Boy's Feast

  “I’m ready,” he says. “I’ll surrender these knots now. I’ll go with you to the mountain.”

  You’re very brave. This isn’t the first time that the Northchildren have come to unstitch you.

  “It isn’t?”

  Here. She touches his delicate garment. Remember.

  The images awaken within him, memories from someone else.

  As purple storm clouds collide over the forest, a man in a soldier’s riding jacket steps through a break in the wall of an abandoned barn. He holds an infant bundled in his own riding cape.

  A woman, wrapped in a blanket, follows him. She’s exhausted, and she takes his arm as they move to an empty horse stall. Kneeling on the thin scatter of white-grass, the man helps the woman lie back against the wall’s wooden planks, then scoops up enough grass to make a soft nest for the child.

  “Brona,” she whispers, her voice breaking. “I thought that we would—”

  “I know,” he sighs, embracing her. “I was frightened.” His wild eyes speak of fears not yet put to rest.

  “You were marvelous,” she sobs into his shoulder.

  “You,” he replies, “had a harder battle to fight than I.” He strokes her hair. “It should never have happened this way. In the wild. So many weeks early. Your mother will be furious that she missed it. She’ll make it my fault somehow.”

  “But now that it’s happened,” says the woman, “I wouldn’t have it any other way. I wouldn’t bring our son into the world behind Abascar’s walls. That glen was a beautiful place. The leaves were like incense. And the birdsong … the birdsong.”

  “I’m just grateful we found a well. And one with such clear, warm water to bathe him.” He offers her the water flask. She drinks some more.

  “We should live there,” she sighs, “and drink this every day. As water goes, it’s wine.”

  “If it’s water at all.”

  As the storm continues without pause outside the skeletal shelter, the man wipes tears from the woman’s face. “You’re trembling. Give your hands something to do.” He opens the pouch at his side and gives her a folded cloth. She unrolls it, revealing a cushion full of pins and needles, two unfinished shoes, and scraps of cloth and grawlafurr hide.

  He touches the child’s cheek, then pokes a fingertip into the boy’s delicate grasp. “Our son will never be a soldier. He’s small.”

  She tries to sit up. “If you speak any words against our boy, Tar-brona, I’ll run this needle into your ear.” Exhausted, she rests. “You’re not a tall man yourself, and you’re the captain of Abascar’s guard. Even if he’s not meant to be muscular, he’ll have a remarkable mind. For he is our child. And I cannot wait to know his name and see what he will become.”

  Wind lashes the trees outside, and thunder shudders the shelter. The man takes the baby and presses his grizzled cheek to that small pink forehead. “Would that he might inherit your gift for craft,” he says, watching the woman work with the needles and hide. “The spells that you know. To craft gloves like mine. Or a scarf.”

  “We will give him the best tools, whatever his passion.” Her voice fades almost to a whisper, as if she might fall asleep. “Like these.” Her hand still trembling, she raises up a fistful of long needles of varying thickness. “Each thread-pin has its own name. Each one stitches a particular cord. The larger ones can pull thick, binding lines. But the tiny ones, like these …”

  “They have names?”

  “The green one, that’s Patcher. The red, that’s Key. Yellow’s the Stitch. Brown, that’s Thorn. These two, they’re thicker. I call them Knife and Spike.”

  “And the thread-pin with the bright blue gem?”

  “Don’t you love how it gleams? Azure. Like the sky after a storm. It’s my favorite. I use it when I do the heavy stitching and weave things into a whole. I just call it the Pin.” She smiles and shrugs. “I …”

  “Shhhh.”

  “What is it?”

  “Look, my love.”

  The infant’s eyes have gone wide, and where he has been gazing without seeing, as if into a fog, he suddenly seems alert, attentive, staring at his mother. New tears spill from her eyes. “He looked before,” she says, “but this time he really sees me.”

  And then the child’s hands open. He reaches with his tiny arms as if to grab what his mother is holding suspended in the space between them—the colored caps of thread-pins that bristle from the cushion.

  “He’s reaching,” the man whispers. “He’s reaching for …”

  “I see that.”

  “Which one? Which one does he want?”

  “Make this memory stop!” cries the boy made of cloud.

  He knows already what his parents will name him, but he cannot bear to see them decide. For this is the name they called out as their Abascar home burned around them, taking both of their lives.

  Northchildren saved you from the fire that claimed us, says his mother. They bathed you in this very water. It awakened your gift of firebearing.

  “I remember. Northchildren stood around my cradle as the fire …”

  Yes. They came to unstitch you. But the plan changed.

  “Captain Ark-robin. He rescued me.”

  The Northchildren look back through the fog, anxious. Something is wrong.

  “What’s happening?” he asks.

  I don’t know, she whispers. We’ve never been inside this strand before.

  He concentrates on the strings that trail back and anchor him to his broken shell. “Someone’s in the water,” he says. “He’s found my shell. He’s calling for me. A friend. He wants me to wake up.”

  Let go, Son. Let go.

  “I’ll let go,” he says, “if you’ll take me to Auralia. I’ve missed her.”

  His mother is silent.

  “The Keeper and the Northchildren took her away,” he says. “I want to follow her.”

  Auralia did not stay on the mountain with us, says his father. She said something was unfinished. So she gave up her memory and her safety. And she …

  “Auralia’s come back? Father, where is she?”

  He’s suddenly pulled from shore, swept downstream, cords drawing him back to where he fell.

  He hovers, watching, while a groaning giant lifts and cradles the boy’s crooked body.

  I recognize him. But he cannot see me.

  He descends over the boy’s broken form. Hoping the body will breathe him back in, he touches the open lips. The skin quakes.

  Spare yourself, says his mother. You’ve suffered enough. I can’t bear it.

  His father speaks to soothe him. The world is not all yours to mend.

  But it is too late. He has decided. Breathe, he says to the broken body, just as his father had said in the moment he was born.

  The giant lifts an open flask and pours water into the boy’s mouth. He recognizes the flask—it fell with him from the bridge.

  “rrBreathe.” That growl—it’s familiar.

  The boy’s body jerks, folds up as a child in the womb, and inhales a feeble breath. He’s drawn in. Stitches tighten, binding him fast.

  He cannot see the Northchildren anymore. He feels the cradle of the giant’s strong, hairy arms. They smell like a wet dog.

  His friend’s name flares in his memory like a lit candle. Jordam.

  The body came alive, choking a spray of water.

  Jordam pressed his bristled cheek against the boy’s scarred red face. “Oh. Good. Good, O-raya’s boy.” His legs folded beneath him from exhaustion, from the strain of his fears that the child was dead. On his knees he held the boy above the water.

  Searching for Cal-raven and the boy in the Cent Regus Core, Jordam had stepped onto the broken arm of the bridge that had once spanned the abyss. Could the boy have fallen? The very thought of that small body dashed upon these rocks made him feel as if he too were falling. But he descended nevertheless.

  The climb had nearly defeated him. A voice—a groan like subterranean continents breaki
ng apart—quaked in the recesses of the earth. A voice that sounded like the Curse itself. Sickened, he was seized by the urge to climb back out of the chasm. But then he heard the river.

  Arriving at its edge, Jordam saw the boy’s sprawled body and pulled it from the floating weeds. His roar of anguish was drowned out by another wave of misery from somewhere beyond the walls. He wanted to fall into the river, to let it carry him away. He had lost too much, failed too miserably.

  But then he found the flask. It contained some water from the well where he had first met Cyndere. The water that had helped him escape the firm grip of the Cent Regus Curse.

  After staggering to shore, Jordam slumped to the ground, cradling the body. He raised a glowstone, and as he looked into the boy’s face, his vision blurred. Tears slid in cool lines down the rough skin that had shed its mask of hair and splashed onto the blaze-scarred boy.

  “Jordam,” the boy gasped again. “The others. The slaves.”

  “rrSome got away. Others killed by Cent Regus. rrFound them up there. Bad. Very bad. rrOne man hiding … alive.” He gestured to that dark shaft in the ceiling. “He waits. Guards a boat for us. He is very afraid.”

  “It’s not Cal-raven waiting … is it?”

  “rrNo.”

  “And Jaralaine?”

  Jordam closed his eyes, choked by his shame. During the escape attempt, the chieftain had caught him and forced him to swallow a bellyful of Essence. Overcome by a violent rage, Jordam had slain the chieftain and gone on to attack Jaralaine’s captors. One of his victims had fallen upon her, running her through with a spear. Cal-raven had held her as she died, and in his grief and rage, he had blamed the Keeper. Jordam had remained silent, too frightened to admit his mistake.

  The boy reached up and touched his face. “You’re changing. Your face isn’t so hairy. Your arms don’t look so much like a beastman’s arms anymore. Well, they’re huge. But they’re not so scary.”

  “Arms not so strong as before,” Jordam sighed, looking up through the dark. “Strong arms would be good. For the climb.”

  “But your heart—it’s stronger than ever,” said the boy. “You came back for me.”

  He turned away. “Not so strong.”

  The boy was quiet. Then he said, “We should go. We can’t let anyone find us.”

  “Strange,” said Jordam. “No chieftain. Cent Regus scatter. Can’t find the Essence. They are thirsty. Angry. rrFighting each other. Weakening. Keeper burned chieftain’s throne room. Burned the throne. All ways to the Essence are closed. For now.” He shook his head. “End of Cent Regus like me maybe.”

  “None of them are like you.”

  Jordam set the boy down on the rocky bank and watched the whirlpool spin in a strange, slow current so far below the other river on which they had planned to escape.

  “So,” said the boy, “we must finish what we started. We’ll rescue the rest of the slaves, Jordam. All of them. Bel Amicans, Jentans, whoever’s left.” He smiled, and pretending to growl like Jordam himself, he said, “rrrrRescue!”

  Startled, Jordam laughed—a series of puffs through his teeth, a sensation that was still very strange to him. “rrNot how O-raya’s boy talks.”

  “I’ll need your help. I can’t move very well just yet.”

  Jordam looked back up into the dark, then pounded a closed fist against his chest as if it were a salute. “rrBig fall. You should be dead.”

  The boy sighed. “I think I was. A little.”

  3

  THE BIRD KITE

  re you sure you want to do this? asked a Northchild.

  Yes, said another. My son is there.

  While rain clouds flooded the sky from the west, the two Northchildren walked across Deep Lake’s darkening water like stray flares from the sun stranded beneath the storm’s curtain. They passed through the eastern span of the Cragavar forest to the edge of House Abascar’s ruins, where they wrapped themselves in whirlwinds and wisps of ash.

  The ground, shattered by the quake that had ruined the house, was a maze of pits, spoiled structures, and crazed cobblestones blackened by fire. Greedy ivy and brambles clambered across it, reclaiming it for the wild, and the hot wind from the east stirred up dustclouds.

  House Abascar’s palace was gone, collapsed like a cake, sinking into the foundation that had dissolved from stone to sand. Its towers had smashed into one another, its walls ripped open to expose royal chambers and stone stairways.

  One by one, the troubled clouds dissolved, raining down in sighs.

  The crater where Abascar’s palace once stood and the canyon of breaks in the stone all around it whispered with tiny waterfalls that trailed like traces of spider webs down into the catastrophe. They splashed across walls that had fallen to floors, soaked the wood of wardrobes and library shelves, saturated scraps of old scrolls that had once told the histories of House Abascar, and carried them away like so many autumn leaves. And so dissolved the tale of Abascar’s kings—Cal-marcus, Har-baron, all the way back to Tammos Raak himself, who brought the children out of captivity north of the Forbidding Wall.

  Observing this, the somber witnesses crossed the wreckage, making their way along broken trails, down slanted shards of wall, and into the spectacular labyrinth. They could see across chasms into the remaining halves of great halls, into small cavities of chambers once private, into dining rooms opened like eggs. Furniture was scattered, scorched, and overturned, half-buried in spills of earth or caught in dangling creepervine.

  As they descended, spiderbats fluttered around them and hissed. A saucer-eyed lurkdasher, the red fur on its back standing on end, stared after them, and then it darted back into whatever tunnel had given it safety.

  Across a yawning space, they saw a box upon a promontory—two walls and a sheltering ceiling. The coil of a stone stairway, which had once wound its way up inside a tower, now stood exposed, spiraling up to the mouth of that room. It was still sparsely furnished—a bed, a dresser, even a rug had somehow been spared from the fire. A torch beside the bed revealed that the blankets were moving, the sleeper restless.

  Let’s go to him.

  The music weaving through their thoughts gave them no permission to reveal themselves. They were careful to trust the music. The more they attended to every scene, restraining their impulses to intervene, the more they found something richer than narrative—not just a chain of this, this, and what happens next. Life was poetry, each scene woven through with innumerable threads. They could find glory in moments that might seem like defeat to someone of lesser vision. This was one of those moments.

  Your son has fallen so far, Cal-marcus.

  Look. His hand is stretched out for help in the night. I wish I could hold that hand.

  They walked across the room’s rough ceiling and lay down upon the wall.

  Bats. Beastmen. Deathweed. So many dangers here, Cal-marcus. Why doesn’t he go back to his people in Bel Amica? This is just a graveyard.

  He is his father’s son. He doesn’t want comfort. All he thought he understood has collapsed. He’s distraught. He wants to wrap the night around him. He’s disappointed and ashamed, as I was, but he will not rest until he’s made sense of mysteries.

  Then he will not rest.

  No, Ark-robin. He won’t. My son has seen the beacon from the north. He’s seen the towers of Inius Throan. And more. Colors shine from beyond the Forbidding Wall. Now if only he would lift up his eyes from his troubles. And remember.

  Cal-marcus, what is this? A tiny bird of color and light.

  They’re everywhere, but so few ever see them. This is just like the one my sweet Jaralaine described. She said it flew into her chamber when she was a girl. She thought it was made of light. And she sought it ever after.

  Hush. Trouble.

  He’s waking up.

  Cal-raven felt a touch on his brow, and he flung himself from the bed. Dust exploded from the blankets that he had dragged from the rubble. Landing in a crouch, he snatched up his swo
rd from the floor and swung it around at the shadows. “Get out!”

  When the dark did not answer, he took the torch and dipped it in the barrel of torch oil. The room reddened.

  Scanning the sparse, scorched furniture, he saw scattered figurines, a dark lantern, a clay goblet. There was the bag he had woven from shieldfern leaves and filled with seeds and roots, should he have to flee into the forest again. Everything was where he had left it.

  But there were smudges like footprints in the dust beside his bed. He knelt, pressing the sword—the one he had trained with as a young man and kept concealed within a hollow bedpost—point-down against the floor.

  Bare feet.

  And then his gaze alighted on the bird kite.

  He had left it on the dresser, but here it perched on the edge of the platform as if it might fly away as easily as it had flown in.

  Several days had passed while he languished in a half sleep of nightmares, too weak to weep any more tears, and then this gliding fragment of light had come fluttering through the darkness.

  He had watched it, certain he was losing his mind. The idea did not trouble him. Better to be a fool here, alone, than among people who depended on him for guidance.

  I led the remnant of my father’s people in the footsteps of some half-imagined creature. I trusted a being made of little more than hopes and dreams. And now I must swallow the truth. There is no Keeper. There are only myths. Delusions inspired by untrustworthy monsters. They lure us into admiration and awe, and then they fail us. One by one. They tease us with kindness. They’ve been captured and caged. I saw it with my own eyes.

  Devastated by his discovery of the creatures that the Seers had captured, Cal-raven had collapsed. Someone had lifted him and carried him away.

  He had thought it was Jordam the beastman who took him. But when he woke alone at a campsite north of the Cent Regus wasteland, he saw saddlebags beside the fire and a mule staring dumbly at the grass. They did not belong to Jordam. The one who had carried him was nowhere to be seen, but by the look of the fish cooking on a spit, the man would return soon.