The Ale Boy's Feast

  Cal-raven, afraid and confused, had run north and east, drawn by a strange gravity. Beyond those hills and trees lay his home. Or what was left of it.

  He did not want to be recognized. He did not want anyone to find him. So he had gone down into the ruins of his father’s kingdom to hide in a hole and give no thought to any future.

  But this tiny, colorful bird had fluttered past him, and he had snatched it out of the air. It struggled only a moment and then surrendered. It was a tiny thing of sticks, paper, and string. A toy.

  Someone above ground was teasing him, and he had answered, “I’m not coming out!” But the toy had fascinated him ever since. How could such a fragile invention fly so gracefully? And what were these silver strings anchored to its wooden frame, as if someone had once flown it like a kite?

  Now, lifting it from the precipice, Cal-raven considered it again. “Thinking of throwing yourself into the chasm? Me too. You go first.” He cast the paper toy from the chamber.

  It fluttered in a circle and returned promptly to alight on his shoulder.

  Amazed, he raised it to look for hidden wires, to try to solve the mystery of its mechanism. The bright daylight above made him wince, and the white scar in his left eye flared up again—the burn he had suffered while staring through a farglass at a beacon from the north.

  Through the mist that wafted from the rainwater falls, he saw a faint patch of shifting light and passing clouds. An angular shape like a kite appeared in the sky over the crater.

  “No,” he said again. “I don’t care who you are. I’m not leaving my kingdom.”

  With that, he cast the bird again—harder this time. It fluttered, then fell, twirling like a pinwheel past the spiraling stair. The sparks of its colors disappeared in the chasm.

  From the darkness came a sound like someone dragging branches across rocky ground. Then he heard a spill of pebbles from the stairway just beneath his chamber.

  Raising the torch, he peered over the edge.

  The torchlight revealed a twitching, bristling branch—the vinelike scourge that had driven his people from hiding in the Blackstone Caves. The Deathweed tendril had wriggled its way to the top of the stair. Its sharp, twiggy fingers spidered across the threshold of the half-walled chamber, groping for the prey it somehow sensed.

  As if following this tentacle’s tentative lead, a wave of crackling branches, black and oily, surged up behind it, coiling around the stair, spilling over one another like a swarm of snakes.

  Cal-raven had sensed the Deathweed’s presence even in childhood. He believed his father had too. Guards had spoken of a terror in the Underkeep. But no one wanted to dwell on such thoughts.

  Who can hope to build a house that stands when such a destructive force can sprout up through the floor?

  Eager, twitching tendrils jostled the empty marrowwood dresser. Cal-raven’s stone figurines shifted and toppled and rolled across the dresser’s flat surface as the predators slid beneath it. They tumbled into open space—Lesyl, Jordam, Emeriene, Tabor Jan, Cyndere, Partayn, and the figure of his teacher, the one man in the Expanse that he believed could save this world. Scharr ben Fray.

  Cal-raven reached out and caught the last piece as it fell off the dresser—a stone he had once lifted from a riverbank and marked with an image of the Keeper’s footprint—and stuffed it into his shoe.

  Fingers of a single hand directed by a single will, the tendrils spread out to cover the floor and prevent his escape.

  “You want to fight the king of Abascar?” He overturned the bucket of torch oil and flooded the oval-shaped carpet. Then he knelt and lit the edge.

  Flames erupted before him and spilled down the stair, igniting the weeds. Branches thrashed, writhed, and hissed until they burst into smoke. The arm from which these fingers grew uncoiled from the stair and slunk back into darkness. Smoke billowed up from the oil burn as if this were an altar for some dark ceremony. It wound through the crowded chasm of the earth’s raw wound, all the way to the sky. He collapsed on the bed, coughing.

  And again a pillar of smoke rises over Abascar. But no one stands on the highwatches anymore. No one looks this way for anything but a troubling lesson.

  There it was, that angular silhouette gliding through the smoke in a sweeping curve. He was almost certain it was a kite. But who would fly kites over Abascar’s ruin? Its shape resembled a blue-winged crane. Skittish, cautious birds. Some said that if one flew into view, it would mean good luck for the witness, for he could be certain there was no danger for miles.

  “Another myth,” he muttered.

  As he watched it circle again, he felt a strange change, as if a trusted friend had placed a hand upon his shoulder.

  Remember how you were shielded from the enemy at Barnashum.

  He was alone. Yet the haze felt charged with energy, just as it had when figures of light stepped out of the air and watched him trying to save his mother.

  Remember how you were given all you needed.

  “Go away. You’re not welcome here.” Remember how you were saved from slave traders. How you returned from captivity to lead your people again.

  The room rocked. He fell forward, almost tumbling into the slick of sizzling debris. The empty barrel hurtled off the platform into space. There was a sound like boiling stew below, intensifying.

  He clambered up the tilting floor. Gripping the edge of the bedframe with one hand, he seized the sputtering torch with the other.

  The Underkeep was alive with motion. Limbs flailing over limbs, a rising flood of Deathweeds climbing up to tear him like an injured bird from its nest.

  “Why do the worst rumors always prove true?” he muttered.

  As Deathweeds coiled again about the stairway, their bristles and thorns scraped against each other with a searing sound that made his teeth ache. He gripped the torch and readied for the onslaught.

  The stairway shattered, disappearing in the sea of oily tentacles.

  The platform groaned, tipped, and began to tear from the wall. He lost his footing. The back of his head hit the floor. Stripes of light crisscrossed his vision. His boots kicked at the oil slick. Furniture slid toward the edge, the bed pushing him into the swath of oil. Deathweeds thrashed, rising to seize him.

  Something struck the floor beside him. He felt a firm grip on his forearm. He lashed out with the torch, but a hard kick struck it from his hand.

  An aroma of damp leaves and treebark, the scents of deep forest, enfolded him. Those perfumes thrust a distinct memory to his attention—Obsidia Dram, the woman who had governed Abascar’s breweries.

  But it was a man’s arms that embraced him, and a brusque voice said, “Will you let me carry you?”

  Cal-raven’s body answered before he could speak. He wrapped himself around the stranger. The man—sturdy and almost as stout as he was tall and clad in rough garments that were, indeed, the stuff of the forest—reached up and tugged twice on a silver line.

  The floor fell away. They rose swiftly.

  Cal-raven heard his chamber disintegrate below.

  They ascended through the pillar of smoke. His thoughts lost their outlines. All he could perceive was the costume of his rescuer, the thin cord that drew them up, and then the heron shadow sweeping against the light of the afternoon sky.

  A rain shower later, beneath a canvas shelter draped between open-armed cotton-beard trees, Cal-raven held his hands out to the crackle of a smokeless fire and tried to absorb what had happened.

  I’ve heard children speak of a sky-man. I never gave it more than a laugh.

  The sky’s grey shell was cracking. Streaks of blue shone through. Rainwater, falling from the leaves and the ladders of branches above, drummed the canvas until the ceiling hung low.

  An enormous kite the shape of a blue-winged heron slumped on the grass in front of him. Rain pinged against the heavy fabric stretched tight across its frame. Its body was an intricate spring-rigged mechanism—a coil of wire connected to a harness of leather
belts.

  Clearly it came from the same inventor who had designed the tiny paper bird.

  Old Soro.

  This kite had suspended Cal-raven’s rescuer, and its coil had retracted the lines, pulling both men up into the sky. They had flown in a graceful escape from the crater, soaring off the edge of Abascar’s stone plateau and descending toward the Cragavar forest, which was green and gleaming in the morning light.

  “I knew you were a kite … a kite-maker,” Cal-raven stuttered. “The woman you were helping at Mawrnash—I don’t even remember her name—she said you made kites. I saw the materials. But I had no idea. You … you built that?”

  Old Soro snorted, shaving curls off a beam of wood with a broad, sharp knife.

  “You helped me climb the tower of Tammos Raak at Mawrnash. Now you’re all the way out here. Why? Why follow me so far?”

  Soro put the plank down, and a sigh puffed through his wild, bristling beard. But his face—it seemed a wooden mask of intricate engravings through which he stared with otherworldly eyes—gave no clue to his thoughts. He slid a hand beneath the bristled treebark vest and withdrew a small loaf of hard-crusted bread as if pulling out his own heart. He broke it into three pieces and offered one.

  Cal-raven took it and began to gnaw at it. It was tough but full of seeds and flecks of dried lamb. The piece was difficult to swallow, but he hadn’t eaten more than a couple of flavorless roots in the last few days.

  He choked and muttered, “So you left the woman at Mawrnash. Just as I did.” Shame burned his face. He had promised to go back and rescue her, and now he could not even remember her name. “You left her there in order to follow me?”

  The old man offered him a flask. Cal-raven sniffed the spout, then swallowed the sour wine.

  “Was I so lost and desperate that you thought I was in more trouble than she? You should have stuck with her.” He paused. “Gretyl. You should have stuck with Gretyl.”

  Soro silently regarded the kite resting on the grass.

  “Poor Gretyl,” Cal-raven sighed. “Yet another promise I failed to keep.”

  Soro glowered at him, then shook his head.

  “What are you doing here, Soro? You’re not from Abascar. I’ve no idea if you’re a merchant or a farmer, a Bel Amican or a Jentan mage. Did you ride from …” He heard the splash of footsteps across rain-soaked soil. “Someone’s coming.”

  Soro glanced at Cal-raven, amused.

  A skeletal man wearing a rough beard, ragged trousers, and an array of scars and bruises staggered into view. He cast down a pile of branches, green boughs like those that Soro had whittled into straight, precise planes.

  “You think he came here for you?” The newcomer’s voice was tarnished and thin as a rusty razor. He sat down and folded his arms across his jutting ribs. He was a bald man, and his wide round eyes regarded Cal-raven fiercely. “This marvelous fellow found me, helped me get my strength back, and carried me up out of the ruins, and along the way we noticed you. He was ready to move on. He asked me if you looked like you needed help.”

  Cal-raven’s eyes narrowed. “You asked Old Soro to take me out of there?”

  The man lowered his eyes. “The least I could do, my prince. My king. I failed your father. I thought the pillars of the Underkeep were strong.”

  “Pillarman.” Cal-raven ran his hand across his chin. “Nat-ryan. I didn’t recognize you without your tools.” Nat-ryan, the “pillarman,” the mad architect of the Underkeep. His task had been to routinely examine the columns that kept the Underkeep secure—a dangerous affair involving scaffolding, wires, and ropeladders. “You’ve been hiding down there all this time?”

  “I thought … I thought the pillars would hold.” Nat-ryan sucked his lower lip between his teeth and bit down as if he’d chew it right off.

  “How did you fight off the Deathweed?”

  “I kept a fire burning. Deathweed—is that what they call it? It doesn’t like fire.” He was staring into memories Cal-raven did not want to understand. “But it waited for me. It wanted me to sleep. And it should have taken me. For how I failed.”

  “Failed? You did what you could to build something that would last. It wasn’t your fault, Nat-ryan. The fire. The Deathweed. Let it go.”

  Soro laughed again, shaking his head.

  Cal-raven glared at him. “I should heed my own advice. Is that what you think?”

  Soro took a long strand of reedstring and began binding two of the wooden beams crosswise and then wove the reedstring through a flat of canvas. Another kite, Cal-raven realized.

  “It’s been a year,” said Nat-ryan. “A year, master. You cannot build something in haste if you hope for it to stand.” He watched the kite-maker work. “Soro. That’s your name?” He frowned at Cal-raven. “If you know him, why did you run from his camp?”

  Cal-raven blinked.

  The pillarman continued. “He says he knew there was trouble in Cent Regus’s territory. He went in there and found you half-dead.”

  “Soro? He carried me out of there?” Cal-raven closed his eyes. “I woke and thought I was in a slavers’ camp.”

  Soro gave the rest of the bread to Nat-ryan. He devoured it, his jaw working hard as an animal fighting for its life.

  Soro got up, and the sight was something like seeing a misshapen shrub grow legs. Cal-raven watched the brusque hunchback hobble awkwardly across the grass.

  Left alone with the rain and the emaciated pillarman, Cal-raven felt as if he couldn’t breathe. He glanced up at the three shadows on the canvas ceiling, and their strange dance was all the persuasion he needed to step out into the air.

  The veering shapes in the sky hypnotized him. They were kites—more kites, smaller and bound to strings that were tied to the tree branches. And yet they flew in concert, darting left and right, diving and rising, dancing in the sky.

  “They’re learning,” said Nat-ryan from behind him.

  “Learning?”

  “Didn’t you see the kite that carried you out? The old man calls that one ‘mature.’ It flew on its own, master. He builds them, and then he trains them to fly but never to wander away. And if he takes their strings, they respond to him.” Nat-ryan shrugged. “Sometimes they fly off on their own, but eventually they fall and break. He runs after them, puts them back together. He says they’re humbler after they’re repaired.” He coughed suddenly, pressing his hands to his chest. “He may be crazy, but he brought me out of the pit.” Then he coughed again, clearly pained by the turmoil in his lungs.

  “What happens now, pillarman?”

  “Soro’s taking me to the lake. He says there’s good water there. And you don’t want to know what I’ve been drinking here.”

  Soro seemed to be adjusting the rods of the heron-kite’s frame.

  “Shall we take you along, master?”

  “I don’t think you’re equipped to take me on any journey. What do you have here—a mule?” Cal-raven shrugged. “And I can’t say I’m comfortable around Soro. I don’t know what he wants. I need somebody who can answer my questions. Somebody I trust.” He looked off into the Cragavar. Where is my teacher now? I wonder.

  Old Soro trudged to the mule at the edge of the trees and lifted saddlebags over its back. Then he paused, distracted, gazing skyward.

  A magnificent rain cloud moved westward on high winds, its bulk like the hull of a ship, its highest reaches white and wind-swept like sails. Sunset’s rays beamed along beneath it. The sight lifted Cal-raven momentarily from his distress. He longed to go back into the sky. To forget everything that burdened him.

  Soro buckled the saddlebags and began untying the mule from the tree.

  Cal-raven walked down toward him. “Where do you plan to take Nat-ryan?”

  “Where does an Abascar man belong?” came the bearded man’s reply.

  The barb in the question snagged him. “I’m not going with you.” He turned back toward the ruins. “I can’t.”

  Soro finished strapping the bag
s to the mule, then clapped his hands three times, and the animal turned and trotted dutifully into the woods, its ears swiveling as if already watching for predators.

  “What are you …” Cal-raven pointed after the animal as if Soro hadn’t noticed. “It’s off with your things!”

  Soro ignored him and marched back to the large kite. He began bending the beams of its wingspan. Then he unclasped small latches along those beams and unfolded greater extensions of canvas, doubling the stretch. It began to beat those wings against the air, eager as a hawk for the hunt. He lifted it then, turned, and waited as if listening for something.

  A wave of wind poured over the ruins, stirring up a dustcloud that rushed toward the forest.

  The hunchback cast the kite up, and it caught the current, fluttering and rising. Its master walked backward, giving it more and more of the cord. “Nat-ryan?” Soro called. “Ready?”

  Cal-raven glanced back to find that Nat-ryan had untied the canvas shelter from the trees. He was holding the canvas just as Soro had held up the kite. And then he cast it up into the wind. It caught and rose, trailing a cord of its own, which, Cal-raven saw with surprise, was anchored to Soro’s belt.

  The two kites began to ride the wave of wind toward the forest, and their combined force pulled Soro into a heavy run. Cal-raven saw now what the man meant to do, and even so he could not bring himself to believe it would work.

  But before Soro had reached the trees, he was bounding in long, elevating steps. And as he reached the tree line, he steered the kites sharply to his left, and they wheeled about and lifted him in another long and sweeping curve. Their spools began to retract. Old Soro ascended, soaring over Cal-raven’s head. His laughter as his kicking boots passed by seemed a response to Cal-raven’s incredulity.

  Then Soro flung out more cords, and they trailed below him. Nat-ryan reached out and caught them and quickly bound their hooks to the strange harness that he wore. As he did, he began to run forward, a frantic stumble, until the cords pulled taut and he too was lifted and swinging through the air just behind Old Soro. Now he was laughing as well.