Wing & Claw 3_Beast of Stone

  If it hadn’t been for Echo, he never would have found the cavern or the plant.

  How long will it be before I see him again? Be safe, Echo. Be careful—watch out for owls. . . .

  He closed his hand gently around the insect, took it to the tent flap, and released it outside.

  His thoughts had led him to a new conclusion. Making the antidote and treating all those animals with it— I mean, if I can figure out how, it will be sort of like finishing the work that Echo helped me start. A way to—to keep him with me, even though he’s not here.

  He lifted his chin as he went back to the worktable. This was much better: Not staying busy to take his mind off Echo, but working hard precisely because Echo was on his mind.

  Chapter Sixteen

  SOON the cleaned cavern plants were simmering in two gigantic cauldrons. Raffa had never before made such an enormous batch of solution. The cauldrons were too big and heavy to empty by upending them. To strain the solution, he and the others began the long, clumsy process of ladling the hot liquid through a sieve into jars.

  “Yow!” Jimble screeched. He had splashed some of the essence on himself. “I’m okay, I’m fine, no worries,” he added hastily.

  Then Kuma went off and returned with two baskets, which they could lower into the cauldrons to scoop out the solids. It was still slow work, but easier than ladling.

  Finally all the plant matter had been removed. Next, the liquid essence would be boiled down to a dry residue, which required careful watching, especially at the end of the process. If it boiled too long, the residue would burn; not long enough, it would remain dissolved in the water.

  At the beginning of the boil-down, when the cauldrons were both three-quarters full, Raffa did not have to keep his eyes on them every second. Jimble had dozed off, leaning against a stump. Raffa woke him and sent him to bed. The last thing Raffa needed was a sleepy assistant, what with the fire and the large quantities of scalding liquid. He knew that Jimble was exhausted, because the boy went to the tents without a word of protest.

  Raffa took a lightstick and held it up to his face. With Kuma at his side, he nudged Garith and stood facing him squarely.

  “I still haven’t figured out how to dose the animals,” he said. The words rasped as they came out, his throat thick with anxiety.

  This was everything. The problem had never been far from the front of his mind, no matter what else he was thinking.

  The guards would send the animals to attack first. That was a guess, but one that the council had agreed made sense: Why risk injury to people when you could use animals instead? Only after the animals attacked would the guards engage in the fighting themselves.

  If Raffa couldn’t figure out a way to treat the animals with the antidote, the Afters would have no choice but to defend themselves, meaning that both humans and beasts would get hurt.

  Or worse.

  Raffa had worn out his brain trying to think of a way to get the antidote into the animals’ food source. It was how he had treated a few dozen animals before. But he could not use the same strategy again: Trixin had told him that the compound now had a much heavier guard presence. And even if he could manage it somehow, he would also have to make sure that the animals weren’t dosed again with the vine infusion, which would undo the effects of the antidote.

  His thoughts had gone in circles so many times that he was actually starting to feel nauseated.

  “I’ve been thinking about that, too,” Garith replied. “Inhalation, right?”

  Raffa stared at him. Of course! The quickest way to get a substance into the bloodstream was by inhaling it. “Like the dogs and the throx!” he exclaimed. Why hadn’t he thought of it before?

  But Garith was shaking his head. “It wouldn’t work the same way,” he said. “Those dogs—their job is to sniff, that’s what they’ve been trained to do. The attack animals, if we scatter the antidote powder on the ground, I’m guessing most of them won’t stop to sniff at it, not if they’ve been well trained.”

  “That’s it, isn’t it?” Raffa said slowly. “Predictability. We knew what the dogs would do.”

  His heart thumped harder. He had a feeling that their discussion held the key to the answer.

  Predictability. So what do we know about the animals? What can we count on them to do for sure?

  He thought again about the animals at the riverbank, and the attack on Kuma’s settlement. And the fox he and Kuma had healed.

  Red, spring . . . Red, spring . . .

  Kuma met his gaze. “They jump,” she said.

  He nodded. “They’ve been trained to leap at people’s throats,” he said. “Not the badgers—they go for people’s ankles, to trip them up. But the foxes and stoats, they attack by jumping.” He gestured with his hands as Garith watched him intently.

  “Sooo . . . ,” Garith said, “how can we use that?”

  On impulse, Raffa decided to try something he’d never done before. He closed his eyes and rolled his shoulders to relax them. Then he let images float freely in his mind’s eye. The fox jumping. Stoats snapping. The cavern plant glowing, the cauldrons boiling, the fine-grained antidote powder.

  He was trying to summon a moment of intuition. It probably won’t work. They have to just come to me on their own. I can’t force them. . . .

  True enough, he saw or felt nothing unusual. Don’t give up. Try, just a little longer.

  The fox jumping. It jumped higher and higher. On its last jump, it landed—with a bottle in its mouth. The bottle disappeared. The fox seemed to be smiling. It licked its lips, then vanished with a jaunty wave of its brushy tail.

  A bottle?

  In a far corner of Raffa’s mind, he was exultant: He had done it! And it wasn’t even that hard. He wondered if it was because of the time he had already spent thinking about the problem. It’s like . . . that part of my brain was ready. All the frustration—it was practice, or exercise—

  “Raffa? Raffa, are you okay?”

  The voice seemed very faint; he could hardly hear it. Then Kuma waved a hand in front of his face.

  He shook his head as if he were shaking off sleep. When his vision cleared, he saw Garith and Kuma both staring at him.

  “Listen,” he said, “I know this is going to sound crazy, but I need your help.”

  Another first: He had never discussed his intuitions with anyone else before. They were too hard to explain. Like the tunnel and the touchrue thorns: That feeling of moving through the tunnel and bursting out of the end was an analogy for thorns shooting through a reed. He had figured that one out quickly enough, but other intuitions had taken him hours or even days to decipher.

  They didn’t have that kind of time.

  “In my head I saw a fox jumping,” he began, “and when he landed, he had a bottle in his mouth. What do you think that means?”

  Garith frowned. Kuma gaped. They both looked completely bewildered.

  “Okay, forget that. Just think about a bottle. When I say ‘bottle,’ what comes into your head? Fast—don’t think, just say words.”

  This was often how his intuitions worked—seemingly at random, their logic buried deep. “Just trust me,” he said. “Please?”

  “Okay,” Garith said, “bottle. Um—they’re made of clay?”

  “Or glass,” Kuma said, “the fancy ones.”

  “Round,” Garith said. “Er, I mean, cylinder.”

  “Cork.”

  “Cork, stopper.”

  “Good,” Raffa encouraged. “Keep going.”

  “What are we trying to do?” Garith asked.

  “I don’t know,” Raffa admitted. “But I think I’ll know when we get there.”

  “Breakable,” Kuma said.

  “Um . . . liquid. They hold liquid?” Garith was clearly growing impatient.

  “Liquid. Pour. Spill.” Kuma was still trying.

  “Neck,” Garith said. “Bottles have necks— Faults and fissures! What are we doing here?”

  Raffa did
n’t answer; in fact, he hadn’t heard anything Garith had said after the word neck. A bottle’s neck . . . It was there, somewhere. Again, his mind sank into itself; for how long, he didn’t know.

  “—can’t think of anything else,” Kuma was saying.

  Raffa bounced up and down on his toes. “You did it,” he said, trying to keep his voice calm. “I figured it out—an idea that I think will work.” He looked from Kuma’s face to Garith’s. “But we’re going to need everybody’s help. Everybody.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  AT daybirth the next morning, the sun rose on the clearing, which was quiet and still. No one was bustling amidst the tents as they had been the day before. Instead, the settlers and escaped Gildeners were sitting in small clusters throughout the camp. Only their hands were busy, engaged in one of three activities: whittling, knitting, or unraveling.

  The whittlers had piles of sticks beside them. They stripped the bark from each stick, smoothed the wood underneath, and sharpened one end. They were making knitting needles.

  As soon as they finished a pair, one of the knitters would snatch it up and begin knitting furiously, using yarn provided by the unravelers. Every available knitted garment in the camp—scarves, sweaters, shawls, caps—was being unraveled, a task easy enough for the younger children.

  Raffa had made samples from an unraveled scarf. He had knitted long narrow sacks in two sizes, one the length of his foot, the other twice that. Each was as big around as an ax handle. He sewed one end shut but left the other open, with a length of yarn hanging free. Now he moved from group to group, showing the knitters the samples, so they would know what to make.

  “You need to make them for every adult and teen in your family,” he said. “Everyone will need at least two of each size, and more would be better.” He repeated this over and over; Kuma helped him spread the word.

  “When we’re done here, the council wants to see us,” she said.

  The first of the sacks were completed by the fastest knitters. Children around eight or nine years of age served as runners, collecting the sacks and delivering them to the apothecary tent, where Jimble and Garith were working together. After making his way around the whole camp, Raffa went to see how they were doing.

  Two huge bags of powder sat on the worktable. Garith held a funnel; Jimble, a small scoop, which he waved at Raffa.

  “I’m not wasting a single bit,” Jimble said earnestly. “Watch!”

  The cavern-plant residue was now a powder; it had been scraped and pulverized in the darkest hours before daybirth. Raffa had added the powder to the panax combination Garith had made. He took a little linen bag, filled it with two scoops of the powder, and put it away in his rucksack for a special task he wanted to work on later.

  Garith stretched the open end of a knitted sack around the tip of the funnel and held it in place. Jimble took a scoopful of the powder combination and carefully poured it into the funnel’s mouth. He was frowning in concentration, his tongue stuck out. Over his head, Garith caught Raffa’s eye and winked, obviously amused and impressed by Jimble’s interest in apothecary.

  When the little sack was filled with powder, Garith tied off the opening with the loose end of yarn. Then he took short pieces of yarn and tied them tightly around the sack in two places. The sack now looked like three linked sausages. A pile of them was growing in a basket on the floor.

  “See?” Jimble said. “We could go faster, but I think it’s more important not to spill the powder. That’s right, isn’t it?”

  Raffa agreed. Jimble glowed.

  Satisfied with their progress, Raffa went to the council meeting.

  Raffa saw Kuma sitting next to Elson, and took a seat between her and Quellin, with Haddie opposite him.

  “What’s this about?” he whispered. He had spoken to the council in the hour before dawn, a long discussion during which he explained the strategy for the antidote. He and Kuma and Garith had been up all night, tending the cavern-plant solution and talking over the strategy from every possible angle.

  “Not sure,” she whispered back, “but at least they’re knitting.” Each council member was busy with a pair of homemade needles in their hands.

  “Good,” Haddie said. “This will be quick, we all have a lot of work to do.”

  Elson turned to look at Raffa and Kuma. “You know that our overall objective is delay,” he said. “We’ve got the blowpipes, and these—” He held up the half-finished sack on his knitting needles. “But that’s not enough.”

  He put down his knitting and placed a hand on Kuma’s shoulder. “Kuma, we’d like you to consider something.”

  She barely let him finish. “No,” she said, crossing her arms in a stubborn gesture and leaning slightly away from him. “No.”

  How did she know what he was going to say? Raffa wondered. But in the next moment, he knew, too.

  There was only one possible strategy that Kuma alone would be able to implement—and she had just said no.

  She would never agree to using Roo in battle.

  Haddie looked resigned. “We expected that,” she said. “Kuma, please talk it over with Raffa. No one wants to hurt the bear, but if she can help us . . .” Her voice trailed off.

  Kuma shook her head and said it again.

  “No.”

  Raffa left the circle with Kuma, and together they walked toward the pother tent. “We need to collect touchrue thorns,” he said. “Will you come with me?”

  “I know where there’s a heavy stand of them,” she said, “and it’s not far from where Roo and Twig are, so we can check on them, too.”

  They fetched buckets, gloves, and snippers from the pother tent, and set off. Kuma led the way east out of the clearing.

  “Roo is so happy to be back in the Forest,” she said. “She’s showing Twig everything. They’re having a grand time.”

  “That’s good,” Raffa said. The two animals were a little family, and they were home again.

  He thought of his own home and family—Da in his cell at the Garrison, Mam creeping around the Commons trying to free the Advocate, their cabin burned to ashes. . . . When would they ever be together again?

  Then he experienced a moment of terrible clarity. Home. The captive animals had been taken from their homes and the Afters were being chased from theirs, acts of cruelty and callousness that had to be defied.

  He spoke at once. “You’re right, Kuma,” he said, “about what the Chancellor is doing—how wrong it all is. And if she wins, who knows what else she’ll do? We have to stop her. We have to use every single thing we have. You can see that, can’t you?”

  She looked startled at the abrupt change of subject, but he had to finish what he was saying. He glared at her. Part of him hated what he was doing; another part of him knew that it had to be done.

  “You know what it means, Kuma: Roo. We need Roo.”

  Kuma shook her head, crossed her arms, and turned one shoulder away from him. But Raffa saw the expression on her face: She was thinking hard rather than instantly saying no.

  He gave her a moment to herself. When he spoke, he made sure that his voice was gentle.

  “Kuma . . . What if we could think of a way to—to have Roo help us without putting her in danger?” Quickly he amended his words. “Or, I mean, as little danger as possible.”

  She tilted her head to let him know that she was listening.

  “Er, I actually don’t have any idea how we would do that,” he admitted. “Maybe together we could think of something?”

  When she didn’t reply, he shrugged. I mustn’t push her too hard. “So where are those touchrues?”

  The shrubs were scattered among tangles of bramble and shagneedle bushes. The growth in the Forest was budding out; twigs and branches were mostly bare. The puffy shagneedles kept their dried foliage through the winter and were just starting to shed; Raffa thought they looked like enormous untidy hedgehogs.

  Raffa and Kuma donned gloves and took up their snippers. Th
ey began clipping the large vicious-looking thorns one by one into the buckets.

  It took a long time to fill all four buckets. Raffa’s hands ached from the repeated motion of snipping. And even with gloves on, both he and Kuma suffered from inevitable scratches. He had brought along a soothing poultice; between them they used every last smear of it.

  Kuma had spent some time with Callian, the Advocate’s son, while Raffa had been away at the gorge. “What’s he like?” Raffa asked.

  To his surprise, Kuma ducked her head in an attempt to hide a shy smile, and Raffa could have sworn she was blushing.

  She shrugged. “He’s okay, I guess,” she said, her voice nonchalant.

  But she couldn’t hold back her interest. “Did you know that he’s half-Hangullite?” Hangull was a land to the west, far beyond Obsidia’s borders.

  “He’s an After?” Raffa was startled.

  “No, not exactly. His mom’s family, they came to Obsidia from Hangull before the Quake. They were diplomats, or something—a group of them traveled here to make an alliance. The Quake happened while they were here, so they never left. Their whole country was destroyed, and then some other Hangullites came here, so those ones are Afters.”

  Most Hangullites had high cheekbones. Raffa hadn’t noticed before, but now he recalled Callian’s features, and it made sense that he had Hangullite blood.

  “Anyway, he seems steady,” Kuma said. “I like the way he treats Bando. More like a—a friend than a pet.”

  Raffa felt an empty chill at his neckline, in the space where Echo used to hang on the perch necklace. He wondered if he would ever get used to missing the little bat.

  With a sigh, Raffa peered into his second bucket, which was nearly full. One more shrub, he thought. One more and we’ll quit.

  He looked around and saw a touchrue some twenty paces away, half hidden behind a large shagneedle bush. As he started toward it, Kuma suddenly raised her head.

  “Did you hear that?” she asked.

  “Hear what?”

  “It sounded like . . .” Her voice trailed off, and she held up her hand.