Harbinger: Fate's Forsaken: Book One (17 page)

“It’s finally
happened — the Dragongirl is wearing her other form,” Crevan hissed, and
the swollen lumps above the beastkeeper’s eyes raised in interest. “If we move
quickly, we may have a chance to deal the ending blow. Go to the atrium and
send the birds — all of them. And when they find her … release the dogs.”

The
beastkeeper’s mouth split open like a crack, revealing a tangled mass of yellow
teeth. On another man, the gesture might have been recognized as a grin.

But on the
beastkeeper, it was just horrifying.

Traveling with
the caravan turned out to be like living in a small, moving village. Each one
of the covered wagons was its own shop: there was a tanner, a blacksmith, a
cook, a tailor, a jeweler and a carpenter. After Garron spelled out the details
of his chores, he gave Kael permission to trade with the carts for whatever he
needed.

But he refused
to use what coin Amos had packed for them. Kael was determined to figure out
how to trade on his own — which made things much more difficult.

He learned
quickly that if he asked for something and didn’t have anything to trade for
it, he got the cart door slammed in his face. He tried to explain to the
blacksmith that he needed a hunting dagger, because he couldn’t skin his game
without it — and he couldn’t turn them into the cook until they were
skinned. But the smith just shrugged.

“And if I give
it to you for free, I lose coin. And if I lose coin, Garron comes after me. We
all got problems, lad. And they’re all ours to solve.” Then he’d slammed the
door.

Kael spent all
day long trying to find someone to loan him a dagger, but no one was willing to
give one up without some sort of payment. He grumbled to Kyleigh about it all
through dinner.

“I’d be happy to
give you some coin,” she said.

He shook his
head. “No, I’m going to figure this out for myself.”

“You could
always use Harbinger.”

He watched as
she polished the sword’s dangerous, curving edge with a rough bit of cloth. The
white blade glowed in the firelight and hummed while she stroked it. The song
wasn’t unpleasant. “Thanks, but I think I’d just end up cutting my finger off.”

“Hmmm, well
there’s an idea.”

“You think
someone would buy my severed finger?”

She laughed.
“No, that’s not what I meant. Didn’t Garron say you’d be hunting with someone?”

“Sort of. He
said he wanted me to teach my skills to his men. But what does that have to do
with anything?”

“Something for
something — that’s the rule of trade.”

He hated
riddles. “But I haven’t got any coin, that’s the point.”

She looked up,
and her eyes caught with the sparks from the fire. “It isn’t only about coin.
You’ve got skills, and Garron’s men need them. In fact, we all need them.”

Ah … now he
understood. Hunting was just as important in the caravan as it was in Tinnark:
if Garron’s men didn’t find food, they wouldn’t eat. And Kael was the key to
making sure they stayed fed. He would help them hunt, they would help him skin,
and then they’d split the coin. It was a perfect plan.

Little did he
know just how much help Garron’s
men
would need.

His hunting
companions turned out to be a pair of brothers — a matched set of noise
and mischief. Claude, the youngest, was hardly twelve and was far more
interested in collecting rocks than tracking game. And Chaney, the eldest,
couldn’t have been a day older than fifteen — yet he carried on like he
knew everything worth knowing. They admitted outright that they weren’t very
successful hunters, and it only took him a few minutes to figure out why.

“Oi Kael! Look
at this plant. What do you think it is?” Claude shouted from across the grove,
startling a turkey from its roost just as Kael locked an arrow on it.

Chaney turned
around and squinted at the flower in Claude’s hand. “That’s bandit’s beard, you
dolt! No don’t eat it. You’ll spend all day in the latrine if you do.”

Claude took the
plant out of his mouth. “Oh. Hey, Kael! Do you think if I ground it up real
small, and maybe put a little water with it, that I could get Jonathan to think
it was soup?”

“Even Jonathan
isn’t that dim-witted,” Chaney said. And he knocked the plant out of Claude’s
hand for emphasis.

The resulting
brawl was loud enough to scatter every animal that hadn’t already run away.

There was no
shutting them up, and there was no losing them. No matter how early he woke or
how quietly he tried to sneak away, it wasn’t long before they’d materialize at
his side — squawking about whatever dragon-shaped leaf or green acorn
they happened to find. Kael realized that the grass might turn blue before the
brothers quit talking, so he decided to try something different.

The next day, he
woke them long before the sun and taught them how to trap. He showed them how
to turn briars into snares, how to bend tree limbs in neck breaking arcs and
use food for bait. It didn’t matter how loudly they cackled while they worked:
by the time they turned around and followed their route back to camp, the traps
were full. At midmorning they caught up with the caravan — toting a
rucksack and a half of small game.

Claude turned
out to be better at skinning than he was at making traps, so he volunteered to
clean the kills. Chaney, on the other hand, had a real talent for trapping. He
could find a likely looking patch of briars and turn them into a snare no
rabbit could escape.

When Kael
mentioned how well he was doing, his face lit up with excitement. “Do you
really think so?” Then he looked at the ground and scuffed the toe of his boot
absently against a rock. “But I’m not as good as you, of course. Your traps
always have something in them.”

Kael didn’t
think that was anything special. As long as he made the trap correctly, he
didn’t see why he shouldn’t catch something every time. But Chaney and Claude
spread the word around the caravan, telling anyone who would listen that his
traps never failed. And it wasn’t long before he was flooded with all sorts of
odd requests.

The smith needed
goose plumage for his arrows, and only a certain breed would do. He gladly
traded his best hunting dagger for three pounds of feathers. Garron mentioned
that he was fond of wild turkey, and there was a new suit of clothes in it for
Kael if he could catch a dozen — which he did. Then the tanner needed
more wolf pelts and the jeweler needed lions’ teeth, for which they paid in
silver.

Tales spread
like colds in the caravan, and soon the word was out: that scrawny boy from the
mountains could catch anything.

“I don’t
understand what all the fuss is about,” he said to Kyleigh. A group of
merchants hailed him as they walked by, and he gave them a quick nod. “Plenty
of people can trap.”

“It’s a fuss
because most people who trap usually come back empty-handed,” she said, as if
it should be obvious. “And they certainly don’t come back with exactly what
they were sent for. But with you, it’s like
oh,
I think I’ll go out and trap three white squirrels today
. And you do.”

He thought her
impression of him was a bit ridiculous. He didn’t sound like that at all. “The
white squirrels were just luck.”

She arched an
eyebrow. “Was it?” She put a finger on his chest. “Or was it skill?”

He knocked her
hand away. “It was luck,” he said shortly. Perhaps if he’d had the gift of
craft, everything he built might do what he wanted it to. But he wasn’t a
craftsman, he reminded himself, he was a healer.

A few days later
he had more copper than he could count, but absolutely no peace. Everywhere he
went, people hounded him with their requests, wagering their earnings on
whether or not he’d be able to find this or that. And he began to think very
seriously about packing his rucksack and running away. He might have done just
that had it not been for Horatio,
the
caravan’s cook.

He was a chubby
man with ruddy cheeks and a tuft of brown hair that sat on his head like a
rooster’s comb. He watched over his food with the protective eye of a mother
hen — and attacked anyone who lingered in his cart without mercy.

On more than one
occasion, Jonathan would burst out the cart door with an armful of whatever
food he managed to pilfer. And Horatio would tumble out behind him, brandishing
the large wooden spoon he wielded like a sword and crowing for Garron to
stop that stringy snake of a fiddler
!

One day, Horatio
caught Kael taking refuge behind a barrel of apples, and he thought he was as
good as dead. But instead of flattening him with his spoon, Horatio took pity
on him.

“How would you
like a job?” he said.

Kael wanted a
job badly. He finished his trapping early in the day and after that, there was
nothing else to do but try to avoid his companions. Besides, he thought it
might be fun to learn how to cook.

Horatio knew
almost as much about cooking as he did about eating. He liked to keep his
recipes crammed into odd nooks — away from the eyes of anyone who might
wander in.

“Make yourself a
pie and there’s always a dozen crows waiting to snatch it up,” he’d rant as he
tugged a clove of garlic from its braid. “I’ll not have my hard work ruined by
halfwits and copy-cooks.”

After he pledged
his life to protect them, Kael got to read the recipes. It was tough to see the
words through the many brownish spatter stains, and a great deal of the ink had
been ravaged by spills. The words bled nearly to the point of being illegible
in some places. But he eventually managed to figure them out.

The cook’s cart
had a shallow iron bowl set into the floor and a hole cut out of its roof.
Every morning, Horatio shoveled the bowl full of hot coals and used them to
cook.

“Hold on a
moment. I think the carrots go in first and
then
the onions,” Kael said.

Horatio looked
up when he spoke, his hand hovering over a pot of boiling water, and frowned.
“Kael m’boy, this is my dear mother’s recipe. I’m quite positive I know how
it’s made.”

He shrugged.
“The recipe said the carrots go in first because they’ll take longer to cook.
Drop the onions early, and you’ll end up with a soggy mash.”

Horatio’s cheeks
puffed out in a frown. “How could you possibly remember that? You barely
glanced at mother’s recipe last week, and here you are spouting it off like it
was in your hand.” He shook his head and crammed the onions back in his apron.
“Young people have such a gift for being right — at the most annoying of
times.”

As he passed
Horatio a handful of carrots, an odd feeling twisted in the pit of his stomach.
He didn’t know how he remembered the recipe. The words came to him as clearly
as the light of day, rising up in his mind the moment he needed them.

Maybe … no, it
was probably nothing.

From sunup to
sundown, Kael stayed on his feet. It took all day to keep the caravan fed, and
sometimes the hours between breakfast and dinner passed so quickly that he
didn’t even remember having lunch. But occasionally, they would get their work
done early.

Those were the
days that Kael enjoyed the least — because the extra hours gave Horatio
the time he needed to try out one of his new recipes. They were bizarre things:
like apple pie with mushroom sauce, or mice tail soup. Horatio called them
experiments. Kael thought they were more like poisons.

“What shall we
try today, m’boy? It’s got to be something really fantastic — something
to warm the heart,” Horatio said. He sat on a small stool in the back of the
cart, his elbow propped on his sizable belly and his chin balanced pensively in
his hand. “The fried turkey liver wasn’t exactly a hit,” he mused.

It certainly
wasn’t. Half the people who tried it spent the night out in the woods, voiding
everything but their innards. The recipe became so infamous that Garron had it
outlawed. Jonathan even wrote a song about it — but the lyrics were not
repeatable.

“You know, I
think we ought to try the tortoise and almond crumble —”

“Or not,” Kael
said quickly.

“Why?” Horatio
said, narrowing his eyes. “A good cook
must
experiment if he ever wants a chance at becoming great. The distance between
the mouth and hand is short, and hand to pocket even shorter. There’s a mine to
be had for the meal that makes the mouth water — and I intend to discover
it.”

Kael had to
think quickly. He felt like someone ought to save the caravan from tortoise and
almond crumble. “I was just … uh, I have an idea. And I wanted to give it a go,
if that’s all right.”

To his surprise,
Horatio looked delighted. “Now there’s a thought. Yes, what this kitchen needs
is a pair of fresh hands. So,” he clapped his palms together, “where do we
start?”

Kael gave him a
list of supplies, making it all up as he went. They killed some of the chickens
and plucked them. While Horatio cut the meat into strips, Kael worked on making
a sauce. He only put things he liked in it: apples, garlic … and a few other
seasonings he thought went with them. He’d pop the cork out of one of the spice
bottles and if he liked the way it smelled, in it went. And while the chicken
roasted over the fire, he smothered it in a good portion of the sauce.

The meat was
still cooking when the carts rolled to a halt, but Horatio offered to serve
dinner on his own while Kael finished up. By the time it was ready, the sauce
had formed a crunchy layer around the chicken. He took a bite — just to
make sure it wasn’t horrible.