Harbinger: Fate's Forsaken: Book One (18 page)

When Horatio
returned, he tasted it for himself. While he chewed, his eyebrows climbed. They
were in danger of disappearing into the tuft of his hair when he finally
declared:

“Brilliant! An
absolute triumph!” He shook Kael’s hand so hard he thought it might come off,
then scooped the chicken into a bowl and waved him to the door. “Come along,
m’boy. We can’t keep our customers waiting!”

The first few
people who reached into the bowl did so with no small amount of reluctance.
They grimaced when they took a bite and chewed lightly, like they thought it
might be the last thing they ever ate. But when the flavor hit, their eyes lit
up. And word spread like wildfire.

A large crowd
swarmed Horatio, clamoring for seconds. He disappeared in the crush and held
the bowl high above the many grasping hands. “One apiece! I said
one
, Claude. Not twelve!”

Kael couldn’t
stop himself from grinning, and so he didn’t try. In the dark, no one could see
how happy he was. He could smile all he wanted to and no one would ever know.

It wasn’t long
before his growling stomach sent him away from the crowd and in search of some
dinner. Everyone in the caravan was assigned a fire for meals and sleeping. He
shared his with the youngest group at the edge of camp. Tonight, they were
pitched under the branches of a wide oak tree — which would be good if it
rained, but also meant that he was likely to find a small family of spiders
living in the foot of his bedroll.

Kyleigh was
sitting alone by the fire, scratching at a piece of beech wood with a dagger.
He checked his belt and discovered that she’d nicked it from him again.

“You shouldn’t
take things that don’t belong to you,” he said as he glanced in the pot hanging
over the fire. It was empty.

“You shouldn’t
keep your knife in your belt,” she retorted. She picked up a small burlap sack
and held it out to him. “This didn’t belong to me either, but I thought you
might be hungry. Of course I can always put it back, if your conscience won’t
allow you to eat it.”

He took the sack
out of her hand and ignored her smirk as he sat next to her. “How did you get
into the food cart without Horatio spotting you?”

“I waited until
he left, of course. I was just going to pop in and say hello, but you seemed so
… focused, and I didn’t want to disturb you.”

He’d been
chomping on a piece of dried meat and wasn’t sure he’d heard her correctly.
“Wait, you were in there while I was working?”

She nodded.

Well that was
disturbing. There wasn’t a lot of room in the cook’s cart and, short of turning
invisible, he didn’t see how she could have snuck past him.

“I swear I can
hear your wheels turning,” she said, and he realized she was watching him, an
amused smile on her lips. “Give up, mountain man — you’ll never guess
it.”

He had no
intention of giving up, and her taunts only made him want to learn her secret
more. But he pretended to surrender long enough to finish his meat. At the
bottom of the sack was an apple, a slice of bread and a wedge of cheese.

He made sure no
one was within earshot before he scolded her. “You shouldn’t have done this,”
he said, holding up the cheese. “Horatio says it’s hard to get in the Valley,
and our supplies are running low.”

“Oh please,” she
muttered as she dug at a knot in the wood, her brows bent in concentration.
“He’ll just get more tomorrow. And besides: they’re swindling you senseless.
You’ve earned a cart full of cheese.”

Kael knew the
merchants were cheating him. Chaney told him to never take the first offer, but
he didn’t care enough to bargain for more. The coin just made his pack heavy,
anyways. “What’s tomorrow?”

“Market. We’ll
be in Crow’s Cross by evening, which means you and I will get our wages,” she
said with a grin.

His cheese
caught in his throat. He was excited about market, but he’d also read that towns
attracted Midlan patrols. Large collections of people meant more taxes for the
crown, after all. “Did Garron say what he expects us to do in Crow’s Cross?”

She shrugged.
“He’ll just want us to look out for thieves. But I doubt we’ll have anything to
do. We haven’t found so much as a bandit the whole time we’ve been here.”

She was right
about that. During a few trapping excursions, he’d come across what looked to
be a bandit camp. The coals from their fires would still be hot and their
weapons would be leaning up against their tents, but there wasn’t a soul to be
found. It was strange … almost like they’d disappeared.

It made him
wonder if there wasn’t something in the Valley worse than a gang of bandits.
Perhaps that innkeeper had been right about the monsters.

“So besides
trapping and cooking, what else have you gotten yourself into today?”

He tore his eyes
away from the fire long enough to answer her. “Nothing, really. What about
you?”

She sighed.
“Let’s see … well, when I’m not fighting off Jonathan, I’m hiding from
Aerilyn.”

Poor Kyleigh.
Her duties had turned out to be less like a personal guard and more like a
personal canvas. Aerilyn cornered her nearly every evening and forced her to
sit still while she applied large amounts of paint to her face. It was meant to
darken her eyes or to brighten them, redden her lips or flush her cheeks.
Whatever the paint was meant to do it usually did, but he didn’t like the way
she looked with it. And he knew she loathed it.

“What has
Jonathan gotten himself into?” he asked, hoping the change in subject would
brighten her mood.

She returned his
dagger and leaned back, propping herself up on her elbows. “Oh, the usual
foolishness. Today he mostly followed me around, abusing that horrible fiddle.”

Jonathan kept
his instrument notoriously off key. He claimed the screeching notes added an
artistic element to his many bawdy ballads. But most people could agree that
the only thing it added was swelling on top of an already enormous headache.

“The kick of it
all is that I think he can really sing,” she continued. “Just this afternoon I
heard him humming when he thought no one else was around, and you know
something? It sounded really lovely.”

“Oh? And where
were you hiding that he didn’t see you?”

“On top of the
jewelry cart,” she admitted. “Though in my defense, Aerilyn was trying to get
me to read some poetry.”

“What’s poetry?”

“Just rhythmic
nonsense people write about trees — and about each other. The stuff
Aerilyn likes is romantic to the point of being revolting.” She tossed a twig
into the fire, probably imagining that it had some offending line about love
etched on it.

“If she can
read, then why does she want you to read it?”

Kyleigh looked
up at the sky, as if she was imploring the stars for patience. “She
says
— and I quote — that
there
is a particular subtlety that comes out in the words when one reads poetry
aloud
.”

She said that
last part in a very over exaggerated, high-pitched voice. It did sound a bit
like Aerilyn. He couldn’t help himself — he laughed.

She raised her
eyebrows. “I thought I’d die before I heard you giggle.”

He turned his
smile into a frown as quickly as he could. “Well you aren’t likely to hear it
again, so just … don’t go on about it.”

“I think I’ll
have Aerilyn sew the date on my handkerchief. Or maybe I’ll write a book about
it. You like to read —” She stopped abruptly and peered across the fire.
A look of such horror crossed her face that Kael expected a two-headed corpse
to rise out of the ground at any moment. “No. Absolutely not,” she said,
leaping to her feet.

“What is it?” He
squinted, but couldn’t see anything in the darkness.

“It’s too
horrible to mention.” She grabbed a low-hanging branch and with one graceful
swing, pulled herself up into the limbs.

Kael wondered if
he should follow her. On the other side of the camp, he could hear Jonathan
playing his fiddle while the men laughed and carried on. They obviously
couldn’t sense any danger.

Kyleigh’s
whisper came from high in the tree: “Just act as if I’m not here.”

He sat on edge for
a moment, wondering if his life was about to end. But then he saw the creature
that stalked them, and breathed a sigh of relief: it was only Aerilyn. She
skipped towards the fire, a frilly, emerald green dress clutched in her arms.

“You should have
picked a better hiding spot. She’s bound to find you up there,” he said out the
side of his mouth.

“The only people
who think to look in trees are the people who climb them,” was her tart reply.

He was about to
say something else when Aerilyn spotted him.

“Good evening,
Kael!”

She wore a pale
pink dress and had the long waves of her hair curled into neat rings. When she
smiled, he was glad the light was too dim to show his blush.

“Yes, evening
and … all that,” he said rather lamely.

She was gracious
enough to ignore it. “You haven’t seen Kyleigh anywhere, have you? I’ve found
the most
ravishing
dress and she
simply must try it on.”

He fixed his
eyes on the fire to avoid accidentally glancing at the tree. “You know, I
haven’t seen her around,” he raised his voice a little, “but I wouldn’t mind
seeing her in a dress.”

An acorn
plummeted from the tree and conked him on the head.

“Ouch!” He
glared up at the branches. When he turned back, Aerilyn was watching him
curiously. “Um, it’s just one of the hazards of sitting under an oak.”

She sighed
heavily as she plopped down next to him, her skirts poofing out beside her.
“I’m afraid I’ve run out of ideas. I thought that if I found you, then I’d find
her. But if she isn’t with you, then I don’t know where she is.”

“Er, well, I
just — I don’t know what to tell you. Why did you think she’d be with
me?”

She snorted.
“The two of you are tight as a sailor’s knot. Everyone can see it.” She plucked
a blade of grass and began weaving it onto another.

He didn’t know
when
everyone
had found time to make
such wild assumptions. “Well, they’re wrong. We’ve only just met — I
mean, it just so happens that we’ve ended up in the same place, is all,” he
said defensively.

She giggled,
knotting another blade of grass onto the next. “Alright, I do apologize. I
suppose being away from home bonds you with another person. Speaking of, are
you really from the Unforgivable Mountains?”

He nodded.

“Oh, I’m so
jealous! I’ve never been to the mountains, but I’ve heard such terrifying
stories.” She leaned forward. “Is it very dangerous? Do people really freeze
together if they sit too close?”

“No, I’ve never
heard of anyone freezing together. But we do have a river we call Hundred
Bones.”

She raised her
brows. “And why’s it called that?”

“Because it’s
said to hold the bones of one hundred of the King’s bravest knights — all
drowned at once.”

She clapped a
hand to her mouth and gasped excitedly.

“It’s true,” he
said, slightly encouraged by her reaction. “The story goes that old King Fergus
wanted his castle built at the very top of the Unforgivable Mountains. He
ordered one hundred of his noblest knights to climb ahead of his masons and
clear the way …”

Aerilyn was the
perfect audience for his tales. When a monster leapt out from the mist, she
gasped. If the story got suspenseful, she would lean forward and listen with
wide eyes until his heroes made it out of danger. She even laughed at the funny
bits. One tale became two, and two became three. Soon there was very little
life left in the campfire.

“And that’s why
the tops of the mountains are always capped in ice,” he finished.

“Because they
quarreled with the sun?”

He nodded, and
she clapped.

“Bravo! That was
wonderful. You’re quite the storyteller.”

He glanced away
from her admiring eyes and scratched his head. “I don’t know about that. Amos
was always better than me.”

The words
slipped out before he could think to stop them, and Aerilyn latched on. “Amos?
Was Amos your father?”

“No — I
never knew my father,” he said quickly. He was trying to think of a way to
change the subject when she gasped.

“Oh Kael, that’s
awful! But I know how you feel: I never knew my mother. Well, perhaps I knew
her at one point or another but I was far too young to recall. It’s just been
Papa and me for as long as I can remember. We travel across the realm, trying
to keep our village fed —”

“Ahoy there! And
what are you two little lambs baaing about?” Jonathan said as he sauntered out
of the darkness. He had his fiddle propped up on one shoulder and swung his
free arm in an exaggerated arc.

Aerilyn scowled
at him. “We were just having a lovely conversation. Until you showed up and
ruined it all, that is.”

Jonathan ignored
her scathing look. “Garron says it’s your bed time, mot. You should get tucked
in.”

Aerilyn wasn’t
allowed to sleep outside with everybody else. Though she begged and pleaded,
Garron insisted that the wilderness was no place for a young lady. He made her
set up her bedroll in the garment cart, instead. And Jonathan never passed up
an opportunity to tease her for it.

Tonight, she
seemed entirely fed up. Her face flushed red as she stood and whipped her
skirts about her. “I’ll thank you not to talk to me like a child. I’m a grown
woman by anybody’s standards!”

She made to
stomp off when Jonathan scooped the frilly green dress off the ground and waved
it at her. “Aren’t you forgetting your rather large handkerchief?” He turned it
over in his hand. “Oops, looks like I was wrong. It’s a tent, isn’t it?”

She snatched it
out of his hand so quickly that it was a wonder it didn’t rip. “It’s a
dress
, you buffoon! Not a tent, not a
wagon cover — a dress!” Then she hiked her skirts up to her knees and stormed
away.