The Ale Boy's Feast (6 page)

“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 breaking 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.”

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 sword from the floor and swung it around at the shadows. “Get out!”