The Ale Boy's Feast (38 page)

The songs offered beauty back to all that the travelers saw until the boy wondered if the colors that surrounded them might be a response to their singing, just as the song itself was born of seeing daybreak.

What kind of house will these dreamers become? What will it be like to live among people who don’t fidget in fear of what’s around the next bend? What kind of melodies will they compose?

He guessed that they would make strange company. Mysterious. Aggressively curious. Scary. Ignoring urgent concerns, distracted by insects and clouds and children. Each would live with one foot planted in another world. No more worry about their reputation. No more sugarcoated persuasion. No more flourishes designed to solicit a shower of coins. Only riddles and play and prophecy.

He guessed that they would hear no more songs about a Keeper who granted wishes. Instead, they’d sing of magnificent creatures that lured people out of the dark, away from all they thought they owned, and showed them something grander.

As the song rose and fell, he noticed Mousey sitting alone on the back edge of the last raft, trailing her feet in the water. Her shoulders shook, and her head was bowed so that the mop of red hair concealed her eyes.

He rose and climbed gingerly from one raft to another to join her. She looked like a rag doll salvaged from the toy box of a violent child. Her arms were scarred with tattoos and crisscrossing scabs from fights and abuses. Her face was a patchwork of bruises, and her breathing was uneven.

He placed a hand lightly on her shoulder. She looked at him and laughed in embarrassment. “Sorry, there. I just … I just don’t know if I should be here. I don’t deserve to live in your new house. I’ve done things. I’ve … I’ve sold people.”

“King Cal-raven likes to give folks chances to change,” the boy replied. “He has friends who are beastmen, friends who are thieves. You won’t be unusual. Tell me what happened. How’d you get caught by shredders?”

She shrugged. “I found my partner’s secret stash of coins. Ya see, we’d been stashin’ away what folks paid us for … for our trade. We were gonna buy a place all our own on the islands. Get free of work. Free of danger. But then I found she’d been takin’ some and hidin’ it elsewhere. I didn’t say nothin’ until the day she pulled a charade, sayin’ we’d been robbed. I told her I knew where she’d put it. I left, carryin’ my half of it all. I just couldn’t believe she’d lie to me.”

Mousey rubbed her hands fitfully. “But we were slavers. Sellin’ travelers and wanderers for money. I was tired all the time for foolin’ myself that it didn’t matter. Kept blamin’ others, sayin’ that if I didn’t do this, somebody else would, so I might as well earn a living. Why should I blame Brown for what she done? Anyway, I went off on my own. And I think she got mad. Set the shredders on my trail.”

She glanced at him out of the corner of her eye. “We’d have made a fortune on you if we’d nabbed you. Firewalkers are rare.”

The ale boy didn’t know what to say to that. So he put his feet in the water beside hers and watched the passing lights paint them different hues.

“Brown’s free of me now, anyways.”

“And you’ve got us now,” the boy said. “You chose a better way. Changin’ things for better is hard work. Like rowin’ upstream. I watched Jordam do it. He got stronger. So he could walk away from the Core.” He shrugged. “Maybe Brown’s free. But she’s alone.”

As they floated along in quiet, his attention drifted from the glowstones that fit together like puzzle pieces along the ceiling, to the arbors of ever-more-extravagant trees along the banks, and then at last to the raft on which he rested.

Mostly, the raft was a wide wooden door with a few gaps punched through it. Someone had patched a break with a wooden shield flecked with fading paint—an
illustration of impossibly muscled warriors. The striped background suggested an unfamiliar flag. Perhaps this piece of pillage had come from House Cent Regus itself before the fall. Another gap was nailed over with a wooden plank—a game board marked with a path of squares that spiraled inward to a bright, star-shaped center.

Bound to the front of the raft, an angular piece of buoyant wood helped the float cut faster through the flow. It may have once hung on the wall of a school, for runes scrawled across it spelled out platitudes describing an honorable citizen.

He felt as if he floated on the wreckage of the history of the world.

“Do these colors exist only here?” he heard Irimus ask. “Or have they always been out there, and we haven’t noticed?”

“All I know is this,” said Nella Bye. “I can see clearly again.”

Later, as the boy drifted through memories of Auralia, Nella Bye drew him back to the immediate circumstance. “Are you seeing this?”

Trees crowded the river, their trunks of braided strands flexing with the currents.

“Yes,” he said dreamily.

“What if our kingdom has trees with roots that reach these waters? What kind of fruit will they bear?”

As they floated around a bend, he noticed a painted figure on the wall. Across the purple curve someone had rendered a white creature that reminded him of the Keeper. But this creature seemed to have fins rather than legs. It was sleeker, with a snaking tail and ears like kites. Someone had plastered brightly colored petals into the stone so they seemed to flower from the creature’s mouth. He started to say something, then fell silent.

“Is that rain?” asked Irimus. “Or snow?”

The golden hermits pulled them into a corridor lined with trees, grateful giants that held out their boughs to one another high above. Flowers caught in their canopy shone with a ghostly blue aura, shedding a steady shower of petals that
drifted down, fizzed when they met the water, and spun as they dissolved, causing small shimmering whirlpools in the river.

The passengers watched, hypnotized and quiet.

We’re reversing Tammos Raak’s journey. We’re drawing closer to the Wall. If the Great Ancestor’s escape into the Expanse was such a glorious thing, why is the world more beautiful the closer we come to the Wall?

The boy caught a petal on his hand. He had seen these blue flowers somewhere before, but not in a tree and never so large. He carefully tucked it onto his tongue, felt it melt like a sugar wafer.

“Everything that lives here has all it needs,” said Raechyl. “I could almost live here.”

“It won’t last,” said the boy. “Why not?”

“We’ve found it,” said the boy. “It’s bound to change.”

“Rescue, look.” Nella Bye smiled. “Look at your hands.”

He opened them and saw that the dark red color that had emerged from the flames was peeling away like sunburn. His new skin was almost the color it had been before his fall in the Cent Regus Core.

He felt a sting in his eyes and rubbed them with his knuckles. When he drew his hands away, they were wet with an oily darkness. He realized that he felt warm with fever. His throat began to ache.

And yet somehow he knew this was necessary.

He caught a few more petals and tucked them into the pocket of his loose white shirt.

The turtles tired and crawled up onto fallen trees, dripping and humming deep sounds of happy exhaustion. The passengers decided to sleep awhile as well.

In this hush Batey visited the ale boy. “I’d form an army to defend this place,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean I’m giving up on Bel Amica. Rescue, we’ve got to
go home. People are in trouble up there. And the more we lie here looking at pretty lights, the easier it is for me to forget my duty.”

The ale boy nodded. “We’re fed. We’re not thirsty. I think we’re safer than before. Maybe it’s a good time to find a way out.”

So while the others slept, Batey and the ale boy swam through the fence of trees, climbed up on the rocky shore beyond it, and began to examine the shell-strewn banks. Clearly, this was an otters’ feasting ground. They explored in opposite directions. The boy moved up the tunnel, where birds flitted this way and that, and toads splatted along down to the water.

Reaching the shore’s end, he waded into the shallows and stepped cautiously into a crevasse in the wall. He found himself waist-deep in a narrow stream bathed in a flood of white sunshine. The water was surprisingly clear; he could see his bare, scarred feet along the smooth river floor. Fish chased each other around his ankles. A striped, eyeless eel with a toothless mouth nibbled at his legs, its scratchy tongue scraping for moss or water bugs.

As he refilled his water flask, he smelled smoke mingling with the perfumes of abundant cave lilies. Then he moved on toward a commotion. A deep ache flared, a feeling he had come to know. Something was in trouble nearby. Something needed his help.

As he straightened, he saw a spill of rugged earth on the left where part of a wall had collapsed, opening a window to bright, turbulent daylight above. Outside, ribbons of smoke twisted past an array of contorted, blackened trees. Flames lashed at the tree trunks.

Those aren’t Cragavar trees. That’s Fraughtenwood. And it’s on fire
.

Deep impressions—hoofprints—punctured the rubble incline. They led into the stream and then emerged again on the soft soil to the right.

He heard trouble frightfully close. Something stirred behind ivy curtains that draped the wall. Drawn by invisible strings, he walked up and gingerly pulled back an edge of the ivy.

A tremendous display of antlers burst forward. The antlers thrashed, striking
the hard wall with sharp cracks, dragging strands of ivy. Crawling away on all fours, the boy saw the blood-streaked face of the animal—a stag of magnificent size, lying crumpled behind the curtain.

His ears pricked toward the boy, the stag bared his teeth and seethed. His eyes were clouded, and his hide was purple and red, burned hairless. He held one front hoof suspended.

“You can’t see me clearly, can you?” the boy asked. “You’re burned too badly.”

The stag’s nostrils sucked noisily at the air, and he shook his antlers as if to assert that he was in complete control.

“You’re mighty. You’re glorious. I can help. But you’ll have to put down your pride.”

The daylight flickered, and waves of twisting flame crashed past the opening. The grasses around the cave-in cowered, blackened, and disappeared in smoke. Heat wafted into the tunnel. The stag pawed at the ground and wheezed what would have been a bellow before smoke scorched his lungs.

The boy uncorked the flask.

The stag sniffed the air again. His ears swiveled back as a great tree, somewhere unseen in the conflagration outside, groaned and exploded. A spray of sparks and smoke billowed up into the sky.

“I won’t hurt you,” whispered the boy. “You’re thirsty. And your wounds need washing.”

The stag’s nostrils opened, the flesh of the muzzle around it scarred with heat.

“You are such a beautiful king,” said the boy. He cupped his hand, poured a splash of water into it.

The stag lifted his head, listened intently to the world all around, then slowly lowered his muzzle, extending a cracked, purple tongue.

As the stag drank, the boy’s eyes glazed with tears. For a moment he felt that all these things had happened so that he might be here, in this moment, offering a sip of water to a desperate king—a touch of comfort, a rumor of a place where water was pure and enlivening, where help came when you needed it.

The stag licked the boy’s hand dry. Then his muzzle swung around and nudged the flask.

“There’s more,” said the boy. “A whole river of it.”

“Boy!” That was Batey’s voice somewhere in the distance.

The stag bit his hand lightly with thick, square teeth, and the boy poured him another handful. He winced, trying to keep his gaze from the magnificent ruin of the creature’s scorched flesh. “You have to let go of this place,” said the boy. “Go north. This water spills from somewhere.”

The stag kicked at the ground, lurched to his feet, and then struck the ale boy with a hard thrust of a hoof. The boy sprawled into the dirt. He heard a thud and a splash, and he saw a shadow pass into the sunlight.

Holding his chest, he fought for breath. The stag was now a proud silhouette stark against the wall of fire, and then it was gone into the conflagration.

“Get back here!” Batey called. “Trouble!”

Batey lifted the boy and carried him, running along the shore and diving back out to swim through the tree line. “They’re coming!” he panted as he approached the others.

“Who?” asked Irimus, sharper than he had been since years before Abascar’s fall. “Shredders?”

“The runaways. They’re armed and look like trouble. Get back on the water.”

“All of them?”

“Five. And … and they’re not right.”

The golden hermits were asleep and refused to rouse, offering deep groans of discomfort when they were jostled. “We’ll row,” said Batey.

A venomous hiss sounded in the corridor behind them. “Was that one of … them?” Kar-balter whispered.

The ale boy saw Batey cast a fearful glance to Raechyl. And now he, too, was afraid.

At the end of the tree-lined corridor, they passed beneath a red arch into a high-ceilinged space lit by patches of blue flowers. A thick pillar—perhaps a tree trunk—dressed in a coat of trailing white moss stretched up to press against the ceiling, which was studded with strange growths like large, folded flower buds. Beyond the pillar they heard a continuous thunder.

“A falls,” said the boy.

“Will we go over?” Kar-balter yelped.

“No,” said Batey. “We’re going upstream.”

“Then we may be trapped,” said Nella Bye.

Daylight painted the far end of the cavern, which was terraced in great swells of stone draped in pink sheets of minerals. Through breaks in the clouds that stormed and steamed from the falls’ concussion, they caught glimpses of a vast pool.

“There’s our way out!” said Batey.

A crooked stair rose from the shoreline just to the right of the falls and ascended into a shaft in the earth.

“Batey!” Nella Bye grabbed his arm and dragged him down. A spear sailed over the Bel Amican.

What looked like Aronakt stood at the front of the first pursuing raft. He wavered awkwardly in his tattered cloak, like a Cent Regus merging of man and bat. His jaw hung open as if it was broken, and fresh scars raked his face. His eyelids were drawn back, and his eyes swiveled loosely.