The Ale Boy's Feast (2 page)

Is the Keeper in their dreams just a figment of their imaginations?

Did the ale boy perish in the darkness?

All these questions will be answered in this, the final strand of The Auralia Thread.

mystery led the old man from the shelter of the trees.

Krawg, raising his picker-staff like a spear, pursued the creature eastward into the open and watched it plunge down the slope toward the River Throanscall. A flash of green wings, an unfamiliar chirp, and the scampering prey was gone, vanishing into the riverbank grasses that stood shoulder high.

He paused, remembering Captain Tabor Jan’s orders.

At the travelers’ suppertime counting, the counters had come up short. Growling, the captain had handed out shrill-whistles and sent seekers to comb the surrounding forest for Milora, a young glassworker who had strayed. The seekers were not to move beyond the safe range of a shrill-whistle as they fanned out through the trees.

But this southwestern branch of the River Throanscall was an endless sigh as it coursed through the seed-heavy reeds, and that familiar music attracted him.

“Bird got away, lucky rascal. Must be rough, don’t you think, Warney—havin’ wings but never flyin’?”

The snarling reply came not from his friend but his stomach.

“Wish I was carryin’ a gorreltrap,” he sulked. “Whatever it was, I bet it’d crisp up good in a pan. I’m so krammin’ sick of nuts and seeds.” He stirred the dry husks of dead leaves with his harvesting rod and watched the river grasses waver. “Could be the start of a story, I s’pose. There once was a bird who couldn’t fly, until one day when—”

That blur of glittering green burst from the grasses and bounded toward him. He dropped to the root-rumpled ground.

It was not a bird but a corpulent puffdragon, flinging itself about like a grasshopper in the autumn twilight.

Peering out from beneath his leaf-pasted cloak, Krawg watched while the wild wyrm played. It seemed to jump just for the crackle and crunch of it. But at times it paused mid-scamper, attentive, its gill-slit ears flaring and one scaly foot lifted like a hunting hound’s paw.

Though it was small and lithe as a house cat, it seemed large and dangerous when it trotted to within an inch of Krawg’s nose and spread the sails of those useless, translucent wings, which made a sound like shaken bedsheets. Hoping puffdragons were as day blind as common wisdom claimed, Krawg fought the urge to blink.

It blasted a sneeze, and the flare singed the rowdy ruckus of whiskers on Krawg’s upper lip. Then the creature wandered off to snuffle through dead leaves for a many-legged meal.

“We’ll be seein’ more of their kind, won’t we, Warney?” Krawg whispered. “Only fire-breathers can survive in a forest where Deathweed snakes through the ground.”

He thought of the black branches. At any moment one might thrust up through the soil, impale his chest, and drag him into the ground. Twitchy, he rose and walked down the slope, stabbing the marsh with his picker-staff all the way to the river’s edge. He did not want to think about Deathweed.

“Here’s another story I might tell. There once was a puffdragon who leapt before he looked …”

Silverblue water breathed a blanket of mist that beaded on his eyelashes. He’d spent many a day strolling along the Throanscall’s melodious strand north of Deep Lake. But if he listened to complaints from his neck, knees, and back, those days were coming to a close.

The river’s rush could not drown out the forest’s unnatural groan. Autumn was dawning, but these Cragavar trees were already skeletal, shaking off leaves and shedding their bark, exposing sickly flesh like plague-bearers begging for a cure. They clacked branches together as if to keep themselves awake.

He tightened his picker-staff grip, desire rotting into resentment. Most creatures of the ground and air had vanished from the Expanse, caught by the underground menace or fleeing its clutches. Krawg had pursued that rusty-hinge chirp, compelled by hunger and, even more, by a longing to see feathers lift a mystery into the air, to hear a song take to the sky.

So when a cry pierced the dusk and a solitary shadow winged low over the river—a stark and simple rune written on the sky’s purple scroll—he held his breath.

Beauty.

He glanced about to make sure he was alone, then smeared his tears with his sleeve. It was a bird. A bird with tousled crestfeathers and a ribbon tail gliding northward. In Krawg’s chest a pang rang like an alarm bell. He wanted to join the bird there, suspended.

“Ballyworms, Warney. What’s wrong with me?”

The bird sailed away, tilting, a kite with a broken string.

“Milora’s gone missing, Warney. But you know who I’m thinkin’ about instead.” He swiped at the reeds on either side, sending seed-heads sluicing into the river. “And, no, it isn’t you.”

Staring north, he watched the bird merge with the darkling boundary, the Forbidding Wall, which stretched from the western coast all the way into the impassable Heatlands of the east. Those mountains loomed as formidable as the front line of an army. In ancient tales that all four houses embraced, they were all that stood between the Expanse and a terrible curse.

“We’re not forsaken in the wild anymore, Warney. We’re the king’s helpers now. So why do I fret as much as ever?”

Perhaps
, he thought,
it’s because we have no king to serve
.

Jordam the beastman had returned to Bel Amica with several prisoners he had helped rescue from the Cent Regus prisons. But the joy of their arrival was overshadowed by their dire tidings. During the escape many other Abascar prisoners had been caught and slain by the Cent Regus. In that violent frenzy, which also claimed the life of King Cal-raven’s mother, Cal-raven had disappeared. Jordam,
having delivered these few survivors, had gone back alone to search for him and any other survivors.

After several days of silence, Abascar’s Captain Tabor Jan announced he’d take a small company and make the journey that the king had planned, following his map to find that mysterious place where Cal-raven hoped to establish New Abascar.

“So what happened to you, Warney?” grumbled Krawg. “Why’d you go missing on departure day? The captain wouldn’t wait. And now here I am, on my way north toward Fraughtenwood, with nobody to try out my stories on.”

He scribbled in the air with the picker-staff. “Once upon a Keeper’s footprint, a naked child was found …”

The reeds upriver suddenly rustled. For a moment Krawg thought it might be a memory. They rustled again.

“Freakish teeth of Grandmother Sunny!” He turned his picker-staff so that the apple-hook end was behind him. He’d sharpened the blade end in case he ran into something fierce. But his three practice throws had fallen short of the targets. He didn’t want to miss again. “Let it be something feastable,” he muttered. “Not something nasty and green.”

A cool line of sweat trickled down behind his ear as he took a step forward.

Nothing dove into the water. Nothing bolted back to the forest.

His feet began to sink into the sludge.
You’re more scared to see a child than a monster
.

Reaching the riverbank, he carefully parted a curtain of grass.

At once he remembered his purpose. For there she lay, the missing woman, curled in sleep on a broad riverstone. She still wore the winding white glassmaker’s wrap around her head, but her woolen cloak was dark and heavy—a gift from House Bel Amica’s Queen Thesera. Milora, the glassmaker’s daughter. Milora, mother of that rambunctious child Obrey.

Krawg drew out the shrill-whistle and put it to his lips.

That’s when the puffdragon, which Krawg suddenly noticed lying in Milora’s embrace, flicked out its forked tongue and drew back its lip from its flame-blackened teeth.

He screamed into the whistle.

The dragon burst from Milora’s arms and was gone. The woman leapt to her feet. And Krawg stumbled and fell with a splash into the shallows.

Milora flailed like a puppet on unsteady strings.

“Beggin’ your pardon, my lady,” Krawg blurted. “Everybody’s lookin’ for you.”

Milora’s eyes narrowed. Then she lifted Krawg’s picker-staff and offered him the apple-hook end. He took it, raising himself from the ground’s dark glue. “I just meant to rest awhile,” she said. “But there’s something about the river. It makes me feel safe. Close to home.”

“Safe? That was a dragon, not a puppy! You hurt?”

She ignored him, looking into the eerie evening colors above the mountains—the Northern Lumination. “Any news of the king?”

“Out here? How would it come to us?”

“He’s alive,” Milora insisted.

“I reckon you’re right.” Krawg tried to smile kindly, as if to reassure a troubled child. But then he remembered seeing his smile in a Bel Amican mirror and decided against it. “Come with me. Tomorrow we’re takin’ you and Obrey back where you came from.”

“If you know where I came from, you know more than me.”

He led her uphill toward the trees. “Thought that glass mine in the mountains was your home. And you went to House Bel Amica because you had a fever.”

“I was poisoned. The Seers wanted to bring the glass miners to Bel Amica and control them. Frits refused. And suddenly I got sick.”

“Cruel, them Seers.”

She shrugged. “They said I had bad blood and that they’d cure me. Said they’d bring back my memories too.”

“But they didn’t, did they?”

Milora pulled something off the edge of her cloak—a scamperpinch. It scissored the air with curved, shiny claws, and its many legs flailed. “Look,” she said, strangely unoffended by the ugly marsh-dweller, curious as a child. “He wants a hold on something.”

“How many years you spent?”
Twenty-five
, he thought.

“What would you guess?”

“Nineteen,” he said. He’d learned it was wise to subtract.

“Wish I knew.” Milora touched a finger to her temple. “Crack in my head. Lots of years have spilled right out somewhere along the way.”

They walked on in silence, back into the trees, where Krawg beat at the bracken in search of the path he’d made. Then he turned to offer the staff as a walking stick. “Surely your papa knows.”