The Ale Boy's Feast (35 page)

Trees began to move as if in a windstorm. She tried not to look at the canopy of branches over and around her, for she thought she saw the shapes of long-legged, skeletal creatures stalking them through the boughs.

Shanyn pointed to a flickering red hue on a hilltop ahead. In the increasing light they could see a dark pillar billowing skyward and bending west across Fraughtenwood.

“We’ve found them,” said Brevolo.

On the hilltop they found small fires scattered all around an ancient barn that appeared to have caught itself in midcollapse. Archers and torchbearers were striking at predators—creatures like bizarre beetles and crickets made of branches and bark.

Brevolo rode the vawn in a circle around the scene, calling out that help had come.

“These kramming monsters,” said Shanyn. “What’s in the barn that they want?”

“Life, I suppose,” said Brevolo, reining the vawn to a halt. “We’re going in there.” She spurred the vawn forward, and as they reached the door, they met an old man on his way out to blow an alarm horn. He saw them and stumbled aside. “Warney!” Brevolo was astonished.

“Brevolo! Shanyn!” Warney pulled at his wisps of hair. “Help us! The Seers have cursed the forest!” He pointed to the leaning barn. “Bel Amicans! Children!”

Inside, between the animal stalls where horses were rearing and shrieking, they found four wagons loaded with large sacks made of seabull hide and covered with heavy tarps.

Someone stepped out from one of the stalls—a woman with her arms around two small boys.

“Sisterly Emeriene?” Brevolo gasped. “What are you doing here?”

Emeriene limped toward them. Something about her had changed. Her eyes were red, her face haunted, and she clung to her sons as if they would keep her afloat on stormy waters. “These wagons,” she was shouting like a deranged patient in the Bel Amican infirmary. “They’re filled with torch oil.”

Brevolo blinked.

“Partayn sent them. He knew you’d need fire to save yourselves from viscorclaws.”

“From what?”

Emeriene pointed out toward the violence. “Viscorclaws. Deathweed’s corrupting the trees. It’s the Seers’ revenge. And fire’s our only defense. But we can’t let the fire touch our cargo …”

Brevolo looked up into the rafters, where smoke was coiling as if readying to strike. “Blazing Tower of Tammos Raak … if the fire reaches the cargo, this hilltop and everything on it will turn to ash in a heartbeat. Let’s get you out of here.”

“You need this cargo,” Emeriene insisted. “And we need these wagons. There aren’t enough horses and vawns for all of us. The whole forest is turning to viscorclaws.”

Brevolo looked back to the entrance. “We’re taking all of it north through Fraughtenwood. As fast as we can.”

The four horse-drawn wagons—the first crowded with passengers, the others heavy with oil sacks—were brought out of the barn into beams of the eastern sunrise.

Archers lined up alongside the wagons, armed with flaming arrows and shooting whenever another tangle of vicious branches came crawling forward.

From her vawn Brevolo issued the command. Shanyn echoed the cry from behind her.

The horses charged forward, as terrified of the flames around them as they were of the viscorclaws beyond. More of the monsters were waiting, clearly visible, some the size of thorn bushes, some the size of trees.

Leaving the smoking hilltop behind, the wagons thundered down the stony slope. The first, carrying Warney, Emeriene, her sons, and several other Bel Amicans, pulled away fast. The heavier cargo wagons were slow, and archers inside them held torches as far from the flammable cargo as they could.

Viscorclaws scrambled and tumbled down the stony hillside on both sides as the frantic parade lumbered along. Those on the right prowled intently, but those on the left seemed to slow as if the ground had gone sticky.

“What’s happening?” Brevolo called to Shanyn, gesturing to the slope.

Mounds of stone were melting and sliding, drowning the crawlers in liquefied rock.

They heard an explosion behind them. The barn had collapsed.

Below them, Fraughtenwood was restless, branches shaking like the limbs of animals caught in traps.
We’ll never get through
.

“There’s a rip in this oil bag!” an archer shouted from the hindmost wagon. “We’re spilling fuel.”

“Patch it,” said Brevolo. “Patch it or drop it.”

Brevolo looked back again. The whole hillside had changed. What had been a field of scattered boulders now looked like a sculpted shell. Except for a few clusters of jerking wooden limbs, the viscorclaw swarm was paralyzed, caught in a gluey tide.

Stonemastery
, she thought, looking about.

“Look out!” called an archer from the second wagon.

A tree, its roots ripping free of the ground, plunged down between the second and third wagons.

The horses pulling the third wagon reared. The drivers steered them around the treetop. A crackle of splintering wood seared the air as blackening branches tore themselves free of the trunk and clutched at the earth for a hold.

“Get the wagons away from the tree so we can burn it!” Brevolo roared.

Already clusters of twigs were dragging themselves toward the wagons like scraps of metal drawn by a magnet. Shanyn shouted for arrows.

Three wagons had escaped the scene. The fourth was motionless behind the tree.

Brevolo’s heart sank. She leapt off the vawn and let it run ahead with the procession. Then she hurried back around the tree.

One of the wagon’s drivers was already dead, a cluster of crawlers flinging pieces of him around the trail. She ran at them, picking up his fallen torch and swiping at his attackers. The predators scattered, limbs aflame. Then she turned her attention to the wagon. Inside, another fallen man thrashed about, screaming, arms wrapped around what appeared to be a tangle of vines.

She threw the torch away from the wagon. Then she reached with both hands into the man’s bloody embrace and seized the hard backbone of the many-legged monster that had torn into his chest. She raised its wriggling bundle, shouting with the effort. It bent its flailing limbs backward to aim sharpened claws at her. One of its talons punctured her left wrist, numbing it at once.

As the wounded man slumped, silent and still, between the cargo and the wagon side, Brevolo stumbled to her knees in the puddle of his blood.

A dark figure with a torch leapt aboard. He seized the viscorclaw with a massive hand and dragged it away from her, uprooting the claw from her arm. She drew her arm in close against her and blinked into hazy sunlight.

Her rescuer, growling like a beastman, pressed the torch’s flame to the frantic viscorclaw. Then he flung the fiery predator away and thrust out a hand to Brevolo.

She recognized his face with its terrible scars and gigantic, toothy grin.

With her good arm she reached around behind her and unsheathed a dagger. “You lying, murderous, traitorous fiend!”

Ryllion jumped from the wagon, the dagger sailing past his ear.

Brevolo righted herself, found a loose arrow lying in the wagon, and leapt after him. “You don’t get to help us, you Seer-serving coward!” As she stalked toward him, someone sprang to her side and seized her arm.

“Let him go, Brevolo.”

She dropped the arrow.

This soot-blackened newcomer picked up the dead driver’s sword. “Ryllion’s here to help. Settle things with him later.” He laughed. “Don’t you know me?”

“Master!” It was Shanyn’s cry. She dropped from her saddle. With one hand grasping the reins of the frightened steed, she reached out with the other to clasp the king’s open hand. “You’re alive!” She did not even see Ryllion.

Brevolo scowled. All she could think about was how Ryllion had lured her away from Bel Amica and sought to seduce her. She had not told Tabor Jan, although she knew he might suspect it. Worst of all, she had almost given in, enthralled with Ryllion’s strength and promises.

Beside her, Shanyn was saying, “You’re making a habit of dramatic returns.”

“Not on purpose,” said the king. “Get this wagon rolling.”

There was a commotion behind them. The path was blackening with viscorclaws. Brevolo spat at Ryllion. “If my king would let me, I’d knock out your teeth for a necklace.” Then she clambered onto the blood-stained driver’s bench and slapped the reins. “Move!”

The animals could not have been more eager, as they pulled the wooden cart around the disintegrating tree.

Advancing crawlers made a sound like a stream of snakes. Cal-raven and Ryllion raised torches and swords and strode to meet them. They became a frenzy of motion, scattering black branches across the ground around them.

Brevolo urged the horses on, then glanced back to see a small twist of smoke rising from the wagon’s tarp. She abandoned the reins and climbed on top of it. There she found a viscorclaw’s dead, burning husk. She swept it off with her hand before the flames could burn through the tarp, and it fell into the dirt on the path behind, flowering into a blaze.

Then she saw the spray of oil from the cargo bag, showering the ground behind the wagon. She slid back down to the rider’s bench. The horses were running hard now, without anyone steering them, and the rugged ground set the wagon to bucking as if it were trying to break free.

Lying against her numb left arm, she reached to one of the rods that bound the wagon to the horses’ harness. “Gonna let … this one … go.” With her knife she sawed through it. It snapped. The wagon veered sharply to the right, bound to the horses now with only one harness strap. She shifted and cut at the last tether.

The horses stumbled forward as they suddenly lost the weight of the wagon. They sprawled in the dirt, then kicked themselves back upright and leaned forward into a desperate run.

The wagon, stopping suddenly, threw Brevolo into the dirt and cast its cargo forward as well. She felt the weight of the oil bag fall on her, a splash of warm fuel seeping through her hair and running in syrupy lines down her back. She crawled out from beneath the bag, spitting out dirt and debris.

Several crawlers dropped from beneath the wagon and advanced.

With her teeth Brevolo pulled off her riding glove and looked at the fresh, blue marriage tattoo on her left hand.

She could still feel the burn of it.

Tabor Jan had tenderly sketched it the night before while she lay stretched across him, the breeze cooling their warm, exhausted bodies in the chamber that Frits had given them as a gesture of privilege. She had brushed tears from her husband’s face—her own tears. That had made him laugh. For the first time since the days before Abascar’s fall, a deep line in his brow had smoothed over as if it had never existed.

“I understand that you live for Cal-raven,” she had whispered. “Not anymore,” Tabor Jan had said, and she had felt his voice reverberate in his ribs.

“No, you mustn’t say that,” she said. “These people must think that you are New Abascar itself. That they can depend on you. That you will act always and only in its best interest.”

“Even if Cal-raven returns? Even if he charts a course that drives you mad?”

“I am pledging myself to you, Tabor Jan. And you are a man who keeps his promises. I may not always trust those you trust. But while the people of Abascar depend on you, you can depend on me. I’ll keep you safe.”

“You’ll be my foundation?” he murmured, touching her eyelashes with his fingertips. “If that’s so, shouldn’t we trade places?”

And then she had laughed, resting her brow on his shoulder.

Remembering this, Brevolo raised her hand and kissed the rune of Tabor Jan’s name.

Then she reached down for her sputtering torch and growled at the viscorclaws as if she were a fangbear protecting her den from predators.

As Cal-raven swept away the last of the viscorclaws from the path behind the wagons, he heard horses shriek, and he turned.

He saw the horses charging off without the fourth wagon. He saw the cargo lying on the ground before the halted cart. A cluster of viscorclaws dropped from their hold beneath the wagon and stalked a torch-bearing figure.

“Brevolo?”

One of the viscorclaws sprang at her. She fought with it, falling back. The attacker sprang away, its back ablaze. Others came scrambling down to keep her from rising. The torch fell from her hand and touched a trail of seeping oil. It looked like a snake of flame was born, and it slithered from the torch toward the cargo.

Cal-raven drew in a breath, but his shout was erased by a noise like a thunderclap.

The ground shook. A fireball engulfed the whole scene, leaping into the sky, red and gold on a pillar of luminous blue, bursting with tumors of smoke. A ring of dust and heat spread outward, slamming Cal-raven to the dirt.

“Get up!” Ryllion dragged him to his feet. Now they were running past the mountain of smoldering debris as blazing shreds drifted down upon the dead forest underneath a spreading continent of smoke. “This fire’s just beginning.”

“Brevolo,” the king groaned.

“It’s too late,” Ryllion roared. “Go after the others. They need you. I’ll keep my distance.”