The Way Into Chaos (43 page)

Cazia was glad to be spending the night on the island. Everyone had told her to be afraid of the alligaunts but so far she hadn’t even seen one. Grass lions, however, she’d seen, and more than once. Sleeping in a tree wouldn’t protect her from
them
, but she hoped the water would.
 

Something woke her. The moon was high and bright. She shifted uncomfortably and looked around. The river lapped against the stony shore of the island, and of course she could hear the constant, never-ending sound of the wind. Fire take that wind; she didn’t know how the herder clans could stand it. Had she been woken by a dream she couldn’t remember now, or was it something else?

Cazia glanced over at Ivy, sleeping in the next tree. She was barely visible among the shadowed branches, but she appeared to be safe. By unspoken agreement, Kinz and Alga had chosen spots on the far side of Ivy so the little princess would be encircled. Cazia couldn’t see them through the branches and shadows, but she was glad they were there.
 

Nothing seemed amiss. There didn’t appear to be anything moving on the ground below. The new-sprouting leaves above twirled in the moonlight. On the water, tiny ripples and eddies moved like moonlit string. The banks were too far to see in this light; the farther north they’d gone, the broader and slower the river became, leaving Cazia to wonder if she would even be able to tell when the river became the lake.
 

It was beautiful.
 

She rested her head in the notch of the trunk behind her, letting her eyelids grow heavy. A wake marked the spot where a stone came too near the water’s surface. She watched it for a moment, wondering at its size. Was it moving?
 

She saw an unexpected blur of movement and a loud splash. Darkness moved against deeper darkness, and moonlight reflected off the splashing water. Something had swooped down into the river and now flapped skyward again. She jolted out of her comfortable spot for a better look.
 

One of the giant eagles had just snatched something from the shallows at the edge of the island. Something big.
 

Cazia had been too startled to cry out when it happened but she was tempted to do it now, just on general principle. The creature that had been carried away had not struggled. The bird’s sudden impact must have stunned or killed it outright. It was all too easy to imagine how an attack like that must feel. How swiftly she would go from a perfectly normal person traveling through the wilderness to a broken sack of dead flesh.

She glanced at the next tree and saw Ivy’s face lit by moonlight. She stared with wide, frightened eyes.
 

They both looked down at the water again. More wakes betrayed someone or something swimming away from the island. Neither girl slept any more that night.
 

The sun came up shortly after, and Cazia was the first to climb down from her tree. Ivy strung her bow and nocked an arrow while her friend walked the length of the island, spear in hand. It only took a hundred paces or so to reach the far side--too quickly for Cazia to work the kinks out of her back and thighs. She wished she could ask the Poalos to check the tall grasses for her, but the only weapons the brother and sister had were their rafting poles, little hatchets, and the crude fishing spear they’d fashioned that first night. Cazia had no intention of surrendering her spear to them.
 

But there were no creatures to be found. Her bow ready, Ivy climbed down. The Poalos followed. The servants looked worried and confused, which was only made worse by the little princess’s mimed explanation. The servants clearly wanted to leave immediately, but Ivy wouldn’t allow it.
 

“One spot on this river is just as dangerous as any other,” she insisted, although only Cazia showed that she understood. “And I am hungry.”
 

The snares the Poalos had set the night before had fish in them--nasty-looking things with triangular teeth and long, fleshy “whiskers”--and while Kinz started the fire, Alga gutted and scaled breakfast.
 

Of course, Cazia could have lit the fire with a spell, but she wasn’t ready to betray herself. It was true that, except for that one fleeting expression, the servants had done nothing to earn her distrust—in fact, it had been so long that she’d begun to doubt her memory of it—but life in the palace had taught her to be cautious.
 

And Alga... He had tried to be charming with her that first day, smiling at her and bringing her food, but Cazia had refused to look him in the eye. He’d taken the hint and left her alone since. Fire take him and the dreams she had about him.

She paced the island once more, her spear making her feel foolish, but this time, she checked for muddy prints along the shoreline. She found one: a long, deep, three-toed print. It was shaped vaguely like a maple leaf, if one of the fronds had been pulled back for a thumb, and there was a sharp claw at the end of each toe.
 

Worst of all, she found it on the near side of their raft, well back from the water’s edge. She bent low to search for more and was surprised to discover an odd pile of stones.
 

It hadn’t formed naturally, and it certainly hadn’t been there the previous afternoon when they made camp. She knelt beside it. There were four small flat, smooth river stones of nearly equal size set beside each other with a fifth on top. To the right was a pair of stones with a third one leaning against the spot where they touched. Beside that was a pair of upright river stones leaned against each other, and there was the first, probably, a flat disk that had been pressed into the mud so it stood on edge.
 

On the other side of the five-stone pile was a stack of seven stones, and beyond that--

Kinz’s boot swept through the piles of stones, scattering them. “Nyoo!” she said. She’d learned the word
no
in Peradaini, but she couldn’t pronounce it correctly. “Nyoo nyoo!” She extended her arms and, elbows locked, opened and closed her clawed hands as though they were huge jaws filled with teeth.
 

Cazia stood and backed away, her spear point toward the water. Did alligaunts make those stone piles? They returned toward the center of the island, where Alga held the skewered fish over the fire.
 

He did not look at her, for which Cazia was both disappointed and grateful. Fire and Fury, he was annoying. Cazia slipped her hand into her pocket to take hold of her translation stone. She expected the servants to talk to each other, and she was right.
 

“Scowler found something beside the raft.”
Scowler
was the name they had given her; she took a perverse pride in it. “A warning from the lakeboys.”

“Lakeboys?” Alga almost dropped the skewer into the fire. “Already?”

“Unmistakable.” She took a skewer from him and began to eat it. Gross. It was almost raw. “It used to be rare to see lakeboys so far from Low Lake, but not anymore. They wander the length and breadth of the waterways now.”

“Do you think the girls understand?”

Kinz glanced at Cazia and Ivy briefly. “They do. But Scowler is determined and the Princess will follow her anywhere, even to death. Of course, if you had managed to sweet-talk her...”
 

“You should sweet-talk her,” Alga snapped. “She hates me and I haven’t even kissed her yet.”
 

Cazia’s hand sprang open as though it had a mind of its own, and she could no longer understand what they were saying. Not that it mattered. Each time she had tried it, she’d heard nothing worse than the usual resentment she always heard from servants who thought no one was listening.
 

Of course, translation stones were
supposed
to turn you into a gibbering fool if you used them too long, but so far she’d seen no sign of that. It was probably another of Doctor Twofin’s lies. Her instructor had been the one person outside Lar’s circle she’d actually trusted, but now... She didn’t like to think about it.
 

The fish may have been the ugliest thing she’d ever seen but it tasted delicious. Ivy had some of her cracker bread with it, and Cazia ate a small bundle of meatbread. Kinz boiled a pot full of river water, and they all shared. It wasn’t safe to drink straight from the river, of course, but Cazia would have liked to make some kind of fish head broth from it, at least. Unfortunately, Ivy and the Poalos had been horrified by the idea.
 

There were no lurking alligaunts beside the raft as they pushed off from the island. Ivy kept her bow strung and an arrow nocked. Cazia sat with her spear across her knees, watching for suspicious wakes. She would have preferred her quiver of darts, but she wasn’t ready to reveal them. Not yet.
 

While the girls watched the water, the Poalos watched the skies. Occasionally, they would see one of the huge eagles flying to the northeast--or returning from it--but that was becoming rare during the day. They seemed to do most of their hunting at night and only appeared in large numbers around sunset. As long as the Poalos made camp early and hid their fire, the four of them would be safe in the trees. Hopefully.
 

Three days later, Cazia learned how to tell where the river ended and the lake began: the river narrowed between two hills and flowed over a little waterfall no taller than Ivy. The Poalos poled the raft toward the eastern shore and all four of them carried their supplies and the raft down the muddy hill. The shore was thick with three-toed prints but Kinz didn’t seem particularly worried about them and Ivy thought they were several days old.
 

The waterfall proved to be made of flat river stones laid like unmortared bricks. It was crude compared to the stone walls of Peradain, but no one could mistake it for a natural formation. Ivy stared at it and stuck out her lower lip thoughtfully. “I wonder which clan built this.” There was no one to answer.

The lake was surprisingly deep. The Poalos couldn’t pole along the shore as they normally did, because in most places, the drop was too steep. Instead, they were forced to paddle with the unbladed poles, a slow and exhausting process. Cazia watched a family of yellow-striped boqs emerge from the tall grass to drink at the water’s edge. She was about to suggest they abandon the raft and walk the rest of the way when a grass lion pounced on the youngest of the boqs, scattering the rest.
 

As they moved northward, the cliffs of the Northern Barrier loomed above them, higher with each day that went by. Hent had been right; there was no pass to take them into the Qorr Valley. For as far as Cazia could see in either direction--and her vision was excellent--the mountainside was a slick, shining wall.
 

It was late afternoon when they reached the far shore. The Poalos drove the raft toward a slope of loose scree and, after they’d transferred the packs, dragged it onto the rocks.
 

There were trees to the east, but here there were only rockfalls from above and marshy grasslands. They had no trees to sleep in tonight, and the cry of that little boq as the lion dragged it away was foremost in Cazia’s mind. Behind them, the cliffs seemed to block off half of Kal-Maddum.
 

Fire and Fury, but it was a strange thing. The rock of the cliff looked like it had been melted until it was as smooth as a grape. There was nothing to grab hold of--not the slightest fingerhold--anywhere she could see. Cazia stepped back and looked up the cliffside. The textureless face stretched so high, she couldn’t see where it ended.
 

Kinz approached the rock wall and hammered at it with the edge of a sharp rock she’d picked up from the scree at the water’s edge. There was no damage to the wall, but the stone in her hand had faint white fracture lines at the tip.
 

Cazia’s stomach felt heavy. Whatever she had expected, it wasn’t this.
 

Ivy stood with her bow at the ready, arrow nocked. Alga stood close beside his sister, hatchet in hand. All were watching her.
 

“It’s time,” Cazia said. “Lets pile our supplies beside me.”
 

Cazia set her own pack on the loose stones at the base of the cliff, then Ivy put hers beside it. When Kinz tried to set the Poalo pack beside them, Cazia waved her back.

“Ivy,” she said. “I suspect that our so-called servants are about to turn against us. If they want to run away, that’s fine. They can take their stuff and go. But if they attack us or try to take our packs, you’ll have to put an arrow into one.”

The little princess didn’t like that. “They are older, faster, and stronger than we are. Sensible tactics suggest that if we expect an attack, we should strike first.”
 

Out of the corner of her eye, Cazia saw the Poalos tense. After days of pretending, they finally gave themselves away: they understood Peradaini.
 

“No,” Cazia said. “I don’t want to fight them. I just don’t want them to panic and run away with our supplies. If they want to go, let them.” Cazia imagined Alga’s shocked expression when the arrow went in, and her stomach did a flip-flop. “Let’s try deterrence first.”
 

“I would prefer that. I have never shot a person before, and I would not like one of these two to be... Never mind. I will not hesitate.”

The princess’s pale little face was determined. Cazia didn’t doubt for a minute that she would do what was necessary. “Little sister, I’m more impressed with you every day. When I was your age, I never did anything I was supposed to.”
 

“I have spent my whole life in the instruction of my family, especially Uncle Nezzeriskos. He taught me that being an Ergoll princess within the Indregai Alliance comes with many privileges, but many responsibilities, too. I do not want to shame his memory.”

“I understand,” Cazia said. “Remind me to give you a hug later.” She tossed her spear to the ground and unlaced her pack. No one reacted when she took out her quiver of darts. It felt good to strap them to her hip, like saying her name aloud. She also noted, with a bit of worry, that she had to tighten the belt an extra notch to make it fit.