“You be careful then,” she said at last, blinking, returning to the moment. “Colors can be dangerous. They play by invisible rules.”
“Fire doesn’t scare me,” he said again. As long as she looked into the colors, he found he could speak freely.
And so it was there he told the story, as much to himself as to her, the lake, and the lights. He was not even aware of the words as they spilled out of him. He remembered the cradle burning around him as the house became a furnace. The shadows all around, covering him. A giant reaching through the fire and carrying him away into cold air and darkness, and then down, down, down into the Underkeep. He saw himself there, swallowing the broth offered by an old woman who smelled like apples—or rather, as he grew up, apples smelled like her. Men stood in hushed conferences, discussing him and his future, something he recognized even if he could not yet understand their words. Then there were the years of learning to walk along the paths of black earth and across the rope bridges over the deep, expanding spaces of the Underkeep. Lessons in the brewers’ discipline. Ale boy. Ale boy.
As he slowly surfaced from the memories, he became aware of Auralia’s intense concentration. It was unsettling to be the focus of someone’s attention. And it was good. What it must be like to be the king! How could a man such as that, so closely watched, not burst?
He leaned forward and blew out the flames with one steady breath. In the darkness, the story told, he was exhausted. “I like to be near the flames. It’s…where I came from. I’m not afraid. It’s the only way I can be close to them.”
“To them?”
“To my mother and father, whoever they were. And to whoever pulled me from the fire. No one knows.”
Auralia pressed her hands to her face, and tears spilled over them.
“Maybe that’s what the beastman is doing here. Maybe the colors are calling it.”
She nodded, dabbing her cheeks with the edge of the blanket that still covered the boy. “You and me are lots the same. I stay near the water ’cause it’s where I came from.” She was looking out at the lake now. Or at something beneath it. “When I sleep near the water, I’m closer to the Keeper.”
“You think he’s actual?” The ale boy did not want to speak of this further, but he felt drawn toward the answer.
“As people grow up, they’re embarrassed to think there’s something out there they don’t understand. It makes them feel small. Like maybe they’re not in charge. Like they have to be careful.” She released a whispered laugh.
“You don’t know for certain, do you?” he whispered.
She turned away from him for a moment. But he saw her hands clench. When she turned back, her eyes had grown larger. She gazed up past the painted face of stone behind them to the overhang of vines and branches. “Once I climbed up there and almost fell asleep. I heard a beastman coming to attack me. I was so afraid, I kept my eyes closed. I did not have time to think who might hear my cry for help. But I called anyway. The beastman screamed. He fell into the water. And then…”
“You think the Keeper saved you?”
She smiled. “Do beastmen stumble over cliffs?”
There was a ripple in the water, and a shape suddenly slipped into their sight.
The ale boy jumped up and ran, his feet punching into the soft sand. “It’s my raft! My raft is here! Quick! I’ve got to get to it!”
Auralia grabbed a long and twisted branch and dragged it after him into the shallows. Together they steered the branch to snag a corner of the raft and pull it in to shore.
He salvaged a wine bottle, which he had intended for the gatekeeper who would let him back into the house. He uncorked it and offered it to her.
“Thank you,” he said, “for saving me from that…that stranger.”
She blinked, stunned. She had forgotten.
She did not take the bottle, but she cupped her hands to him. He laughed, and poured the wine, which trickled through her fingers dark and gleaming. Her hair spilled around her hands as she sipped it carefully. When she lifted her head again, the wine had smoothed the creases in her face.
“Now that,” he said, “is how to drink the king’s wine.” He glanced out at the sky over the lake. “Sun’s gonna be up soon, and I’m gonna get an earful from the officers in charge of me.”
Auralia stepped forward and threw her arms around him. Her neck smelled like smoke and honey. Her heartbeat fluttered against his face. She held him the way he’d always imagined his mother would.
Then he sneezed and made great apology as she let him go and laughed. He offered her the blanket she had draped around his shoulders. “You must take this. They’ll never let me keep it.”
“Come visit me again,” she said, folding the cloth and holding it to her breast. “Oh, I wish I knew your name. What am I gonna call you? Little brother?”
“Just call me ‘ale boy.’ That’s what they all do.”
“But I know your real name,” she laughed. “It’s here. I just don’t know how to pronounce it.” Again she touched his forehead scar. “Promise me one thing. When I’m gone, will you play with your lights here, by the lake?”
“When you’re gone?”
Nearby a fish jumped. Fluttering bats darted past and jittered out over the water.
“I can’t stay here forever. I’ll be caught and hauled into the house. Or someone will come and take over these caves. Or something.” She broke off, bit her lower lip, and looked back at the dark stones where the colors slept until morning. “I’d feel better…it wouldn’t be so sad…if I could finish my work and know that someone will come to watch over the colors.”
He was still. Emotions surged in him like waves. The creature in her caves. The mysterious colors. The shadow in the lake. Abascar. She suddenly seemed vulnerable. “Be careful, ’Ralia.”
Auralia sat on the stones as the ale boy shoved off with his oar, and the raft drifted back out into the water. They watched silently, until they could not see each other. It seemed to the ale boy that he was remaining still while the world turned and took her away, filling the space between them with deep water and traces of starlight.
The forest went on dreaming while Auralia folded her thoughts and set them aside for the night. She sat on the cliff edge, swinging her feet into space as if she might find a foothold and walk away on the air. She watched the lake, following the progress of that small speck of darkness drifting through reflected stars. This was a new feeling, something different from what she felt in the volatile company of Gatherers. She had a friend.
And there was something else puzzling her. The colors had drawn the attention of the beastly stranger yet again, this foul-smelling hulk of hair, claws, and teeth. She had been surprised at her own reluctance to call the visitor a beastman. With his deformity and crude intelligence, what else could he be? But he was drawn to her caves to stare into the colors, to sleep surrounded by the bowls of incense. This was still a mystery to her.
Uncomfortable with the thought of cooking or sleeping in her caves while such a shadow lurked nearby, Auralia had tiptoed around the slumbering creature, bundled patches of unfinished weave, and brought them up the corridor, deeper and deeper until she reached the hollows where a feeble mountain stream fell into a buried river. There she climbed a rugged, narrow stair that took her to the top of the cliffs. She emerged above her lakeside home and took shelter from the breeze beneath trees with warped and bristling branches. She spread the spans of faintly glowing cloth across a bed of brown, broad mushrooms. There she fingered the frayed edges of each piece, imagining what might join one to the other and bring order to their dissonance.
In the distance, she heard a faint trace of the Early Morning Verse. She did not sing along.
The waters of the lake grew restless, a white thread winding along the edge.
Whispering soft comfort to herself, she set the instruments of her craft before her—needles, leaf packets of dye, spools of various threads. She wove strands drawn from the stems of w
ild celery, stained her fingertips with dye, all crazy with colors of fireweed and swamp-muck green.
“Whenever I visit the Gatherers, they’re talking about you,” she repeated to herself. “You think I don’t know what they say? Northchild. Dark secrets. A danger to them all. A spy.” She twisted one red thread around her fingertips, drawing it taut to the snapping point.
9
BREAKING THE BLACKLODE
T his deluge is a curse.”
So ran the rumor down the line of Abascar diggers as they propped their shovels against the rugged wall of the tunnel and surrendered for the day.
“The philosophers of House Jenta would say our shovels have injured and angered the earth. And that the rain has come to stop us. That desert heat makes them crazy in Jenta. But…you have to wonder.”
Submerging themselves in the strata of stone and soil and then returning with wheelbarrows full, these tunneling laborers found that even heavy storm-cloaks were not enough against such a determined storm. It pummeled them. It saturated the hours.
Three days the torrent battered their tents, two days’ march northwest of House Abascar, in the valley between the northern edge of the Cragavar forest and the southern reaches of the deeper, darker Fraughtenwood. The two ancient forests regarded each other across the valley, indifferent to the efforts of the diggers.
The irony of it all—that the diggers, for want of an underground river to quench the thirst of Abascar, would all but drown in water from elsewhere—was not lost on any of them. But they did not laugh. Their capacity for humor had washed away on the second day of work. Here on the third, their willpower faltered. No one dared ask that the dig be suspended. They just worked, pressing on like mindless drones, gouging the earth and hauling boulders, dirt, and roots, dumping them into nearby ravines.
So when they hit a sudden stop, drills and shovels blunting against a vein of impenetrable, subterranean blacklode, they all but collapsed in relief. Their foreman, Blyn-dobed, had no choice but to announce the dig’s suspension.
Errand-runners were sent to request new tools from the deep mining beneath House Abascar. Help would be five days coming.
Meanwhile, a musician, summoned from Abascar on the first day of the storm, had arrived with a royal escort who would ensure that she played properly inspiring music for the waiting diggers.
As her songs began, the foreman, more eager than anyone to see the work finished, paced from the deep tunnel to the spread of tents and back, trying to conjure a solution.
Under a sagging tarp supported by a feeble frame, fifty diggers sat on benches of fallen logs. They watched that grey, wavering light. They watched each other’s grey faces. They watched the open maw of the ground, glad to be free of its stale breath.
A young man in an errand-runner’s cloak stepped out from a tent where Yawny the Gatherer was preparing a meal. He carried a basket and moved up and down the rows of workers, distributing bread from a cloth bag. He spoke quietly with each one, glancing over his shoulder as if worried the foreman might notice.
“The foreman says it’s just a matter of equipment,” the young man said. “But what say you? Should the dig continue?”
The answers were a mix of bitter laughter and the occasional burst of determination and pride.
“The king’s aim outdistances his reach,” one weary man replied, his left arm in a sling.
“Abascar soldiers can’t keep such a stretch secure,” speculated a woman plagued by a perpetual shiver. “Cave-ins, corruption of the waters, pests, and vermin—such a river, if it should flow as directed, would require constant maintenance. And what if our enemies seek to poison us?”
Another scoffed. “What is a vein of blacklode against the might of Abascar? Ours is a house of accomplished miners. We will break through.”
Yet another shook his head. “It’s a bad situation. The king’s judgment is to blame. If the grudgers do exist—and I’m not saying they do—this venture will give them more to protest.”
That last comment caught the ear of the curious helper. “Grudgers? What do you know of grudgers?”
The digger—a white-bearded man with a broken nose—awakened from his sulk and fixed his listener with wild eyes. His pockmarked cheeks bulged as he puffed a cloud into the cold. “Oh, nobody’s certain of anything as far as grudgers go. But if you listen for things that aren’t spoken or watch for things that aren’t there, you may wonder. Some of our beds were empty last night. Secret meetings going on. I reckon some of these folks aim to take action if things don’t improve around here soon. Me, I’m too tired to do anything but complain.”
“Complain? So you’re not a grudger, but you do have complaints.”
“Why are you askin’ these things?” asked the whitebeard, grabbing the bread-giver by the edge of his hood. “Who are you anyway?”
“Moseli. Errand-runner. Just arrived.” He held out a wedge of bread. “Sent with rations.”
The digger hesitated, then took the bread and pressed it whole into his mouth, his rain-wet beard catching crumbs.
“And you?” the errand-runner asked. “What are you called?”
The digger snatched the bag and thrust his hand deep inside. “Who am I? I’m hungry. I’m tired. I’m forty-three years a miner for Abascar. Old enough to remember what the house once was. Old enough to resent what it’s become. That’s who I am.” He pulled out another half loaf and stuffed it into a fold in his cloak. “And I’m called Marv. A miner assigned to a mudhole. This is not my trade. This is just a show of the king’s ambition.”
“Well, Marv, you are not the only one with complaints.” The bread-giver gave the miner a bow, took back the bag, and moved on to the next digger.
Nearby, a separate tarp, patchworked with colors of privilege, protected the gold-clad musician and her instrument. She sat with the string-weave’s span across her knees, sliding ring-jeweled fingers across its web. Notes sprang from the shelter like sparks from a fireplace, only to be caught in the rain and squelched. She sang a refrain, something about King Cal-marcus’s youthful zeal and about how Abascar stood on the verge of a season of bounty.
The singer’s stout, squinting escort, one of the king’s officers of ceremony, wore a forced grin beneath a meticulously groomed mustache and waved his hands in the air as if conducting the singer, who refused to acknowledge him. Her corn-silk hair fell around a freckled face, and she plucked the strings vigorously as if trying to keep her fingers warm.
Increasingly distracted by the musician’s aggravation, the bread-giver who had called himself Moseli emptied the crumbs from his bread sack and moved to the edge of the diggers’ assembly. He whispered something to a small, aged figure in a soil-streaked labor cloak. Together, they broke off and trudged through the rain to the nearby row of boulder-burdened carts.
“I’d trade my vawn for a song about struggle and survival,” said the young man to the old. “It pains me to hear Lesyl’s talents wasted on such simplistic melodies. Those men don’t want to hear cheery fabrications about their leader’s greatness. No wonder the talk about grudgers is growing. Look at them, miserable in the rain.”
“There’s a saying in House Jenta,” the old man whispered. “The clouds weep for those afraid to cry. From the looks of these clouds, those listeners must be in deep despair.”
“And it’s not just the music that vexes them.” The younger leaned back against the cart, bowed his head, and let water stream off his hood and veil the world before him like a waterfall. “They’ve opened up more ground in the last few days than I would have believed possible. And what do they get for it? Abuse from the foreman. It’s not their fault they ran into a blacklode ridge. We have good mappers, but they can hardly be expected to know what lies beneath the ground. May the Keeper protect those poor workers from their own superiors.”
“May the Keeper protect them,” agreed the old man, his words wisping about his cold lips. “But be careful how loudly you speak, boy. If the foreman hears you menti
on the Keeper, he’ll give you a lashing of more than insults and curses.” He shook his head. “Did I call you boy again? Forgive me. I haven’t seen you in such a long time, and it’s going to be tough to break old habits.”
They watched the performer’s sad mouth as she sang what she had been ordered to sing.
“Thank you,” said the young man, “for inviting me to meet you here.”
The old man pulled out a folded leaf, opened it and offered a mix of seeds to his companion. “You’re getting better at finding my little hints. Someday I won’t be able to hide from you even if I try.”
“You’ve taught me to read everything I see closely.” The younger tossed a seed to a mudbird, then ate the rest himself. “And speaking of looking closely, how long do you think it will take before the foreman notices he has two extra laborers?”
“Not long now. We’ll keep this conversation short.” The old man choked, his lungs full of debris from winter plagues. “Kramm, but I must get back to my storehouse for some herbs and lemon peelings. And liquor. Good liquor, not that poison the king drinks.” He blew hot breath into his cupped hands, which were red and cracked from weather and work. “I’ve much to tell you, but first…tell me about the hunt. Did you catch the fangbear?”
“The bear eludes us. But I’m not bothered. Best we can hope for is to chase it out of the region. We don’t have time for hunting bears. There are bigger problems afoot.”
“Bigger problems! Wyrms?”
“Beastmen. Beastmen traveling in groups. We continue to find signs of ambushes against merchants and patrols, four beastmen working together. And this is happening farther north than beastmen have previously ventured.”
“I’ve seen it too. The creatures of the forest are full of talk, and they tell me to beware. I wonder…has the curse of Cent Regus run its course? Perhaps the beastmen are collecting their scattered wits.”
“You make it sound like good news,” said the younger man, surprised.
“The end of a curse? Wouldn’t that be good news?”