Aug-anstern’s rings clattered as he rubbed his hands together. The ale boy heard him say, “Rumor or not, we have no choice but to mount a search. A grudge-bearing mage is not to be trifled with.”
Ark-robin laughed quietly. “This ghost makes an appearance at every event. Scharr ben Fray has worked his way into Abascar’s imagination. The more seriously we take such rumors, the more the people will look for him under every rock. I’m certain the grudgers start such gossip just to aggravate the king.”
Their arguments made plain, the captain and the advisor watched the king ponder.
The magistrates continued slinging questions at the Gatherer. “Was the king justified in casting you out for your slander? Describe for us the proper show of honor toward an officer. How will the house benefit from your return? You approached us with a limp. What caused your injury? Have you heard any rumors of an uprising against our good king? Give us the names of the Gatherers you suspect to be most likely of rebellion.”
It was unclear whether the king heard the woman’s fumbling replies while he chewed on the messenger’s report. Whatever the case, he raised his hand, closed it to a fist, and declared the Gatherer unfit to return to the Housefolk. The people approved. As if her legs were breaking beneath her, the woman staggered out of the circle. The ale boy thought of the king’s private garden and how it had been closed off—fetid, weed racked, and colorless—for as long as he could remember. The king would not be moved by this Gatherer’s flourish of flowers.
“Alert your officers, Captain,” said Aug-anstern. “If one of them recognizes Scharr ben Fray amongst the crowd, he should raise his shield. Then move in for an arrest.”
The captain’s smile faded. “I have not heard the king’s decision. Besides, how would you counsel my men to single out the exile in this throng?”
Aug-anstern leaned closer, like a vulture. “The more time we give him, the more young dreamers he’ll lure into his web of lies and superstitions.” The advisor shook his head. “Think about how deeply his teaching has damaged Prince Cal-raven.”
Fast as a striking adder, King Cal-marcus grabbed the advisor’s arm. “Do not speak so about my son,” he growled.
“Cal-raven is our champion!” Aug-anstern screeched.
“Damaged? You think my son is damaged? Your future king is the apprentice to Captain Ark-robin, and he became such on his own merits. He ensures the safety of this house. What do you say about me, I wonder, when my back is turned?”
Releasing his grip, Cal-marcus seized his goblet, and for a moment the ale boy thought the king might splash hajka into his offender’s face. “Damaged. That’s what you’ll be if my son finds out you harbor such impressions.”
The ale boy wished he could make himself smaller and quieter until the king’s temper cooled.
The exchange had drawn the Bel Amicans’ attention, and they leaned in toward the king, a row of towering dark-robed figures in a crowded line like five fingers of a single black glove. Their wan faces watched unblinking, as if seeing more than anyone could guess.
The king slumped down in his throne, seeking to withdraw from their surveillance. “Search the crowd, Captain,” he rasped. “Scharr ben Fray is still out there, and we should not take the threat of his return lightly. It’s your concern now. I must return to the matter of ‘pulling weeds.’”
Captain Ark-robin rose without protest. This was not a glamorous task, to leave the platform during a ceremony and comb the crowd for a criminal. And yet, he marched away, past his surprised family, and down the west ramp of the dais. There, he commanded a duty guard to take his place as the king’s protector. He beckoned to officers posted at attention around the yards. They moved straight through the assemblage, their gazes sweeping across the heads of the hundreds as if anticipating their orders. As their shiny helms met in a bright gathering along the edge of the event, the courtyard gate closed with a resolute boom.
The musicians returned to the original theme to break the rising tension. Children danced again, but their parents, unsettled by the soldiers’ activity, were anxious.
Another Gatherer was escorted by two duty officers into the stone circle at the foot of the dais. The ale boy recognized him—that gnarled thief called Krawg—and felt a pang of concern. He had never been fond of Krawg, but Auralia’s obvious affection had impressed him. The boy whispered a wish that the Gatherer would be granted a pardon.
Krawg cringed in the crossfire of the Housefolk mockery, the captious judges, and Cal-marcus’s unforgiving stare.
It pained the boy to see this, so while he waited for his dismissal, he preoccupied himself by surveying the crowd and wondering what the famous, exiled stonemaster looked like. He had heard so many stories about the man who could speak with the animals and sculpt stone with just a stroke of his hand.
But as he considered one face after another, his curiosity was quickly quenched. The realization of how many people could see him—his foolish cap, his wine red scar, his tattered trousers—set his bones to quaking. The ale boy’s life was lived out of sight, out of hearing, a mouse in the wall, a beetle. As far as the palace honorables knew, bottles of drink arrived at their doorstep by magic. Outside of those who gave him orders, only the Gatherers knew him by face and a title. But here he felt as though he himself were on trial.
“Ale boy.” It was the king.
“Sire!” the ale boy blurted, stunned.
“Did Captain Ark-robin forget to dismiss you?” Cal-marcus’s narrow, chiseled face was as sullen as his eyes were sad. “Wearying, isn’t it? Up here in front of so many eyes. But I’m glad you’re here. We’ve been unfair to you.”
The ale boy would not have been more surprised if the king had leapt up and embraced him.
Cal-marcus ker Har-baron tipped back his head and gulped the draught of hajka until it was gone. His eyes shut, one fist clenched, and his frame shuddered within the enormous robes. After a time, his expression softened. “Refill my cup,” he wheezed. “And ensure that the magistrates and our guests have had their fill. Then you may go. And thank you, boy.” The king turned his widening eyes skyward and murmured, “Is that a mountain vulture circling above me?”
After refilling the royal goblet, the ale boy walked in a daze behind the rows of magistrates and Bel Amicans, reaching to place goblets on the small pedestals between them. As he did, each magistrate gave him a curious glance. They had seen the king address him and were acknowledging his existence for the first time.
Unable to feel his feet, unsure how to respond, he hastily descended the west ramp, stumbling over familiar mysteries. What had earned him such an honor as to serve the king this way? What set him apart from the ordinary orphans outside the walls?
“We’ve been unfair to you.”
When the ale boy reached the bottom of the dais, sinking into duty and obscurity once again, the only path open lay alongside Gatherers waiting their turn before the king. As he passed the line of hopeful criminals, they nodded in fond recognition. He answered with an almost imperceptible bow.
But as he scanned their faces, the last figure in the line stopped him in his tracks.
“Oh!”
And then fear compelled him to continue.
In the instant that he passed her, he saw a flicker of recognition in Auralia’s eyes. Otherwise, her face seemed distorted, anguished, bruised.
Her eyes were dark, a tale of sleepless nights. Her lips were pressed together as if to stifle a cry. He would never forget her hair; it fell like wolf-spider webs around her face and shoulders, still decorated with fragments of leaves, a twist of thornbranch dust, a broken wispfly’s wing—remnants of the home to which she might never return. Wrapped in a heavy earth-brown cape that dwarfed her frail frame, she hunched her shoulders against a chill. She stood still, but her shadow was restless as light flickered down between undecided thunderclouds. Among the Gatherers, she seemed alone in a forest of tall, windblown trees, swaying in currents of burdensome thought.
Each step he took became more difficult, as if Auralia had ensnared him with an invisible cord and was trying to draw him backward.
“When I’m gone…will you play with your lights here, by the lake?”
“When you’re gone?” he had answered.
The ale boy stepped through a space of grass where children were casting wooden tokens into a pile, making bets on the king’s judgments. A sudden fanfare announced Krawg’s pardon, and some of the children cheered. The ale boy was tempted to seek a better view.
But Ark-robin was in front of him, speaking with one of his soldiers.
“No, no,” Ark-robin was saying. “The man we’re looking for has a round face, deeply carved. We must be thorough. Watch.”
The captain marched boldly up behind a cluster of Housefolk. With a flick of his glove, he jerked back the hood of a bent old man. The nearby children screamed and then broke into laughter. The bewildered suspect reached up to shield his face with a bulbous, disfigured hand. He was merely concealing a deformity; it was as though a mass of flesh from his forehead had melted down over one of his eyes.
Ark-robin’s officer smirked, but Ark-robin winced and stepped away, bowing in apology and flexing the glove of his own three-fingered hand.
The ale boy looked again at the ruined face. He had seen more alarming wounds in the Gatherers’ camps, and he had enjoyed the company of Arec the Mute, One-Legged Jabber, and the Crab Lady many times, so this man’s abnormality was hardly unfamiliar. As the children laughed and returned to their game, the ale boy’s anger was rekindled.
The old man noticed him and approached. “Boy, what kind of drink you got there? Looks like just the stuff to make this ceremony tolerable.”
The ale boy opened his mouth to respond, but bright horn blasts interrupted him, marking the pardon of yet another Gatherer. Polite applause rose from the multitude, not for the pardoned man but to show respect for the king’s decision.
Auralia’s test drew closer.
“Please,” the misshapen man rasped, “could you spare an old-timer one sip?”
The boy felt a swell of pity. The audience was momentarily distracted. No one would notice if he made this small exception.
He offered the tray. With his one good hand, the stranger reached for the goblet.
Someone stepped between them and stole the tray away.
“Thank you, boy.” It was Kar-balter, one of the tower watchmen, a soldier the ale boy had learned to avoid. Kar-balter held the tray up out of reach, smiling through the lifted visor of his ornamental helmet. Before the boy could respond, the watchman lunged forward and snatched the king’s hajka flask as well. “Don’t be alarmed,” he laughed. “I’ve been sent to retrieve these. They need to be refilled.”
“But…but that’s my job!”
Kar-balter winked at the boy’s confusion and grinned with teeth so crooked and eyes so wild that he might have been a clown. “Wait here. I’ll be right back.” The watchman stole away along the back of the crowd toward his watchtower.
“That thieving wyrm!” The boy started after him, but the old man grabbed his sleeve.
“Let him go. The king’s in a foul temper. You don’t want to cause any kind of disturbance.”
The ale boy’s temper had also run foul. Perhaps he was empowered by the king’s recent attention. Perhaps he was spurred by feelings of helplessness as Auralia approached the Ring of Decision. Whatever the case, he was going to stop that watchman. He was going to right this one small wrong.
As Kar-balter reached the open door at the base of the watchtower, he realized this opportunity might never come again.
“A toast,” he chuckled, “to me.”
He lifted the hajka flask, pulled the cork out with his teeth, and spat it to the grass. “Let’s find out what’s so special about the king’s drink.”
He had pulled it off. He had met Stricia’s challenge. She would taste the king’s drink. He would win her favor. And what is more, he would take the medal from that lumpy old watchman who had never deserved it.
As he gulped down a long swig, his gaze traced the line of the looming tower all the way to the parapet in hopes that Em-emyt was looking down at this decisive moment.
And, yes, there was the other watchman leaning out and staring down. There he was, his arm extended, a weighty chunk of stone from the parapet falling from his grasp…
…down, down…to strike the edge of the silver ale tray with a clang.
The tone reverberated in the air like an alarm.
The tray jumped from Kar-balter’s hand.
Launched in a high arc, the goblet flew, streaming red wine that splashed across the ale boy’s tunic as he skidded to a stop.
The goblet fell into the boy’s open hands before it could break on the ground.
Kar-balter grabbed at his throat, dropping the hajka flask and falling back over the first stair to sprawl in the open watchtower door.
The ale boy stood up, wringing wine from his tunic, only to find two duty officers glowering down at him.
“Where is your tray, ale boy?”
The ale boy pointed timidly at the flailing watchman, who was coughing and spitting up hajka. “I think he’s stealing it.”
One of the officers stayed by the boy while the other approached the watchman.
Kar-balter, red faced, shouted and pointed back at the ale boy. “Arrest him!” he coughed, frantic. “He’s wearing red in the presence of the king!”
“And you are not at your post, Kar-balter,” said the officer, picking up the hajka flask and sniffing it. “You’re choking up a drink that was meant for King Cal-marcus.”
Kar-balter, no doubt suffering from the disorientation of the drink, waved his hands about. “No. I was just tasting it. I was supposed to give the rest to Ark-robin’s daughter!”
“He steals wine from the cellars,” the ale boy muttered. “I’ve watched him do it too.”
The officers looked at each other, then at Kar-balter. The watchman, flummoxed, made a crucial mistake. He snatched his dagger from its sheath as if to defend himself from the accusation. The half-bladed weapon was dripping with crimson rivulets of wine.
Kar-balter’s face grew as red as the drink. Before he could run, the officers seized him. A few steps toward the gate, he collapsed in their grip, slumping to the ground.
Retrieving his tray, the ale boy placed the goblet, still half full of wine, upright. His heart was quaking.
“What a day,” he sighed. “What a terrible day.”
In the tray’s reflection, he watched thunderclouds conquer the sky, the only remaining sunlight smoldering around their edges. Exploratory raindrops plopped into the goblet, and the ale boy covered it with his hand. Then the tray revealed the face of the deformed old man.
The stranger’s exposed eye gleamed, and he knelt, pretending to help the boy. A hand of thick, callused fingers took the cup. “Here, let me help you clean this up.”
With a mischievous smile, he took a quick gulp and returned the goblet empty to the tray. “Ahh, that’s good. It reminds me of the smell of the palace candles, the dark and smoky corridors.” He touched his own eyebrow and nodded to the boy. “Your scar…I see you are acquainted with fire.”
A roar from the crowd marked the denial of a Gatherer’s hopes.
Auralia’s almost to the Ring, thought the boy.
“Perhaps you should know,” said the man in a whisper, “that I’ve heard tales about some rare and special people…people possessed of a powerful gift. Long ago they called them firewalkers. But they were so rare, most thought they were only fiction. In Abascar, superstition isn’t welcome. There are people here, right here in this courtyard, who will never discover their own talents simply because they refuse to believe such things are possible.” He tapped his forehead with a crooked thumb. “If you know the secret of passing through fire, there are many places only you can travel and a lot of things only you can know.”
Rising, the stranger held
out his swollen hand to help the boy to his feet. “Take that counsel, if you will, from what’s left of this old brain…a brain that believes such crazy stories.”
The ale boy cautiously accepted his hand.
The old man laughed, drew back, and the ale boy gasped.
The hand came free of the sleeve.
It was a false appendage—a hand sculpted of stone.
A stonemaster. The boy dropped the heavy sculpture and sat back on the ground.
“I have a gift myself.” The stranger glanced about to ensure no one witnessed their exchange. “What others would call an obstacle, I consider an opportunity. What others call a barrier, I call that a door. In my hands, a pebble becomes a key that lets me walk where no one else can go.”
The ale boy could now discern that the man’s facial deformity was a stone mask, a thin shell concealing half his expression. “You’re…the prince’s teacher!”
A loud voice from the platform calling up the next appellant startled them, and Scharr ben Fray took back his false hand, drawing it into his sleeve. “Cal-marcus wants to shut me out of Abascar. But his walls are made of stone.” He laughed. “I hate to trespass, but I pledged to protect House Abascar long before you were born. And I keep my promises, no matter how hard Abascar works to break me. Even if I have to wear a mask.”
“Are you here to protect us from something?”
“Let’s just say I’ve arrived at some troubling questions.”
“Will you find the answers here?”
“No no, I’m pursuing something better than that.” He leaned in close. “I’m pursuing an even bigger question, a question that might brush the others away. And her name, my boy, is Auralia.”
“Is it?” The ale boy pulled up a fistful of grass.
“If we hurry, we’ll see what she has planned for King Cal-marcus. They’ve called her into the Ring of Decision.”
14
AURALIA’S COLORS
W ith every sharp challenge from Aug-anstern, Auralia flinched as from a barking dog.