The stranger turned as though distracted. A roar came from House Abascar, the sound of a thousand voices calling for help, the sound of trees falling. She felt the lakewater rush about her legs as it overflowed its banks.
Auralia opened her mouth to warn her friends who could not see the flood, but then the waters became a tide of arms and hands, grasping at her, clinging to her, an ocean of desperation.
She called out, asking the tall shadow to help, as she was dragged into the mob. But he was engaged in a battle with a beastman. Their blades clashed, blasting bolts of lightning, and a dark shape swept across them all.
The mysterious warrior, knocking the beastman aside, turned and threw his sword skyward, piercing the shape’s dark belly.
“No,” Auralia said.
The desperate hands pulled her back down to the floor of her prison cell.
Auralia rubbed her eyes with scabbed knuckles, breathing quickly, wet with sweat and shivering as the thick blankets of sleep fell away. She got to her knees, fell forward into a puddle, and drew back. Prying her soiled cape up from the gluey ground, she buried her face in its abrasive folds.
Footsteps. The creak of the gate. The hushed voices of three men, perhaps four. One came nearer, cautious in his steps.
Gasps burst from the barred hollows along the walls, followed by a potent, awed silence. He was not the jailer. He was a tall man wrapped in the cape of a common errand-runner.
He stopped, as if waiting for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. And then he lunged toward her, gripping the bars.
She cowered, clutching her stained and dripping colors. A long, taut silence sharpened her senses. An exquisite ring glinted on the first finger of his right hand.
He was silent for a while, the faint lights from Auralia’s cloak illuminating his hands. His attention frightened her. She rose slowly to her feet, lifted and unfolded the cloak, and then held it high, hiding behind it.
“So it’s true.” The man sounded younger than she had thought, like a Gatherer boy enthralled. “To know how colors knit together in this way, you must have seen the Cragavar forest from a very high place.”
Uncertain whether to respond, she shrank back a step and drew the cloak around herself, utterly ashamed of her bruised and shivering form, her legs and feet stained with ink-dark soil.
“Stay. Stay in the light, Auralia.”
She shuffled her feet, her head bowed, and waited, as if he might proclaim some judgment. He looked at her, it seemed, for as much time as he had marveled at the colors.
She braved another look. He crouched down, his eyes level now with hers, and leaned in close. She searched his glinting gaze, found only awe and questions.
“Where do you come from, that you can weave such wonders?”
“I don’t know,” she said abruptly, so very weary of questions.
“What inspired you to craft this?”
“I told them, and they threw me into this hole.” There was defeat in her voice, something she had never heard before. “The king didn’t like my answer.”
“The king is angry. But I…I am not angry, Auralia. On the contrary, I wish to protect the colors.”
She chanced another look into his face, which the colors had touched with a soft glow. “I haven’t remembered where I’m from,” she answered. “But I will, I think. Sometimes I can almost say it. I recognized a northern bird. And I dream of the Keeper. But you know that, don’t you?” She staggered slightly, realizing now how hungry she was. “Nobody believes me when I talk about him.”
“Some of us might,” said the shadow cautiously.
His voice seemed so familiar. She had heard it in the forest. A high-ranking servant of the king? One of Ark-robin’s riders? Someone who had heard rumors and come to see for himself? She stepped closer, and as the faint silver lanternlight touched her cape, even she was surprised by its eagerness to shine.
“Give me more light,” the man whispered, staring up the corridor. To her astonishment, he gazed into her eyes. “You will not remain imprisoned. You will go free. You will be the blow that shakes this house. Now that you have shown them this, nothing can remain the same. We have no more excuses. That is Abascar’s future you hold in your hands.”
His hands smelled of leather, incense, and wine. Was this a conspirator? A rescuer? He spoke as though afraid of being overheard, whispers strange and faltering.
She marveled at his intricately sculptured ring. This was a man of influence.
“Who sent you here?” he asked her.
She laughed bitterly. “You wouldn’t believe me. Who sent you?”
“You won’t believe me either.” He cupped a hand to his mouth and whispered, “An ale boy.”
She gasped. “Really? Is he…”
“He is in no danger. He is safe. And you will be safe soon. But you’ll have to be patient. My father is afraid to admit how wrong he was. Afraid to admit many things. He cannot bear the responsibility. I will need some time.”
Something stirred in her memories. A vawn, a rider. “Why do you always run from me?”
And then she spoke, barely a whisper. “It’s calling me to come back.” She clutched at the cloak.
“The forest?”
“No. The Keeper.”
“The Keeper.” His forehead was against the bars. His hair was like fire and gold, twisted in strange and hasty braids. It made her want to laugh. He reached through the bars to touch a corner of the cloak, a patch of lavender. The stranger’s fingers teased the golden fringe along the edge, and then he drew back as though burnt. “This ale boy, he says the Keeper saved you from a beastman.” She could smell his sweat and his fear.
She liked his face. Clean-shaven. Boyish, but burdened, lines deepening between his brows and at the corners of his lips. One eye was gold, one green as the emerjade around his finger. They were honest eyes.
“Do you hear it at night?” she asked.
“I do not hear it, no. But I seek it. When I was very young, I found a footprint on the bank of the Throanscall.”
At the sound of a rustling at the gate, he leaned back, listened. And then he urgently beckoned her. She could feel his words as he whispered in her ear. “You mustn’t speak of these things. Not here. Not yet.” There was a burgeoning anger beneath those words. “I’m going to help you get out of here. Don’t despair. You’ll live with us in the palace, if that’s what you…” He paused, then laughed. “Listen to us. A prince and a Gatherer. Whispering like old friends in the dark.”
His laughter triggered a rising tide of sound, and specters rose behind the bars on the opposite side of the corridor—naked, wretched prisoners drawn to observe this hushed rendezvous. Bony white fingers curled around prison bars. Pale visages of emaciated captives who had suffered long enough to absorb the cold, the corrosive air, passed in and out of sight like dead fish bobbing in dark water.
The prince swallowed, shivered. “You’ll be safe. Nobody will take away what is yours.”
“Mine?” Auralia’s smooth small brow wrinkled. “This isn’t mine really.”
“Lordship?” gasped one of the prisoners. “Prince Cal-raven ker Cal-marcus?”
Suddenly the whole corridor erupted with the voices of convicts. One by one, they cried their innocence, confessed sins, rattled bars, and begged for mercy and release. The walls seemed to grow hundreds of thrashing limbs as they reached for him in desperate appeal. The commotion pummeled the prince like a hard rain. He reached through the bars, gently grabbed Auralia’s cloak where she held it closed at her collar, and pulled her near with both hands. She surrendered, pressed against the bars. He brushed her silverbrown hair from her face, touched his lips to her tiny ear, and said, “I will bring you whatever you need. Name it, and it is yours.”
“It’s not me, m’lord, that needs your help. It’s Abascar. That’s why I came. The house needs these colors. Somehow, they will help. Somebody here needs ’em. Is it you?” Her cold hand curled into his rough grasp. As it did, she
realized she was holding the crimson threads. Of course, she thought. Now.
The prince pulled his hand away, let go of the cloak. She tumbled back into it. He stood up.
The voices around him were a storm. Guards came through the gate.
In a sudden impulse, Cal-raven knelt once more before Auralia’s cell. “Take this.” He twisted the green ring free of his finger. “If you wear this ring of trust, you show all of House Abascar that I demand your protection. Only my father can say otherwise. He will not. Do you understand?” He took her hand, pressed the ring into her palm. “Do you know who I am?”
Closing her fingers over the ring, she felt heat coursing from his hands into hers. “I know who you are. But…” She closed her eyes, touched an echo of the dream, the shadow turning from his duel with the beastman to throw his sword into the sky. “But not what you will be.”
He drew away, stung.
Auralia took the ring, put it on her finger. It was too loose, for her hands were as small as a child’s. She slipped it around her thumb. Her mouth fell open. The band like a curled tail, the ornament like the body of a great animal—the essence of horse, eagle, behemoth—was the image of the Keeper. Simple, but unmistakable.
She took the colors in her hands. “They’re for you. I don’t need them anymore.”
But he was gone.
She fumbled with the threads and then wound them around the button at her collar.
Knocking the prisoners to the backs of their cells and casting Cal-raven to the ground, color exploded like daybreak through the tunnels under the earth.
20
BLOOD TIDINGS
U nable to return to the palace after what he had seen in the dungeon, Cal-raven wandered out beyond Abascar’s wall. He needed to think. And for thoughts of this nature, he could not tolerate walls. He needed open sky.
Deep in the forest, a concealed swinglift carried him to a platform above the trees, where he gazed northward to the Forbidding Wall. The dark forest rippled, swaths of night-shrouded green, murmuring with mystery, not unlike Auralia’s cloak.
In that cell choked with darkness, the prisoner’s prize had been like a light beneath a door, and when the door was opened, memory poured forth. He had wanted to move back down the corridor to look at her again, but the colors were too strong.
This is a woman who might walk with the Keeper.
He lay down on the mossy wooden planks, which made a damp and clumpish cushion. But the discomfort was small payment for the view of stars and passing clouds soaked in moonlight.
There, in the woods, he could still remember the colors and the scents rising from that cloak. And somehow, he was convinced he could map many of the paths Auralia had walked.
The scents—wild grasses, strands spun from the fur of long-haired bearmice, the spines of green streamertail feathers—teased his appetite for trails and the many ways to leave them. He was climbing on the Cliffs of Barnashum; lying on the smoothed, washed pebbles beside quiet waters; breathing the cold reviving air of a field of vibrant bellpetals. There was a heavy, ancient aroma of everstout trees that grew on the far side of the lake. Then a wind seemed to rise, and he was caught in a wave of golden dust from firestalks in bloom.
Could Auralia have ventured so far at such a young age? Few would have seen, or cared to see, so much. And no one would have observed so intently in order to appreciate such a wild array of life. No one. But Auralia had.
Asleep on that secret platform, just as he had slept as a boy in a tree house, Cal-raven let his dreams take him across the entire Expanse, from the parched, desolate land of House Jenta, up through the Cragavar forest past House Abascar, past Deep Lake, to the dense dangerous Fraughtenwood of the Fearblind, then farther north along the sparkling blue line of the River Throanscall, to the jagged mountain ridge of the Forbidding Wall where he was engulfed in cloud, drowning in the sound of an invisible waterfall.
A hint of delirium flowers on the air pulled Cal-raven’s dream on another path, one familiar but long forgotten: a winding trail that became a stair descending into a small, walled courtyard—his mother’s garden.
In her days of failing health, Queen Jaralaine had found her only joy in tending the lush and aromatic flower beds in a hidden, guarded arboretum. She had never spoken much, nor had she given small Cal-raven anything of herself but color. Her gowns, linens, loom, and her private garden. Only her son and her husband could pass through the ivy-crowned garden gate or walk on the thread-mad floor of her weaving chambers. Even there she would accompany them, protective, smiling, shy, yet watching their every move.
“It’s mine,” she would say. “My sisters will never walk here. My father and mother will never take it away from me.”
It troubled him when she spoke this way, as if these people she hated were haunting the palace and making cruel threats. Once, in the garden, he had cleared his throat, reached for his mother’s hand, planted his feet, and declared, “When I’m all grown, I’ll fight to defend this place. It’s the jewel of the Expanse.” She had laughed until she dropped a bowl of seeds and wiped away tears with her wrist, her smile the most vivid treasure of all.
He was grateful for the memory, the only clear image he had of his mother beyond the disintegration of her beauty. All about her had gone grey—the gold hair, the orange eyes, the redbrown skin of a woman who had grown up in the woods.
And now, many years without her, he found these colors deep in the dungeon, a resurrection of the queen’s gift. But as his eyes followed the spiraling patterns, Cal-raven had seen the face it framed.
This was no painted competitor for his affections, no groveling daughter of a proud soldier. Auralia did not seek to impress him. Further, she had not asked to be released. She sought only to offer what she had. In her face there was a terrible loneliness. Her hair was lined with silver, wispy as cobwebs, as if she were an ancient wise woman made young through enchantment. He saw hunger and pain in her movement, yet she seemed oblivious to her fragility, more intent upon him than he was upon her.
A dull grey blur took on definition—a winged squirrel on the edge of the platform, paralyzed, wide eyed, as stunned to see Cal-raven as the prince was to see the animal. Then, without a glimmer of forethought, the squirrel cast itself into the open air and vanished.
Cal-raven wiped a thin layer of mist from his face, groaning with the cold, bruised ache of a night on unforgiving wooden planks.
Clinging to the lift ropes, he plunged down through the branches before dashing off the trails for a quicker route to the gates, where bewildered guards saluted their leafy, twig-littered master.
Cal-raven clenched his fists and marched up the lane toward the palace, blinking into the brilliant daylight.
Everything was a blur.
Pulling webs and burrs from his hair, he reached the stairway that would take him to the map rooms. There were things he had to say. His father was probably being pestered by advisors, hearing reports from night patrols. He was sure of his convictions but uncertain how to begin.
Auralia has crafted the wonder of Abascar, Father. And not just of Abascar, but of all the houses of the Expanse. There was something to that. And If she can do this, then imagine…Imagine what Bel Amica would say if we now declared Abascar’s Spring. Auralia could guide us into blessing the house with radiant colors. We would at last be the very house Mother wanted…the envy of the Expanse.
The cloak stretched like a banner over all he was thinking, colors rivering in his mind, Auralia’s face the sun at the center.
But before he could ascend, his father appeared above, still dressed in his nightrobe and flanked by soldiers in full battle armor.
“Cal-raven!” The king hurried down the stairs and seized the prince by the shoulders. “Son, where have you been? There is urgent news! We summoned you earlier.” He was clearly piqued by the prince’s appearance. “You look like a pile of wildbrush. Someone might think you slept in a treetop!”
“I did.”
/> Palace servants were sidetracked by the sight and began to congregate behind the prince, stirred up and muttering at the rare appearance of both leaders in the same place…and in the portentous company of combat-ready soldiers. Whatever was about to unfold could fill their hours over hot stoves and steaming basins with stories for the rest of the day.
“I was wrong to think so little of your warnings.”
“What is it? What’s happened?”
“A band of beastmen has overwhelmed the tower at the Throanscall dig.”
“How…” Cal-raven’s mouth went dry.
“I am sending out the first troop straightaway. And as much as my heart breaks to think of it, you must ride at their head. If those savages succeed in overpowering our defense, we could lose this project.”
Irimus Rain caught the prince’s gaze for a moment. They both understood that if the tower was indeed overwhelmed, severe damage had already been done.
“That’s not all we’ll lose.” Cal-raven spoke so the people would not hear. “There are a lot of good laborers out there. Blyn-dobed, the foreman. Camaroth. Arven Parks. And Nav Ballash.”
“Do you think I am a fool? Of course we’ll lose good laborers! We’ve received reports from Gatherers harvesting near the site. They saw the smoke and heard an uproar. A morning patrol reached the river project and found some of our men fallen, broken bodies nailed to the trees, severed heads hung by the hair from branches.”
Cal-raven spat bile. He reached for the sword he had not yet put on. “An organized assault, Father. The beastmen planned this.”
“Differing reports. Some said twenty beastmen, but one said four.”
“Four of those pigs couldn’t besiege a transitory tower!” Cal-raven had often slept inside the cramped quarters of just such a military structure. Designed to house twelve soldiers, these towers were defended by archers above and swordsmen below. Four beastmen would have been shot full of arrows. No, this was something larger.
“Nevertheless, the reports all confirm the tower has been taken,” the king said.