The ale boy felt a surge of relief when he recognized one of them by his stature and his unsheathed sword—Captain Ark-robin—but he did not call out or lift his hood. Despite the captain’s famous strength, his mercurial demeanor always unsettled the boy.
The men exchanged hushed words, their attention drawn by the brightly costumed young woman in their midst. His fear did not leave, but it changed. Would Auralia survive a beastman attack only to be beaten by soldiers from Abascar?
Ark-robin laughed suddenly and spurred his vawn to approach her. “You again. So is this what you do when you stir up a nest of beastmen? You lead them here, to kill Abascar’s Gatherers? I should drag you in for questioning.”
Auralia did not flinch when the vawn’s snout shoved at her.
“Who is this?” asked the red-bearded archer, who had already strapped another arrow to his caster in case of another threat.
Ark-robin hesitated. “A trespasser. Someone I should have stuffed in a sack and tossed in the Throanscall when I found her stealing from our woods.” The captain narrowed his eyes and addressed Auralia. “Do you want to introduce yourself to Tabor Jan? He might know your name. He’s heard about the impudent little weaver who brings the Gatherers forbidden things. And he’ll be seeing you again, soon enough. If my count is correct, you’re about a hundred days from your test at the Rites of the Privilege.”
Another rider drew up between Ark-robin and Tabor Jan. The ale boy gasped, recognizing the yellow sign emblazoned on the soldier’s shield.
“Ride back home, Cal-raven,” said Ark-robin. “This isn’t proper work for a prince. We’ll check around for more beastmen. That dying Gatherer made such a noise he might have attracted others.”
“Is this the girl?” Prince Cal-raven whispered. “Is this the one I’ve tried for so long to catch?”
Auralia faced them with the same readiness she had shown the beastman.
“I’ve looked for you, young woman,” Cal-raven continued, much to Ark-robin’s annoyance. “Why do you always run from me?”
Auralia looked at her toes, which were reddening on the freezing ground.
“It’s extraordinary—what you’re wearing,” said the prince. “Illegal, but beautiful. How do you make such fantastic colors?”
“I don’t make ’em,” she said, and the ale boy wondered if the prince could hear her. “And they’re not hard to find.”
The prince nodded. “Ark-robin told me you would be difficult. But I’m not finished with you yet. I’ll find you again, when this ugly business with beastmen is finished.” He turned his vawn, reached to deliver a congratulatory clap to the archer’s shoulder, and all the riders but Ark-robin charged off into the trees.
Auralia stepped back to avoid the beastman’s blood, which spread like syrup across the frozen ground.
Ark-robin wagged his finger like a disgruntled teacher. “How do you feel about coming to live with us inside the walls now? Think you could give up this foolishness in order to enjoy some protection? We don’t always come to rescue.”
“There’s worse dangers than beastmen,” she quietly replied. “Besides, I woulda been safe. I already called for help of my own.”
“Ha! Your friend the fangbear, I suppose.” Ark-robin prompted his vawn to prance around her, kicking up a storm of dirt and slush. “Spoken like a true child of the North, the country from which nothing good can come.”
“Never said I was a Northchild,” she replied with menace in her voice. “I just told you I remembered being there.”
“You cast a shadow like the rest of us, sure. But you’ve walked where trouble comes from, and so you bring it with you. Take it back, I say.” He pointed his sword northward. “Get yourself gone.”
“You talk like you’ve seen a Northchild,” Auralia said with sudden intensity.
Ark-robin scowled, spat, and surrendered, departing in a rush, a few swinging branches the only evidence of his passage.
Auralia knelt before the fallen beastman. She combed tangles of its deep brown beard, then sharply jerked free a few strands and tucked them into a pocket. Prying the beastman’s massive prong-club free with both hands, she then turned, smiled in the ale boy’s direction, and stepped back into the birch gate through which she had come.
The ale boy thought to call after her, to remind her of her cloak, but something between his mind and voice remained paralyzed. His strewn thoughts realigned in the weary quiet of the clearing. His hands, which had been pressed against the fever in his face, came free and caught a stream of sliding snowflakes. The snow melted there into a small mirror. He watched the faint and wavering reflection of his scar. She had called it beautiful.
A tremor. A rain of snowy leaves. Even the earth, it seemed, was shuddering at what had taken place.
Then it shook again.
The ale boy looked intently into the trees. “Help of her own,” he said to his quivering reflection. “She called for help of her own.”
As the third thunderous footfall shook the ground, he fled, unable to make room for yet another mystery. Not today.
6
SUMMONER AND STRANGER
A vawn emerged from the mist, head high like a conqueror. Each resonant step left its signature print on the ground—three reptilian toes in front and one wide claw in back. A rumble of displeasure rose from the gold-armored belly, up the blue green arc of its throat, to blast in three voices from its nostrils. When it stumbled into a patch of muck, the creature dipped its mouthless muzzle into muddy soup and rested there, face half-buried, drawing ground-slime into its head. Teeth and tongues deep within worked noisily, separating leaf, water, soil, stone.
Meanwhile its rider sat proud as a jay and just as regal blue in her long uniform jacket. The outfit announced that the wearer was of a certain importance, but not a soldier—the high-collared design was certainly impractical. It took some effort for her to survey the woods around her.
She pulled back the elaborate black-tattooed mask and sniffed the air, then shielded her face again from the cold. Like all royal summoners, she depended on that striking, stern mask—a relic from the days of King Gere-baron—for a strong first impression.
At the sweet pang of burning applewood, she turned sharply southward. Her spurs jabbed the soft seam between the vawn’s natural gold belly armor and the tough green flesh of its back. The mount’s head lurched up. Nostrils blasted streams of mud to clear the way for whining voices. A lash of its tail overturned a tree to the right, smashed a bush to the left. Then it resigned itself to the weighty march forward and pushed its way out of the thick patch of trees to enter a well-hidden clearing.
A low murmur of voices rose, fell, and stopped altogether. A bonfire had settled into a mountain of smoky red and black so hot that the circle of Gatherers around it kept their distance to avoid scorching their ragged cloaks.
The summoner scanned the downcast faces, frowned on the bowing and the nodding and the strange spontaneous salutes, ridiculous attempts to appear well-mannered and cooperative.
In no mood for prolonging her task, she cleared her throat, drew the skin-mask back from her lips, and pulled from within her cloak a white scroll tied with a crimson ribbon. She snapped the red strand with a flick of her curled thumbnail and read quickly and colorlessly.
“Krawg. Brown Jelter. Ambaul. Warney. Echo-hawk. Joshoram. Nella Bye. These are recognized by their appointed duty officers. For their admirable efforts in daily assignments. And they are recommended to the king. For restored residence and favor in the house.” She spoke in a mechanical, halting way, breaking each statement into fragments. “To claim this opportunity, they must appear. Before the king six days hence. Bearing a sign of their pledge of service. And the nature of their qualifications for labor. The king will hear each criminal’s case. And judge fairly whether they remain inside the wall’s protection. Or return to the wild for another season.”
“What?!” came an urgent voice. A glowering, broad-chested young man stepped forward
. “You did say my name, yes? Surely you said ‘Radegan’ in them there names.”
The officer smiled. “There is no such name on this list. Stand back.”
Radegan’s face—even in the vermilion glow of the ember mountain—paled to ashen white. “But you said that I…”
The officer went on. She stared at the space above each individual’s head, as though looking down at such people would cause her to lose her train of thought. “And those orphans. Children of age. To be reviewed…include…Auralia.”
The gathering unanimously gasped. Krawg swung his hand around to stop up Warney’s sob. “Summoner,” he said, “there is no Auralia. Not for the Rites of the Privilege.”
“Her name. It’s on the list. She will attend.”
Krawg shook his head. “She’s disappeared, good officer.”
“Find her.”
“We haven’t seen her in many days. Probably snatched by a beastman. Or stumbled into a hole. Or a tree fell on her. Or she got carried off by a devil wind. Or stole away to try to get into some other house.”
“No one who knows House Abascar,” snarled the summoner, “would think of living at any other house.”
“True,” Krawg added. She could see him thinking as fast as he could. “But Auralia’s never known what Abascar’s like inside the walls. She doesn’t know what she’s missing. And you wouldn’t want her shut inside anyway.” He flicked himself in the temple with his thumb. “She’s not well in the head, you know. It’s a sign of her affliction, that she’s run away like this.”
The Gatherers kept their heads bowed, visibly colluding in Krawg’s desperate fiction. The summoner had never seen such a concerted effort to defy her. She might as well have come bearing news of a death sentence. “We shall send an inquisitor. To investigate Auralia’s disappearance. Be ready for him when he comes. He will expect answers.”
She went on to name the rest of the orphans who would be called before the king. But the Gatherers appeared distracted, uncomfortable.
Who was this girl they so revered? Where was she? And how did she elude all duty officers’ attempts to apprehend her?
Radegan, meanwhile, persisted in his pleas. “My name is on the list, and you know it is!” he snarled. He stepped between the Gatherers and the vawn, speaking in a hushed and personal address. “Don’t pretend you’ve forgotten what I’ve done to earn it either. It was all your idea, the things I’ve done to get this chance. I’ve…I’ve helped you out. Just like you asked. And you promised me you’d request an early pardon. You owe this to me.”
“We cannot deny, thief, that your…your help…was most enthusiastic and rewarding for us,” she laughed. “But you have served us so well, it seems we will require your contributions awhile longer before we are willing to send you back into Abascar.”
“How do you know I won’t lose my patience and—”
The summoner tugged at the reins, but the vawn’s head had sunk completely beneath the mire in search of sustenance. The rider felt her grip on composure and civility slipping. She jerked at the leather restraints, and the vawn yanked its head out of the dirt, flinging sand and stones and painting both Radegan and the officer from head to toe in dripping sludge. At any other time, this would have resulted in the desperate sounds of Gatherers trying to stifle laughter at seeing such a figure so offended. But deathly silence remained as they stared into bonfire embers.
The vawn’s three voices complained, dissonant, and it trudged off into the trees, while its muddied rider plotted punishments for the obnoxious beast.
The wet ground had only just closed the vawn’s deep prints when the first currents of the cold night wind chased ashes into whirling dances above the bonfire coals. The Gatherers all took one step closer to the embers, tightened their circle, and began to utter their frustrations. While it was as close to a Gatherer tradition as anything might be—to follow an officer’s visit with self-interested complaint—this time there was only one name on their lips.
“Auralia’s not made for Housefolk.”
“She’d never last inside. Why, today she sang the Morning Verse from the top of the Stone Tooth within view of the watchtower. Even before the watchman took his place to sing it! If he could have reached her, he’d have smacked her!”
Warney dabbed at his eyes (tears still fell from the empty socket behind his patch). “Krawg sometimes spies her asleep at the top of one of them giant evergreens by the lake. She likes to climb. Says she dreams about lookin’ down and seein’ the whole Expanse spread out before her. What’ll she get into inside the walls? I bite my nails all night wonderin’! They’ll be pullin’ her off the palace spires.”
Krawg nodded, tugged at the loose flesh of his neck. “Found her with a yellowbadger curled in her lap, I did. She was combing out its falling winter fur and stuffin’ it in her pockets. It coulda killed her with a bite!”
“She wanted the yellow off its fur.”
Krawg took one end of the scarf he wore concealed under his heavy woods-cloak and withdrew it before their eyes. “I’m a liar if I’m not the only one in these here woods to have a yellowbadger scarf! There’s no Housefolk, or I’d venture to say, no magistrate neither, ever had one so bright and—”
“Shh, put that cloth away!” Lezeeka snorted so violently that things came out of her nose. “If the summoner’d seen that, she woulda taken you in for a good whippin’!”
“It’s Auralia that’s gonna get whipped!” grumbled Yawny, his face as white as if he slept among his flour sacks. “They threw me out here because they caught me wearing my favorite red hat in my own bed. I just wanted to keep my head warm. What I mean to say is…Auralia’s not gonna live long before she starts cookin’ up colors inside Abascar’s walls. We’d better hope she gets in trouble right away and tossed back out like a hunk of gristle. Because she’s the sort who might get sent to the dungeons if she has the time to stir up something serious.”
“You’ve all seen what she messes with,” grumbled Hildy the Sad One. “But me…I up and followed her one night when she was runnin’ away. I know what she does when nobody finds her.”
Warney’s eye found Krawg, and there was an unspoken question between them. Then Krawg scowled. “Aw, Hildy, you’re full of vawn pooey. Last year you told us you woke up on the floor because Northchildren had come for you. You said they pulled you from your bed and tried to drag you into the woods. Turned out you were just sleepwalkin’ and ended up steppin’ in a nest of stingers. So don’t go expectin’ us to—”
“No, I’d like to hear Hildy’s story.”
Krawg turned, and the assembly of nervous Gatherers shifted away from the man who had spoken, for he was strange to them.
He was small, in a simple green shift with a deep hood that shadowed a face like a pale moon. The firelight revealed his scowl. “If Auralia is to come inside House Abascar, we should properly examine her. We should find out where she comes from and what she intends to do.” He opened his hands in a sort of shrug. “The more you can tell me what you know, the less I shall have to ask.”
That the summoner could have sent an inquisitor so swiftly—well, it astonished them all. Their eyes shifted between their visitor and Hildy, who was shaking as though the puddle she stood in had turned to ice.
“So, Hildy. Tell me what you can. I have a meticulous memory, and my words within Abascar’s walls do not go unnoticed. But I warn you, if a single word rings false, you will have a second inquisitor who is not nearly so kind as I am.”
The poor woman had never been the focus of so much attention, and she stammered as she spoke. “At night, at night, Auralia goes to the caves, the caves, along the side of Deep Lake. Down in them cracks and crevices, down in them clefts and holes, she hides, she hides. She empties her pockets of seeds and leaves and roots and things. And seeds. And roots. And leaves. And things. Drops ’em into pots of water she boils over a fire.” Hildy’s gnarled hands tugged at her long white hair and twisted it as she spoke. “Over a fire.
”
“Can somebody else tell this story?” lamented little Abeldawn, pulling on his father’s three-fingered hand. “She don’t talk so good.” His father shushed him by pinching his ear.
Wenjee tried to take the story away from Hildy and carry it herself, but no one understood her, for she was swallowing a bun.
Hildy continued. “Auralia breathes in strange vapor from those concoctions, she does. Her eyes light up. Her fingers wiggle. She dances around like a witch.”
“And she chants!” burst Wenjee, bun finished. “She chants like a Northchild and probably throws curses on our dreams!”
The robed stranger had begun to smile, more amused than interested. Noticing this, Krawg barked, “Close that mouth, Wenjee! You have to lie down and rest just from walkin’ fifty paces. You’ve never been as far as the lake!”
“There were misty ghosts, though, misty ghosts,” said Hildy in a hush. “Misty ghosts blowin’ like a wind from the water. She lies down, her eyes stare at the dark sky, and the stones around her shine and make a most alarming sound, a most alarming sound, breaking and cracking. And then she rises and grabs her brushes. And then she rises and grabs—”
“Her brushes!” shouted Abeldawn, whose father swiftly cuffed him on his shoulder.
Hildy glared at the child and went on. “She dips the brushes into the paints, and then she gets to coloring the stones all the way up and all the way down, all the way out to the edge of the water. Those stones’re stained, I tell ya, stained as red as blood.”
“Maybe it is blood!” murmured Mulla Gee under her breath.
Krawg scoffed. “My little Auralia would never hurt nothin’ that lives.”
Warney’s response was no surprise. “Gotta ’gree with ya there!”