The Ale Boy's Feast (45 page)

“A culprit who loves you. What did you think would happen, singing with her, collaborating?”

“I guess she’d rather I didn’t ride off into battle.”

“She doesn’t want to compose a lament over your death.”

“When I woke, I wasn’t right in the head. Worst nightmare. My troop was replaced by beastmen. Weird beastmen too. Reptiles. Bird men. I tried to wake myself up.”

“And?”

They paused as the beastchild leapt on Dukas to wrestle him. The cat, furious, broke away and loped to a safe distance, then groomed his front paws to pretend nothing unseemly had happened. And as soon as the disappointed beastchild turned to go back to the drawing, Dukas went after her for a tackle. They tumbled about in the sand.

“One of my men, Rohrich, said that beastmen had come out of the cave. He’d tried to wake me, but I was under the spell of the slumberseed oil. The beastmen had not hurt them. They’d offered water to my men.”

“What?”

“Rohrich led me back into the caves, and I saw them. Seven beastmen. Malnourished, feeble. But they’d found a well.”

Cyndere put a hand to her heart. “Were there … blue flowers?”

“Shining blue.” He drew a few petals from his pocket.

Cyndere covered her mouth to repress a shout.

“But that’s not why I came back.” He smiled, looking at the beastchild. “Quite an artist you’ve got there. Look at that. It’s Jordam. Right in front of us.”

Cyndere’s rush of questions was disrupted by the sight. The drawing was now more detailed than anything Cyndere had ever drawn. The beastchild had given Jordam a long, ragged kilt and put a torch in his hand. She’d sketched long red lines across his arms—open wounds from a struggle—and given his toes broken claws.

“I’m waiting, Cyndere,” said Partayn, amused. “But all I see from your new pet is suspicion.”

“Waiting for what?”

“I got your message.”

“What message?”

“A messenger arrived at our camp. He said you needed me. And that the creature needed me too.”

“I sent no message.”

Partayn stood and shook himself off like a hound. “No reason to deny it, sister. I couldn’t ride any farther. I couldn’t bear the thought that you might be in some kind of trouble. And besides, now that I’ve found these beastmen, I want to go back. Quickly. With Jordam, if you can summon him. These Cent Regus might be a great help to us. If they can help me kill the Curse at its root, we’ll make the forest safe again, and you can go back to live in Tilianpurth. You, Jordam, and anyone who will help. We’ll make it a place where beastmen can heal. We’ll give House Cent Regus the help we should have offered in the first place.”

The beastchild uttered a stream of cricketlike chirps, offering Partayn the piece of chalk.

Cyndere’s voice was low and solemn. “I swear, Partayn. I did not send you such a message.”

“I’ll find that messenger,” he growled. “And I’ll give him a thrashing.”

“What did he say … exactly?”

Partayn opened his mouth. Then he stopped. He stared past her toward the
sea, stricken by some dawning realization. The wind brushed back his wild hair, and his eyes filled with tears.

He turned and walked to his horse. Dukas, disappointed, draped his tail around himself in a stately pose and watched him ride away.

The beastchild began another drawing. Another outline. A boy. A boy with large worried eyes, a cloth wrapped around his head, and a water flask in his hand.

Cyndere walked down to the edge of the tide pool bed, stepping into a maze of the blackstone teeth. She paused. In the corner of her eye, she saw it again—the glimmering shape of a figure standing beside her.

“I don’t know how much longer I can do this,” she said, her voice breaking. “Now that Emeriene’s gone, I cannot deny it. I can never replace you, Deun. But if I’m going to make this voyage without hurting somebody, I need help. Help with this beastchild. And this house. I can hear the horns of the harbor, but the fog is too heavy out here.”

In her mind’s eyes she drew the tentative lines of another likeness. But she had no practice drawing this face. Not yet.

With a sharp snap the chalk in the beastchild’s grip broke and crumbled into dust. The creature looked at the powder spilling from her hand. Then she looked at the unfinished drawing. She began to pant in frustration, kneeling to try to press the crumbs back together. Unsuccessful, she threw back her head and unleashed a long and mournful howl, unable to repair what was broken, unable to fully realize the image that burned so vividly in her mind.

Partayn pushed his way through the crowded marketplace, followed by frantic guards and surrounded by people who stopped and cheered for him.

He knew that they were happy to have him in charge, even though they were still complaining over their new limitations. He could always win them over with a song.

He reached a guarded door and was welcomed into a grand cavern where an orchestra was rehearsing an anthem.

Lesyl, who directed them, glanced back over her shoulder and let her arms fall to her sides. The music stopped.

The choir looked at Partayn. Partayn looked at Lesyl. Lesyl slowly smiled, then wiped tears from her cheeks and stepped down from the stage. She walked to Partayn with her gaze fixed on the floor. He cleared his throat and glanced from side to side, anxious as if she were the sovereign and he a cornered subject.

“I don’t know this song,” he said.

“It’s … it’s for King Cal-raven.”

“Oh,” he said. “Oh. I see.”

“No, it’s not like that at all,” she said softly. “It’s a song about his vision. His dreams have always inspired me. You know that. For a while I confused that inspiration with … something else. It was a way to survive. But when we arrived here, I knew that my part of that vision could only come to fruition here. And that my role was bound up with yours.” She took his hand. “Come. Listen.”

She drew him up the stairs. He raised his hand to the musicians. They beamed back at him as if they knew some kind of secret.

“You sent a messenger for me.”

“Did I?” She smiled.

“Your message … your message …”

She drew him behind a curtained door into a closet of shelves crowded with instruments. She took his hand and pressed his palm to her belly. “I said that I need you, and so does the child.”

Dizzy, he reached out to catch himself and grasped the edge of a shelf, which collapsed. Bright copper horns and a huge round drum crashed down and spilled out under the curtain. They heard the drum keep rolling, and then it thundered down the stairs to crash somewhere below.

Partayn tried to comprehend the joy in her face, the gleam in her eyes. His own vision blurred.

“We’ve been … hasty,” she whispered. “Haven’t we?”

“Yes,” he whispered. “Forgive me. Since the Cent Regus prisons, I’ve found it difficult to control myself around … around beauty such as yours.”

She wrapped her arms around him, knotting her hands together at the small of his back. “I’m going to make it very easy for you—for us—to do the right thing.”

“I hope you will.” He cleared his throat and felt a smile finally find his face. “Maybe … maybe a few clumsy opening notes can still become a song.”

“You’re being hasty again, my love.” He heard fear in her voice. “Do you realize the consequences if you choose this? You’re inviting a woman from Abascar to be queen of Bel Amica.”

“I can’t think of a future more beautiful than that. I think the remnant of Abascar may be the best thing that’s ever happened to Bel Amica.”

ar-balter lay inside a dry, empty cave, looking up at a window lined by long bars.

Imprisoned again. What’d I do this time?

A hand appeared beyond the bars, casting a five-fingered shadow. The hand was as large as the white-haired fire-breather he’d seen on the underground river. Kar-balter whinnied in fear as he realized that this was not a prison at all. This was the hollow belly of a massive stringed instrument—the world’s largest perys, he supposed—and its giant string-plucker was about to perform.

A finger lightly touched a string. Its sonorous
plung!
rang out in waves.

A sharp, wet shock washed across him. He woke to find himself seated on the high guard-walk that surrounded the Royal Sanctuary of Inius Throan. Hagah had come bounding around the curve, a splash for every loping stride, barking at the distant bell tower.

“You blasted hound, you soaked me!” Kar-balter yelled, but his cry was drowned out by another ringing bell, another note reverberating. Then rang the third, and so on, with Hagah barking at each tower in turn as if to say, “Again! Again!”

The feast
, thought the guard, rising. Afternoon sunlight illuminated the gleaming clutter of Inius Throan. It seemed the ancient city might forget the passing storm by nightfall.

By the tenth chime, Kar-balter had circled the Sanctuary’s outer guard-walk. He saw a figure in the tenth tower’s window—a pupil in a candlelit eye.

The king’s big secret. And the beastman’s still standing guard. What a strange crew we are
.

The thirteenth bell sounded, and the tone lingered. The progression felt incomplete, and he tensed, waiting for a fourteenth note to resolve the melody. But there was no fourteenth note. And the suspense burned like an insect bite he couldn’t scratch.

“Viscorclaws,” he muttered, returning to his assignment of surveying streets around the Sanctuary. “What’s the world come to? I guarded King Cal-marcus from grudgers and assassins. Now I’m looking to shoot at twigs and branches.”

Captain Tabor Jan wasn’t taking any chances. He had sent instructions that bowls of the Bel Amican torch oil should be set around the city wall, where archers could use them to light arrows if any viscorclaws appeared.

A lump of stone on the city wall was waving, just between the third and fourth tower. Kar-balter waved tentatively, then laughed and waved more certainly. It was Em-emyt at that post, barely tall enough to see over the battlement to the rocky gullies of the canyon beyond.

“Just like old times,” he laughed. “Except different. You were dead for a bit. I think it helped. You were grouchy and mean. Now you’re happy as a geezer with a lapful of grandkids.”

To think that there’s a river down there that pumps life into a carcass
, he thought.
In a few years no one will believe it. They’ll have cooked up a hundred explanations. They’ll say you were only knocked out
. “Nothin’s scarier than a fellow crawling out from under death’s heavy curtain,” he sighed.

Satisfied for now, he stepped through a door in the Sanctuary wall and emerged on a balcony overlooking the assembly space inside.

The lowest tiers of the descending floor sparkled with water while a young Bel Amican guard swept rain puddles from the floors. Lacking tables, people had spread canvases, blankets, and leaves in long stretches across each crescent span. They would dine upon the Sanctuary floor, dream of the tables they’d construct,
and relish whatever simple bites the cooks had made from the bounty of this overgrown, forgotten kingdom.

“They’d better serve me up a heaping plate,” he muttered. “I don’t want to go back to the days of looking down at what others have got.”