The Whirlwind in the Thorn Tree (31 page)

A
S SOON AS I AWOKE, I
slid out of the four-poster bed and stood in the middle of the guest bedroom, teetering, my mouth tasting of cat shit and my head full of bees. It took half a minute of standing there in my underwear to realize that I had no fresh clothes to put on.

The outfit I’d bought in Salt Point was gone, and just as well, because it was a mess. My fingers smelled like pancakes.

I went to the window, drew the curtain with sticky hands, and winced at the lance of pain in the back of my head. The sun sat on the mountaintops like a giant golden eagle egg, sending spears of white into the misty gorge.

Tendrils of fog rolled up from the lake, encompassing the world and making a mystery of it. I could see sleek sand-colored
dhows
cutting through the silver water, made of some paper-smooth wood and pulled by kites.

Men and women bustled here and there about their business, milling up and down the road outside.

I was in a wing of the manor that faced the front lane, where traffic between the town market and the fertile upper steppes was in full force. Despite my misery, I opened the window and waved to some of the passersby that happened to notice me.

From her perch on the bench seat of a haycart, a sweet-faced little Tekyr girl waved enthusiastically back. I smiled and she grinned, lifting my spirits, calling, “Kiet lyh-rurk!”

I echoed it right back, whatever it meant. I closed the window and heard a knock at the door.

It was a matronly woman in a gray wool frock, holding my laundered clothes. “Good morning, ser,” she said. “Oh! I’m already impressed with you. You don’t seem remotely as ruined as the Deon is. It’s nice to have a man about the house that can hold his liquor for a change.”

I was grateful to see that the suite had its own bathtub, and it even had hot running water. I lathered up and soaked until the water was tepid and my hands were wrinkled. The crisp morning light and impeccably clean bathroom made my morning ritual into a process of paradise. Once I was dressed, I wandered into the manor proper.

The Rollins house was a sprawling complex in the same Mexi-Medi style as the rest of Maplenesse, albeit in a much better condition than the pastel-colored barrios I’d sprinted through last night. The walls were pueblo as most inland buildings here, and paintings of Ainean calligraphy and watercolor scenes hung in simple frames over ornate, fragile-looking wooden furniture.

I found Walter and Garrod sitting at a large, heavy table in an equally large dining room. A crude, unlit candle chandelier dangled over their heads, and the Deon looked like a puppet with his strings cut. He slumped in his seat with his hat pulled low over his eyes and a deep frown on his face.

Quartermaster Garrod was sipping a cup of coffee and had no shirt on, gracing us all with an unobstructed view of his leathery belly and thatch of gray chest hair.

The table itself was laden with a good number of platters arrayed with an orchard’s worth of fruits (including the apple-potato things I’d taken to referring to as “applotatoes”); bean-and-bacon falafel balls; savory-looking prosciutto and pancetta marbled with white fat; crusty croissants; fluffy, crisp-edged waffles; grilled flatbreads layered with waxen white cheese, cilantro, and dried tomatoes; spongy spinach quiche; lemon-zest madeleines. I also saw what turned out to be brioche stuffed with salmon coulibiac and brioche filled with boiled cabbage and sausage.

I’m approximating most of this, by the way. There are very few analogs between Earth and Destin when it comes to culture, but culinary dishes seemed to be one thing that I was able to recognize. I knew what prosciutto and pancetta were from eating NATO chow, but don’t ask me how I knew what a “brioche” was.

I sat at the table by Walter’s right hand and said, “Good morning.”

That hand had a fork in it, which tilted toward me. “It is entirely possible to murder a man with eating utensils. Lower your voice, bastard, or you will witness the definition of agony.”

I silenced myself with a smile of pursed lips. A Tekyr attendant appeared and poured me a cup of coffee.

“And you,” Walter said, pointing the fork at Garrod. The quartermaster looked down at his naked chest and took another sip of coffee from his dainty teacup.

“No shirt, no shoes, no service,” I said.

Walter speared the cabbage brioche on his plate and left the fork standing up in it. Garrod grunted, closed up his robe and cinched it with a sash. He was wearing a cherry-red silken robe with embroidered birds, which looked very feminine on such a coarse-looking old man.

The Tekyr attendant brought me a plate with an enormous omelet, with bacon crumbled over the top of it. She spoke to me in a long string of nonsense syllables I recognized as Tekyrian. She accented several of the words by hooting through the airholes along her neck.

I winced in apology, shrugging. She repeated herself so that I could understand her. “After last night’s feast, I thought you would appreciate something other than waffles.”

“Oh. Umm—how do you say
thank you very much
in your language?”

“D’nerg ayo fiha los’n.”

I recited it back to her, which earned me a flustered smirk. “Very good,” she said, and went away again.

“I was unable to detain Sardis,” mumbled Walter, as I tucked into my breakfast. “He escaped into the hills before I could lay hand to him.”

Noreen and Sawyer shuffled out of a doorway holding hands, and joined us at the table. Neither of them looked as ill as I felt—they were in fact joined at the hip, murmuring animatedly to each other. As I talked to Walter, they grazed off of the platters in front of them.

The Tekyr came back with cups of coffee. It wasn’t the rich coco-mocha coffee like the bath-house in Salt Point, but it was delicious nonetheless. I took a croissant, pulled the middle out by one end and ate it, then rolled up a piece of pancetta and plugged the hole with it.

As I chewed the improvised sandwich, I said, “The last thing Sardis said was, ‘Wasn’t me.’”

“Pure, unadulterated lies,” said the Deon. “Sardis was the last person to see Lord Eddick alive. He continues to evade the authorities even now. If he isn’t responsible for Eddick’s disappearance, then where
is he
? Has Eddick fled to Zam?”

“According to his literary agent Maxwell Bayard, my father was murdered.”

“I just realized something,” said Noreen. “Your names are two sides of the same coin.”

“What do you mean?”

“His name is
Sardis
. Your first and middle names are
Sidney Ross
.
Sardis...Sid Ross.
Maybe this guy’s your brother or something. I figure you two have the same father and different mothers.”

“Murdered, then,” said Walter. “With his own guns, no doubt. They are not in his lodge on the hill. I expect that Sardis has taken them.”

“His father had guns?” asked Sawyer.

“Eddick was a gunslinger,” said the Deon. “Obviously not in the same realm of acumen as my father and I, and especially not as skilled or as fearless as Normand Kaliburn, but he was one of us, yes. Does that surprise you?”

“It does,” I admitted.

“Whorin’ and shootin’,” said Quartermaster Garrod, chuckling through a mouthful of food. “Sounds like you didn’t know your father as well as you thought you did.”

“He died in our world. Bayard didn’t say how he died, or how he got out of Destin.”

“Strange.”

A man came in with a lyre, tuning it as he entered. “Music to aid the digestion, sera.”

Walter raised his butterknife over his head by the blade, preparing to throw it. The man turned around without even slowing and walked right back out.

“I expect you’d like to take a look at Lord Eddick’s cottage before we strike out for Ostlyn,” he said, glaring at the lyrist as he left. “Perhaps you’ll be able to find some clue as to why your would-be brother assassinated your father.”

_______

The trek was a short but winding hike up the side of the ridge, into the treeline behind the Rollins house. The picturesque path was little more than a dirt trail through tall grass, trod barren by years of passing feet. To our left was a steep slope shadowed in tall pine trees; to our right was a neck-breaker of an incline, slippery with pine needles.

Over the sparse trees marching down the wash, we could see the distant horseshoe of Maplenesse framing the lake as it glittered in the morning sun.

My two friends were all over each other on the walk up to Ed’s cottage like a couple of handsy teenagers.

“Looks like you two had a good Mokehlyr last night,” I said.

Noreen smiled sheepishly and pretended that she hadn’t heard me. Sawyer grinned, focusing on his feet.

I left it at that.

My father’s house turned out to be a two-story weaver’s cottage tucked back into a sun-dappled glen. A widow’s walk extended from the second floor, serving as a roof for a little porch with a pair of wicker chairs and a glass-topped table. A symphony of birdsong serenaded our approach.

I spied a chessboard facedown on the floor behind one of the chairs, and chess pieces were scattered all over the porch. “Odd,” I said, pushing the door open.

My breath was stolen as soon as I entered the cottage.

The walls were arrayed with a catalog’s worth of artifacts and paraphernalia from Ed’s adventures in Destin. Baskets hung from chains affixed to hooks in the ceiling, filled with coins, bullets, oddly-shaped stones, marbles, and other bric-a-brac. Mismatched pieces of battle-worn armor dangled from nails in the plaster walls, from scrollworked steel morions and pauldrons to the sleek green June-bug armor from K-Set.

Parchment sketches of posing people and scenes of action were nailed up alongside antique shields, with the faces of wolves etched into them. The mounted heads of exotic wildlife stared blandly from their wooden plaques, between shelves displaying dishes on which scenes and creatures had been painted with intricate goldleaf and brilliant colors.

All the things I had expected at his cold, unlived-in house in Blackfield.
This
was his true house.

A large desk dominated one end of the room, looking out through the front window onto the hill and the spectacular view of the city. On it was a manual typewriter and a ceramic stein full of pencils and fountain pens, along with an inkwell and several knick-knacks. A little turtle hewn from soft green jade, and a stainless steel whiskey flask with a bullet lodged in one broad side of it.

I also saw a notepad with the simple word “NO” scribbled on it and a furious underline.

A chill coursed over my skin, and my eyes silvered with long-held tears at the trove of things Edward Brigham had collected on his travels. This is when it hit me—this was why my father never had much to do with me. He’d never had much to do with our world at all. I bit my lips and tried to keep the tears welling in my eyes from sliding down my cheeks.

Sawyer finally said what I was thinking. “Ed wasn’t a recluse after all, was he?”

My face darkened with the effort it took to hold myself together.

I found myself conflicted. “Why was this world so great that he didn’t want to stay in ours? He could’ve brought me here. He didn’t have to come here and have another family, another son. I would’ve been glad to grow up here.”

I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was Noreen with an empathetic expression.

I couldn’t articulate to myself what I was feeling at knowing we had only seen the tip of my father’s iceberg. He had retreated into a fantasy world and left my mother and I behind, leaving only a ghost of himself in his place. I wondered if this was why they’d divorced.

That raised the question
did my mother know?
Did my mother know about this world, this place, my “brother” and
his
mother?

I voiced my question to my friends, not looking away from the things on the walls, which reminded me at length of the restaurants on Earth that nailed farm implements to the walls to give the place a rustic feel.

“I think you answered your own question, Scooby,” said Sawyer.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, look at this place,” he said, gesturing expansively. He showed me the outside, visible through the front door. “Look at this world. You just said that you would have been glad to grow up here. Not that I would ever condone abandoning yourse—” he faltered and corrected, “—your family, but hell, he had the chance to go to a world that has—it has sea-serpents, and Avatar Snorks, and festivals for pancake syrup, and metal giants, and green deserts, and guys that settle shit at high noon. Any one of us, any one of his fans, would have jumped at the chance to come here. He found it, and he took it.”

He shook his head, looking around, and let his hand drop to his side. “Can you blame him, honestly?”

“I guess not.”

“And look at what happened to him, Ross,” said Noreen. “This place may be great, but I’m sure he thought he was keeping you safe by leaving you behind. Is a boring life better—”