The Princess Beard

by Kevin Hearne

  Qobayne led the landing party, and the only other people Tempest knew were Milly Dread and Brawny Billy. The rest of the berry gatherers were new folk, all wearing the red undershirts they’d kept from their POPO days. Most of the crew had stayed behind to fish, sit on the beach, or, in Morgan’s case, take a captaining exam. Even Al stayed up in the crow’s nest, calling down that he felt like the muse was about to return home with fresh groceries, and Vic apparently had mysterious business of his own on the island and was being laboriously lowered down to the bigger dinghy, using the pulley and harness. As she slogged through the sand toward the jungle, Tempest looked back to The Pearly Clam, bobbing merrily in the deep-blue water, and felt quite alone. But as soon as the sand turned to dirt and her toes sank in, she felt more at home than she had in weeks.

  “Whot’s that say?” one of the red-shirted crew asked, pointing at a sign made of ship boards nailed together and painted with what looked like concentrated bird feces.

  “Says help,” Qobayne said. “These uninhabited islands almost always have this sort o’ thing. Some poor critter gets shipwrecked and starts leaving messages to get themselves saved. And then they get saved and leave their trash behind. Rude, if you ask me.”

  “Come to think of it, I noticed some rocks as we came in, spelling out SOS. What’s that mean?” Tempest asked.

  “Save our skins, I think,” Milly Dread said, scratching her bum. “Or maybe send over spaghetti. Must get pretty hungry, trapped out here. Lovely island, but not much in the way of restaurants.”

  And she was right. The island was big, by Mack standards, and Tempest couldn’t imagine why no one had settled there, or on any of the Macks. She thought it had much to recommend it, from beautiful vistas to a lush jungle to bountiful plains. Skullbeard had muttered about the ding gulls being too horrific to make it worth bothering, but Skullbeard had said a lot of things, most of them negative. This path, he’d said, would lead directly to a huge field positively fecund with ding-gull berries, and each sailor had a big, clean bucket ready to fill with their bounty. Tempest swung her bucket as she walked, loving the dappled sunshine that filtered through the tropical forest and enjoying the variety of trees grown to maturity and housing what had to be thousands of songbirds. She smiled at their song, and—

  “Ahhhh!”

  The group stopped, and the jungle went silent.

  “What was that?” one of the red shirts asked, his voice tremulous with terror.

  “Someone said ahhhh, but in fear and surprise rather than physical satisfaction or sudden understanding,” Milly Dread explained.

  “Wait, where’s Marko?”

  Qobayne stopped and looked around the group. “Who?”

  The red shirt quaked harder. “Marko. He’s just a guy?”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “Well, he was with us, but now he’s not.”

  Qobayne looked at the man like he was insane, scanned the dense forest around their trail, and shrugged, seeing nothing in the thick undergrowth. “Let’s hope he went off for a pee. Continuing.”

  The trail seemed well trod and well kept, for a deserted island, and the birds resumed their song, and they passed a sign that said GO AWAY and the loveliest grove of plumeria, and—

  “Ahhh!”

  “There it is again!” Milly Dread said, cocking her head. “Strange reaction to have on such a lovely walk, isn’t it?”

  “And now Poloe is gone,” the quivering red shirt said. “That’s two men missing!”

  Qobayne looked at the red shirt in a way that suggested the man was being part of the problem instead of part of the solution.

  “I don’t recall either o’ these men, but if it makes you feel better, we can call for them as we go along so they can rejoin us after their peeing. Or whatever.” Hands on hips, he shouted, “Marko! Poloe! Marko! Poloe!”

  Milly Dread put her hands over her ears. “Cor, that’s annoying! What kind of a fool would walk around shouting like that? Makes my old ears hurt, that does!”

  After a few minutes of fruitless shouting, Qobayne shrugged and went quiet. The red shirts were all clustered together now, three of them, and Tempest fell back a little so she didn’t have to hear their worried chatter about the obvious dangers of peeing alone. And since she was the last in line, she just so happened to be watching when a huge log swung in from the right to the left, taking a red-shirted lad with it.

  “Ahhhhh!” he cried.

  “Would you please,” Milly Dread called from the front, “stop saying that?”

  But Tempest stepped forward. “No, the red shirt—what’s your name?” She asked the man who had spoken up about Marko and Poloe.

  “I’m called Hayu.”

  “Hayu is right, Milly. His friends are disappearing. A log swung in and smacked a man away. It was tied with vines, and—” Closing one eye, she tracked the log’s trajectory. “Yes! There it is! Lodged in that tree, using some sort of contraption. This is a very complex machine.”

  “Hmm. A man-bashing machine,” Milly Dread mused. “That’s right marketable, that is.”

  The group hurried toward the log to find the missing red shirt—

  “Oh, no. Not Jimson,” Hayu moaned.

  —only to find the remains of Jimson as crimson as his shirt, smeared against the trunk of a tree into a tomato paste with chunks of bone in it.

  Qobayne looked at what was left of Jimson and stroked his chin. “So the big question is this: Are these old, abandoned booby traps, or is someone actively trying to kill us?”

  But Tempest had had enough. “I think the real question is, why are we standing here when someone is killing people with logs? Now, follow me. We’ve got to stay off this trail.” Without waiting to see if Qobayne found this remark dangerously rebellious, she took off running, her berry bucket bouncing.

  The others, thankfully, followed her, and she kept their path parallel to the murderous one but zigzagging through the dense foliage. To be honest, she was only able to run a few feet, and then she had to laboriously push through branches and leaves. Brawny Billy, who was silent but deadly, moved ahead of her to clear a path with his machete, giving her a perky grin and a wink over his massive shoulder.

  “D’ye think Marko and Poloe are dead?” Hayu asked.

  “I would assume so,” Milly said. “I mean, live people would pop back out and mention an interesting bug they saw while having a pee, not shout ahhhh and disappear forever.” And then true horror dawned on her lined face. “Oh, no. They might be ghosts soon. We need to walk faster.”

  Brawny Billy cut the trail as quickly as his machete allowed, and soon the remaining berry pickers stood on the threshold of a spectacular field of berry bushes. Shielding her eyes from the sun, Tempest scanned the area for the dreaded ding gulls Skullbeard had mentioned. Truth be told, a wide variety of birds should’ve been feasting there, but the bushes were unburdened with beaky grazers, even though plenty of the fruits dangled from branches in plain view.

  The ding-gull berries were plump and ripe if ugly, a wrinkled sort of brownish-purple, like spherical prunes with hairy tufts at one end and splurty squirts of brown juice at the other. Although Tempest had never heard of this type of berry before, she’d imagined stuffing herself with something like blueberries or blackberries until the bones in her lower legs stopped hurting. But the stench of these berries suggested no one would wish to eat them. The crew moved into the field, buckets ready to be filled.

  “Ye’ve got to use your knife to cut them off,” Qobayne said, demonstrating by cupping a berry in his hand and sawing at the thick, hairy stem. When it was cut through, he held up the berry and winced. “They’re sticky little nuggets too. Be sure to wipe off your hands afterward. Now, let’s get this done and get back to the ship. The ding gulls will surely show up soon, if they’re as territorial as Skullbeard said.” He drop
ped the apricot-sized berry into his bucket with a meaty plunk and untangled the next hairy stem from the bush.

  Tempest dutifully went to her own bush nearby and began sawing. She quickly realized she was not a fan of ding-gull berries. They were unpleasantly tacky and had hideous little bumps that sometimes felt a bit like corn kernels or cashew chunks. But they weren’t here to feast, she reminded herself. These berries were the key to saving the otters. Without the juice from many squashed berries, they’d never get through the magic aura protecting Mack Guyverr. She thought about Otto’s sweet face and adorable antics; she couldn’t let further harm come to the otters. And so she redoubled her efforts and committed herself to having as many ding-gull berries in her bucket as possible, and—

  “Ahhhh!”

  “Oh, not again!” Milly Dread cried.

  But this time, it wasn’t some random stranger from the former POPO crew. No, it was Brawny Billy, and there was an arrow sticking out of his belly. A piece of white fabric attached to the arrow was crudely painted with the words PRIVERT PROPERTE.

  “Is that true?” Qobayne murmured as Milly Dread tried to help Brawny Billy.

  If it had been one of the scrawny red shirts who’d taken the arrow, they could’ve easily carried him back to the ship, but they didn’t call Billy brawny because he was wee. He was a large lad with huge muscles and a sweet smile who was especially good at carrying things. Captain Luc sometimes called him the Quickerrrr Pickerrrr Upperrrr because he could carry a barrel farther and faster than anyone else. And now he was dying on the ground. Another arrow thwacked out of nowhere and stuck in his chest; the tag on this one read WE MEANS IT.

  Tempest knelt by Billy’s side but could immediately see that there was very little any healer could do for him. Maybe she could—

  No. She couldn’t. Soon her entire arm would be bark. But perhaps she could use her law knowledge to stop more arrows from being fired.

  “This isn’t private property!” Tempest shouted. “I checked the atlas before we landed. This island was never claimed. It’s part of a public trust held by the king. If you’d like to claim a plot, you’ll have to fill out form JNY8675309 and submit it to the King of Pell along with the requisite taxes, but I hear there’s a six-year backlog of claims.”

  After a moment, an arrow thwacked into the ground at Tempest’s feet, reading WHOT?

  “Exactly what I said. I’m studying to be a lawyer, and while we are well within our rights to pick these berries, the law is very much against you, I’m afraid! Murder is a pretty big deal.”

  For several minutes, no arrows thwacked, and everyone hovered around Billy, saying unhelpful things like “Where does it hurt?” and “What can I do?” and “Thoughts and prayers.”

  But then a new figure appeared as if out of nowhere—no. Two figures.

  Nearly identical white men, except in age. Handsome, muscled, suntanned, with long, wild, gold-bleached hair and long beards to match and extremely tight, tattered pants torn off mid-shin. One, however, looked like an older copy of the other.

  “Who the Pell are you?” Qobayne asked.

  “I’m Robin,” the older man said in a deep, dramatic voice.

  “And I’m Robin’s son, Kruso,” said the second one in an equally deep, equally dramatic voice.

  “And why are you picking off my crew, eh?” Qobayne barked. “You think sailors grow on trees? You need these nasty berries so much you think it’s worth two men—”

  “Three!” Hayu piped up.

  “Going on four,” Milly Dread said before adding, in a quieter voice, “Not you, of course, Billy. You’re doing just fine. I was talking of someone else.”

  “Well, we did have those signs up.” Robin fidgeted with overgrown fingernails, looking a bit chastened.

  “Which one? We saw one that read GO AWAY and one that read HELP, which seems contradictory,” Qobayne said.

  “Well, HELP does stand for hey, everybody leave this place,” Kruso said in a helpful way. “Obviously. And you do need to leave this place. Orders from the big guy at the MMA, Angus Otterman. You’re trespassing.”

  “It’s public land!” Tempest asserted again. “Nobody owns it! We can’t trespass on public land, and as for Otterman—”

  “Glurk,” Brawny Billy said, which cut off Tempest just as she was about to contest the idea that some merchant had any authority here. She looked down at her shipmate and saw that Billy was pale and sweating, his eyes lost in the sky and blood seeping from his mouth. He pointed a weak finger upward as if trying to ask a question.

  “If only we had a healer,” Milly Dread cried dramatically. “If only someone could save him!” She tilted her head and gave Tempest a significant glare.

  “Well, I—”

  But before Tempest could explain her precarious situation, her fears and her destiny, her father the bloodthirsty willowmaw and her own righteous path, the conspicuously absent ding gulls arrived with screeching and blood.

  The blood was Robin’s, as a gull flew down onto his shoulders from behind and its sharp beak scissored into his throat, severing the artery. The screech was Kruso’s, as he turned and bolted for the shelter of the forest, pursued by two more gulls. These, however, were just the vanguard of a huge flock coming their way, furious at the invasion of their feeding grounds. Tempest’s jaw dropped in awe and horror.

  Ding gulls were profoundly unattractive birds. In body shape and the cut of their wings, they resembled seagulls, but there the resemblance ended. Their plumage was a splotchy mess of dirty gray with an a and only a hint of nicer grey with an e around their yellow beady eyes. They had dark-red, bulbous wattles and their vocalizations sounded like rusty saw blades trying to chew through soft wood. And their beaks really were scissor-like, in order to cut loose the hairy berries that bore their name. The two that chased after Kruso successfully brought him down, and Tempest realized that they’d all soon be torn to shreds. It was no wonder the island was uninhabited. The berries weren’t worth eating, and if you tried to take any, you’d be sliced into strips of jerky.

  “Hold your buckets over your heads!” Qobayne shouted. “Ready food might be all that distracts them!”

  It sounded like a better plan than anything Tempest had thought of, which was nothing. She held up her bucket as the flock of ding gulls approached, squawking in rage at the interlopers. She jiggled the bucket to make the berries obvious to the approaching gulls and saw some of them adjust their flight and dive for it. And then there was a mess of feathers and squawks and foul berry juices spurting between beaks, and talons raked across her fingers as she held the bucket aloft. Qobayne and Milly Dread and the others were doing the same.

  The noise was nigh unbearable, but then it began to change as the gulls that had fed took wing and soared above the frenzy. The formerly rusty, scratchy cries changed to beautifully pure chimes as the berry juices coated their throats and changed the tenor and quality of their voices. And soon, as each of the gulls ate and launched upward, their whistles wetted, there was nothing but the most sublime music in the field, and Tempest finally understood why they were called ding gulls. She had never heard anything so divine as the song of those ugly birds, which were all happy now and swooping playfully above the field, aggression slaked with their appetites. There must’ve been some euphoric agent in the berries as well.

  Tempest checked on her companions. Their buckets were empty and their arms all ran with streaks of blood and globby brown berry juice, but they were alive, unlike Robin and Kruso.

  And unlike Brawny Billy.

  At some point during the feeding, he had died of his wounds.

  Tempest felt something then that she’d never felt before—a wash of guilt and shame and regret. This kind, foine boy who did nothing but exactly what he was asked, who had leapt before her to cut her path without expecting a word of thanks—a word she’d never given—w
as now dead. And for no good reason. And she could’ve stopped it, could’ve healed him, if only she hadn’t been so selfish. She put the bucket down and looked, really looked, at the blood welling around the two arrow shafts stuck in Billy’s torso.

  Usually, blood made her hungry, made the willowmaw deep in her soul crave flesh.

  Now she just felt empty.

  “They killed him,” Tempest said, but even as the words left her mouth, she knew they weren’t true.

  She had killed him.

  By doing nothing.

  Tempest’s mouth was dry, her eyes wet, her hands stained red. “We need to get more berries, don’t we?” she asked aloud.

  “Aye, I think we must,” Qobayne answered. “Might be a good idea to do it fast. If they get hungry again, we’ll have some defense. And they might let us harvest while they’re happy.”

  “Then let’s be about it.”

  They hurriedly sawed and hacked at the bushes to refill their buckets, all while the ding gulls spiraled above them and filled the air with melodious chimes. Tears coursed down Tempest’s cheeks as she realized they were creatures not unlike dryads—by turns terrible to behold and wondrous to witness in the wild. There was a balance to their lives, a darkness and a light that could not be denied, for Tempest had never heard anything so magical in all her days, and it was a more fitting tribute to Brawny Billy than anything she could have said.

  When they had filled their buckets and the ding gulls were still happy and airborne, they tried every way they could to move Brawny Billy, but the lad was just too heavy; they couldn’t carry him and the ding-gull berries too.

  But Tempest wouldn’t accept that. The thought of simply leaving him there was intolerable to her. “He’s coming back with us for a proper burial. That is all.” She handed her bucket of berries to Qobayne and gritted her teeth as her arms lengthened and grew rough bark. Her crewmates scampered ahead as she took her half-tree form and carried Brawny Billy’s body over her newly broad shoulder. On the way, they took the path that Billy had hewn with his knife. With every step, Tempest’s heart felt heavier and more wooden.