by JA Andrews
He rubbed his thumb over the frayed edge of the cloth his mother had wrapped around his blistered hands, his mind spinning.
Magic. He’d done magic. He’d somehow sucked life out of the grass and used it to shut the gate.
The idea hung in the silent cottage both alien and obvious. Part of him was still shocked, but if he was honest, he knew something magical had been happening for months and months. Not with searing, hand-burning pain, but with mumbled, nudging hints. That empty, endless hollowness he’d felt when he shook hands with the butcher at his wife’s funeral. Or the day they cheered as Ilsa took her first, wobbling steps—when Will’s mother had grasped his shoulder, he thought his heart might burst into a million pieces.
But he couldn’t really be a Keeper, could he?
He’d closed a gate from across the yard, and everyone knew the sign of new Keeper magic was burned hands. He stretched his fingers until shots of pain lanced across his palms. If he’d done magic, would the Keepers have to take him? His heart quickened. He’d get to go to the hidden Stronghold. He’d see the queen in her palace. He’d never have to weed the garden or milk Tussy. He’d be rich. He could buy his father a mule, and Ilsa a real doll instead of that ugly rag she carried everywhere.
Will pulled the thin blanket up to his chin, trying not to get too excited. He wasn’t the sort of boy who became a Keeper. He was the sort of boy who could never get the goat pen to stay closed.
A foreign terror crashed into him, stronger and darker than anything he’d ever felt and he shrank down into his bed. He strained to hear any sound, but his father’s snoring continued, low and steady, and nothing else stirred in the cottage.
He squeezed his eyes shut. Please don’t let me feel their dreams.
The sensation swelled until he couldn’t stay still any longer. He rolled out of bed and tiptoed toward the curtain. The sensation grew stronger. His breath grew shallow and his heart thrummed in his ears as though he stood atop a cliff—or was being chased by something monstrous.
Will pulled the curtain back, desperate to wake them from such a nightmare.
Bright moonlight poured in the window, landing on the bed where his parents lay sleeping. Ilsa and her rag doll curled between them and the wall in a tangle of dark curls. All three were still.
But in the window above them perched a man with a black pointed beard.
Vahe.
Will froze, his hand clutching the curtain. Vahe’s gaze snapped up, and Will’s gut clenched, whether from his own fear or the wayfarer’s, it was impossible to tell. A silver knife appeared in the man’s hand, glinting in the moonlight. Slowly, the man raised a finger to his lips.
Will’s breath caught in his throat. He needed to yell, scream, something. But his body refused to move.
Vahe shifted his grip on the knife until it pointed down at Will’s father’s chest.
“Come with me, boy,” he whispered, the words barely more than a rustle of wind.
The muscles of Vahe’s arm rippled as he shifted the knife over the thin form of Will’s parents. Even if Will woke them, they were no match for this man.
A fierce anger stirred in his gut, an anger all his own at this man for threatening them, for daring to come into their house. For being stronger than his parents.
Will stepped forward and let the curtain fall behind him. He flexed his hands slightly. It had worked on the gate. He just needed to push Vahe out the window. Then he could lock the shutters and yell until the neighbors woke.
The desire to push the wayfarer grew stronger and stronger until it filled him, shoving out Vahe’s storm of emotions. Every bit of Will wanted that wicked face, that silver knife, and that dreadful excitement out of his home. And out of himself. Will lifted one hand and pointed it toward the wayfarer. Pain shot across his palm as he focused all his fury at the man.
Vahe’s eyes widened and he grabbed at the window, bracing himself. “Come,” he ordered between clenched teeth. “No one needs to get hurt.”
Will pushed harder until his palm burned and the wayfarer threw all his weight against the force of it. Vahe’s black hair and beard blended into the night. Will could see only pale cheeks and glittering eyes.
A stray thought wandered across Will’s mind, a memory of the withered grass this afternoon. Was the garden outside withering now, fueling whatever he was doing?
He didn’t care.
Slowly, a finger’s breadth at a time, Vahe slipped backwards.
A small gasp yanked Will’s attention down. His mother lay on the bed in front of him, white as moonlight, gasping for breath, her fingers scrabbling against Will’s other hand where he clutched her arm. Will snatched his hand back, and the fire racing through him stopped. His fury turned to horror.
It wasn’t from the garden. He’d been pulling all that power out of her body.
Everything moved at once.
His mother took a deep, shuddering breath.
His father stirred.
Released from Will’s fury, the wayfarer toppled forward, falling into the room, the knife slamming into Will’s father’s chest. His mother screamed and Ilsa woke, adding her small cries to the chaos. Terror and fury filled Will and he didn’t know if it was his or theirs. Pain and panic and desire rushed in, threatening to tear him apart.
Vahe looked up from the knife, his face shocked. He reached toward Will again. “Come here, boy!” he hissed.
Will backed away from Vahe’s anger, his mother’s terror, and his father’s too-still form.
A shout and pounding on the cottage door behind Will made the wayfarer’s anger flare hotter. Vahe’s eyes bored into Will, his fury thrumming in Will’s chest.
Will’s mother screamed for help. Vahe hurled a last glare at Will, then snatched up Ilsa. She cried, reaching out toward her mother, her dark curls pressed against Vahe’s neck.
“Stop,” Will pleaded, taking a step closer.
The door to the cottage splintered and flew open. Neighbors rushed into the small cottage, bringing in a frenzy of emotion.
The wayfarer yanked his bloody knife from Will’s father’s chest with a snarl. Still clutching Ilsa, Vahe plunged out the window, his anger tearing out of Will, leaving him hollow of everything but his mother’s screams.
Chapter One
Will rode up the interminable slope at a trudging pace, running his fingers through his beard and wondering for the thousandth time why everything on the Sweep was so deceptive. The ceaseless grassland made it impossible to tell distances, and every rise turned out to be twice as long as it looked. On top of that, the seaside road had become mostly sand, and with each step his horse’s hooves sank in and backwards, making the climb feel like a continual progression of small defeats.
Endless, faded, tiresome grass rolled down from the far reaches of the northern Sweep to dwindle here, choked out by the sandy beach. In Queensland, or any other wholesome place, the world would be bursting with the greenness and flowers and warmth of spring. But here the grass left over from last year was brown and brittle, the sea was grey, even the sky was barely blue. The emptiness of the Sweep slithered inside him, deepening its roots, tinging everything with hopelessness.
Over the top of the hill, the tip of a jagged peak appeared, and an ache of homesickness squeezed his chest. It was long past time to go home. He’d accomplished nothing here. For his foreignness, he’d been ignored or scorned everywhere he’d gone. All he had to show for the past year were a lingering loneliness and two books crammed full of overheard Roven stories. Granted the books he’d written held more information about the Roven Sweep than the entire Keeper’s library, but even that might not cancel out his failure to find the things he’d actually been looking for.
When he finally crested the hill, the Scale Mountains spread out along the horizon like the barren, rocky spine of some ancient monster, guarding the eastern edge of the Sweep. From here the road would take him past the southern tip of the mountains in a day and he’d be in Gulfind. A respect
able land with something besides grass. He’d see bushes and trees. He’d be within two easy days of Queensland where he’d have no reason to hide. If people found out he was a Keeper, they’d treat him like an honored guest, instead of calling for his execution.
Something moved in the distance on the road ahead and a mild curiosity stirred his listlessness. He hadn’t seen another traveler all day. The Roven clans had already headed north to graze their herds on the well-watered plains near the Hoarfrost Mountains, and there was nothing but grass left here on the southern edge of the Sweep.
A flicker of color caught his eye, and his hand tightened on the reins.
A gaudy wagon with tall sides and a rounded roof stuttered its way over the next long hill. Its garish paint and gleefully clashing ribbons fluttered against the backdrop of the mountains before cresting the hill and disappearing.
A wayfarer’s wagon.
A surge of fury and hope blazed up in him. He spurred Shadow forward.
It had been months since he’d found one. The wayfarers were impossible to track. They wandered aimlessly in isolated wagons, spread out across the known world, peddling magical trinkets and cheap performances. Even the Keepers didn’t know whether the solitary groups were connected with each other, or whether they hailed from any particular country. The only thing Will had learned in the twenty years since his sister had been taken was that anything he learned from one set of wayfarers was always contradicted by the next.
Will blew out a long breath and relaxed his hands on the reins.
It wouldn’t be the wagon. It was never the wagon. In twenty years he’d found almost two dozen of them, but none of them carried Vahe. None of them even admitted to knowing the man.
Still, Will urged Shadow a little faster down the far side of the hill.
Far to the north, a speck winged through the sky before diving down to disappear into the grass. In the space of a few heartbeats it climbed into the air again and flew closer, growing into the shape of an undersized hawk, thin leather jesses dangling from its legs. Talen flapped down, settling on the blue bedroll tucked against Will’s saddle horn. The hawk dropped a dead mouse onto the blanket and fixed Will with unblinking eyes.
“That is just as disgusting as the others.” Will leaned back from the gift. “You are the worst payment I’ve ever received. It would almost be worth backtracking a day and losing sight of the wayfarers just to give you back.”
Will couldn’t flick the thing into the grass until Talen flew away or the bird would think they were playing some grotesque game of fetch and bring it back.
He’d fully expected the sad excuse for payment to have flown off at the first opportunity. But it had been a full day since a herdsman had offered the miniature hawk as payment for scribe work, and he was still here. He’d wing away to hunt, out of sight across the grass, and just when Will thought he’d left forever, the hawk would come back, dangling a dead mouse in his beak.
“Would you like to come with me to Queensland?” Will considered the hawk who merely stared back. “I can see you don’t plan on talking back to me. Shadow never does either, and he’s been with me for several weeks now.” Will patted the mottled neck of the pinto. “But until we reach a place where people will talk to me, you two are all I have.
“Can you do anything useful?” He reached out a finger slowly toward the bird. Talen twitched his gaze to Will’s hand, but didn’t move. Will ran the back of his finger lightly down the bird’s chest, brushing over white feathers speckled with veins of brown. “If I drew you a picture of the man I’m looking for, could you fly up to that wagon and give me some sort of signal if you see him? Because he’s someone I’ve been hunting for much longer than a year. And as soon as I’ve confirmed he’s not there, I’m going home.” Talen’s back and head were darker with ripples of black and auburn. The feathers were so soft they felt almost liquid.
Talon fixed Will with a round, golden eye.
“I’ll take your lack of response as a no.
“While you were off hunting mice, I realized I know four different stories where an animal allowed itself to be linked to its master, giving them unique powers. Two of those stories were about Keepers.”
Will cast out toward the bird. He found the bright bundle of vitalle wound up in its body, strands of energy humming with the potential to burst into flight or dive after yet another mouse. The bird’s vitalle sat compacted above the broader, slower energy of the horse. Beyond them both, the grass spread out in countless pinpoints of energy, until it ended at the sea.
“Of course, they were a different sort of Keeper than me. Both of them were adept at magic. If you and I are going to communicate, we’ll need to keep it more…simple.”
Will focused on Talen. “There is one thing I can do, though.” Dispend, Keeper Gerone would say, Reach out. But Gerone had never quite understood Will’s unusual talent. It wasn’t really the casting out that all Keepers could do to locate energy, this was more of an unlocking or an opening.
Something in his chest loosened, and a nebulous feeling of expectation, or waiting, poured in from the little bird. Not a fully formed emotion, just a…prodding sort of sensation. That was always the way with animals, broad sensations and hungers. They were recognizable. Loyalty, hunger, satisfaction. But only a single emotion at a time. None of the chaotic tangles of emotions that humans had.
“There are no records of Keepers feeling others’ emotions.” He stroked Talen’s head. A warm, contented feeling surfaced on the left side of Will’s chest from the bird, in contrast to his own worn-in frustration with himself, which sat more centered and more comfortably inside him. “But it’s not a terribly useful substitute for being proficient at magic. Knowing someone wants something isn’t the same as knowing what they want.”
Thundering hoofbeats sounded ahead of him and two red-haired Roven rangers crested the hill, bearing down on him at a gallop. He had time to wrap one arm protectively around Talen and grab hold of his jesses to keep the small hawk from flying into one of the Roven before they raced past on either side him. Two distinct sensations of scorn blossomed in his chest.
“Off the road, fetter bait,” one barked in the harsh Roven accent.
The other ranger kicked out his foot, catching Will’s saddle bag, sending it bouncing and clanging, causing Shadow to prance to the side. “Move, fett!”
The Roven tore away down the road, their emotions fading from his chest, leaving only Talen’s fear, Shadow’s startled wariness, and Will’s own irritation.
“I hate this country.” Will spoke softly and ran his finger down the back of Talen’s head. “You know one of the main problems with the Roven? They think people are fetter bait.” When the hawk quieted, Will loosened his grip on Talen’s jesses. “Setting aside the fact that you’re sort of fettered, I think we can both agree that humans shouldn’t be.”
Will glanced over his shoulder. The two Roven were heading the wrong way. All the clans that way had gone north for the summer already. With the bird calm, Will closed himself off and the birds emotions faded from his chest.
They were almost to the top of the rise when Talon let out a piercing screech. Like a needle to the ear. The bird tilted its head and pinned Will with a hard stare.
“A signal like that is exactly what I’m talking about. Although maybe we could pick a more pleasant sound. You could use it to warn me before I’m charged by rangers—”
A jangle of far-off music caught his attention just as the smell of roasting fish tumbled through the air. Will reached the top of the hill and stopped. A wide, low plain stretched ahead of him all the way to the feet of the Scales. Nestled against the ocean sat the small city of Porreen, the winter home of the Morrow Clan.
And around the wall, tents and people crowded together, proclaiming that here, at the very eastern edge of the Sweep, the spring festival was still going on.
“—or ambushed by festivals.”
Talen gave another screech.
; “Don’t try to take credit for warning me.” Will nudged Shadow down the hill. “A screech is not a warning.”
Like all Roven cities, Porreen consisted of a roundish jumble of lumpy buildings that looked like cattle corralled by a thick earthen wall. With no trees on the Sweep for wood, everything was made exclusively of cob, a mixture of earth and dried grass, shaped by hand without any attempt to make straight walls or sharp angles. The city sat close enough to the sea that the lumpy cob buildings looked like a city built by children on the beach.
The wayfarer’s wagon moved along the edge of the festival, heading out of sight around the city wall. Crowds of red-headed, red-bearded, blue-eyed Roven mingled around the tents. Any head that wasn’t red was either a foreign merchant braving the unfriendliness of the Sweep, or a foreign slave in a grey tunic.
With a screech that sounded disapproving, Talen launched off the bedroll and soared away over the empty grassland. Will couldn’t blame him. The Roven would probably capture the hawk and cage him. It’s what they did to foreign things.
Will scratched at his black beard. It hadn’t helped, really, to grow the beard. Every man on the Sweep had one and so he’d let his grow to blend in. But theirs were all hues of red, from bright orangey-flame to dark coppery russet. Will’s was black. Not a tint of red to be seen. Between that, the rest of his black hair, and his dark brown eyes, his head felt like a signal fire made of shadows, heralding his foreignness. The Morrow Clan’s spring festival was bound to be like the others, a mad scramble to buy supplies before the clan moved north for the summer. The hostile stares he was about to encounter dragged at him. He could almost hear muttered “fett” and “fetter bait” already.
The Scale Mountains were so close, and the idea of leaving the Sweep rushed over him like a fresh breeze. He’d glance at the wayfarers, then go. He could be half-way to the mountains by dark. Will flicked the dead mouse off his blanket.