by JA Andrews
He wanted to take a step forward, but his legs wouldn’t cooperate. His entire body thrummed with a sort of terror. He was desperate for her to look at him, but terrified that she would.
Killien stepped between them to the front of the balcony. Will pulled his gaze away from the slave woman. The world spun and Will put his hand on the railing to steady himself. Killien raised his hand for silence, and within moments the square obeyed.
“Tomorrow the main caravan will leave at dawn,” Killien announced. “By nightfall we’ll be out of view of Porreen and surrounded by the grasses.”
The audience broke out into a loud cheer.
“What about the frost goblins?” A voice called out and the cheers died off.
“We don’t know if the stories are true or not,” Killien answered. “But it is time to move north. The hay is gone, the herds need the grasses.” He paused. “And we need the grasses around us again. The dusting grass has come and the green of the Sweep is waking up. These city walls are starting to feel like a cage.”
They roared in approval.
Will risked a glance toward the slave, but Killien’s wife blocked his view.
“We have heatstones,” Killien continued. Lukas stepped forward, his limp barely noticeable and handed Killien one of the swirling stones. “If there are frost goblins, we will fight them off as our ancestors did, with these burning stones and our swords.” There were rumblings of agreement. “But let us hope the tales of goblins prove only to be rumors.
“Speaking of tales, tonight I bring you something different. A storyman from Gulfind has found our clan.”
The response to this was more curious chatter than applause. Will bowed toward the crowd. The urge to look at the woman who might be Ilsa was almost overpowering, but he could feel every eye in the square fixed on him.
“Will knows stories from many lands,” Killien said. “Tonight he’s offered to tell us a tale from Queensland. I know it’s easy to think of Queensland as the enemy, as the people who hundreds of years ago took the good land, with rich soil and mild seasons, and left us to the harsher world of the Sweep.”
The words cut through the turmoil in Will’s mind and caught his attention. Stern faces nodded in the crowd. The Roven thought they’d been forced out of the Queensland? He’d never heard that. Although it would explain the animosity.
“But it is always important to remember,” Killien said, “that those we consider enemies are more like us than we think. They have homes and families and worries.”
Will held his face neutral as he listened. That was the most humanizing thing he’d heard said about Queensland since he’d come to the Sweep. Was this man actually Roven?
“We must remember our enemies are human,” Killien continued, “if we ever hope to defeat them.”
Yes. He was Roven.
Thousands of eyes were fixed on the porch. A cool breeze brushed past Will and he breathed it in, gathering the chaos of thoughts and emotions swirling inside him, and breathing them out. The need to follow Borto blew away. That might not be Ilsa, but everything about her was right. The idea of being left in Porreen tomorrow while the clan and this woman went north made his stomach drop.
He threw away all his ideas of how to make his story weaker. What he needed tonight was the best telling of Tomkin and the Dragon that anyone had ever heard. Something so good that Killien couldn’t bear to let Will leave.
He resisted the urge to look back, and focused on the tale. It had been a long time since he’d told it. He pulled the beginning of Tomkin to his mind gingerly, hoping it was still intact. This was the right story to tell. Everyone loved Tomkin.
Would the Roven? A little dagger of ice shot into his stomach. How could they not?
“Much can be learned about a people from their stories.” Killien’s voice rolled over the whole square. “Tonight, he has agreed to tell us one of Queensland’s most beloved tales. A story about a young man and a dragon.”
Killien turned and motioned Will to the front of the porch. Something scraped behind him and Will turned too quickly to pretend it hadn’t startled him.
Sora dragged a thin stool over. “Nervous?” she said softly enough that only he and Killien heard. “No one is stupid enough to tell stories from Queensland on the Sweep.”
Killien studied Sora for a moment, then turned to Will with an unreadable expression.
“Maybe they don’t know the good ones,” Will answered quietly, taking the stool. “Get comfortable, Sora. Even you might like this.”
Killien let out a little laugh and sat down next to a disapproving Lilit. Will caught a glimpse of the slave’s shoulder, but turned away. A distracted storyteller was poor entertainment.
Facing the crowd, he pushed everything but the story out of his head. Will did a poor job of many things, but telling stories wasn’t one of them. And though there was probably no way to get Sora to like him, by the end of the evening, the crowd would. And hopefully the Torch.
But the faces in the audience were unenthused. This was not a crowd ready for a story.
“I have spent all winter in the Roven cities along the sea.” Will stepped to the railing, speaking loud enough that the entire square could hear him, searching for common ground. “But now, when I look north, the land isn’t white with snow. I see hints of new green grass growing out of last year’s brown.”
A few heads nodded.
“Across the Scale Mountains, the seasons change gradually. The snows melt slowly, it takes from one full moon to the next for green to return to the land. But only days ago the grasses here were pale with snow. And then yesterday I saw a hint of green.”
The mood of the square rose. “And this afternoon, it wasn’t a hint.” Will paused. “It was…a flood of it.” At the edge of the square, movement caught his eye. Sitting on a porch railing with her skinny legs dangling down, sat Rass, beaming at him. Will bowed his head slightly in her direction. “And I was reminded that the Sweep is enormous and powerful. That everything is born there and everything goes there when it is too old to move.” Rass’s face split into an even wider grin. “There was a thrumming of life on the hills.”
Will let his eyes pass over the crowd, feeling their approval.
Hoping he remembered it right, he took a breath. “Life has returned!”
“We will return!” thundered the crowd in the traditional response, erupting into cheers.
When that faded, Will sat on the stool. “In Queensland, there are men called Keepers who protect stories of the past. I have heard one tell a tale in the hall of the Queen herself.” The crowd muttered and Will let the complicatedness of the response grow. “This is one of their favorite stories. It is an old tale, not a sweeping epic. Only a small story meant to entertain.” He could feel the crowd’s skepticism. He gave them a shrug. “Let’s see if it’s as entertaining as the people of Queensland seem to think.” When the spattering of laughter died, he looked down, not moving or speaking while he waited for the square to quiet.
Once it was still, he began.
“Along the southern border, a company of soldiers surged forward, like the waters of the Great River, battling a deadly foe and performing acts of heroism.
“At his desk, Tomkin Thornhewn sat still, like the waters of a small puddle, shuffling through a pile of paper and only dreaming of such renown.”
Thousands of eyes fixed on Will, and he opened himself up to them. The words continued on, building a scene, a question, a dragon. The power of the story drew out the minds of the listeners and unified them into something more.
But this wasn’t Queensland. The crowd felt too negative toward Tomkin. It had been a mistake to tell them this was a foreign tale, it separated them too much from it. Will shifted his descriptions of Tomkin slightly, less insecurity, more misplaced determinedness. Less fanciful daydreaming, more shock and indignation at his insultingly poor marriage arrangement. The moment when Tomkin picked duty and adventure over complacency, the crowd stopped fee
ling foreign. That was the point when they stopped comparing themselves to the story, stopped even being aware of themselves. They fell together into a single entity, amused, leery, fatalistic, or hopeful in turn as Tomkin dug himself deeper into trouble.
The wide, empty, open feeling of the Sweep receded. Will felt only the ruins as Tomkin explored the castle, saw only the orange-red scales of the dragon, imagined himself huddled bruised and cold in the rain.
Stars glittered in a black sky by the time the story drew to its close.
Almost reluctantly, Will spoke the final words, feeling the crowd before him settle into a satisfied pleasure. “I cannot say that Tomkin and the Dragon lived happily to the end of their days, because happiness is trickier than that. They had plenty of hard days, and plenty of sad days, but they did try to be kind to each other. And kindness takes you a long way on the path to happiness. So I think it is safe to say that Tomkin and the Dragon lived, on the balance, happy-ish to the end of their days.”
Shouts of approval accompanied the slapping of thighs, the Roven’s lower, more rumbling form of clapping. Will stood, set his hand on his chest and bowed his head to the crowd. Thrumming with the triumph and satisfaction filling the square.
“Thank the black queen!” Killien stepped up next to him and pounded him on the back. Will staggered a bit under the force. “That was the best story I’ve heard in years.”
Will bowed, darting a look toward Ilsa. The slave woman helped Lilit stand. With every movement and every expression, Will became more convinced this was his sister. He’d never imagined she could be this much like their mother.
“Killien!” Hal called out. “I like Will. Invite him north with us. We’d have stories for the entire, endless walk.”
Will pressed his fist to his chest, desperately hoping the story had been good enough. When he looked up, Killien’s eyebrows were raised.
“Would you like to come north with us, Will?” Killien held out his hand.
“He doesn’t want—” Sora began.
“I’d love to,” Will interrupted her. He grasped Killien’s wrist, feeling the Torch’s hand wrap around his own like a vise.
Sora’s eyes sharpened.
Killien’s other hand clamped down on Will’s shoulder and the Torch leaned in close to him, a wide smile spread across his face.
“Welcome to the Morrow Clan, Will.”
Chapter Eleven
A bite of cold morning air slid down Will’s neck, feeling more like the lingering end of winter than the beginning of summer. The sun had been over the Scales for an hour before the wagons had rolled out into the grasslands. He breathed in the cool, placid air, trying to calm the tangle of fury and hope and desperation that had kept him awake much of the night.
Ilsa was here.
He’d wanted to follow Lilit and Ilsa when they disappeared down a wide hallway in the Torch’s enormous house. But acting as though he was stalking Killien’s wife, even if he was actually trailing her slave, didn’t seem like the best way to ingratiate himself with the Torch.
In Will’s own room, he’d spent most of the night imagining what he would say to Ilsa, what she would think of his words. And him. The rest of the night had been spent wondering how exactly one went about rescuing a sister from the midst of a Roven clan. Beyond extricating her from the side of the Torch’s wife, sneaking past all of the Roven, and somehow escaping across flat, featureless grassland, how would he possibly convince her he was her brother? Every conversation he imagined left him sounding like a desperate lunatic.
If only he knew a story about a man, unskilled in any sort of fighting, who rescued a woman who didn’t trust him, from the midst of a traveling clan of Roven. Unfortunately, none of the Roven stories he knew were that interesting.
He’d been left to his own devices all morning and ended up riding near the front of the enormous caravan where he’d tried to stay within sight of Killien and the rangers who surrounded him. Several covered wagons stayed near the front and he watched for Lilit, but he couldn’t see her past the Roven that rode between them. More importantly, he couldn’t see Ilsa.
Behind him, the Morrow stretched in a long, ragged line that still rolled out of the city of Porreen. Ox-drawn wagons, horses laden down with burdens or pulling carts, herds of sheep and goats. The Roven walked with a sort of contentment. Children ran along the sides of the column, flurries of races or chases sending them skirting out onto the closest hills. Will opened up toward them, feeling a wild freedom.
The Roven were happy to be on the Sweep.
Will let his eyes run over the grass, spinning his ring and trying to match the pale green emptiness he saw with their happiness. But the Sweep was just faded grass and empty sky. The Scale Mountains to the east were dry and rocky, the sea falling behind them to the south was flat and smudgy blue.
Ahead wound the scar left by the Morrow’s last migration, stretching north as far as he could see, wide enough for twenty men to walk side-by-side. The serpent’s wake, they called it, as though the Serpent Queen herself had descended out of the night sky to lay them a path leading north to their summer homes. He didn’t like the imagery. Following a snake that large could lead to nothing good.
He entertained himself by thinking of every rescue story he knew. Out of the countless stories in his head, there must be something helpful to his situation. His favorite rescue story was Pelonia’s rescue of her cousins from the marauders. But Will didn’t have a sleeping draught to knock out the entire Roven clan. Or a freezing lake. And he doubted he would look fetching enough in a dress to distract his enemy at the crucial moment.
There was also the story of when Petar rescued Taramin from the bandits. But Will did not have Petar’s skill with a bow. He rubbed the inside of his forearm where the string had skidded off his skin the one time he’d shot one. That arrow had landed so far from the target, he’d never found it. No, it was safe to rule out any stories that depended on archery skills.
With a sea of Roven around him and Ilsa while they traveled north, escaping would be nearly impossible even if he had Petar himself here. It was best to focus on first steps: getting to know Ilsa and ingratiating himself to both Killien and Lilit.
Above him, a flicker of darkness in the clear sky caught his eye. With a dip of its wings, a hawk plummeted toward him and settled on Will’s bedroll, dangling a mouse from its beak.
“I can’t believe you found me.” Will pulled a piece of dried fish from his bag and Talen dropped the mouse to snatch it up. Will ran the back of his finger down the hawk’s impossibly soft chest, feeling Talen’s heart patter so quickly it almost vibrated. “And I can’t believe how happy I am to see someone familiar.” He leaned closer to the bird. “I saw her,” he whispered. “She’s here.”
Talen peered intensely at Will’s hand.
“That was the end of the fish.” Will spread out his palms.
Talen let out two quick screeches and took off into the sky.
“I’ll take that as a display of great excitement on your part.” Will flung the mouse into the grass.
A nearby ranger watched Talen leave with a derisive expression. He said something and the rangers around him laughed. They watched him for a few heartbeats, and Will tensed for something more, but they turned away with only a few mutters among themselves.
The absence of the little hawk made the air around him feel empty. The rangers continued to treat him with a cold distance, and the feeling of isolation spread slowly until it surrounded him.
“Do you see the grass?” Rass chirped near midday, running up alongside Will, her dirty face lit up with joy. “It’s growing so fast!” She grabbed his foot and tugged him to a stop. “Look look at this blade coming through the dirt. It’s brand new!”
Will climbed down out of the saddle and squatted to look at the tiny bit of grass. It was an unearthly green, almost glowing against the dark earth and the pale old grass around it.
“And there are ones just like it everywhere!
” Rass exclaimed, throwing her arms out.
Will cast out over the nearest hill, almost expecting to feel Rass’s enthusiasm echoed back in wild, growing energy from a million newborn blades of grass. But he felt nothing other than the bright energy of Rass herself. Because regardless of the girl’s enthusiasm, it was still just grass.
Dirt clung to Rass’s little grey shift, and he was appalled again at how poorly the Roven cared for slave children. What was the point of keeping them as slaves if they were going to starve before they were old enough to work? Her body was so gaunt she looked like her own happiness might break her.
An idea struck him. “Rass, do you know many of the slave women?”
She wrinkled her nose. “Do you want your own?”
“What?” The idea was repulsive he drew back. “No! I don’t—” She cocked her head to the side like a little bird and Will pressed his mouth shut against all the things he wanted to say about slavery. “I was just wondering if you knew many of the adult slaves in Porreen.”
“I don’t know any of them.” She turned toward the grass again. “So much new grass,” she murmured, taking a few steps into it.
“You’re welcome to ride with me.”
She glanced at the Roven near him. “Not until I’m stronger.”
Will bit back a laugh. “When will that be?”
She looked thoughtfully across the Sweep. “Soon, I think.”
Will offered the odd little slave girl a hard roll from his bag. “Well, if you need anything at all, come find me.”
She considered the roll for a moment, then took it and laughed. “You’re funny.” She gave Will a little wave and scampered away from the caravan, out onto the Sweep. Her skinny legs flashed as she ran, her head bobbed into the thick, old grass, then disappeared down the nearest gully.
Will mounted Shadow, feeling impotent to help her. The front of the caravan had moved on with Killien’s rangers, and the Roven here looked at him distastefully. He trotted Shadow back toward the front. When he drew alongside a handful of slaves, he paused, weighing the risk of asking them about Ilsa.