The Story Hunter

by Lindsay A. Franklin

  And then we were on the move again.

  “I wish I could sense the strands,” I said quietly to Mor. “To take some of the burden off Karlith.” The humming in my spirit was faint until we were nearly on top of a strand—not very useful to guide us. “They’re supposed to be storyteller strands. Shouldn’t we be able to feel them?”

  “I can.”

  I swiveled to face him. “You can?”

  “Aye.” He shrugged. “Karlith perceives them much more strongly than I do, so she’s leading the way. Zel can’t feel them at all.”

  “But why? How does a colormaster feel these strands stronger than three storytellers?”

  “Dylun says Karlith is connected to them—not because of the weavers who made them but because of the Source of their power.”

  “And the weavers on the other teams? Don’t tell me they’re all worshipers of the Creator like Karlith.”

  Mor flashed a half smile. “Not likely. But they’re older. More experienced storytellers. They had years to hone their craft before Gareth came into power and the suppression began. It’s only because my parents were free to raise me as they wished at sea that my craft developed as it did. You’ve only had a few moons to truly begin to discover your gift. Dylun thinks that’s why I’m more aware of the ancient strands than you are.”

  “So in another five or ten years, maybe I’ll be useful?”

  The half smile grew. “Maybe.” Then his expression dimmed. “Zel was taught to fear his gift. That fear still grips him, and I don’t know that he’ll ever break free of it.” His gaze caught on his best friend leading at the front of the group with a strand of light. “I’m going to go help him.”

  I watched him speed his pace, leaving me behind. Then I fell into step with Father at the rear of the pack. Dray was on Father’s other side, Warmil and Karlith just ahead of us.

  Father’s voice, colder than usual, startled me. “What exactly is your objective, Dray?”

  “Objective?” Dray asked, as though the concept were foreign. “Whatever do you mean?”

  “Enough.” Father’s tone was sharp. “Don’t trifle with me. Why are you here with us? What’s in it for you?”

  “You’re asking this now?”

  “It served our purposes well enough to have you here, and it still does. But as we draw closer to your . . . Master, I want to know the truth. Why are you really here?”

  “I have my reasons.” Dray faced my father. “It was not part of the agreement that I share them with you.”

  In a moment, Father’s sword was drawn and pointed at Dray’s chest. “Nor was keeping you alive any longer than I wished.”

  Dray stayed very still—wisely. But his gaze traveled down to the blade, a hairsbreadth from his heart, and he smiled. “I see where your daughter gets her vicious streak.”

  The tip of the sword touched the fabric of Dray’s shirt.

  Dray held his hands up. “I have already told you the truth. I’m here for Braith.”

  “General,” Karlith said gently. “No more violence just now. Please.”

  Father didn’t make any indication he’d heard at first. But after a hesitation, he pulled his sword back and sheathed it.

  Dray drew a full breath. “Stars. You people are the most unpleasant traveling company.” He folded his arms and smirked, bolder now that Father’s sword was stowed. “You know, Queen Braith believed in redemption. I’m surprised you don’t.”

  Father glared. “Can a mountainbeast turn into a hedge-nibbler?”

  He spat the words like arrows, and I flinched. His anger frightened me. I didn’t like to see him so bitter. Even if I agreed with him, there was something comforting in imagining my father to be above such unpleasant, unpredictable emotions—something comforting in imagining he would never do anything rash or unwise because of passion.

  Turned out Yestin Bo-Arthio was human.

  “Hearts can change,” Karlith said. “People can change.”

  “Can, yes.” Father continued to regard Dray. “It doesn’t mean they have.”

  Karlith sighed. “That’s true enough.”

  “Look,” Dray said, his voice serious and not filled with mockery for once. “Braith believed in me. She thought I could change—that I had changed. Did it ever occur to you that perhaps I want to prove her right? The only way to do that is to save her. And you’ll have to take my word on that.”

  He didn’t wait for a reply. He hurried ahead and joined Mor and the others at the front of the pack.

  I lowered my voice so only Father would hear. “He might be telling the truth.”

  Father grunted.

  “It’s . . . possible,” I said slowly. “His argument makes sense, anyway.”

  “Careful, Tannie,” Father warned. “His argument might make sense, but it doesn’t mean it’s true. He is a politician, after all.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  TANWEN

  We camped out in an alcove a bit too small for our entire crew that night. I slept with Father’s arm draped over me, my face in Karlith’s back, and someone’s elbow pressing against my calf. I woke to thoughts of Diggy and where she might have slept. Same as I’d wondered every night since her disappearance.

  “Is it morning?” I asked the others rousing around me.

  “Could be,” Dylun remarked. “It’s impossible to tell in here, but we have slept a night’s worth. Or as close to it as we’ll get.”

  I rubbed the sore spot on my calf where the elbow—Mor’s, I now realized—had been pressing all night. He pulled himself to a sitting position, wincing as he rolled his injured shoulder.

  Then he massaged his elbow. “Ouch.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry.” I rubbed my calf harder and scowled at him. “Did my leg flesh hurt your arm bone?”

  He grinned. “Sorry.”

  Zel had managed to create a pocket of flame—just enough to heat some water for tea. We sipped brisk-leaf and nibbled on provisions from our packs.

  Not the most delicious breakfast, to be sure. But I’d heaved enough roasted fish over the side of the Cethorelle to know it wasn’t the worst either.

  “We’re close.” Karlith finished off the last of her tea. “If we weren’t so spent last night, I would have suggested we press on. But I don’t suppose we would’ve had the strength to pull up the strand.” She stretched. “Everything looks better after a good night’s sleep.” She glanced warmly at Mor, and he didn’t shy away from it.

  That was an improvement over the days before.

  I searched in my pack a moment and pulled out my brisk-leaf paste and tooth-cleaning cloth.

  Aeron grinned at me. “Wonder why you’re worried about your breath.”

  I tried to glare at her. “Because I wasn’t raised in a barn.” I paused. “Actually, that’s not true.”

  I had spent a solid six moons living in Farmer Bradwir’s barn while fixing up my family’s cottage once.

  She didn’t poke at me further, but her knowing grin seemed to light up the cave.

  After my teeth were fresh and everyone had stretched, we plodded onward. I soon learned that, to Karlith, close was a relative term.

  “I feel like we’ve been walking for hours,” I grumbled to Mor. I wiggled my fingers to get some blood back into them, and the light strand pouring from my hand wavered a bit.

  “It’s barely been an hour, if I judge right.” He raised an eyebrow at me. “You’re just bored.”

  I fought the urge to pout. He wasn’t wrong. Our first few days in the caverns had been quite eventful—and much of it I could have done without. But in some ways, it beat stumbling through the semidarkness, searching for an ancient strand only Karlith could sense at a distance, unknown danger lurking around every bend.

  “I just want to feel like we’re doing something.” I passed my hands over each other and switched the strand to my other palm. “Like we’re making progress.”

  “We are.” He reached for my free hand, now closest to him. “Even wh
en it doesn’t feel like it.”

  I brushed my fingers over the silkiness of his grazer-hide gloves. “No rainbows?”

  “Not today.”

  I smiled inside. He seemed a bit like his old self finally—not pinched, sad, grieving Mor. He must feel more hopeful about finding Diggy.

  “Stop,” Karlith said suddenly.

  I turned, expecting to be greeted by her wide smile and sleepy eyes. Surely we were there, at last.

  Instead, her face was sharp with fear. She pointed to a small passageway. “Down there. Someone is already trying to pull it up.”

  Blast. Not again.

  Already one of the eleven strands was in the hands of a different team. One that we knew of. How many others had been found already? Did the Master already possess the three she sought?

  I tried to still the tumbling of my wild thoughts.

  Right now, we had to rescue this strand.

  Creator help us.

  “I’ll go ahead,” Father began, but it was too late.

  Mor was already marching toward the tunnel.

  My spirits sank—crashed, really. He wasn’t better today. He was more desperate. Reckless. Wild and unpredictable.

  I saw a spark of Diggy in him, and I wished I could will it out of them both.

  “Mor!” I hissed, but he didn’t turn around.

  So I hurried after him.

  “This is your job,” a man’s voice said up ahead. “This is what we pay you for, so get to it.”

  “Aye, that’s right,” a woman’s voice answered. “Me and the girl are the only ones among us who can see to it, and she’s far from capable yet. So I suggest you back away and give me room. Now.”

  The voice of the unseen woman caused me to freeze so abruptly, Aeron slammed into me. “Tannie?” she whispered. “What is it?”

  Words wouldn’t come together. My mouth didn’t work.

  Because that voice was deeply familiar in the most unpleasant way.

  I didn’t answer Aeron, but I forced my legs to work and sprinted to catch up with Mor just as he entered the cavern where the other party had stopped. Six heads turned toward us, illuminated by the flickering light of torches—four men, an older woman, and a wide-eyed lass of perhaps fourteen.

  “Hey!” one of the men shouted.

  The older woman shot a strand at us—poison-green satin, aimed straight for our heads.

  But I responded easily, imagining a glittering strand of clearest glass. My strand and hers collided in midair. My glassy strand swallowed hers, and the whole mess popped into a crystallized sculpture—a bottle of poison with green smoke wafting from the top. The crystal hung suspended in the air for a moment, then plummeted to the ground and shattered against the stone.

  It had been instinct. I understood exactly what to create, just how to respond, because I knew the green strand so well.

  She had taught me how to make it, after all.

  She leaned forward, squinting, her wiry gray hair fraying from its bun, just like it always did. “Tanwen?”

  “Ho, Riwor.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  TANWEN

  I blinked at my former mentor. “How . . . how are you?” The awkward words felt strange and thick in my mouth.

  Mor swiveled around to stare at me incredulously. Then recognition ignited in his eyes—he knew Riwor now. Of course he did. He had followed us around for a while before he and I met officially. When the Corsyth weavers had heard about a story peddler traveling around the peninsula, slowly losing control, they sent out a team to keep an eye on me.

  A team made up of Mor, Zel, and Gryfelle.

  I pushed back the grief that wanted to press in on me at that remembrance. Not now. Not while Riwor was inching closer to me, an unreadable expression in her eyes.

  She peered at me. “Is it really you, Tanwen?”

  “Aye. I guess you thought I was dead.” It came out a little harsher than I intended.

  But it seemed a statement of fact—she’d left me with the guard on my tail. She must have known they would catch up to me eventually and I would be arrested. And then Gareth would—what? Show mercy? Overlook so-called treason out of the goodness of his heart?

  The simple fact was she had left me for dead.

  I glanced over at the young lass with blonde hair and wide eyes. Riwor had left me for dead and found a new apprentice.

  “Oh, no,” Riwor said, “I knew you had survived.” Her expression changed, but still I couldn’t read it. “Do you not know?” She nodded to the rest of our crew. “You lot are famous.”

  And then I placed that expression on her face. Her mouth was twisted and her face pinched, but the old, familiar spark flared in her eyes—the one I saw often when we were practicing or she was teaching me something new, and I tried so hard to perform it perfectly for her. The same look she got when my stories netted sums twice the amount hers did. When people praised my crystallized sculptures and commented on the clarity and sparkle.

  Envy.

  I was worldly enough now—less naïve and wiser to the ways of folks—to recognize it. Riwor had been jealous before, and she was jealous now because we were supposedly famous.

  As if she had any idea what we had been through and all we had lost. Famous, infamous—whatever she wanted to call it—we hadn’t sought it, and we’d paid dearly for it.

  “That must have been terrible for you,” I said aloud as my mind churned over this new idea about Riwor.

  “Eh? What must have been terrible?”

  “To so badly want the money I was earning for us while being filled with bitterness at my ability to earn it.”

  Her face flushed, then turned purple. “Insolent—”

  “I don’t mean any offense.” And truly, I didn’t. “It’s just that must have been quite a war inside you.” Greed and vanity. “No wonder you beat me so often.”

  True to form, true to the Tannie she knew and the Tannie I would probably always be, I realized a moment late I had spoken too quickly and freely.

  Riwor stepped toward me.

  Mor moved to my side, and I felt the presence of several others at my back.

  Riwor’s eyes flitted upward, and she looked ready to spit as she stared at someone over my head. “Ah yes. The long-lost father, I presume?”

  “Tanwen,” he said, his voice controlled and quiet behind me. “Who is this person?”

  “My story-peddling mentor. She taught me how to tell the crowned stories and perform them for people.”

  Warmil’s hand settled on the hilt of his sword. “She’s the reason you were cursed.”

  I hadn’t really thought of it like that before. Was it true?

  No, I decided. Even if I had never met Riwor, I would have searched out the accepted way to peddle stories on my own. I had wanted to work my way to Urian and become Royal Storyteller. I would have figured out how to do that, with or without Riwor. My ambition would have brought the curse upon me, no matter who helped me along the way.

  But a new thought sparked in me.

  “Why didn’t you get the curse?” I asked Riwor curiously. “You were so strict about the crowned stories. Surely you had to suppress your gift a lot, and for many years.”

  “Unless she doesn’t have much creativity to suppress.” Mor’s voice was hard as stone, and I knew he wasn’t likely to forgive Riwor for smacking me around the way she had.

  Riwor remained silent, glaring at us.

  “No.” I studied her face and spoke slowly, trying to remember exactly what it had been like in those days that felt so long past. “She could create beautiful strands and tell lovely stories when she wanted to.”

  And then it hit me. As if the whole cave had crashed in on my head.

  “You created in secret, didn’t you? You made sure to allow your gift to breathe so you wouldn’t get sick, but . . . you forbade me to do the same.” Tears pricked my eyes. I shouldn’t have expected anything else from her. I shouldn’t have thought better of her.
>
  Still, it hurt.

  “Why? Why would you let me . . .” I shook my head to clear it. I looked at the blonde lass again and back at Riwor. “What was your plan? To use me as long as possible, and when I became ill, you’d find someone new? Someone else to earn a living for you?”

  Her face tightened, and I could see yet another layer to her complicated feelings—shame flickered in her defiant eyes.

  “I don’t have to explain myself to you.” She turned to her team. “If you want me to pull up that strand, you better get rid of this lot. They’re all weavers, and they’ll have the strand up and out of here before you can blink.”

  Well, that did it. Swords reflected light all around the cavern, and Dylun already held an orb of fire.

  “Don’t—” But before I could finish my thought, one of Riwor’s partners charged my father.

  Father disarmed the foolish attacker and pressed a blade to his throat in a flash. But Riwor was already creating more strands of green poison, and the rest of her team hadn’t lowered their weapons.

  The room exploded into chaos—streams of fire, ribbons of smoldering green fumes, and the clash of metal on metal as our fighters crossed blades with theirs.

  “Wait, stop!” I shouted.

  Mor cast another incredulous glance my way. And I didn’t really know how to explain myself, except I didn’t want any more violence. My soul sagged beneath the weight of fighting and bloodshed and strife.

  Couldn’t we talk things through with Riwor and her crew? Come to some agreement?

  “Fight, foolish girl!” Riwor’s growl carried above the cacophony in the cavern, and for a moment, I thought she was yelling at me.

  She had shouted commands at me so often before, it felt as natural as storm clouds that she’d be shouting them now.

  But she was looking at the blonde lass.

  “Dithwyr!” Riwor yelled. “Do something, you lazy, useless lump!”

  Dithwyr’s eyes grew wider by the second as she stumbled backward, away from the fighting. Warmil blocked a sword strike inches from Dithwyr’s head. She flinched, then gasped and ducked, cowering near the floor.