North! Or Be Eaten

by Andrew Peterson

  At last, a pure yellow light crept in through the windows near the ceiling. It diffused the orange-red glow of the furnace fires and torches, changing the heat-choked air of the factory. Dawn.

  A Maintenance Manager appeared and said, “Shift’s over, tool.”

  Janner, covered in sweat and soot, dropped the shears to the floor. He staggered past the machines to the dormitory stair, pushed through the double doors, past the crew of sleepy-eyed children on their way to their stations, and collapsed on his bunk without bothering to eat.

  He woke to the clanging of the bell beside his ear. It was the same boy with the same satisfied grin on his face. Janner ate two bowls of soup, carefully pulled his gloves over his blistered hands, and trudged out the doors and up the stairs to the paring station.

  He couldn’t imagine spending another day in the factory. His hands hurt, his back was tired, he hadn’t seen the sun in days, he missed his family desperately, and most of all, he could feel his mind shrinking. There was nothing to talk about, laugh about, or think about, except the machines. Every child who crossed his path frightened Janner more, because he knew that if he remained in the Fork Factory for long, he too would forget who he was. His eyes would glaze over, he would pass his days in mindless repetition, never thinking, never dreaming, forgetting that a wide, bright world lay outside.

  On the third night of Janner’s captivity, he made a decision.

  He arrived at his station, picked up the heavy shears, and looked around for the Maintenance Managers. He saw one pacing a platform that hung from the ceiling. The boy stopped and leaned over to bark an order at some child on the other side of the nearest machines.

  When Janner was sure the Maintenance Manager wasn’t looking, he took a deep breath, looked around one last time, and ran for his life.

  40

  The Coffin

  Janner was aware of some movement behind him, probably the Maintenance Manager calling for help, but as long as it stayed behind him, he didn’t care. He darted between machines, noting with some satisfaction the looks of surprise on the children’s faces as he passed. It was the nearest he had seen any of them come to looking alive.

  The factory floor was a maze of metal and fire, and after only a few moments, Janner realized he was lost. He had thought it would be easy to find the stair that led to the double doors that led to freedom, but the machines and the aisles of tables and crates disoriented him. He heard more yelling, from every direction now.

  Janner felt an abrupt increase in temperature and rounded a corner to find himself staring at the grim black face of the main furnace. A boy several feet away used a long metal pole with a hook at one end to pull open the hot grate while another child shoveled a serving of coal into its belly; the fire blazed and roared its hungry thanks. The two children looked at Janner with confusion.

  But he finally had his bearings. He remembered seeing the furnace and the piles of coal when he and Mobrik had first emerged from the long hallway. Janner spun and saw the double doors and the stairway that led to them not far away. With the heat of the furnace bright on his back, he ran as straight as he could for the stairs, weaving in and out of machinery but aiming always for the doors.

  At last, he reached the stairs and risked a look behind him. Five boys, taller and older than Janner, pushed their way toward him, in no great hurry. Two more boys swung from the chains that hung from the ceiling.

  Janner had no idea what he was doing. He knew that at the end of this long hallway was the big, empty room where the carriage waited. He knew the Overseer had a whip, and Mobrik said he wasn’t afraid to use it. He knew the only certain exit from the building was through a heavy portcullis he couldn’t open alone.

  But he also knew he couldn’t stand another day at the paring station without doing something. He wasn’t a tool. He was the Throne Warden of Anniera, which meant that though they might capture him, he wouldn’t go quietly.

  As he ran up the stair, he heard something that startled him so badly he nearly fell.

  “Janner Igiby. Don’t.”

  A girl stood at the bottom of the steps. She was filthy, but her eyes were like pearls in the mud, large and luminescent. It was the same child he had seen the day he arrived, the one he thought he recognized.

  “How do you know my name?” Janner asked. Every moment the Maintenance Managers came closer, but he couldn’t make himself move. “Who are you?”

  Her bright eyes filled with tears that streaked her face like white paint on a black canvas. He had to go. If he was fast enough, he might have a few minutes to search for a way out before the Overseer was alerted.

  “Janner, you can’t get out,” the girl said. “Please don’t run.”

  Her voice was sweet and desperate and beautiful, a silver stream in a dark forest. Only such a voice could have stopped him from running. Janner looked at the doors behind him, then at the gang of Maintenance Managers pushing toward him, then at the girl with the bright eyes, and he gave up. Part of him screamed, Run! Get out! But something stayed his feet.

  The first of the tall boys arrived at the bottom of the stairs, shoved the girl aside, and ascended. Janner didn’t take his eyes from her, even when the Maintenance Managers punched him in the gut or twisted his arm behind his back. Her eyes were stars on a stormy night, pinpricks peeking through a break in the clouds.

  Janner felt a knee in his back and tumbled down the stairs, head over heels, wondering dimly what it would sound like when his bones snapped. He crashed to the floor, dizzy with pain. Then he found her eyes again.

  “Who…are you?” he breathed.

  Before the Maintenance Managers dragged him away, she leaned close.

  “Sara Cobbler,” she said.1

  Then someone punched Janner, and the stars went out.

  When Janner woke, he thought for a moment that he was dead. His eyes were open, but he could see nothing. His body ached, and his hands were so blistered that he couldn’t move his fingers. He tongued his swollen lip and tasted blood. He was in bad shape.

  But where was he? He lay on a hard surface, but his hands and feet weren’t bound, which was a relief. He sat up, and his forehead smashed into something hard.

  “Ow!” He put a hand to his forehead, forgetting the blisters on his fingers and palms. “Ow!” he said again.

  When the pain subsided, he found he was in a box not much wider than his shoulders and not much taller than his chest. He felt himself on the verge of panic. Janner had always been afraid of tight places, even when it was just he and Podo wrestling. Sometimes when Podo held his arms down, this same panic erupted. One moment, Janner would be laughing, and the next he lost all control and thrashed as if in a bad dream. He closed his eyes again and forced himself to breathe slowly.

  But he couldn’t resist the urge to push on the ceiling, just to see if it would give. He pushed, found it solid and strong, and then he lost his mind.

  Janner screamed and scratched at the walls and ceiling of the box, heedless of the pain in his hands or in his fingernails when they tore away. He was trapped in a dark so deep that light itself seemed never to have existed at all. He lost all sense of time. He kicked and scraped until his strength was spent and then lay there sobbing. He cried for ages, until sleep came at last, but he dreamed of a giant nothingness, an empty hole into which he tumbled and disappeared.

  When he woke again, he found that the box was not an awful dream but a black reality. He panicked again. He lay panting in the blackness, talking to himself, praying aloud to the Maker, accusing, pleading, screaming things that, while no one could blame poor Janner for saying them, will not be repeated here.

  And the Maker’s answer was a hollow silence.

  Hours and hours passed. Janner wept again, a different weeping than before. These tears were not from fear but from weariness and a vast loneliness. He wanted to feel the touch of Nia’s hand on the back of his neck. He wanted to hear Leeli’s voice, Tink’s laughter. He wanted the musty smell of P
odo’s breath after he smoked his pipe. He wanted to see Peet the Sock Man’s eyes, because the same stuff that made his father swam there. These thoughts floated in his mind like dandelion seeds in a warm wind.

  Janner saw himself in his mind’s eye, sitting in the field beside the Igiby cottage. The long winter had passed. New, green shoots sighed up from the furrows in the garden. Bright leaves as soft as a baby’s feet shone on the trees. Then, as kind as his mother’s kiss, the sun broke through and poured light upon his skin.

  In the black coffin, his hands cut and bleeding, his face bruised from the fists of the Maintenance Managers, Janner slept. His sleep was sound, untroubled by dreams of Fangs or Gnag the Nameless, or the terrible, wheeling blackness.

  The next time he woke, he was aware of his hunger and thirst. Even amidst the terror of his first hours in the box, he had assumed this was a punishment, not a long execution. But now he wondered if they meant to starve him or if they had buried him alive. Maybe he wasn’t in the factory at all but in some cemetery somewhere, deep in the ground.

  He was too tired to cry anymore, too tired to panic. So he lay there and thought about Sara Cobbler and her beautiful eyes.

  “Sara Cobbler,” he said aloud, enjoying the sound of her name. Why was it so familiar?

  She had known his name, but he had never been to Dugtown. How would she know his name? Then he remembered—Sara Cobbler, the girl who had been taken by the Black Carriage. Janner shook his head in the darkness, trying to remember. He had met a family at the Dragon Day Festival the year before, and they had had a little girl the same age as him. It was only a brief meeting, but Janner had made the mistake of mentioning to Tink that he thought she was pretty. Tink made fun of him for the rest of the day. A few weeks later, Nia told Janner and Tink she had been taken by the Carriage.

  But the Black Carriage took children to Fort Lamendron, then to the Castle Throg, like the nursery rhyme said. “At Castle Throg across the span…you’ll weep at how your woes began…the night the Carriage found you.” Why was she here? How many of these children had been taken by the Carriage? How many of their parents assumed they were lost forever, when they were only a few miles away in Dugtown? If they knew their children were here, guarded only by the Overseer, surely they would stop at nothing to tear the walls down and bring them home.

  Then he remembered the hags and beggars of Tilling Court. Many of the parents knew exactly where their children were, and it had driven them mad.

  Janner wanted more than ever to be in the Ice Prairies, among brave men and women not content to live under the thumb of the Fangs. He ached to live in a world where the Fangs dared not enter. Maybe, when he was older, he would join Gammon’s force and be a part of the resistance. He would wield his sword and fight alongside the Skreeans when the time came, and if they could drive the Fangs from Skree, then why not Anniera? And if they could drive them from the Shining Isle and restore his father’s kingdom—well, his brother’s kingdom—then why not attack Throg itself? Why not put an end to Gnag and the trolls and the Fangs and every enemy that would beat a twelve-year-old boy and lock him in a coffin?

  Janner laughed. It was easy to have daydreams about conquering the world for the good of Aerwiar; it was another thing to do it. He couldn’t even make it from Glipwood to Dugtown without nearly dying Maker knows how many times. They had lost Peet, they had lost Nugget, they had been captured by Stranders, chased by Fangs, betrayed, beaten, lost.

  And he had no idea what had become of Tink or the others. Janner’s stomach curled. How long would they wait at the burrow? How long before they gave up on him and went on to the Ice Prairies? How could they possibly find him?

  He forced such thoughts from his mind. He had to get out. That was the only thing to be done.

  Janner’s mind worked this way for hours before he realized with a smile that he was no longer afraid of the darkness or the coffin. He was afraid of starving to death, but he doubted they would let him die, not after all the trouble the Overseer went through to find children for his factory.

  As if in answer to this last thought, a sound came from outside the box—the first thing Janner had heard other than his own voice since he had found himself there.

  Footsteps approached. A clicking sound. Then the top of the box swung open and light stung his eyes.

  “Out, Esben Flavogle. The Overseer wants to see you.”

  “Hello, Mobrik,” Janner rasped.

  Unable to believe he was doing so, Janner sat up and entered the world again.

  Janner forced his stiff body out of the box. The room was small and dungeonlike, with stone walls and a squat ceiling. Chains hung from hooks on the wall, and bones lay in piles in the corners. Two coffins lay side by side, open and awaiting their next occupants.

  One day there wouldn’t be any more occupants, Janner thought. Gammon and his army would sack Dugtown and every other evil place in Skree, and when he did, Janner swore to find this place and tear it down forever. No more children in coffins or in factories or in Black Carriages. No more.

  Janner looked at Mobrik with fire in his eyes. The ridgerunner took a step backward and eyed the door, clearly not used to children emerging from the coffin undefeated. Janner Wingfeather had gone in unconscious and had come out more awake than ever.

  He considered seizing the ridgerunner and throwing him into the box. He knew he could if he wanted, but it didn’t feel right just yet. He had to be careful when and how he took action. No more running blindly through the factory. He would wait, and watch, and plan.

  “Let’s go,” Janner said. “The Overseer’s waiting.”

  1. See Book One.

  41

  Four Apples and a Plan

  The Overseer sat at his desk, wearing his ridiculous hat and trying his best to look angry.

  Janner didn’t care. He resolved to play dumb and pretend to be broken. He nodded his head and waited for the man to finish talking about “obeying” and how there was “no chance for escape” and that Janner was “just a tool now.” At this last, it was all Janner could do to keep quiet. The Overseer warned him that next time he tried to escape, he would spend three days in the box, not just two.

  Two days? Janner thought with a shudder. It had felt like a lifetime. He couldn’t imagine a third day in the coffin.

  As Mobrik led him back across the empty room where the carriage sat, Janner caught a sweet smell. Against the wall near the door sat three baskets of apples, berries, and melons. Mobrik took a deep sniff and giggled.

  “Hurry up, tool,” said Mobrik. “I’ve fruit to eat once you’re back at work.”

  “Can’t you eat some now?” Janner asked, hoping to distract the ridgerunner, but not yet sure why. He had to be careful from now on, but this might be the last time he would be this close to the exit. “You could take an apple with you. It’s a long walk to the paring station and back.”

  Mobrik paused. “It is a long walk.”

  “And fruit tastes best when it’s fresh. ‘The longer it sits, the worser it gets,’ my mother used to say.” Janner forced a laugh. Mobrik stared at the baskets with longing.

  “Come on,” the ridgerunner said, glancing at the Overseer’s door. Their footsteps echoed as they crossed the room to the fruit baskets. Janner caught a glimpse of the portcullis, down the corridor behind the carriage. He wondered if the two children in charge of opening it stayed there or if they only manned it when the Overseer was out and expected to return.

  Mobrik ran ahead of Janner to the baskets, the tails of his little coat flying out behind. He ran his little fingers over the fruit, caressing it and testing its firmness. Janner looked back at the Overseer’s door. It was still closed.

  “The longer it sits, the worser it gets! A true thing for a boy to utter!” Mobrik said, enraptured with the fruit.

  Still not sure what he was doing, Janner lifted a head-sized melon from the basket.

  Mobrik gasped. “Put that back! This is my fruit! Mine!”

>   “Sorry,” Janner said. When he replaced the melon, it fell from the basket, hit the floor with a wet thunk, and rolled away. Mobrik shrieked and scrambled after it. When the little creature’s back was turned, Janner slipped four apples into the pockets of his breeches, thinking as he did that Tink’s quick hands could probably have snagged twice that many in half the time.

  “Terrible idea!” Mobrik said, replacing the melon with great care. “I should never have let you near my fruit. Never. Come on.” He popped a sugarberry into his mouth and shivered with delight. Then he pushed Janner toward the double doors that led to the factory, heedless of the way Janner’s pockets bulged.

  Janner was sent directly to the paring station. He looked for Sara Cobbler as he wound through the aisles of the factory, but he didn’t see her. All the children he passed ignored him intensely, girls and boys with shovels stared at the ground as if it were the most fascinating thing they’d ever seen. Only the Maintenance Managers paid him any attention, and their attentions were of the sniggering, malicious kind. They glared at him from their perches on the walls.

  Janner hoped Sara Cobbler hadn’t been punished for talking to him. The Maintenance Managers hadn’t seemed to notice her in the moments before they knocked him unconscious. The other coffins in the dungeon had been empty, so at least she wasn’t there.

  He wasn’t sure what had happened inside of him at the sight of her glimmering eyes in those moments at the stairs, but he liked it. And the sound of his name on her lips, the tears in her eyes, the bright skin showing through the streaks on her cheeks—all of these produced in Janner an urgency to see her again, to speak to her.

  With a sigh, Janner pulled on his gloves, surprised to find that his blisters no longer stung. He worked in a slow, steady rhythm, lost in his thoughts, finding the work almost soothing. It somehow helped him think, helped him dwell on the faces of his family, of Oskar, to think on the things he would have to do to escape.