by JA Andrews
Away from the woman, the thrum of excitement at finding Borto resurfaced. What was the best way to befriend the man? Telling a story better than anyone else in the competition tonight was obviously the first step.
He ran over the story of the Black Horn in his mind, as he passed through the gate and into the city. He barely noticed the sharp eyes of the city guards or the way Roven purposefully did not move when he approached, but let him move around them. His gaze ran past the lumpy cob buildings, barely seeing them.
His inn slouched against the shop next to it. Around the door, a stonesteep recarved fading protective runes into the cob, muttering to himself while a faint orange glow hovered around his tools. Will cast out toward the man and felt barely a wisp of vitalle. Just enough to make his tools glow. No actual magic was being pressed into the runes. It wasn’t surprising. Most of the Roven stonesteeps he’d seen put only enough magic into their work to make it look real. In fact steep was such an exaggeration Will had often thought they should be called stonedribbles. But Roven were so used to relying on protective runes and burning stones, they paid the stonesteeps without question. These particularly runes were so rough and blocky as to be almost illegible. Protection against weather most likely, a simple spell meant to keep the house safe over the summer while the Roven were in the grasses to the north grazing their herds.
The topmost one could be rain. Or sea, maybe. Definitely something watery.
For the thousandth time, Will wished he’d brought Alaric with him to the Sweep. Alaric was the sort of Keeper who would know immediately what the runes said, what they were intended to do, and why they looked different from the ones the Keepers used. He’d also know how to press magic into them, strong enough to last the summer. Any Keeper besides Will would, for that matter.
He left the stonesteep to his ineffective work and settled his horse in a dingy stable, leaving him with a pile of the cleanest hay he could find. The inn’s common room smelled stale, a mixture of old food and neglect, and it took more money than it should have to rent a room. But the innkeeper took his coin without any disparaging comment or look, which was worth something.
The room was as filthy and irregular as the outside of the inn promised. It bent in an elongated triangle shape, one side following the curving outer wall. A low bed smelling of moldy, dried grass filled one side, and the other curved around into a point of empty gloom. A thin rug, still clinging to the memory of bright colors, covered the floor. When Will got back to civilized lands, he was going to stay in the nicest inn he could find. He’d pay ridiculously high prices just to be somewhere clean and bright and friendly.
He spread his bedroll over the windowsill to air. Dropping his bag down on the bed and ignoring the puff of dust that ballooned out of the mattress, he pulled out a bundle and unwrapped two small books. He sat and thumbed through the pages, the soft corners familiar under his fingers, checking for dampness or paper mites. His own handwriting covered the pages from edge to edge, with small drawings and diagrams crammed wherever they fit.
There was a flutter at the window and Talen landed on the bedroll, the usual mouse dangling from his beak.
Will grinned at the little hawk and dug into his bag, pulling out an old bit of dried meat. He set it next to the candle on the little table. Talen dropped the mouse and hopped down, snatching up the meat and giving Will an emotionless stare.
“You’re welcome.” Will went back to checking his book. Talen moved to the bed with a little hop and fixed his eyes on the flipping pages.
“Shall I teach you to read?” Will flipped back to the beginning. “That would make you a more interesting bird. These are my notes from the past year.” He tilted the book toward the hawk, and Talen backed up slightly. “Originally I went to see the elves. Which was the most exciting thing I’ve ever been asked to do. I only ever found one, though.”
A sketch of Ayda filled the next page. “This doesn’t do her justice. She's…” She was vibrant and fanciful and her golden hair had almost sparkled. “Mesmerizing. I don’t know why she spent so much time with me, but it was weeks. And she never introduced me to any other elves.
“She did show me Mallon the Rivor’s body, though. Here on the Sweep you’d know him as Mallon the Undying. Which is a bit dramatic, even if it might be true. He attacked Queensland eight years ago, and was on the verge of conquering us. Until the elves stopped him. We thought they’d killed him, but it turns out they’d just trapped him inside his own mind.” He glanced at Talen. “I’d imagine it’s like he’s a man stuck in a small, drab, little room only talking to himself. And a bird.
“I was headed back to tell Alaric, one of the other Keepers, that Mallon wasn’t actually dead, when I heard of an old man named Wizendor who was supposedly coming to the Sweep to raise an army for Mallon. That was troubling enough that a Keeper needed to come to this wretched land.” He smoothed the page flat. “At least I assume the other Keepers would have agreed that someone needed to come here. I didn’t ask. I wasn’t doing anything useful in Queensland. I’d been traveling the country looking for children with the ability to be Keepers for years and hadn’t found any. At least Wizendor was someone I might actually find.”
With the pages lying still, Talen twitched and looked around the room.
“Maybe I should have stayed, but if there’s any Keeper not cut out for fighting an enemy with inexplicably strong powers, it’s me.
Talen cocked his head at Will, looking at him out of one eye.
“Don't look at me like that. I left a note. Alaric is the Keeper who needed to know, anyway, and he was off in the south running errands for the Queen. I left that note at the palace for him nearly a year ago. By now he’s probably been back there for ages, doing important Court Keeper sorts of things like straightening out the world and killing Mallon.” He paused. “I wish I could have talked to him before coming here, though. I have no idea what was taking him so long to get back."
“Anyway, all this”—he flipped again and Talen snapped his focus back to the pages—“records me not finding Wizendor. Which is dull.” He stopped at a page where the writing oozed disappointment. “When I did finally hear him speak to a crowd of Roven, it was still dull. Because the man was not worth the chase I’d just been on. If that old fool succeeded in raising a Roven army, then I’m the best Keeper that ever lived.”
Past that, the entries in the book grew shorter and less related.
“By then I was deep in the Sweep, so I decided to learn what I could of the Roven on my way back out. Because, honestly, it feels a little embarrassing to have come all the way here and learned essentially nothing.” He flipped past maps of the Sweep, notes on Roven culture, and overheard Roven stories. Records of searches that had begun as fascinating questions, but ended fruitlessly.
Like his attempt to find Kachig the Bloodless, a stonesteep so powerful that he was only mentioned in hushed voices. People were so frightened of the man, it had taken a whole month to discover he’d been dead for ten years.
It was unreasonably irritating that he couldn’t even find out the reason for the “Bloodless.” A title like that had a story behind it, but whatever it was, no one on the Sweep would talk about it.
The final entries all documented rumors of wayfarers on the Sweep, and any hints at where Ilsa might be.
Talen hopped forward to shove his beak into Will’s bag.
“There’s no more food in there.” Will flipped through the last few pages of failure after failure, but closed the book without his usual sense of crushing despair. Because tonight, none of that mattered. Even though his hope of finding Ilsa hung by the slightest thread—he finally had a thread.
The scent of paper and ink wafted past. It smelled like comfort and home and rooms full of books. He held it close to his face for another breath.
What he wouldn’t give to be in a library. Besides these two books, in the entire last year on the Sweep he had only seen five others. Two had been genealogies of the Sunn Clan
kept in the wealthy district of Tun, and the other three had been carried by a severe looking stonesteep in a parade at Bermea. Almost no one on the Sweep read or cared to learn how. Limited documents were held in each clan recording births and deaths of the wealthy, business men kept minimal ledgers, and very occasionally a contract was drawn up. Will had earned a small amount, including one miniature hawk, by offering to record genealogies for families on the Sweep. The spelling of names was more of an art than a set of rules, but seeing as none of his customers could read, it didn’t really matter.
Will shook out the scarf and Talen hopped back away from it. With a tweeting sort of whistle that sounded annoyed, he took off out the window.
Will wrapped his books back up. There was nothing alive in his room to draw energy from, so Will set his hand on the books and pulled a tiny bit of energy out of himself.
It took so little effort. His palm barely tingled against the books as the energy went into them, wrapping an influence spell around the bundle. It said something that the only magic he was good at involved hiding things. Or himself. He tucked the books in the darkest corner under the bed. Between the shadows and the spell, even if someone came into his room, they wouldn’t notice them.
He pulled a red wool shirt from his bag. It wasn’t exactly like the traditional scarlet tunics storymen from Gulfind wore, but it was close enough that it would fool anyone but an actual storyman from Gulfind. Hopefully Borto would be convinced. He changed into it and straightened his shoulders. The role of storyteller settled over him like a cloud, and he let himself settle into the safety of it. It would be nicer to get to put on the full role of a Keeper. To keep the storytelling but add in the freedom to do magic and keep records and sit in the library and read books for days at a time. To have the camaraderie of the Keepers, to visit court.
He sighed and tucked a small coin purse inside his shirt and left his bag on the bed. The things left in it weren’t worth anything.
The story contest wouldn’t begin for a while, but this room was depressing and at the festival he could work on a way to talk to Borto again. He had nothing to draw energy from for an influence spell. Bracing himself against the hostility he was about to encounter from the Roven, he left the inn and hurried back toward the festival.
When the wayfarer’s came into view he paused to look for Lady Dreadful. Seeing no sign of her or Rass, he sat down on a bench, watching for Borto. As the sky darkened, the area swelled with people. Parents spread out brightly colored rugs on the ground while their children scampered and squealed around them. A sweetbread vendor walked by with a sugary smell of cinnamon. The benches along the back were filling and Will sat along the very edge, avoiding contact with them as much as he could.
A quarter of an hour passed before Will caught a glimpse of Borto passing behind the arc of wagons. With a surge of emotions too tangled to name, Will slipped around behind the nearest wagon to follow him.
There was little commotion back here and Will opened himself up. When he caught sight of Borto, a writhing mass of the man’s eagerness and anxiety rushed into Will’s chest. He drew back against a red wagon wall and glanced around. There was nothing here to cause so much anxiety.
Borto leaned back against his wagon, his arms crossed, one finger tapping quickly against his arm. A young man with a heavy limp came from the other side, and Borto’s emotions flared. Will pressed himself against the red wall until he could just see the two of them.
“Lukas!” The wayfarer greeted him with a wide smile that belied his anxiety.
Lukas answered with a curt nod. He wasn’t Roven. Even though his hair and beard were styled like one, they were light brown instead of red. His clothes were the undyed grey of a slave, but they were fitted and clean. He wore half a dozen rings and three necklaces. Even in the sunlight several of the burning stones held enough energy to be visibly bright. Over his slave’s tunic he wore a grey leather vest stamped with lines and swirls of runes. One of his legs twisted at an odd angle, and he shifted his weight away from it.
He stood farther from Will, so his emotions were faint, but Will caught a hint of greed, and the twists of fear that always wrapped around it. And behind it all sat a deep, ugly hatred.
The emotions of the two men jumbled together and Will closed himself off to them.
If Lukas was a slave, he was better dressed and he wore more burning stones than any Will had seen. He stood next to Borto like a young lord addressing a servant.
Borto held out a bundle wrapped in a worn, brown cloth. Lukas kept his face impassive as he took it, but his movements were too quick to hide his eagerness. He unwrapped the cloth and Will’s breath caught.
A book.
Will took a half step forward before he caught himself.
Not just any book. This was thick, covered with a blue leather binding dark as the night sky with a silver medallion on the front. Even from here, Will could see it promised stories and knowledge. And secrets.
A hungry smile twisted across Lukas's face, and he tossed the wayfarer a bulging bag of coins.
“No trouble getting it?” The words were more of a threatening statement than a question.
“Nothing this doesn’t make up for.” Borto dropped the bag inside his wagon. It let out a substantial thunk.
What book was worth that much money?
Lukas rubbed his hand across the cover.
“Always glad to help out our favorite clan.” Borto leaned back. “And visit our favorite festival. Is the Torch coming to the contest tonight?”
The Torch? If Lukas served the clan chief of the Morrow, that would explain the way he was dressed.
“When he has this to read?” Lukas gave a derisive snort and flipped open the book and thumbed through a few pages. “And he says you’re to leave at dawn.”
Will stifled a laugh. The Roven Torch was trying to control a band of wayfarers?
“Before the festival is over?” Borto asked sharply. “You’ll cost my people thousands of talens.”
“Not all of you.” Lukas's face turned malicious. “Just you. Says the information he sent you is…” His voice cut through the air as sharp as a shard of glass. “Promising, and you shouldn’t dally on the Sweep.” Carefully wrapping the book back up in the cloth and without looking at Borto for a response, Lukas turned and limped away.
Borto glared in Lukas's direction for a long moment before turning and ducking back between the wagons, slamming his fist into the side of one.
Chapter Four
Will took a few steps toward the empty space they’d left.
That had been intriguing on so many levels.
The Torch of a Roven clan just ordered a wayfarer to go do…something. And it certainly looked like Borto planned to obey, despite his obvious frustration.
Will stepped along the wagons until he could see Lukas's grey form limping quickly toward the city gate. His leg twisting painfully with each step.
Will took a step after him, his longing to see the book outweighing the obvious fact that he wasn’t going to be able to get near it. There was no way a Roven Clan chief would let a foreigner into his house, never mind let him read the expensive book he’d just bought in a secret deal from the wayfarers.
Still…
How could he not follow a book like that?
He took another step forward.
“Take your seats!” Estinn’s voice called as a jangle of music started. “Come hear stories that will boil your blood, mesmerize your mind, and seize your soul!”
Will lingered for another moment until Lukas disappeared into the crowd near the gate, before retracing his steps back to the wayfarers’ theater.
As fascinating as the book was, if Borto planned to leave the Sweep in the morning, Will had only tonight to impress him. Maybe a good enough tale would convince Borto to let Will travel with them for a few days. If not, he’d follow him anyway.
The sun hung low behind the city, casting the festival into shadows. Smells of roasted
barley crackers and smoked fish trickled behind the stage to where Will stood with the other performers, a mix of colorfully dressed wayfarers and leather clad Roven. The wayfarers greeted him cheerfully, questioning him about himself and his story. The Roven stood to the side, coldly.
Estinn settled down the crowd and Will shifted until he could see most of the stage and a slice of the audience between the hanging fabric.
“Our first tale of the night is Yervant, come to share the story of when he followed Mallon to Queensland,” Estinn called out, “and killed the Keeper!”
The crowd erupted into cheers and Will’s gaze snapped over to the people beside him.
Mallon? No Keepers had been killed when Mallon had invaded. He’d passed through Queensland like some kind of plague, gaining control over people’s minds in town after town, holding sway over them even after he’d left. And when he’d controlled enough, he’d brought his armies of Roven to destroy the rest.
One of the Roven, a thick, disheveled man carrying a mug of ale and smelling unwashed, pushed past Will and stepped up onto the stage. Voices called out to him from the crowd, taunting but friendly, and he held up his hand for silence. With a few final jeers, the audience stilled.
“When Mallon the Undying”—Yervant raised his mug reverently at the name—“led our great people ‘cross the Scales to crush the farmers o’ Queensland, I traveled with him. Our company had men o’ the Morrow Clan—” Cheers rang from the crowd. “—and from the Panos Clan.” He looked around slowly and the audience quieted.
Will glanced at the faces in the crowd that he could see. Mallon had attacked Queensland only eight years ago. How many of these men were there?
“And we had a giant, with feet so large he crushed three houses with each step!”
The people were nodding along, muttering approvingly and Will held in a snort. Maybe none of these people had fought. Giants’ feet were barely large enough to crush a bush, never mind three houses.