by JA Andrews
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 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.
He opened up to them and a mixture of envy and loathing filled his chest.
“Come to tell us a story, did you?” one of the old men asked quietly. His hair was white and his back bowed beneath his grey tunic.
“He came to offer us that fine horse,” another said, “because he doesn’t want his elders to walk for a fortnight while he rides up and down the line, whenever he pleases.”
“I…” Will stopped, searching for a response.
“Move past, fetter bait,” a sharp voice called from past them. A small Roven woman moved through the crowd toward them, her face furious. “The Torch may want your company, but the rest of us do not.”
Will bowed his head slightly to the Roven woman, and again to the slaves. He turned Shadow toward the front of the caravan, an odd mix of insult and embarrassment washing over him.
He finally caught a glimpse of Hal and trotted towards him, relieved until Sora rode up as well. Hal greeted him enthusiastically. Sora gave him her usual scowl.
“The Torch ordered you to walk with him,” she told Will.
“Ordered me?”
“His exact word was invite, but I thought I’d translate it for you. Because you don’t seem very bright.”
Hal laughed. “He seems bright enough to me.”
“He comes to a Roven clan as a foreigner”—Sora’s gaze dug into Will—“and then spins stories and lies.”
“Sora doesn’t like stories,” Hal explained.
“You don’t like stories? Everyone likes stories of some kind or another.”
She just looked at him, her face set.
“Did you like the story I told last night? About Tomkin and the dragon?” He hadn’t bothered to read Sora after the story ended. Killien had been entertained, Hal and the crowd had loved it.
“You stretched the tale and molded it to manipulate the crowd,” she said. “Every word was chosen to do something. Every word was a lie.”
A thin claw of fear squeezed Will’s chest. The lie part was wrong, but not the rest. He had judged every word, every line, weighing it against the audience, drawing out the parts that pleased the Roven, softening the parts that would feel foreign to them.
He opened his mouth to answer her, to find some sort of defense for it, but Hal spoke first.
“That’s the point of a storyman, Sora. If we wanted to hear something boring, we’d ask about your last hunt.”
She turned and trotted ahead. “It’s not bright to keep the Torch waiting.”
Will nudged Shadow to follow her. “This is the second morning you’ve come to find me. Should I start expecting it? I could have a cup of saso ready for you.”
She shot him another glare, the hundredth he’d received that morning. “Unless you don’t drink saso.” His voice sounded snippier than he’d intended. “Then we could have tea. I know of a red tea from Baylon that would be perfect for you. It’s bitter and disagrees with almost everyone.”
That earned him the slightest uptick of the very edge of her mouth. She turned into the caravan and led him past dozens of rangers.
The Torch came into view, walking alongside his small fiery-haired wife. Will straightened, looking for any sign of Ilsa. Lilit caught sight of Sora and Will, and her expression sharpened.
“I’ve brought you your liar,” Sora announced.
Killien turned with a raised eyebrow.
Will flung a glare at her. “They’re stories. Not lies.”
Sora didn’t bother to look away from the Torch. “I ride west today.” Without waiting for acknowledgement, she rode into the grass.
Lilit whispered something to the Torch that ended with a harsh “fett”. Stabbing a cutting glare toward Will, she walked away.
Killien mounted his horse and glanced back toward her. “I didn’t introduce you last night, but that is Lilit, my wife. Flame of the Morrow Clan.” He worried his thumb across his lips, watching her walk away, and the burning stones in the rings on his fingers glinted in the morning light. “Carrying our first child. The healers assure me that the child will not come until we reach the rifts.”
Lilit walked back to a wagon covered with a tall canopy of undyed wool, colored silks draping the front and back to make fluttering doorways. A hand reached through the silks to help her climb in and Will’s breath caught at a glimpse of brown hair. Both disappeared into the wagon.
“Flame?”
“A Torch is not much use without a Flame.” Killien squinted back towards her. “She’s not happy that I invited you along. I’m expecting you to be so entertaining she changes her mind.”
“I could ride with her,” Will offered, a little quicker than he’d intended, “tell stories to pass the time.”
“That’s a terrible idea. Last night she called you a danger to the clan. Thought I should kill you in your sleep. I pointed out that you were a protected guest, she said you weren’t her guest, and if she killed me in my sleep, she’d be free to kill you.” Killien smiled, but it was a bit strained. “The best thing you can do is stay away from her. Your new goal here is not to entertain the clan, it’s to convince my wife to like you. So she stops being mad at me.”
The curtains shifted at the front of Lilit’s wagon and Will caught a glimpse of movement inside. “I’ll do my very best.”
“Lilit will come around,” Killien said, pulling Will’s attention away from the slaves. He did not sound entirely hopeful, “But Sora was right, it’s your familiarity with lies I’m interested in.”
Will threw up his hands. “A story is very different from a lie.”
“Is a rumor? My rangers have found rumors of frost goblins as far west as they’ve traveled. But since you have been quite a bit farther, I was wondering how far west the rumors went.”
“Rumors of frost goblins was the only thing I heard agreed on in every city along the entire coast. They’re talking about them in Bermea just as much as here.”
Killien blew out a long breath. “That’s not the answer I was hoping for.”
They topped a small rise and the emptiness of the Sweep felt like a facade. The serpent’s wake ahead of them slithered over the hills ahead of them, dipping into countless unseen valleys. There could be hidden ravines everywhere, full of frost goblins. The earth beneath them could be riddled with warrens.
“Frost goblins aren’t a threat to a caravan of this size, are they?”
Killien didn’t answer right away. “It’s been generations since anyone’s seen hives large enough to attack a clan.”
“What do they want?”
“Meat and metal. They are especially drawn to silver and gold, but they also gouge out nails, hinges, any metal they find. And they eat raw meat. They’ll rip chunks of meat off an animal and leave the rest to rot.”
“Do they—” Will hesitated. “—eat people?”
“They seem to prefer animals.”
The empty expanse of the sky settled down heavily over the grass, the wind rippled across one hill and spread onto the next, jostling against them constantly.
“They dislike heat. Usually the spring weather drives them into the mountains, which is why we have heatstones. If you bring a stone near a fire, it’ll give off tremendous heat for an hour or two.”
Killien turned and gave instructions to a nearby ranger, who rode off down the line.
Pairs of riders cantered out from the main caravan, taking up positions on a perimeter around the main group. Killien gave the riders a brief glance before turning back to Will. “Yesterday you mentioned you’d been to three other clans. How does a storyman from Gulfind end up so well-traveled through the Roven Sweep?”
“I didn’t intend to be.” When he’d first stepped foot on the Sweep, following rumors of a gathering war, he’d thought it would be easy to confirm or refute. How hard could it be to find a single holy man proclaiming that Mallon the Rivor still lived and calling warriors to his banner? He thought he’d find the old man, figure out whether the Roven were amassing an army, and get back to Queensland within a fortnight. “I was chasing a story, actually. Following rumors of an elderly fellow who claimed a dead man had sent him on a mission.” Which was true, from a certain point of view.
“Did you find him?”
“It took a while.” A long while. Weeks and weeks of following rumors about the man. “And when I found him, he was a complete disappointment.” The old man had been so ridiculous. Will had finally caught up to him in the summer valleys of the Boan Clan and instantly dismissed any rumors he’d heard of the man actually gathering an army. “He was just a doddering old man giving foolish speeches that no one listened to.
“But by then it was late in the fall, and the clans were heading south, so I followed and got caught up learning Roven stories.” Especially Roven rumors about wayfarers and whether or not they sold foreign slaves on the Sweep. “It’s taken months to work my way east again. I planned to go back to Gulfind before I met you.” He kept himself from glancing back at Lilit’s wagon. “And your offer was too interesting to refuse.”