Suddenly, Aidan’s plate lurched away from him like a boat that had drifted into a swift current. For a dizzying, disorienting moment, Aidan thought he was falling backward out of his chair. But Aidan wasn’t tipping; the table was, tilting forward into the middle of the trophy room, crashing heavily onto its side. Earthenware dashed to pieces on the sandstone floor, and peas, carrots, and potatoes scattered in all directions. Candle stands clattered to the floor, and broken, extinguished candles lay among the debris. The hunting dogs boiled over the overturned table to get at the roasted hogs that lay broken on the floor.
Chapter Four
Aidan’s Mission
Everyone stared in astonished silence at King Darrow, who stood in his place at the center of the head table. His face was still red from the exertion of flipping the thick walnut table and its heavy contents-no small feat for a man in his midsixties. His black eyes were flashing, and his hands were clenched into fists at his sides.
“I am Darrow,” he said in a loud, clear voice that echoed around the trophy room. “I am king of Corenwald.”
The courtiers, recovering a little, rose quickly to their feet out of respect for their king. Darrow put a booted foot on the edge of the overturned table and tipped it so it was completely upside down. The heavy clap of the tabletop on the floor scattered the dogs. The king stepped across the table and into the space between the two remaining tables. He stood in front of Lord Grady and spoke to him with clipped words. “I am your king.”
Grady looked down at his hands, fumbling at his hunting tunic. “Yes, Your Majesty.”
Darrow turned to the table behind him and walked to Lord Halbard. He reached across the table, grabbed a handful of Halbard’s coat, and pulled him close until their noses almost touched. He searched Halbard’s face, as if he no longer recognized his old friend. “I… am
… your… king!” He spoke each word separately and distinctly, and his voice was raised to a near shout.
Halbard’s eyes bulged with terror. “Y-yes, Your Majesty,” he stuttered.
Meanwhile, the dogs had begun fighting over the carcass of Aidan’s boar, and the growling, snapping, yelping mass tumbled into King Darrow and got tangled under his feet. The king let go of Halbard and kicked at the dogs. He caught two by the scruff of the neck, one with each hand, before they could scamper away. He lifted the two dogs up to his own eye level and, shaking with rage, screamed at them: “I am your king!” He dropped the dogs, and they slunk off whimpering, their tails between their legs.
Darrow now turned his attention to Aidan. He stalked toward the head table, unmindful of the potatoes and peas that stuck to the bottom of his boots with each step. Standing on the planks of the overturned table, he towered over Aidan. “I am Darrow of Tambluff!” he thundered.
“Yes, Your Majesty,” Aidan answered, looking down at his boots. His father had taught him never to make eye contact with an aggressive bear; it seemed fitting advice at this moment.
Darrow leaned even closer, and Aidan could feel his hot breath on his forehead. “Look at me when I’m talking to you!” bellowed the king.
Aidan raised his eyes to look into his king’s, and he was startled by what he saw. Darrow’s eyes bulged out of their sockets. White showed all around the black pupils. Darrow saw the horror in Aidan’s face. “How dare you look me in the eye?” he shouted, even though he was only inches away. “I am your king!”
Aidan wasn’t sure where to look. He couldn’t please the king by looking down; he couldn’t please him by looking him in the eye. He fixed his eyes on Darrow’s chin. “Yes, Sire. You are my king. I have never once forgotten.”
King Darrow snorted. “You have forgotten many things, boy. You have forgotten every kindness I ever showed to you and your family. You have forgotten what you were when I brought you to Tambluff: a shepherd boy, the son of a father whose standing in the realm isn’t what it used to be.”
Darrow’s low, contemptuous chuckle was interrupted by the clear voice of Prince Steren. “No, Father.” Darrow wheeled around to face his son. But Steren wasn’t cowed by his father’s rage. “You are the one who has forgotten. Aidan’s bravery saved your realm from the Pyrthen Empire. Is this your thanks for Aidan’s service?”
“Quiet, you insolent pup!” spluttered Darrow. “You may be too foolish to see what this boy is doing, but I’m not.” He shot a quick, scornful look at Aidan. “He wants to be king. From the day he got here, he’s done everything he could to steal away the loyalty of my noblemen.”
Aidan could feel hot resentment gather in a knot at his Adam’s apple. But it wasn’t only resentment he felt. He also felt the heartbreak and disappointment of injured love. No one in Corenwald was more devoted to King Darrow than Aidan was.
Darrow continued. “He has wheedled his way into your good graces, too, Steren, with his pretended friendship.”
“Pretended?” yelped the prince. “How can you even say-”
Darrow raised his hand for silence. He was speaking more softly now. His rage seemed to have spent itself. “Quiet, Son. You must see. It’s not my throne that’s in danger. It’s yours. I’ll live out my days as high king of Corenwald.” Darrow gestured toward Aidan behind him. “There’s not much this schemer can do about that. But someday I will die. And do you think he’ll just sit by and let you receive the crown of Corenwald without a fight?”
Darrow put a hand on either of Steren’s shoulders. “You are a good and trusting soul. Too good. Too trusting.”
The king turned and faced Aidan, who was too bewildered to speak. “I, too, have trusted too much.” He spoke without emotion as he addressed Aidan. “I brought you into the bosom of my family. It would have been better to embrace a rattlesnake. At least a rattlesnake’s venom works quickly. Yours is a slow poison.”
Aidan had withstood Darrow’s rage bravely. But this quiet insult was more than he could bear. He stood straight, his eyes fixed on Darrow’s beard. But big tears welled in his eyes and rolled down his cheeks.
Darrow was unmoved. He spoke to Aidan with a steely evenness. “Save your tears, boy. A crocodile can cry too. But that doesn’t mean it won’t eat a man alive.”
The king reached into a pouch that hung at his side and pulled out a piece of folded palmetto paper with a broken wax seal. Without prelude or explanation he began to read it: Your Majesty-
I write to warn you: Your most dangerous enemy dwells under your roof. Beware the youngest son of Errol.
He has convinced himself that he is the Wilderking of ancient prophecy-the rightful occupant of your throne. His every action is calculated to convince your courtiers of the same. His claim to have killed a panther with a stone is a claim on the throne of Corenwald-a blatant reference to the Wilderking Chant: With a stone he shall quell the panther fell, Watch for the Wilderking! He claims friendship with feechiefolk as part of a scheme to build a legend in keeping with the Wilderking prophecy.
At the mention of feechiefolk, Steren gasped, remembering his own run-in with Dobro Turtlebane the day before. But Darrow paid him no attention and kept reading the last paragraph of the letter. Your Majesty, it pains me to accuse a fellow Corenwalder of treason. But it pains me more to think that my king would be nurturing a traitor under his own roof.
Yours sincerely, A loyal subject
All the color drained from Aidan’s face as the king read. It was a lie, of course, but it contained just enough truth to make it hard to answer. Yes, he had come to believe that he was destined to be the Wilderking, but that realization had been thrust upon him. He had never wanted such a destiny, had certainly never schemed to put himself in that position. Yes, he claimed to have killed a panther; yes, he claimed to know feechiefolk. But never had he shown (or even felt) anything less than perfect loyalty to the House of Darrow. He stood mute under the glare of his king.
Darrow turned to the assembled courtiers. “See?” he said, gesturing at Aidan with one hand and waving the letter in the other. “He doesn’t even deny it.�
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For the first time since Darrow’s outburst, one of the noblemen spoke. “Your Majesty,” said Lord Aethelbert cautiously, “these are very serious accusations. An anonymous letter is not the same thing as evidence.”
Darrow fixed Aethelbert with a withering glare. “Ah yes, Aethelbert. On the boy’s side, are you?” He looked around the trophy room at the other noblemen. “Does anyone else wish to throw in his lot with these two traitors?”
The room remained silent. No one else was willing to take on the king when he was in this irrational frame of mind. Aidan looked imploringly from face to face, but no one, not even Steren, would meet his gaze.
Finally Aidan spoke. His voice was choked with emotion. “I have only ever loved you, my king.” Darrow gazed blankly at him. Aidan tried again. “Your Majesty, I have desired only to serve you and your house.” Darrow looked away, staring into the distance as if he had heard nothing.
“Command me, my king.” Aidan’s tone was plaintive. “How can I prove my loyalty to you?”
King Darrow still stared into the distance, but his eyes narrowed slightly as he mulled his options. Aethelbert was right. He didn’t have hard evidence against the boy, even if he was sure of his guilt. Still, evidence or no evidence, he couldn’t afford to have the boy at his court any longer. He believed what he had said to Steren: Even if the boy weren’t a threat to Darrow’s own kingship, he was a serious threat to his hopes for Steren. And yet he couldn’t have the boy killed or banished. The Four and Twenty Nobles would never let him get away with that. Maybe he could use the boy’s professed loyalty against him.
At last the king turned to Aidan. “I suppose you’ve noticed I suffer bouts of melancholy.”
Aidan just listened, choosing not to acknowledge how obvious the king’s depressive episodes had become.
“My medics and chemists have tried everything that might offer me some relief,” continued the king. “But nothing seems to help. There is one last treatment-a certain cure-but they lack the only ingredient.”
“Is it something I can get for you?” asked Aidan hopefully.
“Perhaps you can. The old lore promises one sure cure for melancholy: the essence of the frog orchid. Bring me a live frog orchid, and I will have no reason to doubt your loyalty.”
“A frog orchid?” barked Lord Cleland. “I know a little of the old lore, too, Darrow. The frog orchid grows only in the depths of the Feechiefen Swamp.” Darrow nodded knowingly but without apparent concern. Cleland continued. “Nobody has ever come back alive from the Feechiefen Swamp!”
But Aidan was relieved to have been offered the chance to prove his loyalty, even if the offer came in the form of a seemingly impossible task. “I’ll leave first thing in the morning.”
Lord Cleland wouldn’t let it lie. “You’re sending Aidan to his death, and you know it!” he protested.
“You weren’t so squeamish three years ago, when the boy offered to fight the giant on the Bonifay Plain,” Darrow retorted. “What was it you said, Cleland? ‘If the boy wants to die for his country, why not let him?’”
Cleland was ashamed of the words he spoke the first time he ever met Aidan Errolson on the battlefield at Bonifay. But he couldn’t deny them.
“Well, if the boy wants to die for his king,” continued Darrow, “why not let him?”
But Aidan wasn’t there to hear this exchange. He was already headed toward his sleeping quarters to pack a bag for his trip to Feechiefen.
***
Aidan was nearly finished packing when the door swung open and Prince Steren stepped into the room. He looked at the backpack on Aidan’s bed, and his face filled with horror. “You’re not really…” he began. “Into the Feechiefen?”
Aidan didn’t answer but kept packing.
“Don’t do this,” Steren pleaded. “You know how Father is. Tomorrow he will have forgotten all about this. Why don’t you go away for a few days? Go see your father and brothers at Longleaf. Father will be all right.”
“It’s been a long time since your father’s been all right,” Aidan answered. “Toward me anyway. He’s lost faith in me, Steren. I can’t stay here if my king has no faith in me. Yet I cannot bear to leave the court of Darrow. I must complete this quest.”
Then, almost as an afterthought, Aidan added, “Besides, if the essence of the frog orchid really does cure your father’s melancholy, that will be a service to the whole kingdom.”
“But nobody ever comes back from the Feechiefen,” Steren persisted. “What makes you think you will?”
Aidan rolled back his sleeve to expose a red scar in the shape of an alligator on his right forearm. “That’s the feechiemark,” he said. “It means any feechie I meet is obliged by their code of honor to be a friend to me.”
“Like Dobro,” Steren observed.
“That’s right,” answered Aidan. “By the providence of the One God, I believe the feechies will see me through the Feechiefen.”
“Do you even know how to get into the Feechiefen?” Steren asked.
“Just what we all learned in geography lessons,” said Aidan. “Follow the Tam to Last Camp and turn south. You can’t miss it. But I’ll stop by Longleaf tomorrow to see what my brother Jasper can tell me. He knows the old lore backward and forward.”
Both boys were silent for a moment, then Steren spoke up with the determined voice of a person not accustomed to being told no. “I’m coming with you, Aidan.”
Aidan shook his head. “No, Steren. This is my mission.”
“But you’re my best friend,” Steren insisted. “I can’t let you face that kind of danger alone.”
“We may be best friends,” said Aidan, “but your responsibilities to Corenwald outweigh your friendship to me. You’re the crown prince, King Darrow’s only heir. You can’t go galloping off to the Feechiefen Swamp.”
Steren saw Aidan’s point. “I’ll pray for you, Aidan,” he said. “Every day.” He turned to leave, then stopped.
“Was any of it true, Aidan? About you believing that you’re the Wilderking?”
It was a hard question for Aidan to answer. So he answered another question instead: “No one has ever been more loyal to the House of Darrow than I am.”
Chapter Five
Home Again
Aidan was about to turn his horse off River Road and into the cart path leading to the manor house when his brother Percy burst through the gate at a dead run and lurched to a stop in front of him. Percy was eighteen now, and his responsibilities at Longleaf Manor were growing as he moved into manhood. But in his enthusiasms, he was as boyish as ever.
“Aidan!” he shouted breathlessly, not even bothering to say hello to the brother he hadn’t seen in nearly a year. “You’ve got to see this!” He grabbed the horse by the bridle and, horse and brother in tow, ran down the trail that led to the River Tam.
Aidan was anxious to see his father, his other brothers, and the old home place after so long an absence. But it was hard not to be carried away by Percy’s enthusiasm. “What’s at the river?” he asked. But as soon as the question was out of his mouth, the river came into view and he could see for himself.
Around the upstream bend a huge timber raft slid along the surface of the water. It must have been constructed from forty full-grown pine trees lashed together, and they made a floating floor more than half the size of the floor in King Darrow’s great hall. At the front of the raft, two men wearing buckskin and coonhide caps were straining at a long pole that reached into the water. The pole was an oar-sweep-a forty-foot-long paddle whittled from a single pine sapling and balanced on a waist-high oar bench. In the spring of the year, when the water was high, a skilled rafthand could stand at the back of a raft and, using that one long oar, guide a hundred tons of pine trees around any bend or whirl the River Tam might offer.
But these obviously weren’t skilled rafthands. The back of the raft was where the front was supposed to be, and the front was where the back was supposed to be. They were drif
ting down the river in a slow spin, in spite of their efforts with the oar-sweep. They were utterly at the mercy of the current. Aidan shielded his eyes against the high sun and peered upriver at the vast bulk of pine logs lumbering toward them, sideways now. “Who are those people?” he asked.
“A couple of gator hunters up from Last Camp,” answered Percy. “They bought a load of logs from a farmer clearing a field above Hustingreen.” The Errolsons watched one of the gator hunters get knocked into the river by the swinging oar-sweep, and Percy couldn’t help chuckling while the other hunter, the bearded one, fished him out. “They thought it would be a good idea to build the logs into a raft and float them down to Big Bend.”
“Big Bend?” snorted Aidan. “I’ll be amazed if they make it around the next bend. How do they expect to make it all the way to Last Camp?”
The Errolsons watched the approaching vessel get closer. For the moment it was oriented correctly: bow in the front, stern in the back. But it was already going into another rotation. “Ebbe was at Hustingreen this morning when they came barreling through,” said Percy, smiling at the old house servant’s description of the scene. “Said they had the whole village in an uproar. They came shooting out of the upper shoals like a hog on ice, taking out everything in their way. Smashed up a few fishing skiffs, barely missed the ferryboat, and the whole time those two swampers are shouting and yelling at one another, riding that sweep like a bucking horse.” Percy pointed at the raft and chuckled. “About like they’re doing now.”
The raft was less than a hundred strides away, and they could hear the hunter-raftsmen yelling at one another.
“Pull to the starboard!” called the one with a beard.
“I am pulling to the starboard!” shouted the other, obviously irritated.
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