Pickro poled the boat to the landing, and Carpo pulled Aidan from the boat by his tied hands. Looking very important and self-satisfied, they marched Aidan across the bare sand. The bustling little village stood still as they paraded through. Feechie blacksmiths in gator-hide aprons held their hammers aloft in midblow and turned their soot-blackened faces to follow the civilizer. Forge fires cooled as bellows-tenders stopped their work and gawked.
Aidan’s captors prodded him across the settlement to a wooden stockade surrounded by a palisade of upended pine logs sharpened at the top. There was a door in the wall facing the settlement, and beside the door stood two guards.
The guards were civilizers, the first civilizers Aidan had seen since Massey left him at the south bank of the Tam. They were short, broad, and well armed. “This here civilizer is Pantherbane,” Pickro announced to the guards. He gave them a second to be impressed by this information. “We brung him to the Wilderking.”
One of the guards ducked through the door into the fort. Carpo called after him, “Tell him it was Carpo and Pickro what captured him.” He winked broadly at Pickro and rocked up and down on his feet in smug self-regard.
The guard returned shortly. “The Wilderking says to take the prisoner to the holding cage. His Majesty will see the prisoner in his own time.” Carpo and Pickro were dejected. They turned to go, and Pickro called over his shoulder, “Make sure he knows it was Carpo and Pickro what brung him.”
Aidan’s guards marched him back to the northern edge of the island and into a cage made of thick bamboo poles. They locked the door with a crude iron padlock. The sun drilled down on Aidan. There was no shade, nothing to sit or lie on besides the bare ground. There was nothing to do but wait and watch. He waited all day, and the Wilderking never came.
Aidan spent the long day observing the scene around him. Behind his cage was the open swamp. In front was the feechie settlement. From where Aidan sat, he could see five different forges burning. Blacksmiths took the bars of iron that arrived on flatboats and pounded the metal into arms and armor. Some of it they pounded into more mundane implements, such as shovels and picks. Feechies scuttled back and forth with wheelbarrows, carrying finished armaments from the forges to the Wilderking’s stockade, carrying unfinished metal from the landing to the forges. Feechie timber crews went back and forth, sometimes with axes over their shoulders, sometimes lugging chunks of firewood to fuel the forges.
Aidan had never seen feechies look so busy. He had never seen feechies look so tired. And another thing occurred to Aidan. He had never before seen feechiefolk look so frightened. Every half hour or so, the door to the stockade swung open, and a pair of civilizer taskmasters came out. When they walked around the settlement, the feechies always started moving faster.
On Aidan’s second day in the cage, Pickro and Carpo came back. To Aidan’s horror, they had been assigned to be his jailers. It was like being in the flatboat all over again, with their incessant yammering. Aidan wondered if this was a cruel punishment the false Wilderking had devised for him. When they arrived at their posts beside the cage door, they were already deep into a conversation about what they were going to do after the Wilderking established himself as king of Corenwald.
“I ain’t raising none of them smelly sheep,” Carpo was saying, “but I might could get used to riding around on a horse. I’ll howdy all the pretty civilizer ladies, and they’ll howdy me. They’ll say, ‘Howdy, Mr. Carpo. How you come on this morning?’ and I’ll say, ‘Pretty tolerable good, pretty lady, except I got a bad case of the burps.’ And the lady’ll say, ‘You poor feller. I get the same way sometimes, but I eat a bait of latherleaf, and it mostly goes away.’”
Aidan groaned. “I promise you, that’s not what a civilizer lady would say.”
“What do you know about it?” asked Pickro.
“He’s just mad ’cause his folks ain’t gonna be in charge no more,” said Carpo. Aidan retreated to the back of his cage, away from the two feechies.
“I reckon I know what kind of house I’m gonna get,” Pickro announced. “I seen a great big civilizer house on the river, up on a bluff of honey-color sandstone. Right where the river bends around. Biggest thing I ever seen. It was made of sandstones piled up on each other. And it had a little creek in the front where you can keep your alligators if you get lonesome for the swamp.”
Aidan was trying to ignore the feechies, but he couldn’t help himself. “Tambluff Castle?” he blurted. “You want to live in Tambluff Castle?” He threw his hands in the air. “Let’s just say this impostor Wilderking does overthrow King Darrow and makes himself king of Corenwald. Do you really think he’s going to set you up with big houses and big estates? If he brings you to Tambluff, it will only be to get more work out of you.”
He swept his hand in a broad gesture. “Look at this place. Do you really think this is how the true Wilderking would do things? There’s no wilderness here. The trees are gone. The birds are gone. You can hardly breathe for the smoke.” He pointed at a group of feechies shuffling past with shovels over their shoulders. “Look at them! Look at you! You were a free and happy people before this Wilderking came along. He’s made you slaves. Not with chains but with empty promises of power and riches and ease.” He nodded his head toward the nearest forge, where sweating feechies were heaving big chunks of wood onto the fire. “Is this really the way you want to live?”
Aidan shook his head. “Don’t you understand? This pretended Wilderking has wiggled into the worst part of your nature, and he’s enslaved you. That’s not how the real Wilderking is going to do it.”
The feechies stared at Aidan, astonished by his outburst. They seemed to be considering what Aidan had said. But Pickro spoke at last. “Don’t listen to him, Carpo. He’s just jealous.”
“Just jealous,” repeated Carpo. “It’s like the Wilderking says: Civilizers ain’t gonna like it when feechiefolks come to get what’s ours.”
“That’s right,” Pickro added. “Wilderking says you civilizers think us feechiefolks is second-class sun-setters. But we ain’t.” Pickro folded his arms in the gesture of a man who has made his point. Aidan squinted at him, trying to make some sense of what the feechie had said.
“I don’t think he said ‘second-class sun-setters,’” said Carpo. “I think he said ‘second-class setter-suns.’”
Aidan blinked, still confused. Then a light dawned at last, and he couldn’t help laughing. “Second-class citizens,” he said. “The civilizers think you’re second-class citizens.”
“See?” said Pickro to his partner. “He don’t even deny it.”
***
Aidan’s second day in the cage went much like his first, except that the ceaseless, idiotic chatter of Pickro and Carpo was layered on top of the monotony and misery of being locked in an unshaded cage in the middle of a swamp. Aidan paced back and forth to keep his blood flowing, and he watched the dull-eyed feechies go about their daily labors. He watched smoke billow and curl in black violation of the Feechiefen sky. He saw plume hunters arrive with their hateful trophies and another plume bale go out toward the world of the civilizers.
But he still didn’t see the man who called himself the Wilderking.
The third day was very much like the second. The tedium and the sun’s unremitting glare, however, were starting to do their work on Aidan. He didn’t feel like pacing that day but instead lay in the back corner of his cage watching the sun make its way across the sky. The conversation of a new pair of guards sounded to Aidan more like the buzzing of wasps than intelligible speech. He left his duckweed cakes untouched and didn’t drink much of the water his captors provided.
Aidan didn’t even seem to notice that night had fallen or that Pickro and Carpo were back on post. He drifted into a fitful sleep that didn’t seem very different from the dull waking of the daytime. His dreams were confused and vivid. Calling out in his sleep, he spoke many more words than he had in the whole previous day.
The feechie settl
ement was midnight-still when Aidan began to awaken. A first-quarter moon hung high in a clear sky, spilling its silver light across the sandy desolation of Bearhouse Island. Aidan was startled out of a dreamy half sleep when he caught a glimpse of a white cloud hovering like a phantom just outside his cage. When his eyes adjusted, he saw that the cloud was a spray of egret plumes. It was a headdress, worn by a man-a civilizer, judging by his size-who crouched a few feet away. Aidan knew at once that, unless he was still dreaming, this had to be the false Wilderking watching him sleep.
“Who are you?” Aidan asked.
The visitor answered in a whisper. “I am you.”
“I am you?” scoffed Aidan. “Nobody talks like that.”
“All right then,” continued the stranger, still whispering. “I am what you might have been if you hadn’t been so stupid.”
Aidan tried to get a look at the stranger’s face, but the night was dark and his face was mostly obscured by the egret plumes anyway. The headdress seemed to glow with its own light, but it didn’t illuminate its wearer’s face.
“I am the Wilderking,” the stranger continued. “The boss of this swamp, as the feechiefolk say. And before long I’ll be the boss of all Corenwald.”
Aidan strained to hear any trace of a Pyrthen accent-indeed, any clue to where this impostor had come from. But any such clues disappeared in the whispered speech.
“You could have so easily been where I am,” the pretender continued. “But you didn’t seize your chance when you had it. That’s the only real difference between you and me.” He shook his head, and the egret plumes waved extravagantly. “After Bonifay, you had a lot of people convinced you were the Wilderking-civilizer and feechie alike. But you frittered it away. Did you think somebody was just going to hand you the kingdom?” He snorted a short, mean laugh. “And now it’s too late. Your moment’s past.”
Aidan racked his brain. A courtier? Was this someone he knew from King Darrow’s court? “You know a lot about me,” he said.
“I have made you my study,” the false Wilderking hissed back. With that, he left and made his way back to the stockade. Aidan lay listening to the raucous snoring of Pickro and Carpo, whose sleep was undisturbed. It wasn’t long before Aidan joined them in sleep. He dreamed of feechiefolk in Tambluff Castle.
Chapter Twenty
Fracas
While Aidan was trying to eat his breakfast the next morning, a fist-sized rock came sailing into Pickro’s helmet. Thwack! He slumped into a pile in front of Aidan’s cage. Pickro had scarcely hit the ground before Dobro Turtlebane whirled in like a tornado from behind the one tree remaining on the north end of the island. He snatched Pickro’s spear from the ground and cracked the butt across Carpo’s helmet. Carpo, too, dropped to the ground before he realized what was happening.
Dobro rattled the cage door, looking to make a quick getaway with Aidan. But he had never seen a padlock before-he had hardly ever seen a door-and he didn’t understand why the door wouldn’t open. “I’m gonna get you outta this cage,” he said, breathing hard. “I’m gonna get you out.”
Four Bearhouse feechies patrolling nearby heard the commotion. They saw their comrades lying motionless on the ground and a strange feechie trying to open the civilizer’s cage. They started running for Dobro.
“Oooik!” their leader barked. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“It’s locked!” Aidan shouted at Dobro. “It won’t open. Run away!”
But Dobro didn’t run away. He kept rattling the lock, pushing and pulling against the door that wouldn’t budge.
“I shouldn’ta left you at Scoggin Mound,” he kept repeating. “I shouldn’ta left you!”
“It doesn’t matter, Dobro. Run!”
The feechie patrol had Dobro surrounded, but Dobro paid no mind. He worried the lock and rattled the door, as single-minded as a raccoon. Cold-shiny spearpoints gleamed all around him, but he paid no mind.
The lead feechie gave the signal, and all four patrollers attacked. Preferring to capture him alive, they flipped their spears around and struck Dobro with the handles rather than the spearpoints. Dobro soon lay battered on the ground, unable or unwilling to rise.
The lead feechie was about to ask Aidan a question when the still, black water behind the cage erupted in a frothing tumult. A hundred feechies from the North Swamp had been lying beneath the surface since before daylight, breathing through reeds, and now they lurched up as one and charged, dripping clubs in hand, on the unsuspecting Bearhouse feechies.
They overwhelmed Dobro’s four attackers in short order, but the alarm went out across the island, and two hundred Bearhouse feechies answered the call. They came with swords, spears, and axes, all of shining steel. Their bowmen notched steel-tipped arrows to their bowstrings and pulled them tight. They laughed cruelly at the stocks and clubs of the North Swamp feechies; old-fashioned weapons had no place in the new world ushered in by their Wilderking.
But the North Swamp feechies were undaunted. They formed a line and faced their adversaries without flinching. The air crackled with tension as the two ferocious armies glared at each other across the clearing.
Behind the line of Bearhouse feechies, the door to the stockade swung on its hinges, and Aidan got his second look at the man who claimed to be the Wilderking. Stepping into the morning sunlight, he was a dazzling sight. A long robe of fuzzy white egret plumes trailed behind him, and around his head, egret plumes shot out in all directions like the rays of a fuzzy sun in the headdress he had worn the night before. Even in the daylight, the false Wilderking’s face was more or less obscured by the plumage. Beside him stood an old feechie in a wolf-hide cape-Chief Larbo, Aidan figured. Six thick-bodied civilizers, his bodyguard, formed a protective semicircle.
With a clear voice the false Wilderking addressed the Bearhouse feechies: “For this I have trained you, my hearties. You are strong of arm and strong of heart. Your steel is strong too.” He raised a plumed spear above his head. “For Bearhouse! For Larbo! For the Wilderking!”
The North Swamp feechies braced for the onslaught. But before it came, a wild cry echoed across the clearing:
Ha-ha-ha-hrawffff-wooooooooo… Ha-ha-ha-hrawffff-wooooooooo.
All eyes turned to the bamboo cage from which the watch-out bark had come. Aidan stood with his face pressed between the poles of his cage. Chief Larbo’s voice was the first to break the silence. “A watch-out bark!” he called across the battleground. He glanced at the spearheads and arrowpoints glinting all around. “If you don’t mind my saying, young civilizer, it looks to me like you the one ought to watch out.” The Bearhouse feechies snickered.
“That may be,” answered Aidan. “But you’d better watch out too. All of you.” The authority in Aidan’s voice captivated the attention of every feechie within earshot. “Things will never be the same if you turn those cold-shiny weapons on other feechies.”
“That’s what I know!” shouted one of the Bearhouse feechies. “Larbo’s boys gonna rise again!” A rumble of agreement rose among the Bearhouse feechies, punctuated by two or three enthusiastic whoops.
But Aidan’s voice silenced the crowd with a single word: “No!”
All eyes were once again on the civilizer’s cage. “If you win this battle for this pretended Wilderking, no feechie will ever rule in this swamp again.”
The false Wilderking’s plumage shook with rage, and he began to speak: “This fool has-” But a glance from Chief Larbo silenced him, and Aidan went on.
“If you turn a cold-shiny weapon on another feechie, you won’t be just killing a feechie. You’ll be killing all feechiedom.”
The Bearhouse feechies had been foolish, but they weren’t altogether stupid. They were listening to Aidan now.
“Today you have a choice to make.” Aidan waved his hand in a sweeping gesture to indicate all of Bearhouse Island-the forges, the desolate landscape, the Wilderking’s stockade. “Choose this, and you can never go back to the life you lived in your h
ome band. You can’t have both.”
Aidan noticed that the forest of spears across the battleground were held a little lower. He pressed his advantage. “And you’re not just choosing for yourself. You’re choosing for the mamas and sweethearts you left behind. You’re choosing for your daddies and your granddaddies, for the wee-feechies who can’t choose for themselves.”
Aidan looked into the silent faces of the Bearhouse feechies. “That’s all I have to say.”
In their training, the Bearhouse feechies had used their swords and spears to do all sorts of horrible things to fake enemies stuffed with graybeard moss. But now that real enemies were in front of them, they looked more like cousins and former bandmates than enemies. It’s not that they minded attacking the invaders. North Swamp boys had no business, after all, on Bearhouse Island. But how much fun could it be to cut them up with cold-shiny weapons?
The Bearhouse feechies threw down their swords, spears, and bows. The North Swamp feechies threw down their clubs. And the two lines rushed headlong toward one another with flying fists, flying feet, and flying leaps. The Battle of Bearhouse was on, and it was ferocious. Aidan had witnessed a few feechie fights. There was nothing in the civilizer world to compare to a feechie fight for sheer brutishness. Fighting bears would be more civil. The Battle of Bearhouse was a hundred such fights, raging in every direction.
Aidan hung from his cage poles, whipped into a frenzy by the fracas around him. On one hand, he longed to get at the impostor who had tricked and enslaved the Bearhouse feechies. On the other hand, he was thankful for the protection afforded by his bamboo cage. He did his best to cheer the North Swamp boys, but it was hard to tell who was who.
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