by Jordan Reece
Hanging out an open window upon the second floor was Conton Evry himself. Red-faced, he was beating dust and crumbs from a rug with fervor. The cleaning of the rooms was entrusted to his chamber-servants, but he had such fear of a spot of filth offending a guest that he checked them after the servants went through. He leaned out further and bellowed, “Repse! I’ll meet you downstairs!”
Elario let himself through the door to the common room. All of the tables were empty but one near the window, where two men were seated together. Each had a mug of ale, a half-eaten plate of food, and a weary expression. They looked like crop drivers. Harvest was a busy time for them, too, ferrying excess crop from each town along the Hopcross to Ballevue. Once Elario had known many of the drivers, and the crop dealers as well, but the contagion brought new faces to the job. New faces to almost everything.
Feet thundered down the stairs and Conton burst from a doorway. There were no calm or quiet Evrys; all of them stampeded about in high spirits from old to young and dawn to dusk. Wiping sweat from his forehead with a rag, Conton tucked it into his pocket and beckoned Elario to the counter in the back of the room.
“A shame, a shame, this!” Conton reached beneath the counter and drew up in distaste a bin of mud-splattered mail. “Have you ever seen the like? The sarge’s girl said the sarge cut too close to the edge of the road in getting around a fallen tree. He nearly lost the whole wagon and every last piece of post to the Muckwater Creek.”
The Muckwater was aptly named. As Conton sifted through the contents of the bin, Elario said, “I hope the damage isn’t too great.”
“Herbs, is it? I thought so. The moment the girl lifted the package from her satchel, still dripping, and read me your last name, I cried out to Nance for rags to wrap it up in. There it is.”
The innkeeper pulled out the rag-wrapped package and set it on the counter. The door swung open and he looked over Elario’s shoulder. “Veritte! Let me get your package for you. Pins and I won’t miss my guess because one stabbed through to my finger.” He dug into the bin again as the seamstress bustled up to the counter.
Elario moved his package over to the side and gingerly unwrapped the topmost rag. Odd. It was a strange shape, this package, cylindrical and a fair foot in length, with the width of his fist. His packages of herbs were usually on the rectangular, and three-quarters as long at most. The damage was to one end of the package, which was crushed in on itself like a boot had stamped it into the earth.
Unwinding another fold of rag, he beheld water-stained brown wrapping with REPSE written thickly in black and speckled with dirt. His first name was invisible under a dry sheath of mud, a bit of which flaked away as he rubbed at the package absent-mindedly.
N. There was an N before the REPSE. This was something for Jazan Repse, and the realization was a prick to Elario’s heart. He knew what this contained, seeds or a small farm implement, ordered long ago from Ballevue. It had likely been stuck in a mail sack and lost in the contagion, as many things were, recently rediscovered and sent on its way.
He turned the package over to see if the company was printed on the other side. It had gone into the mud, too, more and more of it flaking away onto the rags and counter. Stamped on the wrapping was a diamond-patterned circle enclosing three mountain peaks. Bewildered, he scraped clean the word beneath the peaks. Rathgate.
A mountain town, and far, far in the west. It had to be; collectively those mountains were called the Gates. Phaleros was framed on three sides by mountains, every side save north. Gate was always part of the name in those western mountain towns: Witgate, Solgate, Evengate, and apparently a Rathgate as well. Towns in the eastern mountains were denoted by win: Queenswin, Tellowin, Faywin, and more. They were remnants of the Old Tongue, gate meaning dusk and win meaning dawn. The mountains to the south of Alming were the Daine, so tall and treacherous that they cut off Phaleros from Bejeng. One could only reach Bejeng by ship. By the time the land below the Daine mountains was peopled, nobody spoke Old Tongue anymore, or carried on the tradition of including daine in the names of the towns and cities to sprout there.
Why would his father have ordered anything from Rathgate? This had to be an error. Jazan Repse had been born and died in Alming, taking very infrequent ventures in his life out to the larger world. No farther west than Ballevue, no farther north than Penborough, no farther east than Goat’s Rise, Jazan had lived in a small world, and was content. Elario had gone no farther either, nor dreamed of it. Most people in Alming had never even been as far as Penborough.
Turning over the package again, he examined the damaged end of the cylinder. Whatever caused it to crush had rent a tiny opening in the heavy paper. Elario tipped it to the light. Within was a rolled letter, small for the size of the package. It was tied with a ribbon.
A strange sensation came over him, as if he had stepped partially out of his own flesh. Just as his finger nudged into the hole to widen it, a clatter brought him back to his senses. Veritte was gone without Elario noticing; Conton was returning the bin to its place below the counter. Smiling, the innkeeper said, “How bad is it? The package was so light I feared everything spilled out.”
“It’s just a few sachets of powder banded together,” Elario lied, and the lie startled him for how it left his lips unbidden. “They look intact.”
“Good, good.” Conton swept the discarded rags out of sight. Most of the mud flakes went with them. “Then all’s well.”
“All’s well,” Elario echoed, his fist closing tightly around the cylinder. “Did the sarge’s wagon get fixed?”
“Oh, yes, he just cracked a wheel. He rolled in here some time ago on a new one to pick up his girl and on they went to Briars.” Conton motioned to one of his sons, who had stepped out from the kitchen in a server’s apron. “Bring your wet cloth, Riri, the counter needs a thorough wipe down!”
“Yes, Papa!” Elario moved out of the way as the boy hustled to the counter. The door opened and Conton called out merrily to the new arrivals about their post. He dipped behind the counter for a moment and popped up with two envelopes.
Elario went outside with the crushed end of the package held upright. There on the Sixes porch, he widened the hole and drew out an eggshell-white slip of paper. The ribbon about it was a black, dusty thing, and he pulled it away. Dropping it into the cylinder, he pinned the package under his elbow and unrolled the letter. The message was jerkily scrawled, giving the impression that the writer pressed the words to paper in anger or fear. Or haste.
Brother, I live, but not for long. The contents of this package are more precious than I have the time to explain, and I will die soon for what I have taken. Do not open the box and speak of it to no one. I bid you carry it to Westen at’Inamon of Drouthe, and he will know what to do. I dare not send it to him directly, and though the ties between us are loose, and regrettably of my own making, you are an honorable man and the only one I trust with such cargo. I am sorry to put you in danger, but I fear that I have. Burn this message, leave at once, and exercise caution at every turn.
The fortunes of the world rest within your hands, and everyone is an enemy. Bid you well, under Elequa’s favor, Hydon.
The date along the top was from nearly a month ago. With incomprehension, Elario read the message a second time. Jazan Repse had not liked to speak of his younger brother, who left Alming at the age of eighteen and never returned. A madcap, Jazan called him once in Elario’s hearing. There were madmen and madcaps, and those were two very different beings. A madman was beholden to the whims of his madness, talking to invisible beings or wandering into the mountains or the Wickewoods after some nonsensical aim. Some people were born mad; others became mad after high fevers or accidents damaged the brain. Many were sent to the Ballevue asylum for their own protection; they could not care for themselves. A madcap, however, was one of those lack-in-sense, fanciful fools who thought to traverse the Wickewoods to the Great Cities and hunt for fortune there. Those were children’s games that children gr
ew out of, but not all. A madman was not any more responsible for his actions than a baby, whereas a madcap made a deliberate choice to be foolish.
People rarely spoke of madcaps. It was impolite, though every family in Alming had a madcap or two somewhere in its generations. Hydon was the Repse family’s sole contribution to lunatic dreams. For all of Elario’s childhood, he believed his uncle long dead. Madcaps never returned more than once or twice from their roving, if they returned at all, because the Wickewoods always took their due.
But here was this letter in his fingers. Madcap indeed! These were the ravings of one utterly mad. Letting the letter roll shut, Elario looked again into the cylinder. A dark shape was caught at the uncrushed end.
He banged the cylinder into his open palm to jostle it free. A small black box fell out into his waiting hand. Silver hinges joined the two halves of the box. Both the box, and its contents, weighed no more than an ounce or two put together.
That sensation of uncanniness overcame him once more. Stepping out of himself yet likewise was he within himself, and simultaneously was the feeling that he was in neither place, nor was he even fully Elario Repse of Alming. It was the queerest of perceptions, and then it was gone. He was just Elario, as he had been before, holding a crushed package, a letter, and a box outside of the inn.
The door to the common room opened to release the crop drivers. He shoved the box into his pocket by reflex and went down the steps after them, his mind on Drouthe. Drouthe of all places! North of the Wickewoods, north of the capital, north of the golden ring, which were the grandest cities in Phaleros today. He recalled the name from a mistake in his schooling years, a fellow pupil naming Drouthe as a city of the golden ring, and the master correcting him that it was not. Drouthe was a trade town between the golden ring and the farm and fishing villages along the northern shore.
To demand Elario’s father carry this box there was insanity! And yet . . . and yet there was something very strange about it, some nameless peculiarity, inexplicable though undeniable, and prickling at his fingertips. It was hard to fathom that this little box was putting Elario in danger, here in tranquil Alming, where danger came only from dervesh, illness, and farming mishaps.
Ridiculous. Ridiculous! He’d have to leave immediately for Drouthe to get back before the first snow fell, as fast as this winter was coming on. And all on the word of a madcap thought dead for decades!
A bay horse drawing a wagon was turning off Cuthill Road a quarter-mile ahead of Elario. It was Orman, with Nyca stiff-backed and proud in the driver’s seat, his work scuffs changed out for his best trousers and shirt. After ten years of accompanying his father to the weigh-master and listening to the haggles of price between farmer and dealer, Yens was entrusting Nyca for the first time to do it on his own.
Elario was going to take this package to Yens once the crew was gone. Yens had known Hydon from youth, being raised in the same household as Repse and at’Matte children always were. He would know what to make of this. Having a set intention quickened Elario’s stride, and so perturbed was he about the package that he passed a half-dead creeper without stopping to clip its leaves.
Chapter Three
A moment of peace to speak to Yens was not to be found. Just as the crew moved on to Helm’s, Guye Blaine rode up with a sheepish face, a blood-soaked bandage upon his wrist, and a fresh meat pie as payment. In cutting apples from his trees with a sharp hook, he accidentally slashed himself. Elario put the pie on the kitchen counter and treated him at the worktable, bringing his store of prepared argetonia even lower.
Once the man was gone, Elario dumped out the pouches of leaves and separated them green from brown, the mixed leaves sided to the brown. The green went to the far end of his worktable, carefully laid out in rows to dry; the brown he chopped into pieces with a blade. Using his mortar and pestle, he crushed them to powder. A pinch in tea for a headache; mixed in a salve for a laceration or mild burn; he labored over his medicines in the living room as the day wore on, the box burning a hole in his pocket.
Then Nyca was back, the empty wagon rattling behind him. The stone-faced boy possessed twice the pride of before and a leather pouch of coins for Elario. The crop dealers had taken him for a child, a child who was unaware of the worth of his crop, offering him four silver bits per basket. Four-bit! It was an insult. Only the sorriest, most rotten crop was deserving of that little. They must have thought he had the same amount of brains as the tubers in the baskets.
Yens had trained him well, so Nyca countered ten-bit to be equally outrageous. In the end, they settled on seven-bit per basket, a very respectable number. Few farmers in Alming would haggle for any better price than that. Elario fingered one silver bit from the pouch and flicked it to Nyca in gratitude. Catching the coin, the boy went happily out the door to collect Jersey from the pasture, saying something over his shoulder about Hallowmas. Merrymakers traveled down the Hopcross for the holiday, bringing drums and horns, jokes and stories, and trinkets and oddities for sale or perusal. Elario’s hoarded coppers in his youth were spent on polished shells and scream-whistles and a stomach-ache’s worth of sweets.
Elario tidied the worktable, his curiosity about the box having grown tenfold in the intervening hours. Would it hurt so much, just to take a quick look within? There was a fair chance it contained nothing at all, and this was simply a further expression of Hydon Repse’s delusion. Elario could toss it with a lesson learned.
Yes. To turn this matter over to Yens in alarm, and for it to be nothing, would embarrass Elario tremendously. He was not a child to get caught up in fancies of peril and adventure.
Sliding out the box, he inspected it closely in the light from the window. It was as long as his little finger, and as tall as his second knuckle. The casing was a hard, smooth shell. He shook it and heard silence, which proved beyond a shadow of doubt the falseness of the letter’s claim. A small mercy that Jazan was not here to see this. How could he rejoice to learn of his brother’s life when his mind was not remotely intact? Sending an empty box and a paranoid letter . . . all was far from well with Hydon, and that was a pity.
Pinching the sides of the box, Elario edged up the lid. The hinges resisted him, but he forced the lid up slowly and peeked inside the crack to confirm his suspicions.
Something was inside, a swirling, luminescent golden glow, marble-shaped and moving. It was moving, these vaporous swirls, in the eddies and curls of water along a bank. Faster and faster they churned, flowing around the marble, pulling behind them a scarlet iris that stopped in the current and looked straight out to Elario.
Great Elequa! He inhaled in horror, releasing the lid. The hinges drew it down with a startlingly loud snap. The door opened and he jumped half out of his skin in terror, whirling around to the entryway.
It was Yens. In an instant Elario had the letter out, the package, even the ribbon, and he pressed these items upon his houseman. All he held onto was the box, which was back in his pocket. Yens read the message standing, his scuffs too soiled from the day’s work to take a chair.
Elario’s explanation was rapid and ill-worded; he did not know if he was making any sense whatsoever in his babble. “I thought it was nothing, truly nothing. The box weighs little more than air and made not a sound when shaken. I cannot tell you what it was I looked upon inside, only that it looked back.”
Nyca walked past the window with Jersey. She still had to be brushed and fed, and that would keep Nyca busy in the barn for a while longer. This unnatural thing had to be kept from him! One ill-advised whisper of it and all of Alming would know of the eye in the box.
Yens turned over the letter. Nothing was written on its back side, and he turned it again with his fingers rubbing on the ribbon. Then he set those things down to inspect the crushed package. “Rathgate,” he read, tracing the stamp. “What would have taken him so far west?”
“I have no idea,” Elario said. “All I’ve ever heard of Hydon was that he was a madcap, and I presumed him de
ad.”
“Certainly dead, as all of us thought, from the very first days he went missing.” Yens picked off mud flakes from the package, revealing the name of Elario’s father one letter at a time. “We buried him, in all but stone, and mourned him, though we were not much shocked. Those dreams of fortune he had at eight years old were just as strong at eighteen. He dreamed them to his death, as is the way of it for madcaps.”
“But Rathgate is nowhere near the Great Cities! Is this all some kind of trick?”
“Hydon was never prone to tricks, but I can only speak of him as a boy, Elario.”
“Please do. Anything to clarify this would be useful!”
Taking a scraper from the cup upon the worktable, Yens scaled away the mud in larger strips. “He was an honest boy, given to fancies and more than his fair share of greed, but honest. And for all he wrangled with your father and I as children, he was not a mean or spiteful soul. To lose a game to either of us provoked him, yet it never occurred to him to better his odds by cheating. That is Hydon in my memories. He just wanted more than what he had, always and forever, and was incapable of being content with his lot.”
Too agitated to sit down, Elario stood beside Yens as he worked with the scraper. “Did you know then that he would grow up to be a madcap?”
“Not then, no, not when we were boys. But his face, his face whenever we listened to the lost ballads! You could have set fire to his hair without him aware, so intent was he on the singer. Jazan liked them, as did I, but Hydon was rapt upon them. Utterly rapt for hours, even at seven years old. By ten, he had them memorized and sang them himself. All of them as we walked to school, or sitting on the stairs.”
“That is no small feat. I could not even do that now.”
“Nor I, but he mastered them. The Corpse King, Elequa’s Wrath, Fall of the Great Cities, Shadows in the Woods . . . His favorite was Jewels and Blood, of course, but that one is the favorite of most children. He was never the best of students, no, that was Jazan, but when Hydon attended to a subject of interest to him, his mind was as keen as a newly sharpened knife edge.”