Steampunk Hearts

by Jordan Reece

  They parted so that Keth could swing the cage around a boulder in a field. When they came back together, Volos said, “To be the tracker is a gift that can be given to anyone in the Cascades. I did nothing to earn it. Just as easily could it have gone to any of my older brothers, or the schoolhouse master, or one of the crier’s daughters. The ability to track is special, yet I am not. I am only Volos. Cusano taught me this as his finger traced where my baby nail scratched down his cheek when he was a little boy. Should my ability fade tomorrow, he still loves me. My other brothers will still love me; my mother will still love me. But that boy . . . that boy with the deceptively soft eyes, he would not.”

  “And Lith was not that way, I take it,” Arden said.

  “No! He never dropped my name at a shop. That would have been repugnant to him. He wanted to be his own man. That mattered to him even more than it should. My special ability did not make him less special. He would have learned this in time, I hope, but then he was taken to the grave.” Volos breathed and turned wistful. “I can smell home in that breeze.”

  The ground grew so broken, rocky, and wearisome to travel upon that they went back to the road, but then her scent twisted away from it and returned them to the troublesome process of moving a cage over forbidding ground. At last it became so impossible that Master Maraudi commanded them to stop.

  The tracker was removed from his cage. He was heaved up onto Arden’s horse, wrists shackled and ankles left free. Master Maraudi looked up to him in warning and said, “If the penchant reports any problem to me, tracker, any problem at all, then your legs will be shackled again. I’ll have you riding this horse on your belly. It will not be comfortable for you.”

  They quit the cage, having no choice in the interest of time, and rode faster after the scents of the princess and her man, which were moving again but did not go far. Farther and farther the scents drew the search party from the roads, until the only ones they came across were barely-used scratches in the dirt. Fairly fresh hoof prints were in it, two horses stepping side by side.

  Rumpled black hair was constantly flying back into Arden’s face, and with permission, he braided it. The strands were soft. Ahead of them, Master Maraudi and Keth rode through a thick haze of insects buzzing about in a golden shaft of light between trees. They batted at their heads once through.

  “Will you part those?” Volos asked. “Can you with minds so small? I do not wish bugs in my teeth and up my nose.”

  “It is with the smallest minds that I exert the greatest control,” Arden said, tying off the braid and looking to the cloud of insects. Dieter rode through them and then coughed violently, leaning over to gargle and spit on the ground. Forcing himself into the bugs’ minds, which took even less effort than the dragons’, Arden parted them like curtains at a theater. They rode through the light unmolested.

  “You must be the most popular man at the zoo with your penchant,” Volos commented.

  “Quite the opposite. I am the most loathed,” Arden said. “I am the only one with a penchant for animals, and not high enough in position to command their respect.”

  “So they hate you for it. We have no penchants in the Cascades, although we know what they are. They are simply not born to our families, just as trackers are not born to yours in Odri. That is a strange magic, the penchants of Odri, Havanath, and Loria. How did you learn of your skill, or did you always know?”

  “I knew nothing as a child. I liked animals but never recognized my affinity for commanding them as anything unusual. There were few animals around the orphanage anyway, except the carriage horses. It was the matron at the orphanage who noticed how I rarely had to flick the reins to direct them or make them behave. One was quite naughty when she was driving, but it never gave me as much trouble. She reported me, I was tested, and then I was claimed for the king. After that, I was assigned to the zoo.”

  “Do you like the zoo?”

  “No.”

  “But this you’ll do forever, work in a zoo and surrounded by people who dislike you so? You are a more patient man than I. Humber and I would pay to have someone of your abilities when we’re off to track sheep. It makes us insane to do it. They’re silly creatures and it damn near broke our backs when we were leading back Sor Dane’s ewe and her newborn triplets. We had to carry the babies and sheep don’t look up. So she didn’t see them over her head and had a panic about how they had turned invisible. Running this way and that way in search. We had to walk bent over so she could see them, and this we did in rain and hail and wind for almost a mile upon shifting rocks. But you, you could have just said into her mind to come and she would have followed. Yes, I would have kissed you in gratitude had you been there.”

  “Are you trying to lure me to the Cascades?” Arden teased, feeling the tracker’s soft lips on his hand.

  “Why not? Is there something in Odri that holds your heart? Come to the Cascades, Arden, we have no one there of your skills and they will be in demand. Perhaps it scares you to think of leaving what you know, even if what you know is unkind to you. But the pearls will not be foreign to you.”

  “How could they not be? I have never been there.”

  “Places are only foreign when you are alone, and no one is alone in the pearls. You will be taken into a family even as a grown man. And you will not be there three days before some child comes tap-tap-tapping at the door with a plea to command her kitten down from a tree, or Humber and I with long faces and a track to make after sheep. My mother will command your presence at Sevenday dinner because she loves a full table, and she will tell you of every eligible woman in all the pearls until you confess your leanings and she switches to every eligible man. Yes, and within a year, your doorstep will see such traffic as mine in wood for your fire, jams for your pantry shelf, meat pies and baskets of apples. This will happen with the kittens in trees, the sheep in the woods, the pigs freed from fences. Give in the pearls and they give back in spades. And there is a man named Oloni who will be quite interested in you.”

  Arden laughed. Dieter turned around and Arden called, “Just a rabbit tripping over its own clumsy feet.” He had to be more cautious when he was in Volos’s company, or the others would suspect he was being hoodwinked.

  “Will I have my minute?” Volos asked quietly once the squire had turned away.

  “You will have as many as I can grant,” Arden said, and not because he was hoodwinked. He felt instead that Volos was opening his eyes.

  “Then fourteen is indeed a lucky number. I will go as quickly as I can, and I will try to find a healing penchant or jeweler to trade these in.” He opened his shirt pocket and Arden peered over his shoulder to a small collection of dragon scales. Those would not feed him for long. Arden opened his pouch, moved aside his carved dragon, and withdrew three silvers and several coppers. He dropped those into the pocket after checking to make sure that no one in the search party was looking back.

  “Thank you,” Volos whispered. “You will ever hear this on the winds from the goddess rocks, which rest low the pearls but stand tall to the sky. May I ask a question?”

  “Yes.”

  “You really would never consider leaving Odri?”

  When Arden didn’t know what to say, Volos filled the silence. “This is the most cruel part of living within a cage for so long. Having every decision made for you so that you do not know how to make a decision for yourself. I do not mean this rudely. I am sure you make many decisions at the zoo for the animals. But you do not make them for yourself. A grown man, Arden, but always a boy doing what he is told. You can be more than this. You may not know how, but it is not too late for you to learn. For you to tell the king, by words or actions, that you belong to yourself.”

  “A poor way to repay him,” Arden said. “For through his orders, I have been fed and provided work when so many hunt for it; he despises foolishness among his staff and gave me an education. I am better off than many men of Odri.”

  “You may have benefited, but he
did this only for himself, and you traded away your life for it. Did you ever have a voice?”

  Arden had neither been meek nor brash as a boy. He had spoken up when something mattered, and held his peace when it did not. But then he had gone to the perindens, and meekness had been forced upon him to survive. Meekness had become a protective cloak, and he learned over the years to wear it well. Uncomfortable with the conversation, Arden said, “I would speak of something else for now.”

  Volos nodded. “She will make you quite mad, should you come, listing all the men of the pearls over your meat and potatoes. But she means well, trust in that.”

  “Will she include you in that list?”

  “She will. I’ll sit there with my face in my hand as she does. She’ll want to know everything about you. Who was your mother, who was your father . . . what kind of furnishings you want for your home . . . do you like to read, can you read, try this book, what did you think of it . . . if you want children and would you open your door to a fisher’s baby. Oh, she will go on and on at you.”

  “A fisher’s baby?”

  “The fishers in my region worship strange gods, and hold to beliefs that twins are a slap in the face to those gods, and that a man with too many sons or daughters should send back the newest until he gets what sex he is short. Those gods and beliefs came to them from the seafolk, to whom the region’s fishers are distantly related. So the babies come down the River Shayle in baskets, the unwanted ones, now and then. The lowest of the pearls butt up right to the fishing communities, as I’ve told you, and my people rescue these children from being dumped out into the sea. Their gods are not our gods; their beliefs about children are repellent to us. A girl cannot help being a girl; a boy cannot help being a boy; twins are not responsible for the sibling to grow beside them in the womb. A crier carries the child or children among the pearls until arms reach out to take them. We treasure what they throw away. Lith and I were planning to . . . well, some plans do not come to fruition.”

  Volos stopped speaking to study the sky, and then he gathered himself to continue. “As you and your man will not be able to bear children together, and as there are men and women married to one another who cannot bear either for some reason, these children will be offered to you first so that your family name can continue. If that is what you wish, my mother will tell the crier. Sooner or later, your sons and daughters will come to you.”

  “I would take them,” Arden blurted, seeing the gentlemen and their niece playing at the fountain in the palace courtyard. “I would take all of them.”

  “We are at the border,” Keth called. They came to lines of little streams choked by greenery and stopped there. Keth scanned the map and nodded to herself. “These can be nothing but the Strings.” That meant beyond them were the wildlands. There was nothing particularly wild about the land beyond except the foliage, which was wild in the extreme.

  They dismounted and led the horses in, Volos remaining seated since he could not be much help with his hands shackled. The horses disliked walking in the streams, which were clotted with underwater plants, sticky mud, and small, leaping fish. When they grew balky, Master Maraudi called Arden to the front of the search party. He pushed into their minds with pleasant thoughts, and they followed him placidly to the other side.

  Keth found their exact position on the map, which showed two tall boulders within the Strings that they could see just west of them. The map also showed a nearby road. Yet again, the scent of the princess did not stray in its direction. Volos pointed away from it.

  Their journey through the woods on a rough path led them farther and farther from the port where a Loria-bound boat would be found. At last, Master Maraudi called out decisively, “She is going to Havanath. That’s the only solution left unless she’s planning to set up shack in the middle of nowhere and till the soil for her meals. Havanath is the sole land going this way. What is her pull to that region, Keth?”

  “She enjoyed her visit there years ago, but no more or less than she appeared to enjoy Loria. She speaks Hav fluently, as she does several languages.” Reluctantly, Keth said, “It was Hav that pleased her the most, both the language and literature.”

  “Who does she know of consequence in Havanath?”

  “She has many distant cousins there, none I would estimate as of consequence. The Havanath ambassador Lord Irabeen lives in Lighmoon, but he is decades her senior and they have exchanged no more than common courtesies. She has a lady’s maid from Havanath, her language tutors, of course . . .”

  Arden did not listen much. To give the tracker a head start on his escape, to point a finger in the wrong direction and send the search party dashing after nothing, this would not be hard to do. Opportunity would come on any morning when the others were still asleep. But to go along . . . did he take his horse? It was not truly his. Travel on foot? The soldiers could not track by scent, but footprints in dirt and crushed grass were signs easy to follow, and their horses would overtake him and Volos even if they were running.

  “Why are you encouraging me to do this?” Arden asked. “To go along?”

  “I like you,” Volos said simply. “I wish to know you better, and I wish to go home. I can only have both of these things if you come. You can push into my mind a little, yes? And see the truth of this?”

  Arden might have that ability, but he didn’t want to push into Volos’s mind. He wanted to trust that these were not lies rolling from Volos’s tongue to win his freedom. The silence grew long between them until Volos said, “I do not think you are going to want every single child to wend down the river in a basket. You may end up the father of twelve naughty children and gray before your time.”

  Master Maraudi looked back to see how everyone was coming along, so Arden did not respond. To return to the perindens and remember every day that he had passed up a chance for more . . . it would poison him. Yet he knew the perindens. There was comfort in what was known.

  Dear Dagad, he was overcome with a wild desire to never return to the palace, to walk those branches of animals he dreaded and collect baleful looks for decades. But to go with Volos to the Cascades . . . that was madness.

  Something unpleasant bridled in his chest. When had he become so timid? He led his life with no more direction than a baby swaddled to its father’s chest. To leave would require courage, and as he scavenged his mental stores for such a trait, he came up short. He was the king’s perpetual child. He was Tolaman’s perpetual child, a man that Arden could not stand in the slightest. Arden was even less than a child to the first lead. He was an animal to be ordered around and kicked.

  To be so cowardly made him angry. And that, perversely, made him swell with determination to flee. If Volos was using him for freedom and discarded him afterwards . . . it would hurt, but it was of no consequence to the decision. Arden would shave his head, or dye his hair, and find other clothes. He would run away where the king’s forces would never find him. To the Salts possibly. It would be easy to vanish there, and he did not need to earn his coin by working in zoos or for breeders. His penchant could not be used at a job upon a fishing boat, where people would see it and talk, but he had money in his pouch. He could buy a little boat of his own and command the fish to leap into it.

  Even the fantasy of it frightened him, but he fought against the fright fiercely. He was not a prize Halulus to be kept in his stall at the palace; he was a man with a desire to be elsewhere than Lighmoon, and he should have that right. The king would not grant this, so Arden would grant it to himself. West to the Odri coast, a boat on the sea, more coin in his pouch from the sales of the fish, and maybe at a pub or a bar at an inn he would spy a man with rumpled black hair and sea green eyes . . .

  No. Arden would avoid that man. It would make him remember.

  That night was spent uncomfortably. The ground could not be cleared of the natural twists and turns in its formation, or the thick roots bumping up from beneath. Indeed, they could not even all fit into the same clearing.
The trees grew too closely together. Master Maraudi had Arden adjust the chains of the wrist and ankle shackles, shortening them so that the tracker could barely move his hands and feet apart. Then Arden was ordered to tie him up further with the reins looped around a tree.

  “Will we be doing this often?” Volos queried in a sly whisper as Arden restrained him. “Do not hear a complaint in this. It just isn’t usually how I’ve started up with fellows in the past.”

  “Every night, as I have been commanded,” Arden muttered as Master Maraudi retreated to the next clearing.

  “Interesting.” Volos inspected his bondage. “I’m usually the one doing the restraining, and a fair bit better than you. You have much to learn.”

  Something in Arden’s stomach dropped to his groin at the friendly lewdness. He just smiled and continued to tie up the tracker, ignoring Dieter’s grouse to make the bindings extra tight.

  “How far off is her smell?” Master Maraudi called.

  “She’s barely budged,” Volos said. “I’d say we’re less than two days behind her now. She’s northwest of us, more north than west.”

  “That could indicate the Five Brothers,” Keth said in grim triumph. “She is going to Havanath, and crossing the five rivers instead of taking the roads. That will slow her up considerably in waiting for the ferries.”

  To have a firmer answer to this mystery heartened both of the soldiers, who roused at first light and woke everyone. They further decreased the distance when the princess failed to move until midday. Then the ferry presumably carried her over one of the brothers, which were called that for the five brothers of long ago who steered the first boats over the water for travelers. From there she and her man went slowly. Their scents came strongly in every breeze, of which there were many that day.