The Way of the Wilderking wt-3

by Jonathan Rogers

  The Way of the Wilderking

  ( Wilderking trilogy - 3 )

  Jonathan Rogers

  The Way of the Wilderking

  Jonathan Rogers

  The Wilderking Chant When fear of God has left the land,

  To be replaced by fear of man;

  When Corenwalders free and true

  Enslave themselves and others too;

  When justice and mercy disappear,

  When life is cheap and gold is dear,

  When freedom’s flame has burned to ember

  And Corenwalders can’t remember

  What are truths and what are lies,

  Then will the Wilderking arise.

  To the palace he comes from forests and swamps.

  Watch for the Wilderking!

  Leading his troops of wild men and brutes.

  Watch for the Wilderking!

  He will silence the braggart, ennoble the coward.

  Watch for the Wilderking!

  Justice will roll, and mercy will toll.

  Watch for the Wilderking!

  He will guard his dear lambs with the staff of his hand.

  Watch for the Wilderking!

  With a stone he shall quell the panther fell.

  Watch for the Wilderking!

  Watch for the Wilderking, widows and orphans.

  Look to the swamplands, ye misfit, ye outcast.

  From the land’s wildest places a wild man will come

  To give the land back to her people.

  Chapter One

  Intruder in the Swamp

  A civilizer captured in the Feechiefen. More civilizers on the way with cold-shiny spears and swords and axes and saws. The swamp was abuzz with rumors of new civilizer trouble. When the news reached Bug Neck, Dobro Turtlebane and Aidan Errolson-or Pantherbane, as the feechies knew him-left immediately. They poled all night for Scoggin Mound, where Chief Tombro’s feechies held the captured civilizer.

  The chill of morning was still on the air when Aidan caught his first glimpse of the towering spruce pines of Scoggin Mound. Well before they could see the island itself, the high, nasally shouts and squeals of a dozen excited wee-feechies carried across the black water to the ears of the two flatboaters.

  Then, above the wee-feechies’ shrill racket echoed a deeper, prolonged scream-a scream of fear and helplessness. It couldn’t have come from a feechie.

  It had been three years since Aidan had heard the voice of another civilizer. It had been that long since Aidan had fled the dangers of his civilized life and taken to the swamp to live the life of a feechie. Three years since he had worn anything besides his snakeskin kilt and the panther cape to which he owed his feechie name. Three years since he had eaten from a plate or ridden a horse or been inside a building. With his face and hands daubed with swamp mud, his matted hair draping almost to his shoulders, he hardly looked like a civilizer. He himself had almost forgotten what he was. But something about that throaty howl of human terror-so out of place in the Feechiefen-brought Aidan back to a world he had almost left completely.

  With brisker strokes Aidan and Dobro poled for Scoggin Mound. The civilizer’s shouts grew even more desperate. “Help me!” he wailed. “Help!” It was a prayer of desperation. And Aidan somehow knew he was the answer to the civilizer’s prayer.

  The flatboat had scarcely grounded itself before Aidan and Dobro leaped nimbly onto the white sand of the landing at Scoggin Mound. Aidan and Dobro hadn’t spoken a word to one another since they first heard the shouts of the wee-feechies, and they didn’t speak now as they pounded down the trail toward the ruckus.

  When Aidan and Dobro crashed through the palmetto and into the clearing, there was already so much commotion that nobody noticed them. It took Aidan a few moments to understand what was going on. A tight knot of wee-feechies was gathered beneath a moss-hung oak tree, arranged in a half circle with their backs to Aidan and Dobro. Though they could hear the civilizer well enough, all Aidan and Dobro could see of him was his boots and black leggings, dangling above the wee-feechies’ heads and suspended upside down by a vine rope looped over a branch. A cluster of wee-feechies at the other end of the vine rope raised or lowered their captive by pulling or giving slack.

  The screaming of the civilizer was more or less constant, but it grew louder when his tormentors lowered him and less urgent as they raised him. Aidan understood why when he took a step closer. The weefeechies were gathered around an alligator they had rustled from the swamp-a hungry one by the look of things. It lunged and snapped at the civilizer every time the wee-feechies lowered him, and though the alligator hadn’t caught its dinner yet, it wasn’t missing by much.

  When Dobro understood what the wee-feechies were up to, he was impressed with their ingenuity. “Heh, heh,” he chuckled. “Them’s some clever rascals.” But when he noticed the grim look on Aidan’s face, he quickly changed his tune. “Hey, you bumptious scapers!” he yelled at the wee-feechies. “You barbous stinkers, you criminals, you rowdies! Leave that civilizer alone.”

  “Ooik!” shouted one of the wee-feechies. “It’s Pantherbane and Dobro!”

  The youngsters scattered, howling with frustration and disappointment. “I don’t never get any fun!” one of them complained.

  “What I’m supposed to feed my alligator now?” asked another, to nobody in particular.

  The wee-feechies who held the rope scattered, too, and when they did, their civilizer thudded to the ground, almost on top of the alligator. Though bound hand and foot, the poor civilizer managed to roll away from the alligator’s first lunge. Before it could make a second, Aidan ran up its back and held its jaws shut.

  Dobro, meanwhile, was cutting through the vines that tied the civilizer’s feet and hands. While he was getting the powerful reptile under control, Aidan could hear Dobro talking to the civilizer.

  “You know how younguns is,” Dobro was saying. “Always wanting to frolic, always getting into some mischief or other.” From the way the civilizer’s back was heaving, it appeared he was still gasping for air; in any case, he wasn’t answering Dobro. But Dobro didn’t seem to notice. “If my remembrance don’t mistake me,” he continued, “a passel of wee-feechies set old Aunt Seku on Aidan here the first time he come to Scoggin Mound. She ’bout skewered him on the spot.”

  The civilizer looked over his shoulder at the young man astride the alligator. “Aidan?” the civilizer asked. He nodded in Aidan’s direction. “His name’s Aidan?”

  Aidan was concentrating on the task at hand, but when he heard his name spoken, he looked into the civilizer’s face for the first time. His mouth dropped open in astonishment. “Percy!” he shouted, at last recognizing his brother.

  Chapter Two

  News from the Outside

  The two brothers stood staring at one another. Percy knew his brother’s voice, and he recognized the broad-shouldered frame shared by all the Errolson brothers. But seeing Aidan in this feechiefied state was disorienting. Percy was sure he had found his brother, and yet he wasn’t sure.

  The alligator, meanwhile, saw a second chance to get a bite of civilizer, and it meant to take it. It lunged at Aidan, but Dobro picked up a stick left by one of the wee-feechies and brought it down on the alligator’s snout, then chased it into the water nearby.

  “Aidan?” asked Percy. He rubbed fingers in a circle on Aidan’s forehead, trying to get through the swamp mud. “Is that you under there?”

  Aidan embraced him. “What are you doing here?”

  “Looking for you,” Percy answered. “Bringing a warning.”

  Aidan’s eyes narrowed in concern. “What kind of warning?”

  “Darrow’s army,” Percy said. “
They left Tambluff a week ago, marching for the Feechiefen.”

  Dobro had rejoined the conversation by now. “Why you reckon a army of civilizers wants to drown theirselves in the Feechiefen?” he asked.

  Percy looked careworn and uncharacteristically somber, older than his twenty-one years. He took a long look at Aidan before he spoke. “It’s you they want, Aidan.”

  Aidan went pale beneath his coating of mud. “Why me?” he asked. “What trouble have I been to King Darrow? Why now? I haven’t left this swamp in the last three years.” Aidan hadn’t even seen the king since the night he’d taken the frog orchid to Tambluff Castle. His hard-won offering was met with the king’s implacable hatred and jealousy. Aidan was still a boy then in most ways, a mere fifteen years old. But even then he knew enough to realize his life had changed forever. Rather than provoke further outbursts by the king-and rather than endanger his father and brothers-Aidan had exiled himself to the Feechiefen. There he had stayed ever since, unaware of what was happening in the Corenwald of the civilizers.

  “You don’t know about the Aidanites, do you?” Percy asked.

  “The Aidanites?” Aidan’s brow wrinkled in confusion.

  Percy took a deep breath. This was going to take some explaining. “The Aidanites,” he repeated. “They’re your followers. They think they are anyway.”

  Aidan’s head was swimming. “How can I have followers when I’m not leading anybody?”

  Percy shrugged. “They call you their king in exile.”

  Aidan gasped. “I never claimed to be anybody’s king!”

  Percy’s sense of the ridiculous was starting to reassert itself. He couldn’t help but chuckle. “Funny, isn’t it? In a strange sort of way. The Aidanites go around tacking copies of the Wilderking Chant on trees and buildings all over Corenwald.”

  Percy launched into the Wilderking Chant: When fear of God has left the land, To be replaced by fear of man; When Corenwalders free and true Enslave themselves and others too; When mercy and justice disappear, When life is cheap and gold is dear, When freedom’s flame has burned to ember And Corenwalders can’t remember What are truths and what are lies, Then will the Wilderking arise.

  Aidan interrupted the recitation. “Who are these people?”

  Percy shrugged. “I don’t really know. They operate in secret mostly. I don’t know whether there’s a dozen of them or a thousand or ten thousand. But you’d better believe they’ve got King Darrow wound up.”

  “Oh no,” said Aidan, holding his face in his hands. “Oh no.” King Darrow had been insanely, murderously jealous of Aidan when he had no reason to be. What must he be doing now?

  “The king has declared us all outlaws,” Percy said. “Father, you, me, Brennus, Jasper-Maynard, too, if he ever shows his face in Corenwald again.”

  Outlaws. The word hit Aidan like a hammer. Their father Errol, one of the Four and Twenty Noblemen of Corenwald, King Darrow’s most loyal subject. A magistrate for Hustingshire and the entire Eastern Wilderness, Errol had been the only law between Longleaf Manor and Last Camp, fifty leagues away. Now he and his sons were outside the law’s protections; any criminal Errol had ever sent to prison, any jealous rival, any miscreant in Corenwald could commit whatever crime he pleased against Errol or his family, and the law of the land would do nothing about it.

  “When did this happen?” asked Aidan.

  “About two years ago,” his brother answered. “We left Longleaf in the autumn two years ago.” Outlaws couldn’t own land or pass it on to their heirs, and even if the law allowed it, it wouldn’t have been safe to stay. “King Darrow gave our lands to a Fershal from the Hill Country-Lord Fershal, as he’s called now. He took Father’s place among the Four and Twenty Nobles.”

  Aidan felt as if the solid ground below him had turned to quicksand. Errol had shaped Longleaf Manor out of pure wilderness. Its lush plantings and spreading meadows, its teeming fishponds and fruit-heavy orchards had been his life’s work. The man and the land had survived both drought and flood. Errol had protected his lands from the never-ending encroachment of wilderness-from the weeds and creeping vines that flourished in the rich loam of the floodplain, from the bears, cats, and wolves that carried off his stock. He had defended Longleaf from invading armies, twice rebuilding his house and barns after Pyrthen attackers had burned them to the ground. He had seen five sons born there. There his sweet wife had died when he was still a relatively young man. And now Longleaf Manor, which the armies of Pyrth had never been able to take from Errol or his sons, had been given to a stranger.

  When he could speak again, Aidan asked, “So where have you been these two years?”

  “We’ve been at Sinking Canyons most of the time.”

  Dobro whistled. “Sinking Canyons?” he asked. “About a two days’ trot south of Bayberry Swamp?”

  “That’s right,” said Percy. “Down in the Clay Wastes. Do you know it?”

  “I reckon I do know it,” said Dobro. “All feechiefolks knows about Sinking Canyons. Feechiefolks don’t ever go down in it though. Feechiefolks ain’t skeered of much, but we good and skeered of holes in the ground.” He shuddered. “I peeped over the side of Sinking Canyons once, but you better believe I run off in a hurry. Theto Elbogator told me that hole is still growing, still swallowing up a little more ground every day.” He shivered at the thought of it. “Every wee-feechie in the swamp knows a rhyme about Sinking Canyons. Their mamas teach it as a warning to stay away from that place.” He began a recitation: Fallen are the feechiefolks, In a gully, down a hole. No more fistfights, no more jokes, In a gully, down a hole. To the river, to the woods, In a gully, down a hole. Time to leave these neighborhoods. In a gully, down a hole.

  Aidan was getting impatient with this distraction from the matter at hand. He turned back to Percy. “What have you been doing in Sinking Canyons?” he asked. “How do you live there?”

  “It’s not all that bad,” Percy answered. “We live off the land, you might say. Lots of fresh game, berries, roots. Father was able to bring plenty of gold when we left Longleaf, and we send somebody to buy supplies every now and then in Ryelan or Duckington, the nearest villages.”

  Aidan was growing red in the face. “That’s no way for our father to have to live. He’s sixty-two years old!”

  “You boys is livin’ like feechiefolks!” Dobro said. “Living like you got some sense. ’Cept you living in a hole.”

  Aidan ignored Dobro. He was rolling now, beginning to warm to his subject. “Thrown off his own land! Forced to live in the wilderness!”

  Dobro chuckled. “His own land,” he mocked. “If you civilizers ain’t the beatin’est things. Two civilizers fussing over who owns a piece of land is like two bird lice fussing over who owns the craney-crow.”

  Aidan gave Dobro a sharp look but didn’t say anything. Turning back to his brother, he asked, “Does King Darrow know where you are?”

  “Apparently so. He sent a party of six scouts to Sinking Canyons looking for us a couple of years ago. But when they found us, they decided they’d rather stay with us than go back to the army. Darrow sent a second party to find the first party, and they decided to stay too. All twelve of them are still there.”

  “That must be helpful, having scouts in camp,” Aidan observed.

  “It has been. They’re used to pulling guard duty, and that’s freed up the miners to do more tunneling.”

  “Which miners?”

  “The Greasy Cave boys-Gustus, Arliss, and the rest of them-the ones who led you through caverns underneath Bonifay Plain.”

  “How on earth did they get there?” Aidan asked.

  “King Darrow outlawed plenty of people who were associated with you. The Greasy Cave boys, because he thought you were hiding in their mines. The hunters at Last Camp, because they helped you get to the Feechiefen and back when you went after the frog orchid. Lord Aethelbert and Lord Cleland-he had always suspected them of plotting with you when you were at his court. Most of those outlaws
have made their way to Sinking Canyons one way or another.

  “Then last week one of the Last Campers-Isom, I think it was-went to the village to buy some supplies and came back telling of a new rumor flying around. Folks were saying you had put together an army of feechiefolk in the swamp and were planning to march on Tambluff.” He picked up the Wilderking Chant where he had left off a few minutes earlier: To the palace he comes from forests and swamps. Watch for the Wilderking! Leading his troops of wild men and brutes. Watch for the Wilderking!

  “It seems King Darrow wasn’t in the mood to watch for the Wilderking any longer,” said Percy. “He decided to take the fight to you. He was gathering a force of a thousand men for an invasion of the Feechiefen.”

  At this news, Dobro perked up. “Invasion? That’s a kind of fighting, ain’t it?”

  Percy sighed. “I’m afraid so, Dobro.”

  Dobro jumped up and clapped his heels together. “Hee-haw!” he yodeled. “What some fun! I ain’t done no serious fighting since the Battle of Bearhouse!”

  “No!” Aidan groaned. “They can’t come to the Feechiefen!”

  “Let’s see here,” said Dobro, more to himself than to his companions. “A thousand civilizers”-he was scratching in the sand with a stick-“if every feechie whips about fifty civilizers…”

  “They’re staging from Last Camp,” said Percy. “They’ll be ferrying men across the Tam from there.”

  Dobro gave up scratching in the sand. “I never learnt no number figuring,” he said, “but I don’t reckon a thousand civilizers is near enough to go around.”

  “We can’t let a civilizer army come into the Feechiefen,” Aidan said. “They’d never survive here.”

  Percy nodded in agreement. “Father sent me to warn you and the feechiefolk. Now I see you aren’t the ones who need warning. It’s Darrow’s soldiers who are in real danger.”

  “You reckon there’s any way the king’d bring more’n a thousand fighting men?” Dobro interrupted. “A thousand civilizers ain’t hardly worth poling across the swamp for.”