We heard the duke’s man threatening Natty. His mechanical partner had become still.
I jumped to my feet. “We have to do something!”
Valory grabbed my pants leg. “You said not to draw any attention! We can’t go barging up there! Natty will just have to pay, that’s all!”
“It’s not about that!” I said. “They’re terrorizing this town! Somebody has to put a stop to it or it will just keep getting worse!’
“Emma—” Valory tried to argue.
“I’m going!” I said, heading for the ladder.
“Emma!”
This time is was Commander Larue who spoke. His yellow eyes blazed out of his ashen face. I stopped immediately.
He sucked in a ragged breath. “This isn’t your fight. Remember what I said? You must find Lord Finbarr.”
I ducked my head and said solemnly, “I know, Commander, but—”
“But nothing,” he said. He held the wrapped stone in his hands. “Let me handle this. I’m going out anyways. I might as well go out with a bang.”
I knew what he was going to do. Every bit of wanted to stop him, but I wouldn’t. Commander Frayne Larue deserved his honor.
He unwrapped the stone slowly, reverently, for the last time. His bare palm closed around it. Blood rushed into his face, restoring a touch of youth. His sagging skin became taut with lean muscle.
He stood up. The stone fell from his hands. It was black, cold and empty. The last of its magic flowed through Commander Larue in a visible stream of light. He glowed with it. Hard resolve showed in the lines of his face.
He wore no regal purple uniform. No diamond source crystal hung around his neck, but he was the man I’d come to fear and respect. I wished so much that his family could see him. Wouldn’t his brother, Jules, be proud? Wouldn’t Alice and Harriet stare in awe and swear to be just like him one day? They’d know. I swore then and there on my own life that I’d find them and tell them about their heroic uncle.
Valory and Trapper Toussant trembled as Commander Larue walked by. Valory’s wings drew up rigidly at the field of energy surrounding him. I stepped out of his way and gave him a salute.
“At ease,” Commander Larue said. “You stay out of the way until the mess is cleared up.”
I lifted my chin and tried with all my might not to cry. “Are there any other messages you want me to deliver?”
“Yes,” Commander Larue said. “If you see Chloe, tell her I apologize that I won’t be able to serve under her. It was my life’s greatest achievement to serve her father. And tell that no-good nephew of mine that I don’t mind if he tinkers with gadgets so long as he does it to crush the duke and his whole rotten regime.”
“Yes, Sir,” I said.
He climbed the ladder. Valory, Trapper Toussant and I climbed up quietly after him and held the trapdoor open just a sliver so that we could watch.
The duke’s man was shaking a handful of furs at Natty. “What’s this rubbish? Where are the gems, woman? You know we only take real currency!”
The mechaman stretched a metal arm over the bar towards Natty’s face. Natty quivered and pressed as far away from it as she could.
“That’s all the currency I got right now!” she said. “In this season people barter furs, not gems.”
The guard threw the furs at her with a vicious sneer. Then he snapped his fingers and barked an order at the mechaman. “Show this wench what happens when she disobeys a royal guard!”
The mechaman lunged over the bar. At the same instant, Commander Larue stepped out of the corner booth. In one lightning flash that lit up the inside of the bar like ten sunrises, he knocked the mechaman out. All the skin on its metal frame sizzled and then turned black. The monster lay lifeless at the guard’s feet.
“What the blazes?”
The words had barely left the guard’s mouth when Commander Larue shot deadly swords of ice at him. The guard gurgled, choked and fell in a bloody heap next to the mechaman.
Natty ducked behind the bar. The rest of the customers pressed against one wall and stared at Commander Larue with mixed looks of fear and amazement.
The swinging doors banged open and the guard who’d questioned us earlier entered the bar. Two more red capes came with him. They spotted their fallen comrade and let out cries of anger.
“Which one of you filthy, mud-eating hicks is responsible for this?” one of them shouted.
“That would be me,” Commander Larue said. He raised his hands and another flash of lightning felled all three men at once.
“He’s incredible,” Valory said with a gasp. “Almyra told me about magic, but I never knew it was like this.”
Three more guards burst into the bar. They came armed with meager magic of their own. Weak jets of flame flew towards Commander Larue. The aura of power around him grew even brighter and denser, blossoming into the biggest shimmering Fay wings I had ever seen.
The wings lifted Commander Larue above his attackers. Natty’s customers made sounds of awe. Nothing this exciting ever happened in Feegman’s Boot.
The three red capes revaluated their options and made a run for it. Commander Larue cast a vapor of ice at the doors, freezing them shut. The red capes smacked into them and fell to the floor. They scrambled to get away, but Commander Larue finished them off one by one. It took a barrage of icicles and two balls of lightning to rid Feegman’s Boot the of the duke’s men.
The bar patrons burst into applause. Natty held a hand to her forehead and looked as though she might faint. The bodies of seven red capes littered her pub. It was not going to be an easy clean up.
Commander Larue’s wings flickered. Though the others cheered and clapped, I saw what was happening to him. With each passing second his skin grew whiter. The hairs on his head withered and fell out. The hollows of his cheeks sank in. He was drying up, turning to a skeleton as all the magic left him in the form of starry wings. His body became a deadweight. I could almost pinpoint the exact second when all that remained of Commander Larue blinked out. In one instant, his yellow eyes still glowed in his skeletal face; in the next, their light vanished. The wings pulsed a final time with enough energy to fill the room with a blinding flash and then they disappeared. The commander’s body fell woodenly to the floor.
A ring of silent faces surrounded him. The events of the past few minutes had rendered even the drunkest patrons stone cold sober. For what seemed like a long time, they just stared at the body. Under the trapdoor I squeezed my eyes shut and buried my face in Valory’s shoulder.
Commander Larue had gone out fighting the way he wanted. Now I had a job to do and I couldn’t let him down.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The sun shone much too merrily for my mood the next morning. I stood before a fresh mound of earth. The modest grave was surrounded by stakes with upturned boots on their tops. It was no majestic pillar in the royal graveyard of Mag Mell. Under different circumstances, Commander Larue would have been buried near Ivywild’s most esteemed nobility.
“Seriously, what’s with the boots?” I asked Valory.
Valory shrugged. “I don’t know. I reckon it’s a sign of respect. All those folks seemed awful sad to bury him.”
“Here your path in this world ends, so I bestow upon you my leathers that you may have an easy journey into the next,’” said Trapper Toussant.
I looked up in surprise. I had not noticed him standing nearby.
“It’s an old country prayer,” he said. “That’s why we give up our boots for the departed. Looks like this fine gentleman has twenty pair. That’s the most I’ve ever seen.”
“Hey, what’s all that you’ve got?” Valory asked. She pointed to a large pack and a bundle of supplies next to Trapper Toussant.
“I’m going up into the mountains,” he said. “Most folks are. We’re emptying the town. That way, when the duke sends men to come looking for his missing guards, we can lay an ambush and make the fight a bit more in our favor.”
“That�
�s stickin’ it to em!” Valory said, slapping Trapper Toussant on the back. He nearly fell over.
Natty walked by along with five little Brownie children. They each carried rucksacks full of supplies.
“Going back to the old homestead?” Trapper Toussant asked her.
“Yes,” Natty said. “My Pa said he’d make room for us.” She turned and frowned at two of her children who were shoving each other. “Straighten up you two!”
The Brownies moved on. I noticed shop owners nailing their windows shut. Other families filed past on the road out of town.
“Where will you go?” Trapper Toussant asked.
Valory and I looked at each other.
“We have to find Lord Finbarr,” I said. “Unfortunately the trail has run cold and we have no idea where to look. Are you sure a Fay man with glasses never came through here?”
Trapper Toussant scratched his whiskers. “Not that I can recall. There was something I was gonna tell you, but I forgot until now. See, there’s rumors of a resistance group up north. I thought when you two came walking into town with all those furs that maybe you was a part of it and you was coming to barter for supplies. That’s why I took you under Natty’s bar to begin with. I’ve had no dealings with the resistance myself, but I know that back in the fall some Fay strangers came into town and bought up lots of provisions, like they were supplying a whole group of people, see? Natty and some of my other buddies helped them out with discounts.”
A flutter of hope filled my chest. “Really? When was the last time those Fay were here? Are they due back soon?”
“Don’t count on it,” Trapper Toussant said. “They’ve stayed away since the duke’s men took over.”
The hope fizzled out. I kicked a clod of dirt and sent it skittering down the road.
“Chin up,” Valory said. “We don’t have to wait around. We’ll find these resistance folks ourselves. We know they’re somewhere in the north, right?”
I grimaced. “Valory, north could mean hundreds of places. There are like, mountains and a huge forest and…I dunno, probably trolls and dragons and stuff.”
She grinned. Her wings twitched in excitement. “Don’t be such a prickly prune. You’re with the best tracker in these parts! All I need is something that one of the resistance folks bartered and a map!”
Trapper Toussant’s head snapped up and his eyes sparkled beneath their bushy brows. “Well now, I’ll tell you what! You need to talk to Natty. I think she has some jewelry that one of them fellows traded for a bag of grain. Meet me back here and I’ll get you your map.”
Trapper Toussant limped into town and vanished inside one of the buildings. Valory flapped her big wings and took to the air. Natty and her children were already quite a ways down the road. I had no hope of catching up, so I waited by Commander Larue’s grave.
I sat down and rubbed my palm on the fresh burial mound. I didn’t know what the citizens of Feegman’s Boot had done with the other bodies. I didn’t care. All that mattered was that I deliver Commander Larue’s message. I kept the stone he’d brought from Helm Bogvogny in my pocket. However sinister its origins, it was the last link I had to him.
Valory returned. She wasn’t wearing her fur coat. At first she seemed cross but she flashed me a smile and showed me a bracelet made of sparkling opals.
“Got it! One of those resistance people traded this bracelet to Natty and Natty gave the bracelet to her daughter on her birthday. Ornery little brat. She couldn’t even fit the thing around her wrist, but she wouldn’t trade it unless I gave her my coat.”
I admired the opal bracelet. It was a finely crafted piece of jewelry of the sort that only master artisans could make. I hadn’t seen anything so pretty since leaving Ivywild. “Sorry about your coat.”
Valory shrugged. “The days should be getting warmer now and it’s heavy, so I won’t miss it much. It’s just sentimentality. Almyra helped me make it.”
“What about the bracelet?” I asked. “Is there any scent left on it?”
Valory slipped the bracelet on her wrist and sniffed it deeply. “Once you get past the Brownie smell there’s a little hint of something that smells like flowers.”
“Fay women bathe in flowered water,” I said. “That must be it. Can you pick out a trail off that alone?”
“I can try,” Valory said, pushing her hair behind her ear. “If it’s been months since they last came this way it won’t be easy.”
Trapper Toussant reappeared with a yellowed, torn piece of cloth. It looked very old. The ink, probably made from a root, had faded to a light brown.
“What’s that?” Valory asked.
“The only map in the town of Feegman’s Boot,” Trapper Toussant said. “It’s been hanging in Clementine’s brothel for as long as I can recall.”
Valory wrinkled her forehead. “What’s a brothel?”
“Never mind that,” I said, taking the map. It smelled of pipe smoke and low-quality perfume. “Let’s see…there are no trails marked north of here.”
“Well of course a secret group isn’t gonna set up shop just off the beaten path,” Valory said, snatching the map from me. “Here’s what you’ve got to figure. They’ll need a steady supply of water, so it’s gonna be by a stream or something.”
My spirits sank again. “It looks like streams crisscross all over the place.”
“Right,” Valory said. “But there’s other things. See these pointy marks over here? That’s some real barren slopes. There’s no good hunting there and the weather’s always nasty, so we can rule that out.”
“That just leaves that big space with all those swishy markings,” I said, indicating one whole third of the map.
“The lower part of that is all saltwater swamps,” Trapper Toussant said. He blocked off part of the area with his hand. “Nobody would settle there unless they wanted to catch mudgump fever.”
“So what’s all that above it?” Valory asked.
Trapper Toussant pointed to an area of markings so thick that the ink had bled together in splotches. “Forest. It’s full of big, needle-leaf trees. Dryads don’t like to live in em’ because the sap is so bitter.”
“That has to be it!” I said. “Secluded with no Dryads around to give away the location…”
“Yep, and look at this,” Valory said. She pointed to a squiggly line that ran next to an inkblot. There might have been writing by it at one time, but now it was too faded to read. “What do you reckon that is?”
“Looks like some kind of building or town or something,” I said, turning the map around to see it better. “A river runs by it!”
Trapper Toussant smiled. “Sounds like you girls are on your way. I’ll be on mine. Good luck to the both of you. I still owe you a drink if you ever come back.”
I glanced at Commander Larue’s grave. “Don’t worry. I’ll be back someday for sure.”
We plunged into the wilderness with only the map and the sky to tell us where to go. Valory had not picked up the bracelet’s scent anywhere yet.
I remained quiet most of the day, alternating between grief over Commander Larue and hope that Lord Finbarr might be among the resistance fighters. Of course, we’d have to find the rumored encampment first. The distance on the map looked enormous. I hadn’t dared to ask how many days of travel it would be.
The air became thicker and warmer as we dropped in elevation from the mountains. Green shoots poked up from the rocky terrain. New leaf buds showed on all the trees. The forest hummed with little creatures stirring after their winter nap.
At sundown Valory heaved our camp supplies onto a patch of flat earth. “Bollywarts. All this way and I still can’t pick up the scent of whoever wore this bracelet.”
I heard tree branches rustling above us. “Hello? Is there a Dryad present?” I asked.
“Indeed,” said an unseen voice. “What do you want?”
“I don’t bother talking to Dryads,” Valory whispered to me. “They like to play mean tricks and steer you
the wrong direction.”
Her warning made me think of Chloe and her prejudice against mermaids. I hoped Valory and Chloe could meet someday.
“Listen,” I said to the Dryad. “We’re trying to find some Fay who might have come this way before winter. Did you see anybody?”
“I have not,” the Dryad said. “But my sisters south of here tell of murder in the town of Feegman’s Boot. Do you know anything about that?”
Valory and I exchanged a guilty look.
“No,” I said. “We’re just passing through.”
“I’d much prefer it if you slept somewhere else,” said the Dryad in her terse little voice.
“See,” Valory said. She stuck her tongue out at the tree. “Bunch of stuck-up snobs. They think they’re so neat because they live in trees. Why, if I had my axe with me—”
“Come on,” I said. I grabbed the camping supplies and tugged Valory’s arm.
“I want to camp here now just to spite her!” Valory said, glaring at the tree.
I sighed. The last thing we needed was a forest of Dryads angry at us. “Let’s just go. If you stop making a fuss I’ll tell you what a brothel is.”
We made camp in a little valley far away from the Dryad. I heard whispers following us. The trees teemed with life, most of it invisible. It made me think of the elevatree at Ivywild.
“You’re doing it again,” Valory said as she tied back the tent flap. “What are you thinking of this time? I can tell it’s not that boy because your heart’s not beating all fast.”
I stared, too amazed to be embarrassed. “You can hear my heart?”
“Yep,” Valory said. “I thought it was gonna pound right out of your chest when Commander Larue was talking to you. You were real scared, weren’t you?”
I pulled my knees up to my chest and laid my cheek on them. “Yeah. Yeah, I was. Commander Larue was the greatest man I ever knew next to my own father. If they could do that to him…well, it’s almost like there’s no hope for the rest of us.”
“Aw, don’t think like that,” Valory said in a low, soothing voice. “We’ve made it this far.”
The Flute Keeper's Promise (The Flute Keeper Saga) Page 26