by Layton Green
At first he thought it was Mateo, but when he looked closer and realized who it was, saw the fine-boned face and olive skin of his brother, Will released a strangled cry.
Caleb managed to rip away the silk covering his mouth. “Will! Get me out of here!”
It was Caleb’s voice. Will started to sprint forward when Mala called his name, too. He turned and saw her struggling to free herself. “Hurry, Will! The others are trapped nearby!”
Behind Mala, a huge, bulbous shape scuttled into sight, closing in on her position. The spider looked as big as a small house. Mandibles longer than Will’s arms clacked as it approached, and his knees turned to jelly, palms slicked with sweat.
Unless he intervened, Mala would never free herself in time. Caleb shouted his name again, and Will turned to see another spider approaching behind his brother.
He turned towards Mala, then back to Caleb again. Of course one or both could be an illusion—but they could also be real. He had no doubt the sorcerer king had the power to pluck his brother out of Freetown and bring him here. It made more sense for Mala to be real, since she was in the pyramid with them—but what if Mala was an illusion? That would be the sort of devious trick the sorcerer king would play.
He couldn’t tell.
But he didn’t have time to save them both.
“Caleb! If that’s really you, what was the name of my first pet?”
“What? Spike the Gerbil! Now get over here and free me, little brother!”
It was the right answer, unknowable to anyone else on Urfe. Delivered exactly as Caleb would speak.
“Hurry!” Mala said. “I’ve no more time!”
She was right, he knew. He had about two seconds to decide which one of them to save. While it hurt worse than he could have possibly imagined, as much as his father’s death or his mother’s breakdown, Will knew what he had to do.
“Will the Builder, where are you going?”
He shut out the panic, the suffering, in her voice as he ran. He couldn’t bear it.
“You’ll never finish the quest without me! Our people will suffer!”
That gave him pause, the knowledge that saving Mala might be for the greater good. But Will was a man of passion, and that sort of argument had never won the day with him. Caleb was his brother.
“Will, I love you!”
No, he thought as a lump formed in his throat. Don’t say that to me. Not now. In that moment, as he moved farther and farther away from her and condemned her to die, he knew that he loved her, too. Maybe that love didn’t make sense, but he knew it as certainly as he had ever known anything.
But deep down, he didn’t believe Mala would say those words to him. One day perhaps, but not yet. Not even to save herself.
Though maybe he was wrong, and his brothers were right about her. That she was selfish and acted only in her best interests.
Just before Will reached his brother, he heard a scream and turned back to see the spider sinking its fangs into Mala’s throat. It began to feed as he turned and sprinted the last few yards to Caleb, reaching him just ahead of another mammoth arachnid. With tears blurring his vision, devastated by the choice he had been forced to make, Will freed his brother from the web. Caleb’s lopsided smile of gratitude, the terror in his eyes: it all looked exactly as it should. Yet as soon as Will turned and raised his sword to fight the spider, Caleb’s hands wrapped Will’s face from behind, obscuring his vision, and a voice as ancient and moldy as a funeral shroud rotting in a thousand-year-old tomb whispered into his ear.
“Greetings, Will Blackwood.”
-34-
The first night with Luca in the Blackwood Forest passed without incident. After a solid dinner and a long night’s sleep, some of the color had returned to the boy’s cheeks. In the morning, Caleb scrounged around the Romani camp and brought back a pallet of eggs, which the Brewer turned into a mushroom omelette. Luca gobbled up a huge portion.
Just as they finished breaking camp, a distant whinny caused everyone to stop moving. Hoofbeats followed, and Caleb’s eyes flew to meet the Brewer’s.
“It’s not tuskers,” the older man whispered. “I know the sound of their steeds.” As Marguerite nodded in agreement, he added, “but that doesn’t mean it’s not bandits.”
Though the boy had a stoic set to his mouth, his eyes had gone wide with fear. Caleb put his hands on his shoulders and gave him a reassuring squeeze, then lifted his eyebrows at his companions, silently seeking the best course of action.
“Go to the waterfall,” Marguerite said. “The noise and the smell of water will help hide ye. I’ll join ye soon.”
“What!” Caleb said in a loud whisper, as the hoofbeats grew louder. “Why aren’t you coming with us?”
“We need to know if it’s friend or foe. If a friend, they might bring news. If foe, there may be others.”
“Let me go.”
She flicked her eyes at the boy. “Better you stay here.”
Caleb gripped her arm, terrified at the thought of losing her. “It’s too risky.”
She reached up to pat his cheek. “They won’t see me. It’s what I do, love.”
“I don’t like it,” the Brewer said, “but she’s right.” He looked at Marguerite. “If you’re as good as you say.”
The corners of the young rogue’s mouth upturned, and there was a flinty edge to her gaze. After disguising the remains of the fire as best they could, she shooed them away. “Quickly, now. To the river.”
Caleb didn’t like it one bit, but Marguerite was already slinking into the trees. She disappeared without a sound, almost right before their eyes, which gave him a small measure of relief.
Oh, she’s good. Very good.
As the Brewer led the dash back to the waterfall, the boy looked so small and lonely that Caleb took him by the hand. As soon as their palms met, the boy squeezed him tight, as if he had been waiting for the gesture. Hand in hand, they slipped through the forest behind the Brewer, searching for a place to hide as they hurried up the path beside the falls.
It was the boy who found it: a patch of space under a fallen log half-covered by a nest of brambles. The thorns scratched their cheeks as they hurried into the tiny space, grateful no snakes or rodents called the alcove home. There was just enough room for the three of them. Once inside, the Brewer reached back and covered the entrance.
The river drowned the hoofbeats. The only other sounds were a pair of robins chirping above their heads. As they waited, Caleb found himself breathless with worry for Marguerite. The feeling of anxiety expanded into a well of fear in his stomach so dark and deep he found himself shaking beside the boy.
I can’t lose her again.
Long minutes later, someone yanked away the brambles covering the entrance. As Caleb shrank back, Marguerite’s head popped into the hole, her gray eyes twinkling. “And here I thought I’d caught me some rabbits for dinner.”
The three of them climbed out of the cramped hole. Caleb groaned as he stretched to his full height. He gave the Brewer a hand, and the boy scampered out like a monkey. After giving Marguerite a bear hug, she laughed and eased him away. Caleb said, “How’d you find us?”
“I told ye. It’s what I do.”
“Who was it?” the Brewer asked. “Did you see them?”
“Aye. It’s a group of gypsies, and they’re waiting for us by our camp.”
The new arrivals turned out to be a war party of sorts, a few dozen men and women from a settlement farther north that had heard of the raids and sent out volunteers to battle the tuskers and search for survivors.
“Cleared out three bands of ’em already, we did,” said a raven-haired woman with a colorful scarf tying back her hair. Though taller and not as dangerous-looking as Mala, she wore a similar weighted sash around her waist and carried a short sword, reminding Caleb of the adventuress. “Ye’ve saved us some time, too,” she said. “Now that we know you’re from Freetown, we’ll turn east instead of south.”
; The entire party was heavily armed. A few carried strange, flexible blades called urumi swords.
One of the men spat on the ground. “It cost us,” he said. “Lost a dozen ourselves. But I’ll gladly give up me own life to stick a few of the filthy tuskers raiding our camps.”
As a chorus of agreement broke out, Caleb sent Luca to the river to fill water skins, then helped Marguerite give an account of what they had seen. After providing chilling information on the number of destroyed settlements, the new arrivals listened to the news of Tamas’s call to arms with grim satisfaction, vowing support from the clans to the north. They said they would take over the task of spreading the word, suggesting it was too dangerous to proceed without the protection of a large group. After a short discussion, Caleb, Marguerite, and the Brewer decided it was better to return to Freetown and relay what they had learned.
The war party gave a detailed account of the clans and settlements in the north ready to join their brethren, and promised to communicate with Freetown via messenger pigeons. As with the council in Freetown, the attacks and massacres across the Ninth had spurred the clans into action. Though aware of what they were facing, the news of the sword and the search for the coffer had provided a spark of hope up and down the Barrier Coast.
“If anyone can bring the coffer back, the wielder of Spiritscourge can,” one of the men said. “We ’eard he slew three dragons in the Battle of Freetown. Have ye seen him, then? Is he really as tall as two men?”
It took Caleb a second to realize they were talking about Will. He hiccupped a laugh and held a palm under his chin. “He’s about this tall, and trust me, you’ve never seen a bigger dork in all your life.”
“A dork?” one of the men asked.
Caleb laughed and rolled his eyes, filled with a rush of longing and pride for his brother.
The war party stayed around for a late afternoon lunch. They were well-stocked and knew how to live off the forest. After making squirrel stew, they replenished the party’s rations. Before they parted company, Caleb pulled the leader of the war party aside, a slender, hard-eyed man named Merrin.
“We found the boy with us on the river yesterday,” Caleb said. “Should he . . . go with you instead?”
“Best if he stays under your care,” Merrin said. “We would only put him in danger.”
Caleb agreed, and felt a rush of relief. “What about his family? He said they lived near the water, and his parents put him on a raft three days ago.
“Upstream, then?”
“Yeah. Has to be.”
Merrin’s face darkened. “We’ve seen all the settlements around here, every direction but south, inside a two week’s ride.” He glanced over at the boy, sitting near Marguerite with downcast eyes, whittling a stick with a small knife. “There’s nothing left but smoke.”
Later that night, after Luca and the Brewer were asleep, Caleb took Marguerite by the hand and led her back to the intact wagon in the camp. The war party had buried the bodies, and what stench remained was unnoticeable inside the wagon. Still, to help perfume the air and erase bad memories, Caleb burned a stick of vanilla-and-cinnamon spiced incense he found in a cabinet. Surrounded by the ghosts of his kin, he made love to Marguerite, filled with a sadness that her warm body, her tangible humanity, helped alleviate.
Not just alleviate, he thought, but heal. The presence of the beautiful wanderer who was both tough and gentle, rough around the edges but secure in her own skin, had filled him with a strange and constant fluttering in his gut that he had never before experienced. Despite being born on a different world, maybe in a different universe, they operated on the exact same wavelength, as if they were two halves of the same intergalactic soul.
So this is what love is like, he thought.
Caleb was lying on his back. Marguerite reached over to stroke his cheek. “What’s on your mind, love?”
“Luca.”
“Aye,” she said, after a moment. “We might be all he has left.”
“I know,” Caleb whispered. “I don’t know how to tell him about his parents.”
“I think, in his own way, he already knows.”
Caleb stared at the roof of the cabin, a lump forming in his throat.
Marguerite took his hand and snuggled up beside him. Her auburn hair, cropped short when he had met her, had grown past her chin. It brushed his face as she leaned over him, but he sat upright and put a finger to her lips. “Did you hear that?”
“What, love?”
“I thought I heard footsteps.’ ”
“It’s probably the Brewer,” she said, though she slid off the bed and reached for her trident dagger.
“He wouldn’t interrupt us. Not unless something was wrong.”
In the camp outside, Caleb heard a series of sounds that chilled him to his core. An exchange of snuffles and grunted commands in a language he didn’t understand, but which he had heard before and would never forget.
Tuskers.
Caleb’s eyes went wild with fear.
“Get dressed,” Marguerite hissed. “We’ll hide here and hope they pass us by. They’re just looking for survivors.”
That rationale did not make sense to Caleb, but what was there to do about it? With shaky hands, he slipped on his boots and leather pants and ruffled shirt, donned his father’s vambraces, and picked up a foot-long metal candlestick with a pointed end. Caleb abhorred violence with every fiber of his being, but he had people to protect. A woman he loved. A child.
He hovered over Marguerite’s shoulder as she crept to one of the circular wagon windows overlooking the camp. As she eased aside the lace curtain, he saw three spear-wielding tuskers stomping between the wagons. Two of them had spiked clubs strapped to their backs, the third a sword.
By their relaxed posture and the loose way they carried their spears, Caleb knew the tuskers thought the camp was deserted. They’re looting, he reasoned. Looking for something they might have missed the first time around.
“They’re coming straight for us,” Marguerite said. “To search the wagon.”
Caleb gripped the candlestick. “What do we do?”
“We surprise them.”
“Can we beat all three?”
“If I kill one before the battle even starts, maybe.” She looked Caleb in the eye. “If you ’elp me.”
Caleb swallowed and gave a slow nod. “I’ll do my best.”
She squeezed his arm and told him what to do.
As Marguerite hid beside the door, he tiptoed to the window facing the forest and eased the wooden shutters open, cringing at the creak. He froze, but the tuskers kept snorting and conversing as if nothing had happened. Caleb crouched by the window and waited, devastated by the thought of Marguerite facing off against a monster half again her weight.
The tuskers drew closer. Caleb’s hands shook, and his stomach heaved like a ship’s deck in a hurricane. He choked back the urge to vomit.
When the door swung open, the first tusker stepped inside and noticed Caleb crouched by the window, drawing its attention. Before the creature could cry out, Marguerite sprang from behind the door and knifed the tusker in the throat.
The monster gurgled and clutched his neck. Caleb dove through the window, rolled when he hit the ground, and sprinted to the front of the wagon. “Hey pig-face! Over here!”
He had to divert the attention of at least one of the remaining tuskers. Marguerite was no match for them both, especially in the confined space of a wagon.
Caleb rounded the corner and got his wish. One of the tuskers was waiting on him with a raised club and a spear. On pure instinct, Caleb ducked the club swing and met the thrusting spear with his left bracer. The spear shattered, causing the tusker to step back in surprise. Caleb swung his candlestick like it was a tennis racket, smacking the tusker on his arm. The creature grunted and raised its club.
From the corner of his eye, Caleb saw Marguerite dive out of the wagon, just beneath the sword thrust of the third tusker. Behind her la
y the prone and bloodied form of the first attacker.
Caleb’s opponent feinted, then kicked him in the chest. He stumbled backwards and raised the candlestick threateningly, like a landlord with a baseball bat, aware it was an inferior weapon he didn’t know how to use. The tusker came at him and swung low, at his feet. Caleb stepped back and blocked downward. His bracer made contact but didn’t splinter the wooden club.
So it only destroys metal. Helluva time to realize that.
Confident its opponent was outclassed, the monster shook the club above its head as it advanced. Caleb knew he couldn’t defeat him on his own, and a brief glimpse told him Marguerite was locked in a battle for survival. He looked to the side, desperate for another solution, and saw three more armed tuskers running into the settlement, their bare ugly feet slapping the ground, squat bodies jiggling with fat and muscle.
Oh, God. There’s more of them.
Marguerite saw them as well. She screamed, “Run, Caleb!”
The new tuskers reached the center of the settlement, twenty yards away and closing. Caleb feigned a run into the forest. His opponent followed. Faster and more agile, Caleb twisted to the side, blocked a club thrust with his bracer, then sprinted back to help Marguerite.
“No!” she cried. “Flee!”
Her opponent never saw Caleb coming. He brained it in the back of the head with the candlestick, and Marguerite followed up with a wicked thrust to the gut. They turned and saw the four remaining tuskers approaching with evil grins, knowing they had Caleb and Marguerite backed against the wagon.
“At least we’ll die together,” he said.
Marguerite squeezed his hand and crouched, brandishing her three-pronged trident dagger. Caleb was dizzy with fear. As the tuskers attacked, snorting and rushing their prey, the knowledge of an easy victory gleaming in their eyes, a forceful baritone interrupted the battle. As if entranced, everyone stopped to listen. The voice sang a song of warriors, a tune whose words Caleb could not understand but which he knew spoke of valiant deeds and courage in the face of danger, of good triumphing over evil, of a knight on a windswept cliff bringing death and justice with the sword clenched in his gloved fist.