A Blight of Blackwings

by Kevin Hearne

  Rölly simply stared at the bard for a long while, holding his gaze, making it clear he didn’t truly believe there was nothing else he should know at the moment. I had no idea what they might be referring to, and it took a supreme effort of will not to break in and say, Hey, what are you talking about?

  “Very well,” Rölly finally said. “If you think of anything later, Master Bard, that I might not know but might find relevant, please make sure you get word to me through Dervan or a mariner. I don’t wish to be surprised again. I’ll be quite displeased, in fact, if I discover you’re holding something back right now that can help my people.”

  “Some of what’s to come will no doubt help your people, and mine,” Fintan said. “But not right now. It will only be helpful once the Raelech army arrives—plus the Fornish reinforcements and the Kaurian fleet—and we are still weeks away from that.”

  “Yes, we are.”

  “Then you can cease to worry, Pelenaut. The past cannot change and it won’t affect the present, and the future it will inform is still some distance away.”

  Föstyr grunted. “The past always affects the present.” He waggled a fork at Tallynd. “The second könstad here has some information to share with you now that will have an effect, I promise you.”

  I noticed that Tallynd’s eyes locked with Rölly’s at that point, and he gave her the barest of nods. Something was up, and I couldn’t wait to discover what it was. But Rölly placed his napkin over his unfinished breakfast and excused himself. “I have much to do—hygienists to assign and food shortages to address—so I hope you’ll excuse me. Dervan, if you’d accompany me, I’d like a word.”

  My gaze dropped down to my unfinished plate. There was still plenty to be enjoyed, luxuries from Tallynd’s gift baskets, but that butter and jam spread deliciously on crunchy perfection almost sang to me that it could not bear to be left behind. “Can I…bring my toast?”

  “Yes, bring your toast. I know how important that is to you.”

  I salvaged it, grateful that it wouldn’t go to waste, and bid Fintan farewell, promising to meet him that afternoon for our daily recording session. We left him with Tallynd and Föstyr, and I supposed I’d hear about whatever they discussed later.

  Once outside, the pelenaut waited for me to devour my toast and matched his pace to my slow one. Mariners preceded and followed us at a discreet distance.

  “How’s the bard been of late, Dervan?”

  “He’s been plagued by nightmares of the Hathrim.”

  “That’s it? I know Numa just visited him. Did he behave differently afterward, say anything strange, ask you anything?”

  I thought of sharing the intelligence that Clodagh knew we’d stolen her journal but remembered that I didn’t want to be a go-between or play their spy games. I didn’t want to lie either. “Apparently the Triune Council is aware that we’re writing the bard’s tales down. They relayed a brief message to me, but it’s nothing that concerns you.”

  “Let me know if anything changes.”

  “What are you looking for?”

  “I’ll know it when I see it. Or rather when you tell me about it.”

  That made me wrangle somewhat with my decision to keep quiet. What if the message from Clodagh was what he was looking for? Clearly he was expecting something from the Raelechs, or he wouldn’t be checking in with me. But, no, I firmly wished to keep myself and the world of espionage at a distance, and sharing that would only draw me closer to that world.

  Rölly made excuses—the very good excuses that he had a country to see to—and left me alone soon after that, and I found myself abruptly with nothing to do. I no longer had any classes to teach at the university. I’d have no work to do with Fintan until that afternoon. It was time to find an occupation, for I’d be presented with more such moments in the future.

  Thinking of Tallynd’s promise, I took myself down to the refugee kitchen on Survivor Field and volunteered to work however they could use me. I was chopping vegetables soon enough and a bit later was slicing up sausages and cheeses from Tallynd’s gift baskets into portions for children.

  Noon arrived all too soon and I promised I’d return as often as I could. There was plenty of work for volunteers there.

  Fintan was beaming when I met him for lunch. “Tallynd told me the most amazing story,” he said. “People are going to learn a lot today.”

  I asked what he meant by that, but he told me I’d have to wait.

  * * *

  —

  “Today you’ll see a familiar face and two new ones,” he said hours later from atop the wall. “But first, an original song for you all today based on a true story: This is ‘The Tragical, Lamentable, Entirely Preventable Swamp Duck Death of Jahm Joumeloh Jeikhs.’ ”

  I want to tell you a story of a bootmonger

  Who isn’t with us any longer;

  He was rude at the table and ate too fast

  So now we must speak of him in the past.

  It wasn’t just a case of bad luck

  That made him choke on a glazed swamp duck;

  It was his poor manners alone

  That made him inhale that fatal bone.

  So please slow down and chew your food

  Or you’ll be short of breath, my dude;

  You’ll turn blue and asphyxiate

  And fall facedown into your plate.

  (Chorus)

  For safety and propriety

  Please tell your little tykes

  Of the tragical, lamentable, entirely preventable

  Swamp duck death of Jahm Joumeloh Jeikhs.

  Jahm grabbed a breast and a leg and and thigh

  And crammed them in, I don’t know why;

  Perhaps it was the rich fire glaze

  That tempted him to end his days.

  But there hasn’t ever been a sauce

  Rich enough to justify such a loss;

  The extreme high speed at which he fed

  Caused him to choke and then drop dead.

  The proper thing to do at table

  Is to enjoy each bite as long as you’re able;

  You sure don’t want a glazed swamp duck

  To be the end of all your good luck.

  (Chorus)

  “I can’t believe you did that,” I said during the break.

  “I told you it was too good to pass up,” the bard said. “Jahm will serve as a warning to generations. And I wanted those Nentian merchants to hear it before they left town with their hygienist.”

  After the break, Fintan pleased everyone by taking the form of our national heroine, Second Könstad Tallynd du Böll, and I grinned with anticipation. I couldn’t wait to hear what she’d shared with him that morning.

  When your time is running out, that which you normally view as mundane can become a treasure. A flowering weed in the garden, a thing to be despised on most days, can become a beauty of the world—a miracle of life!—if only you believe that such a flower might never be seen again. Noting what may be the last time for everything infuses every moment with poignance and sentiment. And even the sentiment gets its chance to be cherished, because when might one have the luxury to feel that again?

  The pelenaut’s orders had me feeling that way. I was to scout the Mistmaiden Isles up close, a deed not undertaken for many years. In fact, I could find no records that they had ever been truly scouted at all. Delving into the archives, I found no records but maps, and even those were suspect, since no one could tell me when last they were surveyed. I was privately informed by the pelenaut’s master of charts that cartographers just copied what had already been done years ago, and accuracy was not a priority. After all, why worry about charting coastlines accurately when no one would dare to sail there?

  “How long since the isle
s were last surveyed?” I asked the master of charts.

  She shrugged. “I don’t know when the last survey was completed, Second Könstad.”

  “Ten years? Twenty?”

  “Oh, much more than that. Long before you or I were born. It might have been our great-grandparents’ time.”

  My jaw dropped, and she waggled a finger at me.

  “That’s being optimistic, mind. If someone who knew the answer for sure told me it was three hundred years or more, I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  “Three hundred? Do you know what three hundred years of tide does to a coast? The coastlines are going to be entirely different now!”

  “I understand, Second Könstad, believe me. But no one wants to sail near the wraiths. Those islands are left alone for good reason. I do have a record of a survey ordered by the pelenaut from one hundred twenty-seven years ago, and the quartermaster of Festwyf was supposed to recruit a company for the task and outfit a ship for that purpose.”

  “Oh? And did the quartermaster follow through on that?”

  “I have no record of it—perhaps some records in Festwyf’s archives can break through this dam we find ourselves up against. But since we have no completed survey from that time, we may deduce that the quartermaster either failed to send out a crew or did send one out but they never returned.”

  I closed my eyes and sighed, trying to let my frustration hiss out of me. I have often envied the Kaurians for their ability to breathe peace. I usually find my own peace in the currents of the ocean, in keeping pace with whales migrating through our coastal waters, but those seasonal moments of bliss were far away from me right then. The master of charts had an excellent point: I, too, would leave the islands alone if I had a choice. But now it was clear these islands were a huge blind spot for the Brynts—one we all knew was there and had willfully avoided, as if nothing in the isles could ever harm us so long as we left them alone.

  I hugged my boys tightly before I left and told them I loved them and always would and that they should never ever forget that. Which of course scared them. My own fears were flowing into them, the tears in my eyes telling them that I was about to do something dangerous. They didn’t want me to go. Neither did anyone else, especially me. But I knew that I needed to go.

  So I set out from the Lung’s Locks with a waterproof carisak full of paper and ink, just in case I found a safe place to take down some notes, along with an oilskin and a bedroll. I sleeved myself through the waves to the Mistmaiden Isles at the fastest pace I could comfortably maintain. My plan was to never set foot on any of the isles—a reef, a crag, maybe, but never where I might come face-to-mist with a wraith. All we really knew about them was that they didn’t like the living and couldn’t swim.

  But though they couldn’t inhabit or cross the water, I didn’t know what my kenning could do against them. Certainly no weapon could harm them, since they lacked substance, but would a squirt in the eye do them any damage? If I walked on the isles wreathed in a swirling shield of water, would they be able to penetrate it to do me harm? It sounded like it might work in theory, but I wasn’t willing to experiment.

  In the old tales, wraiths were said to have some power to lure people to their doom. If the tales held a droplet of truth, it would be better for me to remain unseen. If I didn’t return, the likelihood of anyone ever coming after me, much less finding me, was incredibly small. It had taken a hundred twenty-seven years after the last expedition to send me out, after all. If that expedition had ever actually been sent.

  What few reliable records the master of charts could find indicated that perhaps not all four of the islands were inhabited by wraiths, but there was no solid information on which ones were safe and which were not. I must therefore treat all of them with the same excess of caution. And the wraiths were not the sole danger: I was going there to locate a Bone Giant fleet, after all, and perhaps something that could conceivably be called the Seven-Year Ship, possibly crewed by men with pale skin, if the information we had from the Kaurian scholar was correct. And, of course, there were krakens. Always krakens, once you got away from the coasts and into open ocean, preventing us from finding out what might lie beyond the edges of our maps.

  It occurred to me that the Bone Giants might have had some secret colony hidden in the Mistmaiden Isles for centuries and we obviously had never figured it out because we had never explored them. Or, more implausibly but still inescapable to my paranoid mind, perhaps the infamous ship was in fact crewed by wraiths, a sort of ghost ship. That possibility chilled me.

  The churning of my mind was not echoed by the sea, thankfully. It was a calm day, and as I traversed the deep channel between the continent and the islands, I sensed nothing large moving beneath me. The krakens, if they were out there, were still for the time being, or perhaps not interested in something as tiny as me.

  The southernmost island, according to our out-of-date maps, was a smallish one, shaped like a kidney bean with the inner curve facing north. When I found the island, it proved to be both bean-shaped and empty of wraiths, so far as I could tell, as well as unoccupied by a fleet of ships. It did have fantastic fishing; its populations had never been touched by a net.

  I moved on to the neighboring island located to the northwest, which was also uninhabited and its shoals also blessed with extraordinary schools of fish. I found some rough rocks offshore on which to set up my bedroll and an oilskin for the night. I could technically sleep in the ocean, since I’d never drown, but that was an outstanding way to get caught and slowly digested by a nocturnal bloom of stalking jellyfish.

  I slept poorly but did appreciate waking with the dawn and witnessing seabirds dive for their breakfast. I dove for mine as well, spearing a sandy flounder with my glass knife and returning to the rock to cut off some fresh fillets and eat them raw. It was a clear, sunny day, even finer than the last. An auspicious morning on which to encounter wraiths, if such a thing had to be done.

  Taking the time to write down a report of seeing nothing on the southernmost islands was an exercise in procrastination. I wanted to do my duty but didn’t especially want to find anything either.

  Of the two islands left, the one to the northeast of where I’d slept was the smaller, so I went there first. The big island was so large I doubted I’d be able to complete a circuit of it in a day. It then occurred to me that it might be convenient to name the islands. Bean for the smallest one. Bolt for the second, since it was a bit of a zigzag shape. And the drawings I’d seen of this third one looked like the silhouette of my boys’ least favorite vegetable—it had a small stalk and floret, anyway—so I named it Broccoli. No doubt the master of charts would disapprove, but it gave me some comfort to exert this small measure of control.

  The big island looked like a mess on the map and I toyed with the idea of calling it Barf, just to really outrage the master, but decided to reserve judgment on that until I’d scouted it.

  Broccoli, like Bean and Bolt, was free of habitation but lush with wildlife on its shores and in its depths. Living in the reefs on the eastern side were fish I’d never seen before—many new species, in fact—and if I’d had the leisure to watch and document them, I would have gladly taken it. But I kept circling Broccoli until sometime in the late morning, when I was in a strait between it and the big island.

  I was traveling south at that point and periodically looking west, to my right, to see if I could spy the big island at all across the strait, and I could. A low, gently undulating ridge of dark green. And then, suddenly, patches of white.

  Were those sails?

  I stopped, treading water and squinting to be sure. There was just enough distance and glare that I couldn’t be certain, so I first pushed water beneath me and then pulled it up underneath, shooting myself high into the air as if I’d been ejected from a whale’s blowhole. At that height I could confirm that, yes, th
ose were sails, quite a lot of them, and that I’d most likely found the fleet I’d been sent to find. When I dove back into the ocean, I immediately abandoned my circuit of Broccoli and sleeved myself toward the fleet, taking note of the currents and vibrations in the water.

  I found quite a bit of activity underneath those boats. The vibrations might be normal, because these waters were full of creatures whose purpose was to consume and be consumed. But it also might be a feeding frenzy of bladefins and other creatures reacting to a new abundant food source.

  The flat bottoms of the boats, when I reached them, were familiar to me. These were definitely Bone Giant vessels, the same barely seaworthy craft they’d employed for the invasion. What were they invading here?

  I surfaced cautiously near one of the boats and checked to make sure there were no sentries with spears guarding them. Satisfied that the boat in front of me, at least, was anchored and abandoned, I hauled myself aboard to search for intelligence. I found nothing of significance on board—no convenient letter announcing what they were planning to do there—allowing me to depart without further ado. But I did stand up in the boat and count all the rest of the ships that I could see.

  The fleets that had attacked our cities comprised one hundred boats carrying one hundred giants each. Ten thousand. These boats were the same size as those in the invasion fleet, but there were only thirty-five of them anchored in the inlet. It was a sizable inlet and could have held a full hundred boats easily. But either this force was a fraction of the fleet sent to the islands and the other sixty-five boats were anchored elsewhere, or it hadn’t been the same size as the other fleets to begin with.

  Why had these boats come here? I squinted at the shore, covered in thick forest, and saw no buildings. But I did see a ship of a different design moored at a weather-beaten dock extending from a small sandy beach. Perhaps there was a path leading into the forest and then to some settlement or habitation hidden in the trees, but I could not see any details from where I was. I’d have to swim to the shore for a closer look.