by JA Andrews
A wayfarer’s wagon.
A surge of fury and hope blazed up in him. He spurred Shadow forward.
It had been months since he’d found one. The wayfarers were impossible to track. They wandered aimlessly in isolated wagons, spread out across the known world, peddling magical trinkets and cheap performances. Even the Keepers didn’t know whether the solitary groups were connected with each other, or whether they hailed from any particular country. The only thing Will had learned in the twenty years since his sister had been taken was that anything he learned from one set of wayfarers was always contradicted by the next.
Will blew out a long breath and relaxed his hands on the reins.
It wouldn’t be the wagon. It was never the wagon. In twenty years he’d found almost two dozen of them, but none of them carried Vahe. None of them even admitted to knowing the man.
Still, Will urged Shadow a little faster down the far side of the hill.
Far to the north, a speck winged through the sky before diving down to disappear into the grass. In the space of a few heartbeats it climbed into the air again and flew closer, growing into the shape of an undersized hawk, thin leather jesses dangling from its legs. Talen flapped down, settling on the blue bedroll tucked against Will’s saddle horn. The hawk dropped a dead mouse onto the blanket and fixed Will with unblinking eyes.
“That is just as disgusting as the others.” Will leaned back from the gift. “You are the worst payment I’ve ever received. It would almost be worth backtracking a day and losing sight of the wayfarers just to give you back.”
Will couldn’t flick the thing into the grass until Talen flew away or the bird would think they were playing some grotesque game of fetch and bring it back.
He’d fully expected the sad excuse for payment to have flown off at the first opportunity. But it had been a full day since a herdsman had offered the miniature hawk as payment for scribe work, and he was still here. He’d wing away to hunt, out of sight across the grass, and just when Will thought he’d left forever, the hawk would come back, dangling a dead mouse in his beak.
“Would you like to come with me to Queensland?” Will considered the hawk who merely stared back. “I can see you don’t plan on talking back to me. Shadow never does either, and he’s been with me for several weeks now.” Will patted the mottled neck of the pinto. “But until we reach a place where people will talk to me, you two are all I have.
“Can you do anything useful?” He reached out a finger slowly toward the bird. Talen twitched his gaze to Will’s hand, but didn’t move. Will ran the back of his finger lightly down the bird’s chest, brushing over white feathers speckled with veins of brown. “If I drew you a picture of the man I’m looking for, could you fly up to that wagon and give me some sort of signal if you see him? Because he’s someone I’ve been hunting for much longer than a year. And as soon as I’ve confirmed he’s not there, I’m going home.” Talen’s back and head were darker with ripples of black and auburn. The feathers were so soft they felt almost liquid.
Talon fixed Will with a round, golden eye.
“I’ll take your lack of response as a no.
“While you were off hunting mice, I realized I know four different stories where an animal allowed itself to be linked to its master, giving them unique powers. Two of those stories were about Keepers.”
Will cast out toward the bird. He found the bright bundle of vitalle wound up in its body, strands of energy humming with the potential to burst into flight or dive after yet another mouse. The bird’s vitalle sat compacted above the broader, slower energy of the horse. Beyond them both, the grass spread out in countless pinpoints of energy, until it ended at the sea.
“Of course, they were a different sort of Keepers than me. Both of them were adept at magic. If you and I are going to communicate, we’ll need to keep it more…simple.”
Will focused on Talen. “There is one thing I can do, though.” Dispend, Keeper Gerone would say, Reach out. But Gerone had never quite understood Will’s unusual talent. It wasn’t really the casting out that all Keepers could do to locate energy, this was more of an unlocking or an opening.
Something in his chest loosened, and a nebulous feeling of expectation, or waiting, poured in from the little bird. Not a fully formed emotion, just a…prodding sort of sensation. That was always the way with animals, broad sensations and hungers. They were recognizable. Loyalty, hunger, satisfaction. But only a single emotion at a time. None of the chaotic tangles of emotions that humans had.
“There are no records of Keepers feeling others’ emotions.” He stroked Talen’s head. A warm, contented feeling surfaced on the left side of Will’s chest from the bird, in contrast to his own worn in frustration with himself, which sat more centered and more comfortably inside him. “But it’s not a terribly useful substitute for being proficient at magic. Knowing someone wants something isn’t the same as knowing what they want.”
Thundering hoofbeats sounded ahead of him and two red-haired Roven rangers crested the hill, bearing down on him at a gallop. He had time to wrap one arm protectively around Talen and grab hold of his jesses to keep the small hawk from flying into one of the Roven before they raced past on either side him. Two distinct sensations of scorn blossomed in his chest.
“Off the road, fetter bait,” one barked in the harsh Roven accent.
The other ranger kicked out his foot, catching Will’s saddle bag, sending it bouncing and clanging, causing Shadow to prance to the side. “Move, fett!”
The Roven tore away down the road, their emotions fading from his chest, leaving only Talen’s fear, Shadow’s startled wariness, and Will’s own irritation.
“I hate this country.” Will spoke softly and ran his finger down the back of Talen’s head. “You know one of the main problems with the Roven? They think people are fetter bait.” When the hawk quieted, Will loosened his grip on Talen’s jesses. “Setting aside the fact that you’re sort of fettered, I think we can both agree that humans shouldn’t be.”
Will glanced over his shoulder. The two Roven were heading the wrong way. All the clans that way had gone north for the summer already. With the bird calm, Will closed himself off and the birds emotions faded from his chest.
They were almost to the top of the rise when Talon let out a piercing screech. Like a needle to the ear. The bird tilted its head and pinned Will with a hard stare.
“A signal like that is exactly what I’m talking about. Although maybe we could pick a more pleasant sound. You could use it to warn me before I’m charged by rangers—”
A jangle of far off music caught his attention just as the smell of roasting fish tumbled through the air. Will reached the top of the hill and stopped. A wide, low plain stretched ahead of him all the way to the feet of the Scales. Nestled against the ocean, sat the small city of Porreen, the winter home of the Morrow Clan.
And around the wall, tents and people crowded together, proclaiming that here, at the very eastern edge of the Sweep, the spring festival was still going on.
“—or ambushed by festivals.”
Talen gave another screech.
“Don’t try to take credit for warning me.” Will nudged Shadow down the hill. “A screech is not a warning.”
Like all Roven cities, Porreen consisted of a roundish jumble of lumpy buildings that looked like cattle corralled by a thick earthen wall. With no trees on the Sweep for wood, everything was made exclusively of cob, a mixture of earth and dried grass, shaped by hand without any attempt to make straight walls or sharp angles. The city sat close enough to the sea that the lumpy cob buildings looked like a city built by children on the beach.
The wayfarer’s wagon moved along the edge of the festival, heading out of sight around the city wall. Crowds of red-headed, red-bearded, blue-eyed Roven mingled around the tents. Any head that wasn’t red was either a foreign merchant braving the unfriendliness of the Sweep, or a foreign slave in a grey tunic.
With a screech that sound
ed disapproving, Talen launched off the bedroll and soared away over the empty grassland. Will couldn’t blame him. The Roven would probably capture the hawk and cage him. It’s what they did to foreign things.
Will scratched at his black beard. It hadn’t helped, really, to grow the beard. Every man on the Sweep had one and so he’d let his grow to blend in. But theirs were all hues of red, from bright orangey-flame to dark coppery russet. Will’s was black. Not a tint of red to be seen. Between that, the rest of his black hair, and his dark brown eyes, his head felt like a signal fire made of shadows, heralding his foreignness. The Morrow Clan’s spring festival was bound to be like the others, a mad scramble to buy supplies before the clan moved north for the summer. The hostile stares he was about to encounter dragged at him. He could almost hear muttered “fett” and “fetter bait” already.
The Scale Mountains were so close, and the idea of leaving the Sweep rushed over him like a fresh breeze. He’d glance at the wayfarers, then go. He could be half way to the mountains by dark. Will flicked the dead mouse off his blanket.
Dismounting, he led his pinto horse off the road, cutting through the grass toward the nearest tents. The tufts at the top of the winter-dried stalks tugged at his pants like greedy little fairies. After a year trying to move unobtrusively through the Roven Sweep, he’d mastered one bit of vaguely sophisticated magic. He cast out, reaching past the dead grass and finding the bits of new growth, just starting to peek out of the ground.
Slowly he extended his fingers toward the ground and began pulling the vitalle out of them, drawing it through his hand and into himself as he altered the tiny snips of life-energy into something more elusive. He let the vitalle slide out from his other hand, stinging his fingertips as he spread a cloak of disinterest around himself. A suggestion that there was nothing about him worth noticing.
It was done before his fingertips were even singed, accompanied by the usual twinge of guilt at the fact that the other Keepers wouldn’t approve.
The influence spell had become unsettlingly easy. Like every other bit of magic Will had ever tried, it had been challenging to cast at first, and even more challenging to sustain.
When he’d first come to the Sweep, he’d only used the influence spell occasionally. But the farther he traveled among the Roven the more he realized that the Sweep was always unsafe. They distrusted all foreigners, but had a special hatred for Queensland. Parents frightened their children with stories of evil Keepers who didn’t use stones to hold their magic, but pulled it out of living things. It became easier not to be noticed, and now putting on the influence spell was like part of getting dressed. He’d renewed it so often it felt as though it never completely wore off.
The other Keepers definitely would not approve of that. Gerone’s eyebrows would dive down into a hairy scowl and he’d say there was something dishonest in it, something slightly dangerous. Which was true, but there was something definitely dangerous about having the people of the Roven Sweep find out Will came from Queensland. Or worse, was a Keeper. So Gerone and his eyebrows could say what they pleased.
Will drew close to the crowd, his hand tight on the reins. But the first person’s gaze slipped past him without notice, and he let himself relax. He skirted the edge of the festival. Runes of protection and good luck decorated each tent. The leather vests of the Roven were marked around the armholes and the neck with runes. More were painted onto their bowls and tables, and woven into their rugs. Small gems glittered everywhere. They flashed in rings, hung around necks and wrists, many of them glowing with trace amounts of vitalle. The Roven called them burning stones if they held any energy, and Will sighed at how much money he could have made on the Sweep if he’d had any idea how to put the energy of living things into a lifeless rock. The Roven filled the festival covered in runes and gems in an effort to be safe, or lucky, or shrewd.
The wayfarers, with their trinkets that looked magical, whether they were or not, were going to make a fortune in this city. They were probably the only foreign people who walked freely through the Sweep.
Will caught a glimpse of long, brown hair coming toward him, and his fist clenched on the Shadow’s lead. Opening up without meaning to, the emotions of the crowd rushed into his chest with a cacophony of feelings, shoving aside his own blaze of hope.
The crowd slithered past and the slave woman shuffled into view carrying a pile of fabric. An ordinary clutter of emotions from her blossomed in him. Worry, exhaustion, mild curiosity.
Will searched her face, looking so hard for the resemblance to Ilsa that it took a moment to actually see her and recognize it was all wrong. More than that, she was too old, much older than twenty. She paid no more attention to him than anyone else, and didn’t raise her eyes from the ground as she passed. When her emotions faded, Will shoved the chaos of the rest of the crowd out of his chest.
Butter-yellow fruit caught his eye. When he offered the Roven vendor his copper half-talen for three avak, the woman looked surprised to see him for just a breath. Her eyes took in his not-red hair and the fact that he didn’t wear a grey slave’s tunic, and her lips curled in disgust. She snatched the copper out of his hand with a “fett” and went back to her Roven customers.
Will turned away, blending back into the crowd. To chase away the bitter taste of the slur, he took a bite of the fruit, and the tangy juice burst into his mouth like a splash of brightness in the dusty Sweep. Avak was one of those glorious things that was always better than expected. Like the smell of the air after rain. Or the vividness of a lightning strike. One of those things that breaks into life with the truth that there is far more…something in the world than people usually notice.
Will took another bite.
Avak didn’t fit here on the Sweep.
The sharp tanginess perked up his mind, as it always did. The afternoon sunlight danced over the orange fabric of the tent next to him. It glinted off a set of metal spoons and shimmered down the red-gold braid of the Roven woman considering them. To the south, the ocean rose in small swells glittering like scales on a sea monster.
A bit ahead of him the flutter of the wayfarer’s wagon caught his eye.
The last bite of avak flesh pulled cleanly off the smooth pit and Will tucked it in his pocket. The Keepers’ Stronghold needed an avak bush. Gerone would be thrilled. He could plant an orchard of them.
The freshness clarified the reality of Will’s situation too. This was just another random, solitary wayfarer wagon. The search for his sister was nothing more than a far-fetched dream, and being on the Sweep was a waste of time.
Will led Shadow around a large red tent filled with blankets and stopped.
At the edge of the festival, flashing with gaudy colors and snapping ribbons, sat over a dozen wayfarer wagons lined up one after the other, in an arc.
Rooted to the ground, Will stared at the cacophony of color ahead of him.
He’d had never seen so many wayfarers in one place. Never even heard of a gathering like this.
Wagons with rounded, stout roofs parked next to ones with tall, pointed roofs. One blood-red wagon even had a flat roof, crenelated like a castle. Wildly colored shutters were thrown open and a few of the crooked chimneys dribbled out smoke. A raised stage nestled up against one painted the spiky yellow of a bumble bee, creating the impression that Will stood in a theater.
The stage sat empty, but handfuls of people sat along a row of benches stretching across the back of the makeshift theater, and he sank down on the end, dazed. He let Shadow graze, and watched wayfarers dressed in garish colors unload even more garish costumes and props for the evening’s show. A young girl holding a pot passed, trailing the earthy smell of sorren seeds. Tiny shells edging her amber shawl jostled each other with a quiet clatter.
The wagon Will had been following settled at the other end of the arc, calling greetings to the other wayfarers. Will cast out toward the people around him and the energy teeming in their bodies and the bright pinpoints of vitalle humm
ing from the burning stones they wore echoed back to him. Countless colored gems, set in rings or pendants, swirled with light and tiny snippets of power.
Will took a bite of the second avak, his surprise fading. He’d found a band of wayfarers doing what wayfarers always did, entertaining crowds and selling marginally magical trifles. The familiar frustration gnawed at him.
A woman stepped up onto the stage wrapped in flowing layers of ocean blues and greens. “Come! Listen to old Estinn!” she called out to the milling crowd with a lilt that made her accent impossible to trace. Bits of grey hair snuck out from under her emerald scarf and her voice rang out loudly from her thin, hunched body. The crowd paused. “When the sun drops over the edge of the world, come witness a battle! Storytellers from near and far will gather, pitting their skills against the skills of Borto Mildiani, in a contest of…” She stopped, then smiled a toothy smile. “Skills!
“Are your stories duller than last year’s grass? Then keep them to yourself. But if your tales ensnare the ear, come test your mettle against the legendary Borto!” Estinn flung her hand toward the yellow wagon behind the stage.
A black bearded man in a loose rust-red shirt stepped out, bowing to the crowd with a flourish.
Will’s heat froze for a beat.
Vahe.
Chapter Two
Will surged to his feet before he caught himself. Rage and disbelief crashed into each other like wild, frothing waves in a storm.
Will stared at that face, opening up toward the man, as though he could reach past the crowd and feel only Vahe’s emotions. There were so many people between them a torrent of indecipherable feelings rushed into him.
Old Estinn stepped off the stage and several other wayfarers joined Vahe. The man greeted them warmly, leading them behind the wagons and out of sight. Will’s emotions were so taut he felt almost numb.
A bright dart of curiosity burst into his chest and Will’s attention snapped back to the bench. A little slave girl peered at him through strands of long, pale hair from the corner of the nearest wagon. Her emotions were a blazing fire of interest, full of wonder and enthusiasm so strong they shoved everything else inside him to the periphery. She stared at him with large green eyes, as light as spring grass. Her face was so gaunt it was angular.
