The Storyteller

by Traci Chee

  Fifty-one. Fifty-seven. Sixty.

  How many ships would it take for the Alliance to breach Broken Crown? Had Queen Heccata had the foresight to fortify her defenses there?

  Ed had no way of knowing, and no way of sending her a warning.

  He’d gotten a dozen redcoats out of Jahara. He might have prevented Lac from being killed. But he kept thinking of the invasion fleet they’d seen at Epidram. He kept thinking of Delienean soldiers storming the ramparts, flooding the city, killing and conquering—all for the Alliance.

  He never should have given up his crown. But he had. And that was a mistake he wasn’t sure he could ever fix, no matter how many redcoats he rescued.

  Sometimes, in his hammock at night, he cried. He cried for his uselessness. He cried for Arc. He cried for Deliene, in the grip of the Alliance and a shadow organization Lac and Hobs called the Guard. He cried for his dead days, when all he wanted to do was sleep, though those days grew fewer and farther between the longer he was away from the Northern Kingdom.

  Lac would wake—the boy had become such a light sleeper since his beating, startling awake at every little sound—and sit silently with him, patting his shoulder. Sometimes Lac would suggest they see to the animals, and the slow, measured motions of cleaning the pens and refilling the water troughs as the pigs snuffled at his pockets for treats would calm Ed again.

  Ed did what he could, when he could. He worked faster and harder for Neeram, despite their violence, because they kept the crew alive and out of Alliance hands. He picked up extra chores for Lac, whose broken ribs made him slow. He even thought of riddles for Hobs: “If you sandwich a sandwich in sandwich sandwiches, how many sandwiches do you get?”

  Dropping the lines he was trying to weave together, Hobs stroked his chin. “If you sandwich a sand witch in sandwiches, and witches . . . wait, which kind of witches?”

  “Belay that chatter!” the first mate bellowed.

  Stifling their laughter, they returned to repairing the rigging. In the silence, Ed could hear Lac’s labored breathing. He sneaked a glance at the boy’s face. Neeram had broken his perfectly symmetrical nose, and bruises and cuts marred the skin he’d taken so much pride in. He was quieter now. Ed missed his braggadocio.

  “Seven!” Hobs cried suddenly.

  Ed patted him on the shoulder. “Nope.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Three weeks after abandoning Epidram to the Alliance, they got their first glimpse of Broken Crown . . . and immediately ran in the other direction.

  They were too late. Too late to warn Queen Heccata and the Royal Navy. Too late for Lac and Hobs to rejoin the redcoats.

  The island cities of Broken Crown were on fire. A wall of noxious black smoke rose into the sky. Ash dusted the decks of the Hustle like snow. A horrid red light hugged the southern horizon.

  This was where all those vessels had been headed, arrayed across the sea in perfect formation: hundreds of warships, thousands of cannons, hundreds of thousands of soldiers from the three kingdoms of the Alliance.

  Ed watched them disappear behind the Hustle as they raced north again. It was an invasion force that could have swallowed the fleet at Epidram and still been hungry. It was a kingdom-killer.

  Broken Crown hadn’t stood a chance.

  “Anyone in pursuit?” Captain Neeram called across the ship.

  “No one, Captain,” Ed called back. With the blaze still raging at Broken Crown, their little ship seemed to have escaped notice.

  Beside him, Hobs was crying. Lac was not. Lac looked sick, his pallor almost as green as his eyes. As they sailed off, he leaned over the rail and emptied the contents of his stomach.

  “We ran for nothing. We saved our own hides . . . for nothing,” he said. “We should have stayed at Epidram. At least there, we would have been able to—”

  “Where to, Captain?” the first mate asked.

  Neeram ran a hand down their face. “We need provisions. I was hoping to resupply at Broken Crown, but . . . we’ll have to find somewhere else.”

  “All that’s between us and Epidram are fishing villages.”

  Their jaw clenched. “Then we’ll hit one of them.”

  “Hit?” Hobs muttered, glancing sideways at Ed. “That’s an ominous word choice.”

  Ed shook his head as Lac began dry heaving. He rubbed the boy’s back. “Let’s hope not.”

  They found a tiny village a half-day’s sail from Broken Crown, almost invisible at the feet of the steep forested mountains rising from the shoreline. The docks were deserted; the streets in chaos. Animals were running, bleating, on the muddy streets. Urns and other crockery lay smashed on the roadsides among trampled bundles of vegetables and discarded items of clothing. People ran in and out of their houses, stuffing belongings into crates, settling infants onto carts.

  As the sailors of the Hustle disembarked, a man paused on the docks in front of them. “What are you doing? Haven’t you heard?” In his arms, he held a box of what looked like medical supplies. “The Alliance is marching north from Broken Crown, burning villages as they go.”

  “Where are you headed?” Ed asked him.

  “Into the Cloud Pillars. If we leave the coast, we might have a chance.”

  The Cloud Pillars were the deep canyons and tottering columns of rock that lay beyond the mountains to the west. Mist swirled up from the ancient riverbeds and through the trees, mingling with the low-hanging clouds that obscured the peaks, giving the landscape its name. People said seers lived at the tops of the pillars, subsisting on nothing but the incense that stimulated their visions, but for everyone else, the Cloud Pillars were a place to be avoided, a maze of slippery rocks and passes too steep to climb.

  “Do you know a way through?”

  The man shook his head, already running off. “I’m sorry, I have to go!”

  For a moment, Captain Neeram watched his retreating form with narrowed eyes. Then, taking a breath, they turned to the crew of the Hustle. “All right, you’ve got an hour to get us resupplied and get back on the boats. If you’re late, we leave you. No exceptions.” They began rattling off a list of provisions—fresh water, lamp oil, dry stores . . .

  As soon as they’d finished, the sailors began running into buildings. There was the sound of wood breaking, glass shattering.

  “Looting?” Lac blinked, dumbfounded. “We’re looters now? Captain, we can’t—”

  “If they left this shit behind, they don’t need it. We do.” Neeram hefted a coil of rope onto their shoulder. “You want to be a hero, you can die with the saps you’re trying to save. Cowards may be the bonesucking scum of the sea, but at least we live.” Without another word, they grabbed a second length of rope and turned away.

  Lac looked miserable.

  “What are we going to do, Ed?” Hobs asked.

  A mule ran past, trailing a rope from its halter. A girl ran after it, crying, “No, no! Stop!”

  Without a second thought, Ed took off after the mule, dragging Lac and Hobs with him. “Come with me.”

  Together, the four of them corralled the animal. Ed took the mule by its halter, stroking its nose while the fright ebbed from its large, intelligent eyes. Not for the first time, he missed his gray mare, whom he’d left behind in Corabel along with his dogs. He hoped Arcadimon was looking after them. He hoped they were looking after Arc.

  “Thank you,” the girl said.

  Ed gave a little shrug. “What else can we do?”

  “Please,” Lac added, taking her hands. “Allow us to do something.”

  They stacked water kegs on wagons. They carried chests of heirlooms. They caught chickens and stuffed them into wooden cages for the journey.

  Once, Ed looked to the docks and saw the Hustle leaving the harbor. “Well,” he said, “there goes our ride.”

  “Do you think
they’ll make it?” Hobs wondered.

  “They’ll make it,” Lac answered. “Neeram will make sure of it.”

  “What about us?” Hobs asked. “We can’t reunite with the Royal Navy now.”

  Ed looked toward the smoky skies above Broken Crown, toward the war front, toward the Delienean ships, which had been painted Alliance blue, and the soldiers that Arcadimon had forced to join them.

  Briefly, Ed wondered if he could march south, directly into the oncoming Alliance forces, and announce himself. He was the Delienean king, returned from the dead, and he would be removing the Northern Kingdom from this ludicrous war.

  Could he really do it, though? These past weeks with Lac and Hobs and the animals aboard the Hustle, he’d finally started feeling well. The melancholia still reached him sometimes, but now that he’d left his kingdom and his title, he wondered if he was becoming the boy he could have been if he hadn’t been born under the Corabelli Curse, if he hadn’t watched so many of his loved ones die, if he hadn’t been poisoned, for years, by his best friend.

  And if the Alliance was, as Lac and Hobs believed, under the control of the Guard, the Guard wouldn’t blink twice before executing Ed on the spot. Even if he managed to sneak past the Alliance foot soldiers to the Delienean generals who were surely among them, he wondered how long it would take King Darion Stonegold to send an invasion like this to the Northern Kingdom. He wondered what his beloved cliffs and White Plains would look like strewn with Delienean bodies.

  And he wondered if, perhaps, Arc had had the best interests of the kingdom at heart after all.

  But what had he done to get there? Ed swallowed, thinking of his cousin’s body on the funeral bier. Whom had Arcadimon sacrificed?

  Ed turned back to Lac and Hobs, who needed him now. “We can help these people,” he said, “while we have the strength to help them.”

  They lugged and dragged, they packed and carted, they worked without complaint until almost the entire village had evacuated, winding up the narrow paths into the mountains.

  Finally, there was only one wagon left, and two women who were wrapping a pair of ornamental shutters that had been in their family for hundreds of years.

  “You look familiar,” one of them said as Ed gave her a hand up onto the front of the cart. She squinted at him, and he wondered how much he resembled his likeness on Delienean coins. He’d put on muscle, he knew that. His hair had grown longer. “Who are you?” she asked.

  But it was Lac who spoke up. “We’re redcoats,” he said, and smiled for what seemed like the first time in a week.

  Ed frowned. He may not have been the King of Deliene anymore, but he wasn’t a redcoat. He was no one, with no last name and no home.

  The second woman leaned over her partner. “You boys survivors from Broken Crown?”

  “No,” Ed said, “we came from up north.”

  “We had a messenger two days ago who said the Alliance razed Epidram to the ground,” she said, reaching out with a soft hand. “We’re sorry.”

  Gently, Ed squeezed her fingers. The pale band of skin where he’d worn his signet ring was completely gone now, the same tanned brown as the rest of him.

  “You boys need a lift?” asked the first woman. She jerked her head at the back of the wagon, where their goat was lying among some dry fronds.

  “In the back?” Lac said. “With the goat?”

  Ed wandered to the wagon bed, where he let the goat nuzzle his palm. “Where are you going?”

  “Kelebrandt. Queen Heccata will protect us.”

  Ed hadn’t been to Kelebrandt in five years. It had the natural protection of Tsumasai Bay, which had only four entrances, in addition to the stone forts the Oxscinian monarchs had built over the years. Lac and Hobs would finally be back with the Royal Navy. And Ed? Well, he’d find another way to be of service, somehow.

  CHAPTER 15

  Chief of the Bloodletters

  Later, Sefia found out that most of the Gormani clans had refused to join the Alliance with the rest of Deliene. Since Arcadimon Detano had sent the bulk of the kingdom’s navy to invade Oxscini, Oshka Kemura and her allies had been causing all sorts of trouble up north, preying on Alliance patrols like the one the Current and the Crux had seen at the Trove of the King.

  “Kaito would have loved that,” Sefia said.

  Thumbing the worry stone, Archer nodded. After his confrontation with Chief Kemura, she and the other Gormani captains had departed for the north, taking the Oxscinian merchants with them, and the Brother had begun sailing south for Haven with the Current, the Crux, and the other two outlaw ships from Epigloss.

  Sefia, Archer, Frey, and Aljan moved their belongings from the Current to the Brother, where Keon excitedly ushered them to the great cabin. It was in even greater disarray than Sefia remembered it: great swaths of leather slung over the chairs, jars of glue sticking to the tabletop, knots of thread mixed up with scraps of paper, and dozens of books stacked on chairs, in corners, and crammed between sofa cushions.

  “I kinda got carried away,” the skinny boy said sheepishly, jamming his hands in his pockets. Even though they hadn’t needed the decoy Book, he’d found he enjoyed the work, and with nothing better to do when he wasn’t on watch, he’d begun making other books: palm-size books, large books, books that could fit easily in a satchel or on a shelf . . .

  “And they’re all blank?” Aljan asked, reverently leafing through one of the bigger codices.

  “Grieg took one for his recipes,” Keon said with a shrug. “But all the rest are, yeah.”

  “Got a story to write?” Frey asked, looping her arm through Aljan’s.

  He nodded.

  He took over writing lessons aboard the Brother, teaching Frey, Keon, Griegi, and a couple others, while Sefia continued her study of Alteration.

  Objects that had been excised didn’t just disappear, she learned. Once you’d eliminated every trace of them, it was as if they’d never existed at all. Once, the Scribes had used this power to erase entire armies—all those people, all those stories—gone, as if they’d never been.

  Sefia returned to studying grains of rice. In the Illuminated world, she would examine every particle of light. Then, as if her fingers were tipped with blades, she’d slice through each golden flake, and one by one, they would melt into darkness.

  In her hand, the grain of rice would disappear.

  Excision.

  But the Illuminated world was a painstakingly connected web. Some streams of light were dim, like the faintest constellations in the sky, and others were so bright they seemed to pulse with the strength of their connections, forming a complex system of rivers and brooks and many-armed deltas.

  And she soon learned it was these she had to treat with care.

  Once, she was going too quickly—she was getting overconfident—and as she was eliminating particles, her hand slipped. Entire strands of gold started disappearing, faster and faster, farther and farther away from her, burning out like candles in the wind.

  Around her, the tides of the Illuminated world shifted. Somewhere across the years, she saw a stalk of rice wink out of existence. She saw a sickle. A flash of red. A scar.

  She reeled, blinking. Her palm was empty. She’d excised the grain of rice successfully, but she’d also taken the entire plant—somewhere, in burlap sacks and earthen pots, every piece of rice that plant had produced had also disappeared—and that one change had caused permanent injury to a person she’d never met.

  She was more careful, from then on, but she was not deterred.

  She didn’t yet know how this power could alter the course of Archer’s future, but she would make sure he would no longer be the boy from the legends. She would make sure he lived.

  * * *

  • • •

  Archer had expected to be relieved, being back with the bloodletters, but his ru
n-in with Chief Kemura had unsettled him, and he could not help wondering if he’d made a mistake, not leaving with Sefia after the Trove.

  But he loved the bloodletters. They were his family—sometimes they felt more like family than his own flesh and blood back in Jocoxa, on the northwest tip of Oxscini. No one else knew what he’d been through with the impressors. No one else could really understand.

  One day, as he sat with Scarza in the great cabin, he asked, “We’ve done some good together, haven’t we? The bloodletters?”

  They’d stopped the impressors in Deliene. They’d freed dozens of boys.

  Looking up from the rifle he’d been cleaning, Scarza watched him with his gray sharpshooter’s eyes. “Is this about what Chief Kemura said?”

  You’ve done more harm than good.

  Archer nodded. “Even after Versil, and Kaito, and the others we’ve lost, I still think the good we’ve done outweighs the bad . . . but the longer I’m your chief, the more battles I lead you into, the more I’m afraid I’m tipping the scales the other way. It’s not the fighting . . . or not just the fighting. It’s the leading. When I’m leading you, I can feel myself becoming a different person.”

  The commander. The conqueror. The boy from the legends.

  “A worse person,” he added. “If I keep leading you into battle, it’s only a matter of time before I am him, and I won’t be able to come back from that.”

  “But we’re not going into battle anymore,” Scarza said, deftly snapping pieces of his rifle back into place with his one hand.

  No, they were going to Haven. And if Sefia was right, they were going exactly where the Book wanted them to. A stay at Haven, however, would at least buy them a little time to figure out exactly how to use the power of the Scribes to rewrite the future.

  Scarza gripped his shoulder kindly. “I’ll lead us if I have to. But I don’t think I’ll have to.”

  And for two and a half weeks, things were fine. Archer remained chief of the bloodletters, but they didn’t fight or train as they used to. They had no one to fight.