Flee!screamed the voices.Save yourself!
Artham saw the cell door standing open, and he ran. The voices in his mind cackled with glee. He held his deformed hands over his ears as he screamed down the corridors that veined the depths of the Killridge Mountains, and the talons cut his cheeks and ears and mocked his cowardice. He ran past chamber after chamber of muttering prisoners, mad with the music and the endless night.
For hours he ran, until he forgot his name, and his brother, and his kingdom. He crawled through tunnels where insects nested and slithered in shallow pools, he swam through ponds of living sludge, trying to escape the song and the voices and the memory of the one he had abandoned.
And then, suddenly, he emerged from the Deeps of Throg into a forest at the foot of the mountains. He lay for a long time at the mouth of the cave, looking up through towering trees at the sunlight that filtered faintly down.
He wandered for weeks, eating leaf and fruit and creeping things. And one day he stumbled into a clearing where stone pillars, covered in vine and mildew, rose like the bones of giants. At the center of the ring of pillars lay a pool of water as still as glass. The trees whose roots drank from its water were thick as houses, and Artham heard enormous things thudding through the foothills, behemoths calling to each other in a language as old as the world. He woke that night beside the pool and saw the shapes of ancient, beautiful beings not seen by men since epochs long forgotten, lapping up its water.
In some distant part of his mind, he knew he had found the First Well, though he had no words for it. He wondered if the water might heal him, might remove the terrible red talons, maybe even quiet the voices. He found on the forest floor an empty brown shell as big as a bowl—the husk of a seed fallen from the towering trees—and he scooped up the water.
He raised it to his lips, aching to taste its power, wanting so much for it to kill the voices in his mind. But he couldn’t drink. He remembered his brother in the Deeps of Throg, still chained to the wall. How could the Throne Warden be whole when the High King was broken?
So Artham Wingfeather wandered the old forest for days, seeking the way back into the Deeps where his brother languished, carrying with him the water of Esben’s healing. Where it spilled, the ground burst with flowers and green things, and Artham longed to drink. But he kept it from himself.
Many days he sought the cave. He cradled the water as the seasons passed, and it never steamed away and hardly diminished, so careful was he not to spill it.
Artham encountered monsters in the woods, and he knew them to be like him: half-made beasts, bent things, Gnag the Nameless’s abandoned mistakes, who had either escaped from the Deeps or been cast out. They snuffled and rooted and lurched through the forest, and some, who could speak, begged Artham for a taste of the water. He refused them, finding that he could hardly speak a sane word. He told them in his gibberish that it was for the High King of Anniera, and they laughed. Some attacked him, so mad were they for respite and healing, but always he kept it safe for Esben, for Esben, always for Esben.
But the cave, the entrance to the Deeps of Throg, eluded him.
After many moons fattened and diminished, blinking in the night sky like the Maker’s all-seeing eye, Artham emerged from the Blackwood. He found a vial in an abandoned farmhouse, emptied what was left of the water into it, and swore, with what was left of his mind, to find his brother’s children and keep watch over them in Esben’s stead. Long he sought them, listening through the dark voices to a single bright one that he knew told the truth.
Cross the Dark Sea, the bright, quiet voice whispered to him, and he knew it was true because the other voices told him not to. He stowed away on a Fang ship, nearly starved in the hold, but set foot at last on the shores of Skree. He found Glipwood, the town Podo Helmer was from, and one glad day he saw three children who looked, in different ways, like Esben Wingfeather. Artham watched the Jewels of Anniera from afar, always ready to ward and protect them, since their father, the High King, was lost.
Or is he? screamed the voices in the night as Artham tossed in his treehouse.
And the more he wondered, the louder the voices grew.
As he writhed on the grass, while Sara Cobbler and Maraly Weaver knelt over him, calling his name, he knew.
Esben is alive.
His heart tore in two. He had begun to believe—to hope, even—that Esben had died. That he suffered no more. That Gnag the Nameless had not managed to break his spirit and make a monster of him. Nine years was too long to dangle from a dungeon wall with that incessant music screeching in his mind. But he saw his brother now, bulging and bent, a lost thing. And it was Artham’s fault. He had fled when he should have fought.
Oh, Esben!Artham wailed in his mind.I’m sorry.
His words pulsed through the earth, carried by the cord of Leeli’s song, and spoke in Esben’s mind. As Artham writhed in Dugtown, he saw the Grey Fangs in the Hollish Keep, saw the children huddled over the cloven and the arrows in its back. He saw the battle and knew the Jewels were in great danger.
Sing the song, Artham said into the cavern of his cloven brother’s mind.Sing it for them. Sing it to save, not to be saved. Sing it for love, not power.
Artham? said Esben’s voice.
“Esben!” Artham said aloud through clenched teeth.
Sara and Maraly, kneeling beside him, looked at each other helplessly.
“What’s wrong with him?” Sara cried.
“Yes, it’s me, little brother.” Artham was crying. “Please listen to me. Sing the song of the ancient stones! You must remember it! But do it for them. Not for the Stone Keeper! You can’t let Gnag get to them!Wake up, Esben!”
Artham clung to the connection between them, willing his words to find their way deep, deep into the cloven body where Esben’s heart still beat. Artham pleaded with him, but his mind seemed so far away.
SING IT! he told his brother as he saw Bonifer Squoon racing through the Fangs and Hollowsfolk to grab the children.
Then the connection broke. The vision vanished. Artham Wingfeather curled up on the grass and wept, unable, yet again, to help the king.
Sara Cobbler and Maraly Weaver helped him inside and tended to his sorrow, though his only words were gibberish.
56
The Queen and the Cloven
Nia heard Janner scream, “PAPA!” But she didn’t understand why.
A Grey Fang stood behind her with one arm around her neck and the other pressing the point of a dagger against her ribs. Podo was beside her, held fast by three Fangs. She saw Janner fall, saw him look into the cloven’s face, then sensed a crackle in the air, like a silent flash of lightning in a distant cloud. She didn’t know what it meant, but it sent Leeli running to the monster’s side to block the Fang’s sword. The Fang yanked Leeli away just as her dog, Baxter, darted into the hall. Nia looked up to see Rudric, the man she loved, poised on a high limb, just as he shot the Grey Fang leader and ignited the battle.
Rudric and his Durgan Patrol swarmed the branches of the tree with bows and arrows, felling Fang after bewildered Fang. The wolfmen holding her and Podo tensed and dragged them further back into the great tree’s roots. She caught a glimpse of Oskar N. Reteep comforting Freva and Bonnie as he peeked from behind the tree, but try as she might, she could no longer see her children in the chaos.
Grey Fangs and Durgans and Hollowsfolk roared and growled and hacked in the wildness of war, and somewhere among them were Janner, Kalmar, and Leeli—and the cloven. Why had Janner been talking to it? And why did the cloven have Freva’s daughter? And why, oh why, was Bonifer Squoon, her husband’s closest advisor, leading the Fangs of Dang into the Green Hollows?
Nia’s thoughts were interrupted by the faint but unmistakable sound of her daughter’s voice, singing from somewhere in the mayhem. Leeli, at least, was alive. The melody she sang unlocked itself in Nia’s mind; it was an old Annieran sailor’s tune called “My Love Has Gone Across the Sea,” a song Leeli had first l
earned years ago in Glipwood.
The song was cut short, and for a moment the battle parted enough for Nia to see three Fangs and Bonifer Squoon hurrying out of the Keep with the children.
Moments after they were gone, she heard another sound cut through the clamor—another melody. This one was odd, and garbled. She thought at first that it was some son or daughter of the Hollows in the agony of death, so sad and eerie was its music.
Then the air shimmered as with the heat of a fire, and a light flashed in the room. The Fangs cringed and the Hollowsfolk gasped. It only lasted a moment, and then the battle raged on. But from the center of the room, a new commotion began, and Nia heard a ferocious snarling as the Grey Fangs intensified their attack.
The Fang behind her grew agitated and said to one of the wolfmen holding Podo, “What do you think, Gergin?” Nia felt its breath in her ear.
“I think General Swifter’s dead,” said the other. Nia and Podo exchanged a worried glance. “And it looks like our fellow soldiers could use our help.”
“Aye. The Jewels are gone. I saw Feral and the others carry them out.”
“Then what are we doing with these two?”
“Don’t suppose we need them anymore, do we?”
Nia felt the muscles in the furry arm tighten around her neck. Podo squirmed, but with his hands tied and in the grip of the Fangs, he could do little.
Nia dug her fingernails into the Fang’s forearm and felt the blade press into her side. She screamed Rudric’s name again and again, but her voice was lost in the clash and bellow of the fight. She caught a glimpse him on the opposite side of the room with a warhammer in one giant fist and a sword in the other, embattled with seven Grey Fangs at once. Rudric saw Nia and roared, but there was nothing he could do. He was too far away. Every Hollish fighter Nia saw was either dead on the floor or locked in combat.
She looked to her left in time to see Oskar N. Reteep heave himself onto one of the Fangs holding Podo. But even as big as Reteep was, the Fang kept hold of Podo’s neck and kicked Oskar aside so hard that he slammed awkwardly into a nook in the root and lay motionless, his spectacles cracked and dangling from one ear.
“Enough with these two,” the Fang called Gergin said. “I’m going to fight.”
“Rudric!” Nia cried again, but it was hopeless. If she was going to die, she certainly wasn’t going to stand still and let the Fang run her through. She struggled against the Fang and felt the blade cut through her dress and pierce her skin.
Then from the center of the skirmish, she heard a voice as deep as thunder. It was a roar, but it was more than that—louder and stronger, and it carried a word. Her name.
“NIA.”
From the center of the mayhem rose the shaggy head of a bear. Its golden fur-covered body was shaped like a man, but a man so strong that even Rudric looked small by comparison.
It flung its huge arms outward and Fangs flew through the air, crashed into walls, and snapped branches of the great tree. The bear hunkered down, aiming its shoulder at the clot of Fangs before it and charging. Fangs flattened beneath the bearish creature like grass in a thunderstorm.
Gone was the mottled gray skin. Gone were the twisted limbs and the lurching gait. The thing bore toward Nia with such power and speed that the very walls of the Keep would not have stood before it.
The Fangs holding Podo and Nia whined like puppies, released them, and scampered away, but the bear seized them each and hurled them across the hall into a muster of Fangs gathered at the main door.
Nia couldn’t breathe. She stood rigid with terror, looking up at the beast. She sensed Podo to her left, picking himself off the floor. “Easy there,” he said to the beast, inching between them.
The bear sniffed. Nia looked up into its face, trying to see the thing’s eyes, but they were hidden too deep in shadow. Its fur was the color of cedar bark, and it smelled like a horse, or a dog, or fresh-turned soil. As the battle boiled on behind them, the world between Nia and the bear grew still.
It lifted one of its arms and opened its fist—a fist as big as a pumpkin—and placed its hand on Podo’s head. For perhaps the first time in his life, Podo was too afraid to move. Nia knew the bear could pop his head like a berry if it wanted, but it only patted the old pirate twice and nudged him aside.
The bear knelt before Nia, and she was able at last to see its face in the torchlight. Its eyebrows trembled and raised enough to reveal two blue eyes that Nia had looked into a thousand times. She touched the bear’s face with a trembling hand. “Esben?”
When her fingers brushed the side of its snout, it sighed and closed its eyes and leaned its cheek against her palm. Nia shook with a sob, then lost herself in the warm folds of the bear’s embrace. She closed her eyes and heard a happy groan deep in her husband’s chest, and she felt young and safe and holy with love.
“Esben,” she murmured. “Oh, my husband.”
“Nia,” said the bear. She felt the word vibrate in the bear’s warm chest. “My love.” Nia looked up to see Esben’s eyes gazing down at her. His damp, black nose nuzzled against her cheek. “Nia,” he said. “I’m sorry—sorry I wasn’t stronger.”
“Shh,” Nia said, content to feel her heart entwined with her husband’s again. She didn’t know how he had changed or how he got there, and she didn’t care. Podo knelt nearby, watching Nia and the bear with a childlike smile.
“I was lost . . . in the Deeps,” said Esben. “He tried to change me, and for years, I tried to be strong. But they broke me.”
“It’s all right, Esben,” Nia whispered. “You’re here now, and you’re alive.”
“I got out, but I was alone in the Blackwood for a long time.” Esben’s voice softened with what sounded like wonder. “And one day I felt the children. I saw them in my mind, as if they were standing right in front of me. And I heard sweet music. I knew they were in Ban Rona, and so I came. Kalmar, he—he took care of me. He told me to go back, but I couldn’t. I found the girl in the cave and knew that I—I had to help her. Then I heard the music again! Oh, Nia. I found you.” Esben’s voice was thick with tears. “Leeli’s so beautiful! And the boys are so strong and handsome, even—even Kalmar. But what did they do to him, Nia? My boy!”
Nia stiffened. The children. They were gone, and they might not have much time. “Esben, listen. We have to get them! Bonifer—”
“Bonifer,” Esben rumbled. He straightened and held Nia out before him. “He’s here?”
“Yes,” Nia told him. “And he took the children. I don’t know why, but he betrayed us.”
“He’s done more than that,” Esben growled. “He betrayed Anniera. He betrayed the Maker himself.”
“How do you know? What do you mean?”
“Gnag told me.” Esben lifted Nia into his arms and said, “Come, my love. The children need us.”
Esben the Bear turned and took one step down from the dais just as Podo yelled, “Rudric, no!”
Rudric stood before them, his face and beard soiled with the spray and sweat of battle, his teeth bared and his eyes fierce.
Esben jerked to a stop, and Nia looked down to see Rudric’s sword buried to the hilt in Esben’s stomach.
57
A Bear in Ban Rona
Let her go, cloven!” Rudric wrenched the blade further in.
Nia was too stunned to make a sound. A trickle of blood ran out from the folds of Esben’s fur, down the hilt and over Rudric’s black glove. Esben swayed and grunted, and one of his big hands went to his stomach.
Nia finally let out a sob and shook her head at Rudric, her eyes a storm of sorrow and confusion and denial. When Rudric saw those eyes, his grimace faded into a frown of confusion, then, slowly, the horror of regret as he began to understand what he had done.
“Rudric,” Podo said quietly. “It’s Esben.”
Rudric released the sword hilt as if it were red hot and stumbled back from the steps. He tripped over a dead Fang and landed on his back, shaking his head slowly
. “I’m sorry—I’m sorry, I thought—”
Esben shook his great shaggy head and heaved and coughed. “Not . . . your . . . fault.” He looked around the great hall, empty now but for the bodies of slain Hollowsfolk and empty Fang armor, blown with dust. “Where are my children?”
“The Fangs retreated,” Rudric said. “Back to their ships.”
Esben took a deep breath and withdrew the sword. It clanged to the floor as the great bear, with Nia still in his arms, lowered his head and ran. He bounded out of the Keep and into the streets of Ban Rona.
Nia closed her eyes and rested her head against his warm neck. She felt his great strength, his mighty arms holding her fast, and the rhythm of his stride as he hurtled down the snowy street, thundering like a warhorse into battle. His head slung to and fro with every step. The wind peeled the fur back from his face and revealed his desperate blue eyes. She looked behind them to see Rudric and Podo running after, unable to keep up, and a crimson trail of blood strung out like a ribbon in the snow.
“Hold fast,” Esben whispered.
Nia turned to see them approaching the rear of the Fang retreat. Hollowsfolk pursued them to the waterfront, hurling spear and sword and dagger, and Fangs littered the streets, crisping into dust. Biggin O’Sally and his boys led a pack of armored dogs that snapped at the Fangs as they ran. Wisps of grey and white fur littered the air like foul pollen.
Esben pushed through the Hollowsfolk and into the retreating Fangs, slinging his free arm like a giant hammer. Grey Fangs crashed through windows or were trampled underfoot. They squealed like hogpigs and fled the Bear King of Anniera and his queen.
Esben burst through the knot of Fangs and raced ahead to the harbor. When he turned the last corner of the road that led to the docks, a wall of Fang archers waited, lining the pier, their bows drawn. The Fang commander shouted, “Now!”
The Monster in the Hollows Page 30
