by Brian Fuller
“In you go, lad,” Sikes said after lighting the lantern.
The cell had no amenities other than the bed and a chamber pot, which, Gen discovered, Sikes had not emptied for a day or two. Sikes closed the cell door and stared at his keys, trying to determine which to use. Gen wondered what the other keys were for, since the only lock in town was on the cell door. Not even Jeorge Morewold, the store owner, bothered locking up his wares.
After locating the right key, Sikes stared at it as if trying to determine whether to put the key in the lock or the lock in the key. After some consternation and several different keys, the cell was shut and locked.
“You keep to yerself, boy! I don’t want no racket while I sleep.”
Not being a reader, Sikes banked the fire and extinguished the lamp immediately. A few minutes later he forced Gen to relinquish the blanket from the bed. In short order, Sikes set to snoring like a drunk, congested sailor, awaking with a screech from time to time, perhaps reliving the wicked blow to his head.
Gen finally learned to ignore Sikes’s discomfited stirring and fell asleep, only to be awakened by the desperate Warden demanding the chamber pot. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t fit between the bars, which set Sikes to fumbling with the keys again. Before long, his need became so urgent that Sikes forsook the keys and went outside.
The rest of the night passed in a similar fashion, and, as the fire faded, Gen could hardly sleep for the chill. When the sun rose, he felt out of sorts and was hoping some of the Pureman’s treatments would help Jakes’s lips heal quickly. Sikes still slept, limbs sticking out of the blanket at wild angles. He twitched as Bernard Showles’s shrill voice split the calm morning air.
“Get that thing back where it belongs! By Eldaloth, I will kill whoever has done this!”
Gen poked his head up to peer through the bars of his window. There, sitting just outside the jail, was the Showles’s outhouse, the words “Free Gen” scrawled into the side. Gen grinned. Hearing Sikes stirring, he dropped back to the bed and pretended to be asleep.
“Sikes!” Bernard howled, kicking open the door. “Sikes! Get up! They’ve done it again.”
Gen feigned waking and saw the Magistrate in his long johns kicking Sikes in the ribs. At the sight of Bernard in his underwear, Gen couldn’t decide whether to laugh or vomit. Bernard scowled at him as Sikes collected himself and stood. Howen poked his head in the door, sticking his tongue out at Gen.
Sikes grabbed his club. “Any idea who done it, sir?”
“How would I have any idea who did it? Howen, help Sikes get this back to the house!”
The three left, voices trailing off. Gen lay back, wondering who his benefactors were, especially since the obvious choice, Gant, had likely been confined to his home by his master besides being injured. Of course, it could be anyone. The people of Tell could do nothing to protest the Showles’s childish behavior. Entreaties to the Baron only resulted in petty revenge from the Magistrate, so the townspeople exacted their frustration with the Showles family in the only mode available—pranks.
And pranks there had been aplenty. The favorite target was the Showles’s outhouse. The outhouse lowered the Showleses—fancy clothes, fancy house, social standing, and all—to the same level as everyone else in the town.
Pranksters had inflicted just about everything imaginable upon the structure at one time or another. Every animal that could fit had been left in it as a surprise for the unfortunate victim in search of a little midnight relief. It had been knocked down, dragged out to a field, had the roof removed during rain and snowstorms, piled with cow manure, sticks, and leaves. It had been filled, broken, hidden, greased, and painted in so many ways Gen concluded an entire book couldn’t hold the tale of them all.
At one point, the pranks became so bad and so frequent that the Showleses set their boys out to guard the structure during the night. But after a few days, their whining, lazy sons gave up. A lock was next, but this idea was abandoned the very next day when someone rendered the lock unopenable by jamming it full of small stones.
Gen could only think of two things that hadn’t been done to the outhouse yet. For one, nobody had set it on fire, but why would anybody destroy their one source of revenge? The second thing was something so terrible, so heinous, that no one dared to do it.
The best thing, however, was that Sikes never caught any of the perpetrators and never would. For just as surely as Bernard Showles was ordering Sikes at that very moment to track down the dastards who dared move his toilet seventy-five yards away, Sikes would find that no one had the faintest idea who had done it. The Secret Society of the Outhouse would never give up its members, and Gen took satisfaction in the fact that someone in that society had seen fit to honor him.
The days passed slowly in the cell. Finding the four teeth took nearly an entire day, as at least two of the teeth were in several pieces. Rafael came every morning, and, after a stern lecture that got shorter each time, always brought a book, which Gen hid under the mattress so that Sikes, who couldn’t read, wouldn’t confiscate it.
Gant talked to Gen through the bars when Sikes was away, and his friend gave him daily reports on the state of Jakes’s mouth. After the third moving of the outhouse, Bernard forced Sikes to camp by it, which gave Gen the pleasure of uninterrupted sleep for the rest of his stay. To further the Showles’s frustration, the children in town frequently puffed up their lips in an imitation of Jakes’s face, and to make matters worse, the two teeth that the Pureman could not repair were the top front two.
“I guess all his th’s will be whistled,” Gen quipped to Gant one chilly morning.
“Yep. Folks are already makin’ fun of that.”
“Can he eat meat yet?”
“I dunno,” Gant answered. “He’ll certainly have to cut it from now on, so I hope that’ll count or you’ll be in here fer life.”
But after a week and a half of imprisonment, Gen received a sudden reprieve.
Chapter 2 - Regina
Hubert Showles was coming home.
Gen yawned and flung the shutters of his room wide to invite the chilly pre-dawn breeze to pry open his eyes the rest of the way. His own efforts had failed. He had slept little that night, finding that an evening of rigorously practicing his repertoire of songs for Hubert’s return celebration only set his mind to lively wanderings that chased sleep away, despite finding himself in the comfort of his own bed for the first time in nearly two weeks.
The second-story window of his room overlooked the last of the Green Road and commanded a pleasant view of the dense Alewine forest. Dying night winds that set the forest to sighing and bending wafted the fermented scent of autumn’s decay into his room.
A statuette of a hideous Uyumaak on the table caught the weak, pink light of the clouds and shifted its color from night black to the brown of the table. Gen picked it up and regarded it, its color changing to match that of his fingers. Rafael had gifted him the statuette when he had shown a fascination with it as a boy.
The long, powerful legs and the gangly arms terminating in vicious claws marked this Uyumaak as a Hunter. The different breeds of Uyumaak had different bodies designed for different purposes, but all had the same face—a circular mouth ringed with triangular teeth pointed at the center of the hole, slightly protruding so it could suck meat into its maw for the teeth to devour.
A set of three nose holes formed a triangle above the mouth just beneath an inset crevasse in the conical upper skull, which held a row of glassy black eyes. His statuette had nine, though Rafael said that some had as few as three, while stories from the Mikkikian wars talked of some having as many as twenty. The thought of all those eyes moving about sent a shiver down Gen’s spine.
The statuette imitated the talent of the Uyumaak’s scaly skin—it changed colors to match its environment. Some of the songs he’d prepared the night before told stories of the creatures hiding nearly invisible in the deep grass or woods for a chance to chase down a horse or tear apart
an elven scout.
The miniature statue had scared and fascinated him as a boy, and, to overcome his fear, he took to giving it the name of whatever person in town annoyed him at any particular time. The habit stuck.
The statue had borne Hubert’s name many times before. Gen considered the snotty, stupid son of the town’s Magistrate the worst of the Showles lot. His only redeeming virtue was that he didn’t play favorites. He tortured everyone, including his own kin, until loneliness drove him to relent enough for those with short memories to come within earshot of him again. Gen’s memory was not short. After Hubert threw him in the well behind the Church when he was ten, Gen had avoided the brute diligently.
He set the statuette back on the book-laden table and shut and latched the shutters in case rain or wind blew in while he was out. Quietly, he took the creaky stairs down to the kitchen, though his stealth was unnecessary. Rafael was already there, slouched over the table with breakfast at the ready. Gen drank the cinnamon tea and ate the barley cakes slowly, hoping they could throw off the grogginess and get him into performing condition.
Rafael looked as tired as Gen felt. The old bard usually slept until the sun was well past full up, and rising early in the morning disagreed with him. He had combed back what little straggly gray hair still clung to his scalp and donned his performing clothes. His pants and shirt were baggy on him. During the successful years of his barding, he had eaten from the larder of lords and ladies and grown plump. The food of his retirement was less rich and less abundant.
If he were telling the truth, Gen wanted the same traveling life as his master, hoping Baron Forthrickeshire would permit him to travel to Khyrum, the capital of Tolnor, or even to other shards such as Tenswater and Rhugoth. Staying in Tell would resign him to a life of inconsequence and boredom. The poor town was good for one thing only—lumber.
Few traveled the long, unkempt Green Road that connected a string of towns set on the southeastern edge of the expansive Alewine forest. The farther north the road went, the smaller and less frequent the towns became until at last one arrived at Tell, after which no permanent settlement could be found all the way to the nearly impassible Rede Steppes and Red Wind Desert.
Despite the constant cutting of branch and tree, the wood still threatened to overrun the towns built with and sustained by it. Tales passed down from the first woodsmen to work the timber told of groves cut down one day and regrown the next. While Gen had never seen a tree grow overnight, the townsfolk waged a constant battle to keep the seedlings out of house, garden, and field. Under the previous Magistrate, every mid-spring the children would be let loose to pull as many suckers and saplings as they could from around the buildings in town, the child who brought in the most winning a rabbit or a bronze piece.
Very little else of importance, however, came from Tell, not in product or person. Few people outside of the nearby towns of Sipton and Hazelwhite knew Tell existed at all, and they were mostly relatives of the townspeople who had worked the forest and the land for several generations.
The folk in Tell, especially the older ones, enjoyed the solitude and separation, while the young did little more than dream of leaving. Some of the apprentices accompanied their masters as far west as Green Wall when the lumber was sold. Their tales of the inns, festivals, and pretty girls set the rest of the young men to longing for adventure and travel and to a great deal of complaining—mostly to unsympathetic parents—about how dreadfully dull Tell was. Gen agreed with them.
Only two things had happened in the last twenty years that people thought amounted to anything worthy of talk, and Gen was one of them. While orphans were not rare in Tell, ones who wandered about naked in the woods with burn-scarred feet were. They said Gen was only three or four years old when a lumbering party found him sitting in a tree. They took him to the woodmaster, who in turn gave him to the care of Tell’s young Churchman, Pureman Millershim. The Pureman diligently searched for the boy’s parents in the small towns along the road, but with no success.
At first, the strange circumstances of Gen’s appearance caused the normally friendly families of Tell—long accustomed to raising orphans—to shun him. While the forest might provide for their bread, the people believed it a fey and dangerous place. Pureman Millershim ardently preached against entering deep within the shadowy boles, as, he said, worshipers of the dead goddess Owena kept watch over the trees and practiced strange rites. A child found in the wood, therefore, was an ill omen, especially considering the strange condition of his feet, which conjured images of strange rites by firelight. People whispered in low voices that Gen was the kin of cultists, and they waited to see what he would become.
The Pureman gave Gen his name and entrusted the strange boy to the only person who took vocal pity on him: Rafael. The retired bard had just bought the status of freeholder with earnings from the success of his trade and settled into the large, abandoned farmhouse.
After Gen was successfully placed, the town mothers would often cluck and fuss about how the boy should have a proper mother, though none wanted the job personally. To add further controversy, Gen’s skin was pale white, his eyes green, and his stature tall—all marks of noble heritage, unlike the short, stocky, and swarthy traits of most Tolnorian peasantry.
For a time, Gen remained a thing of conjecture and gossip, but as the boy grew under the tutelage of the learned bard, his strange history faded in importance and he became a regular part of the town, though not an ordinary one. Rafael was learned in lore and in the ways of court. Before long, Gen stood out for his manners and speech rather than for his mysterious origins. The coarse, rough-and-tumble boys of the rural town had plenty of reasons to despise Gen as their parents continually used the bard’s apprentice as a standard of sterling behavior. “Why can’t you be more polite, like Gen?” “If you had half the sense Gen had. . .” “You could learn a thing or two from Gen about how to behave. . .”
The ill feelings died off as they grew older and Gen demonstrated that he was neither aloof nor conceited. The fact that few—if any—mothers would allow their daughters to take the orphan bard seriously helped, too. As the boys started their apprenticeships, something Gen had embarked upon years before, Gen became a mentor in finding ways to romance the young ladies of Tell. He felt foolish giving advice about something with which he had no personal experience, although he knew the heart-wrenching tales of his trade.
But experience or no, Gen’s reputation as a bard and as a young man grew. His voice was strong and clear, his fingers nimble upon the lute. His easy manner endeared him to the townsfolk (with the notable exception of the Showleses). Only the glint of cunning intelligence in Gen’s eye, his refinement of speech, and his appearance marked him as different; in all other ways, he was a boy of the country. Rafael always looked on Gen with a proud glow and had said more than once that the boy would go far—the good Baron permitting.
The second notable thing to happen in Tell was the placement of Hubert Showles into the armies of Duke Norshwal. While the Showleses were technically nobility, they were not the kind that mattered. Somehow, however, Bernard arranged for his son to serve in the Duke’s regular army.
At first Hubert seemed mortified at the opportunity, but his father saw to it that the town paid him the proper attention and respect—things the entire Showles family held in short supply—and Hubert soon took to strutting around as if he were a King, lacing the ears of the young ladies with all manner of fabulous tales about the adventures and dangers in which he might find himself (and which every boy in town hoped he would find himself). In Tell, the general lack of news made even stupid fiction incredibly interesting, and Hubert enjoyed his own inventions as much as anyone.
When the snow finally broke on Hubert’s sixteenth year, he was sent off to Graytower, an arduous journey from the eastern edge of the Dukedom to its capital. Bernard pressed the townspeople into a great production for his departure even though the unusually long and harsh winter had depleted their sto
res. The Magistrate had even gone so far as to buy new dresses for several of the more attractive young ladies so they could line the road and wave their sashes at his son as he left. The dresses were collected directly afterward, however, and sent to be resold elsewhere.
Hubert was soon and pleasurably forgotten, and life returned to normal until that morning in late autumn when Rafael came with an order from Bernard to collect his apprentice from jail. Hubert would return the next day, and once again the Showleses demanded that a festival be thrown in his honor. Celebrating Hubert’s departure, while inconvenient, was at least palatable because he was leaving. Gen thought that working up a festive attitude for Hubert’s return would require the type of cheerful disposition only the truly ignorant can possess. Everyone else would need to pursue a drunken stupor and endure his arrival the best they could.
“Well, lad,” Rafael mumbled, voice weary, “let’s get to it. Bernard said he wanted us to play ‘from dawn to dusk and then some’ and dawn is nearly broken.”
“We will get some breaks, won’t we?” Gen asked. He wanted some time to have a little fun himself. Starting the festival so early was as insensitive as it was ridiculous. Everyone knew Hubert would arrive during the late afternoon at the earliest.
“Of course,” Rafael answered sarcastically. “The Magistrate is a considerate man.” Gen grunted and stood, gathering his cloak and his instrument, which he wrapped in a blanket.
“You’ll have to retune that once we. . .” Rafael began.
“I know,” Gen cut him off. “I’ve done this before. We play at All Peace Day in the dead of winter every year.”
“No harm in a reminder, especially to the tired, which would be you, or the hungover, which would be me. Let’s say the Oblation and get going. If you would do the honors, Gen. My mind is still a little foggy.”
