The Story Peddler

by Lindsay A. Franklin

  Scurried closer. Slowed to a crawl. Brightness of daytime streamed from the room, assaulting the eyes. Stopped and waited to adjust to the burn.

  Then hurried along the ceiling beams. Close to the walls, in the shadows.

  And then the view into the room was clear. Battle, come to Gareth’s seat of comfort at last.

  So many years . . . his heart lurched. So many years since these eyes had seen this room where King Caradoc once held court.

  Story strands flew everywhere—the unidentifiable whirring noise. Strands of pain and vengeance.

  He unslung the bow to nock an arrow, just in case. Settled in to observe. Who had brought the sword to Gareth after all this time?

  Easy to pick out the rebels from the armored guardsmen. A dark-haired lad, handy with a sword. Short hair, no tail. A sailor. A tiny glint from a piece of gold in his ear.

  A pirate.

  There was a woman fighting. Holding her own with the men. Shorn hair and trousers on a lass.

  Puzzling.

  There was a Meridioni lad. Art raged from his fingertips.

  Colormastery strands. Ablaze.

  A wispy cage surrounded a pretty lass who might have been one of the courtiers if not for the shabby state of her gown. The cage of wisps—defensive songspinning.

  Another colormaster at the back of the room. Water rolled around her, and a half dozen courtiers huddled in the safety of the fluid wall. Protective colormastery.

  A farmer lad was warding off three soldiers at once. Yes, it was he who created the orange story filling the room.

  What had Gareth done to stir such violence, such angst?

  Ah, there was the old pretender himself. Surrounded by protectors, his massive bodyguard in a heap on the floor.

  Had the usurper forgotten how to fight? It was the only thing he did well.

  Seeing him, thoughts poured out in waves. Memories.

  Another rebel pushed toward Gareth. An old soldier, gray hair and vicious swing. His profile looked familiar.

  There was the fox-faced Sir Dray, his fingers wrapped around the throat of the princess. Scoundrel.

  He could make the shot from here. His fingers tightened around the nock of the arrow, the string of the bow. But wary of the princess’s movement. Could hit her if she didn’t remain still.

  And then a blur of familiar black hair. The young woman from the darkness. Cameria rushed toward the princess and Dray, her dagger drawn.

  His heart skipped.

  Another young woman. A lass with golden hair. A lass who looked like . . . Glain.

  Something shifted. Mind jolted. And . . . the waves of fuzzy memory burst into clarity. Realization locked into place.

  He looked down at his hands, wrapped around the bow. He was Yestin Bo-Arthio, First General of Tir, and there was the miraculous possibility that this golden-haired lass before him was his daughter, Tanwen. He was almost sure.

  He drew the bowstring taut, sighted Dray, then released. Dray moved, last second, and the arrow nicked the back of his neck. Dray flinched and stumbled. Cameria missed her mark and tumbled to the floor.

  Go. Move. Now.

  He swung down the wall—plunging over unfamiliar curves in stones his fingers had never touched.

  His sword was drawn before his feet hit the ground.

  Chapter 47

  Tanwen

  I couldn’t see where the arrow had come from. Seemed like someone was protecting the princess—or maybe all of us. But it must have been a stray from some guardsman.

  Unless one of my Corsyth friends had managed to snag a bow somehow.

  In any case, Sir Dray stumbled under the sting of his grazing wound. Braith flung herself toward Cameria. I was swallowed up in the mass of frantic courtiers again before I could see where they had gotten to.

  I prayed they would find safety.

  I shoved a swooning lady off me and turned back toward the fray of battle.

  Where was Brac? I needed to find him. Make sure he’d managed to get out of the thick of it.

  But where? How?

  I forced my feet to slow and listen to my brain, not my wild, thumping heart. Didn’t have a weapon on me, of course, so it wasn’t like I could take off with a shout and start splitting folks in two the way Aeron might. And even if I did have a weapon, blazed if I’d know how to use it. But . . .

  My gaze floated upward to Zel’s wild strands.

  I guess I did have one weapon.

  I slipped to the side of the room, half-hidden behind some court ladies. At least my fancy dress helped me blend in while I worked to fish something from the dark recesses of my worn-out mind.

  But none of those crowned stories would do. I needed to make something new. Something real and true and powerful. I needed to create, as Mor had shown me.

  My eyes drifted shut, and I worked to build a picture in my mind.

  A dry land. Parched. No green things, nothing living. Just cracked, dead earth, screaming for water through the gashes in its surface. And then the water came—not as drops of rain, but as a great flood of color.

  Waves of orange and watery blue—for Zel and Karlith—and a ribbon of fierce black and white, which could only be Aeron. Flame wreathed the edges of the waves—that was for Dylun. A river of red flowed through the middle of the flood—deepest red for Warmil and the death he was so bent on atoning for. The airiest green vapor for Gryfelle. Glittering gold for Mor.

  And a wide swathe of sparkling, seastone blue. It took me a moment to realize that was me. Looked like my eyes in sunlight.

  Truly, it wasn’t until that moment that I realized I really was a part of this just as much as the other weavers. I was one of them, and we were all in this together—live or die.

  Live, I hoped.

  The tide of color rolled over the parched land like water—healed it. Restored it. Truth and beauty returning to a land starved of it for so long.

  My eyelids fluttered open. Guardsmen roundabout stared down at their armor. The silver was now splattered with all the colors of my imagining.

  I almost laughed aloud.

  Guessed my creations didn’t have quite the bite of Zelyth’s deadly strands. But I squeezed my eyes shut again and forced my mind back to the idea.

  Grass poked through the earth. Plants sprang up—trees, flowers, vines. Through the greenery trod a beast, partially of my own making and partially what I imagined the golden Haribian animals we called halo-heads would look like. Never could get Riwor to tell me whether those things were real or just something from Haribi’s fairy stories. But I always pictured their proud gold manes ruffling in the breeze all about their catlike faces.

  The animal pawed through the fresh grass, lifted its head, shook the dew from its fur.

  When I opened my eyes, the creature stood before me, in real and actual flesh and twice as large as I’d pictured him. The bottom of his belly came up to my shoulder. And he seemed to be waiting for my command.

  I sucked in my breath and stepped back. Had I . . . had I made this creature? He yawned wide, then rumbled a low noise almost like a purr.

  Guessed I had.

  Ignoring a fresh wave of swooning and screaming around me, I thought one word: Go.

  In a single, powerful bound, the beast cleared half the room. He made for one of Naith’s priests.

  And shredded the man to bits in two seconds flat.

  I stumbled backward like I’d been struck. With a scream, the man—all fine robes and bejeweled fingers—disappeared into wisps like story strands. Then the gold-furred beast lunged for another priest. And another.

  Then he turned on the one who had threatened me—High Priest Naith himself. His Eminence took a couple halting steps away. Then his gaze found me, and if glares could slice, I would have been flayed right there.

  Next moment, I saw his lips move. A strand of shimmering blackness, like the star-speckled night, burst from nowhere and wrapped around my beast. Something invisible pulsed out from that story and hit m
e in a heartbeat. Set my stomach roiling and skin prickling.

  What was it? Death? Evil? I wasn’t sure. And I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

  For one long breath, my beast was shrouded in the night. Naith spared me a final glower, then used the cover of his darkness to slip away from his attacker.

  Before I had a moment to wrangle my wits, Naith had escaped from the throne room.

  Was His Holiness a . . . storyteller? A storyteller with dark, wicked stories? I had to tell someone—Mor, Karlith, any of the others. They would know what it meant.

  Then a tiny bubble popped in my mind. The sense of urgency, of burning information, weighed in my chest.

  But I couldn’t remember why.

  A giant halo-head-looking creature pawed the ground before me, and I vaguely remembered I’d made him. That must be the sense of urgency weighing on my chest. Surely. I felt the burden of my own power—power I’d never asked for and didn’t know quite how to use.

  Guessed my stories did have some of that deadly bite, when they had a mind to.

  I stopped counting how many guardsmen my beast shredded. Part of me relished the revenge I was finally getting on all those soldiers who’d bullied me and Brac, pushed us around, taken coppers from Farmer Bradwir’s hands.

  But the other part of me couldn’t shake a nagging question. How many of these men were like Bo-Ifun, who’d been kind to me? Guardsman Bo-Ifun, who hoped to change the guard from the inside out. Had my beast ended any men like him? Even when you were fighting on the side of right, it wasn’t all black and white.

  But with the blades of the guard at our throats, I supposed it was us or them. Why did so many things in life come down to us or them?

  The throng of people in the room thinned. It was starting to look like a field that’s been harvested out. My eyes searched for my friends and found Warmil near a band of guards surrounding the king. He looked tired, like his swings weren’t as swift as they ought to be.

  Gryfelle crouched across the room. Our eyes met, and it was plain to see the relief ooze all over her face at finding me in one piece. But my stomach jolted when I realized she was crouched over Dylun. Wispy feathers of song hovered over the colormaster—I supposed that meant he was simply injured and not dead if she was protecting him still.

  But I couldn’t help wondering how bad it was and if some protective song strands would be enough.

  Zel struggled in another corner of the room. Blood flowed from a wound in his side, and it didn’t seem reasonable that he’d be able to keep his attackers at bay for long. I sent a silent message to my story beast: Help him.

  And there was Aeron with Sir Dray at the end of her sword. Lucky for him he was at the end of her sword and not on it. The councilman had his hands in the air, but he didn’t look too pleased about it. Aeron appeared whole, if spent. Karlith sheltered a group of courtiers with a bubble of her colormaster’s water—looking out for the unarmed, as one might expect of her. And then my heart gave a great sigh of relief, because there was Mor with a group of guardsmen whose weapons lay at their feet—guardsman who had surrendered, by the looks of it.

  But who in the name of mountainbeast milk was that man with the bow?

  He looked to have crawled out from under some rock where he’d spent the last twenty years—bedraggled and wild, like a wide streak of savage ran straight through his core. In those twenty years spent under a rock, or whatever uncivilized place he’d been camping out in, it seemed he’d survived on heavy lifting and half a piece of bread a day. I’d never seen muscles so lean, like they were ready to rip through the skin.

  And he might’ve been an immortal from one of the goddesses’ tales the way he loosed those arrows with such an eye. While I watched, he didn’t miss a single shot. Every arrow found a mark. And by those marks, it wasn’t hard to figure he was on our side.

  But . . . why? Had he been the one to shoot the rogue arrow that allowed the princess to escape from Dray?

  The bowman’s head turned toward me, as if he could hear my thoughts. To my surprise, his eyes looked kind—and startled. He stood utterly still while we stared at each other. Then, quick as a flash of regret, he darted away and fairly disappeared.

  I blinked and scanned the room for him. But he was gone. Seemed like he’d vanished, or else flown away, up to the ceiling.

  But before I could complete a ceiling inspection, a shout from Warmil sent my heart to my throat. A guttural, animal cry of war like my ears had never heard and didn’t care to hear again.

  The old captain stood before Gareth. The king stared down at the blade by his throat. His many defenders lay in a heap at his feet.

  Warmil edged his blade closer. “It’s finished! The usurper, murderer of Caradoc II, has surrendered!”

  Relief swept through me. It was over. Done. No more fighting; no more killing. Perhaps there could be peace at last.

  Everything stilled, and only the heavy breathing of tired warriors, injured rebels, and scandalized ladies could be heard. I found my golden beast circling around Zel, and sent him a silent message: It’s done now.

  Like his very fabric had been caught up in a breeze, the creature swirled a moment, then wisped into nothingness. I couldn’t decide if I ever wanted to see him again.

  “Tannie?”

  The voice, so faint it almost didn’t register, seemed to come from the floor. But it didn’t matter how soft the words were spoken or from how far away. I’d know that voice anywhere.

  “Brac?” I spun in a circle—scanned the piles of bodies on the floor. But I couldn’t find him. “Brac!”

  “Here.” Barely above a whisper, but close.

  Something stirred under a nearby pile of guardsmen. I dropped to my knees and shoved with everything I had left.

  And there he was—broken, collapsed on the floor. His lips, his mouth, glistened red—like they had many times when we’d eaten our fill of hathberries off the vines around Pembrone. Or like the times we’d sneak a couple fresh hathberry pies off his mam’s kitchen windowsill as they cooled. He would suck out the sweet red filling from the holes on top of his, then place it back on the sill—an empty crust sitting there like a broken promise. Ma-Bradwir had caught him once and whipped him good. Then she had whipped him again after he insisted he’d taken the second one too. The one I’d eaten.

  I supposed this was something like that. Just one more fall Brac had taken to protect me.

  The last fall he’d ever take for me, for it wasn’t hathberry juice on his mouth. It was his own blood, bubbling up from inside his broken body.

  Chapter 48

  Tanwen

  I swallowed the cry that wanted to escape from me. “Brac.” I touched his armor gingerly, so as not to disturb him any more than I had to. I could see that it had been knocked sideways somehow—probably wasn’t fitted or attached properly in the first place. The spear, sword, dagger, or whatever else might’ve done the deed had slipped right past Brac’s breastplate.

  And into his gut.

  Blood blossomed on his guardsman uniform around the wound—blacker spots on the crisp black of the palace guard.

  Tears rolled down my face. I took Brac’s hand. “Does it hurt?”

  He tried to turn his head. “Don’t reckon I can tell anymore.”

  “Oh, Brac. I’m so sorry.” I tried to force my gaze away from his wound, from his lifeblood spilling all over the stones of Gareth’s throne room.

  “My fault much as yours, lass,” he said. “Reckon we both been fools.” He seemed to swallow with an effort. “Hey, Tannie?”

  I squeezed his hand. “Aye?”

  “I wish I had my hat, you know.” He nodded his head slightly, and his helmet clinked against the ground. “This blooming thing don’t fit me right.”

  “I know it doesn’t.” I resisted the urge to curl up on the ground beside him.

  He cracked half a smile. “Never did, I suppose.”

  He’d never spoken truer words. I did my level best to lift
his head and get the blasted helmet off without moving him too much. My fingers fumbled as I loosened the ties on his breastplate. “That better?”

  His eyes slipped closed, and my heart stopped for a moment. But then his eyes opened again and he smiled weakly. “Still wish I had my hat.”

  I laughed, watery through my tears. “Well, then I reckon I’d better get it for you.”

  His lips had faded to gray, like a winter morn by the sea. But his eyes stayed focused on mine.

  I made the words come out. “Once, there was a farmer lad from Pembrone.”

  A ribbon of earth-toned leather unwound from my fingers.

  “He could drive his best friend half mad when he wanted to.”

  The leather swirled in a slow circle above Brac’s laboring chest.

  “But even so, I loved him best of all.”

  The leather solidified into exactly what I’d been picturing in my mind’s eye—Brac’s floppy hat, complete with every blemish and sweat stain he’d collected over the years. Real leather. Not crystallized story.

  I fingered the soft, worn grazer hide, then placed it on his chest. “How’s that?”

  “That’s fine.” His breath jagged. “Didn’t know you could do that.”

  “Didn’t know either, till the others showed me.”

  “You forgive me, Tannie? Can you?”

  I brushed a lock of hair from his sweaty forehead. “What’s gotten into that sunbaked brain of yours? What’s there I’ve got to forgive you for?”

  “For—” His own cough cut him off, followed by a sputter of blood. “For betraying your friends. Didn’t know better at the time.”

  “Of course you didn’t. And of course I forgive you.”

  Can I ever forgive myself?

  Couldn’t wrestle with that now. Not while Brac was slipping away from me.

  “Tannie?”

  “Shh. You rest now.” I moved more sweaty hair off his face. His skin grew colder and more ashen by the moment.

  “Can’t. I got to ask you. Once more.”

  “Ask me what?” But I already knew, and I also knew what I’d say. Just this once before he was lost to this world.