This inspired a rumble of discontent, one that rose in volume and turbulence. Others raised their voices, angry and bold. The young complained, and the old shouted their resentment.
Auralia felt the firm grip of a soldier’s hands on her arm. She looked into his uncertain eyes. “Be careful,” she said quietly. “If a single thread of my cloak is broken, the colors will disappear.”
Ark-robin nodded, awestruck, and then lifted her and slung her like a sack across his shoulder. Auralia did not struggle. She just turned her face to the pardoned Gatherers.
Krawg had pulled his hood back, and tears ran off his crooked nose and whiskered chin. He reached out his hands as if to catch her in a fall. She tried to find a way to smile, but her face was so cold, so numb.
Objections to Auralia’s seizure grew loud, and Aug-anstern shuffled up behind the king. “Grudgers, my lord,” he whispered. And then, losing his composure in the noise, he shoved his nose out at the crowd, spittle flying as he jeered, “All of you! Grudgers! Disloyal to the king!”
The king slashed the air to silence his advisor, but it was too late. Like a plague, agitation spread across the yard. Cal-marcus backed toward his throne. As he did, he stepped on the edge of Aug-anstern’s robe, and they both tumbled to the platform.
As if on cue, the crowd became a tidal wave of protest, surging toward the dais. Their colored honor stitches would not bind them to propriety any longer. Like a creature long caged suddenly set free, they would protest the Wintering. They would not let the soldiers carry Auralia away. Her arrest was a clear condemnation of their longings. Auralia had thrown open the gate of the past and unleashed their memories of glory.
The ale boy let Scharr ben Fray set him down. He felt that rough, callused hand take hold of his chin and wrest his attention from the crisis.
“If you are a friend of Auralia, when the time comes, help her.” Scharr ben Fray was shouting to be heard above the riot. “You may be the only one who can.”
The boy nodded, and yet he could barely grasp a thought in his spinning head.
“Listen, boy. I must go.” The mage cast a glance toward the wall. “The king thinks I had something to do with this. But this is stranger stuff than even I have seen in all my journeys and years. We’ll see each other again. When we do, I want to hear the story of all that transpired here in the wake of my departure. Pay close attention. Understand?”
With that, Scharr ben Fray staggered crookedly back into the crowd, his false stone stump protruding useless, but convincing, from his sleeve.
The ale boy felt the nightmare rush toward its conclusion.
He had to find Auralia.
He pushed forward again, squirming, trying to break through the mob.
“Help her,” the old man had said.
But he was pinned between a tall woman’s pillowy hip and a short man’s sharp elbow.
The people of Abascar joined in a shout of defiance, surprised to realize they could be a mighty force. Emotion turned to action. The ale boy was caught up in their momentum, lifted off his feet, and carried forward.
Then, as quickly as he had been carried up, he fell. The mob crushed his legs, smashed his knees, bruised his back, kicked his head.
The king was shouting.
Barking dogs joined the melee, turned loose by soldiers to break up the crowd and turn their anger to fear.
There was the rattle of armor, the shouting of orders, screams.
When he awoke, he sat alone in the debris-littered square.
The riot was over. The platform was empty.
Aggressive guards, their swords held high and gleaming, their dogs snarling, were shepherding the tumultuous Housefolk into lines and herding them like cattle through the gates of the courtyard.
Above him in the clearing sky, a thousand birds were going mad, their circles broken, reeling.
15
CAL-RAVEN COMES HOME
P rince Cal-raven returned with a trophy for his father, another set of wild eyes and bared fangs to join the gallery of ferocious faces that glowered in the king’s library.
Shepherds, lamenting losses almost daily, had called for the hunt, showing officers the tracks in their bloodied fields and stables. Cal-raven’s troop had pursued a fangbear that was easily persuaded to hunt for meals elsewhere.
But even as his officers chased the lumbering monster away, messengers reported that the slaughter had resumed. The bear had not been the only menace murdering woollies, chumps, and grazers. A snowcave wolf, big as any bear, had come down from the mountains—an unprecedented event—and evaded all of Abascar’s bear traps. Drawing his troop back, the prince concealed them in the treetops around the pastures, and Tabor Jan, Cal-raven’s guardsman, brought the she-wolf down with one precise arrow and then finished her with a spear.
It might take five or six years before the shepherds restored their herds and flocks, but that did not prevent them from sacrificing a few animals for the sake of a celebratory feast within the house. The threat had been removed.
Admirers filled the avenues from the main gates to the palace, enduring the rain so they could slow the line of vawns that bore the twelve hunters. All eyes were on the prince. The Housefolk learned to recognize him, despite his best efforts at anonymity. Unlike other high-ranking officers, Cal-raven did not announce himself by leading the procession, nor did he ride a vawn marked differently from those of his officers. The Housefolk identified him by his tightly braided hair, streaked with red, and by the way he always seemed preoccupied with the sky above the house. They loved him for that dull grey cloak, for they swore he chose it to show respect for the common folk. It seemed a gesture of defiance to the laws that kept the palace bedecked in color. They took this all as a hopeful sign that someday King Cal-raven would restore what they had lost.
He deflected their praise with a generous smile, directing their cheers forward to his guardsman. The crowd’s enthusiasm only intensified at his humble gesture, shouting the names of two heroes instead of one. Tabor Jan frowned and muttered, spurring his vawn to splash faster up the slick avenue.
While this welcome was flattering indeed, Cal-raven was uneasy. A strange passion fueled this feverish display, as if his return brought relief from some burden, as if he suddenly represented more than he understood.
At the palace gates, the guards were strangely gruff. The prince tried to win the waiting stablehands’ attention with details of how the great wolfskin across the back of his vawn had come to be their prize. They nodded dutifully but exchanged nervous glances.
Only guards awaited them in the palace courtyard. The prince calmly noted the condition of the lawns, which looked as if they had been plowed and tilled. The platform was bare, cleared of any clues that the Rites had taken place.
After the gates closed, cheers continued outside, cast up and over the wall, reaching through the tower windows so all within would know the favorite son of House Abascar had returned.
Cal-raven left his vawn with another officer and crossed the shredded yard, shoving Tabor Jan ahead of him. He tried to laugh and ignore the solemn, stagnant cloud blanketing the palace. They moved through an archway, pushed aside heavy purple curtains, and stepped into a fragrant golden corridor lined with glowing incense bowls.
He would customarily proceed to a receiving chamber where guards would offer him a formal robe. And then he would move into the royal court, where he would find the magistrates and the king himself waiting to receive him, eager for his report.
But the prince paused as if sensing a trap and decided not to follow the path prepared for him. He turned, parted curtains that lined the wall, and revealed a dark, descending stair. Today he would leave the magistrates to mutter and fume. He directed Tabor Jan down the stair, to pass beneath the Ceremony Hall, and then through quiet corridors where the air was heavy with dust and old echoes, leading them to a tower and, at last, up to the king’s most private retreat—the library.
“There’s something you�
��re not telling me,” Tabor Jan muttered, gruff and uncomfortable. “First you run away from the hunt for some secret conference with a man your father has condemned. And now you’re rejecting the magistrates. Are you so determined to make enemies?”
“Something’s happened. The people looked ready for a coronation, not a wedding. The courtyard—”
“Practically destroyed.”
“And the guards—”
“Doubled, at every gate on our way in.”
“And I’m—”
“Walking so fast you’re getting ahead of yourself.”
“Don’t—”
“Interrupt you?”
“My father’s in a foul mood. That’s obvious. And when he’s upset, he disdains all formal company. He’ll be hiding from the magistrates too.”
“Sometimes I admire his judgment.”
Cal-raven slung his hunting bow over his shoulder and rubbed his hands together. “He’ll be here, in his cave, drinking himself into a stupor.”
“And you want to visit him in this ugly temper?”
“The angrier he is,” the prince sighed, “the more honest he is. I don’t like hearing bad news when it’s been sweetened and stirred by a jury of false-faced, slick-tongued magistrates. I want to hear it from my father. If we catch him while he’s bitter, we’ll get a detailed rant about all that took place, without any flattery or foolishness.”
With that, Cal-raven jumped ahead of his friend, ignored the bewildered guards who scrambled to their feet at his approach, and knocked open the heavy black doors of the fireside library so hard that they slammed against the inside walls. This shocked the quiet chamber.
Cal-raven was not one step through the door before he shouted, “A bottle! We’ve freed the flocks from a she-wolf with the help of Tabor Jan’s arrows. We must raise a drink in his name!”
Startled, the king’s small dog, Wilfry, bounded forward like a four-legged bundle of cotton, barking in panic and dismay. He yapped and snarled in a voice that would fail to frighten a housemouse, his pink eyes bulging and his pointed ears flattened back. The other dog, the ancient woodsnout called Hagah, merely lifted his head above his mountainous shoulders, layers of rolling flesh revealing the moist black nose that dwarfed the rest of his features, but not his eyes, which remained hidden by the flabby skin. His tail, heavy as the bough of a coil tree, lifted an inch above the floor and then thudded down, a rare note of enthusiasm from the elderly hunter.
Kicking back the annoying yapper, Cal-raven walked around the massive strategy table and snatched a bejeweled cup from the mantel. “Goblets of gratitude, Father. Let’s warm his belly and dull his wits. Then we can send him off to endure the tedious flattery of the magistrates while I stay here with you.”
Tabor Jan turned red—the prince could see that even in the firelight. The armored giant awkwardly bowed to the shadow-clad king, who was slumped in his chair before the hearth and staring into the flames.
The door guards looked around, nervous.
The king was unmoved by his son’s humor. Cal-raven knew that once again he had guaranteed a scolding, for the king would find rebellion in the very fact that the guardsman, not the prince, had been given the honor of ending the hunt.
But such a prince was Cal-raven.
Feats of strength and violence did not appeal to him, unless they came in the form of a narrative he could dazzle an audience in telling. He took pleasure in praising others and peppered his stories with gratuitous details so nothing about them would fade.
While his father charted out his future as a soldier and king, the burden of Abascar’s anticipation wearied Cal-raven. He had inherited the skills of a soldier, but as he rose in rank and dexterity, his boredom with competitive pursuits increased. He demonstrated more enthusiasm for chasing fugitive birds through the palace than for hunting beastmen. And he found himself increasingly nostalgic for those childhood hours playing alone in his mother’s courtyard garden. Or for those long nights listening to Scharr ben Fray’s fanciful tales. After his mother’s disappearance and the exile of his father’s aging advisor, the prince grew increasingly distracted by the wilderness, the woods, and the weather.
At home he groaned when magistrates sought to embroil him in debates about the law or win his favor for selfish gain. Much to their chagrin, he forgot their names and titles. He was more interested in the relationships, dramas, and secrets of his servants, whose names he did remember and whose histories he could recite with surprising accuracy. He was known to stay up all night telling stories to the dusty Housefolk children who swept the corridors and rearranged the tapestries. When advisors proudly paraded their decorated daughters through the palace, he shrugged and trudged to the sparring ring, where an exercise with ambitious swordswomen quickly became a flirtatious dance.
Rumors of Cal-raven’s unpredictable affections ran rampant one scandalous season when he assigned himself to assist a young mosaicist, quietly observing as she meticulously designed a mural depicting Cal-marcus’s battles with forest mercenaries. For days she was his only confidante. The king quickly arranged a year of formal dinners with families who had respectable daughters of marrying age.
When he wasn’t whispering with those beneath his station, Cal-raven wandered alone, drawn more to the windows than the dining halls, more to the secluded libraries than the bustling court. Occasionally he would disappear entirely, prompting rumors that he had been living and working in disguise among the Housefolk. A trick the exiled mage once taught him—that was the popular speculation.
And so he had come home from another hunt without any boasting of his own. He tried to turn his father’s attention to the courage of his guardsman, but the king was not particularly interested in any kind of report. Cal-Raven began to suspect that more troubling things were afoot than he had thought.
The prince approached the silhouette of the high-backed chair. His father’s hands gripped the armrests, rings sparkling in the firelight. And then the king growled, though it seemed the voice came from the bared teeth of the wyrm head mounted above the hearth. “How generous of you to allow your friend to strike the killing blow.”
Wilfry, suddenly noticing that Cal-raven had not come alone, turned and threw himself at Tabor Jan, barking in increasingly high-pitched squeaks.
Holding his bow as though it were a staff, Cal-raven knelt at his father’s side, studied that narrow face, and felt the last sparks of his cheer go out. “I give Tabor Jan no charity. My arrows slew nothing but a few unfortunate trees. His shot was true. Had I some measure of his stealth and cunning, we would be rivals, not friends. I need his gifts on a hunt. Let’s give gratitude where it is due…overdue. A bottle. Something special. Surprise us. We’re thirsty. We’ll drink anything.”
The king’s lips parted to reveal clenched teeth, and when he did glance at his son, Cal-raven knew immediately that trials had pierced through that toughened hide and struck bone.
“Wilfry!”
At the king’s voice, the small dog crossed the room with a yelp to land at his feet and stare adoringly up into his face, tongue lolling out from an exaggerated smile. The king kicked at him with a wool-slippered foot, but the dog dodged and returned to the spot as if oblivious to the complaint. Hagah groaned—the sound of an old man whose patience had been beaten senseless—and turned his drooping jowls toward Cal-raven with a baleful sigh.
The long dormant anger that weakened the king was suddenly awake and hungry. Cal-raven could only assume there was more hajka in his father’s belly than could fit in a bottle. He immediately regretted his request for drinks, but it was too late—his father lifted one of six small pegs in the arm of his chair, each of which bore a different bell, and let a cold, lonely tone ring through the library. The chime shimmered down a long corridor behind curtains in the corner, where it would reach the ears of a waiting attendant.
Cal-raven sneezed.
“Foul weather, this.” King Cal-marcus gestured, as if fighting a cloud of insects
, toward the tall window at the far end of the room. “You’d do well to curtain your window tonight. The season of plagues is upon us.”
“Has the weather brought back your headaches?”
“Headaches? Where would you like me to start? How about the Rites of the Privilege, which you cleverly avoided? I might not be suffering so much had you been there.”
Behind the chair, Cal-raven lifted a hand to caution Tabor Jan: Do not come closer, but do not leave just yet.
“We did not go riding for our own amusement, Father. The rain made the hunt a miserable bore. It slowed our progress. And the forest seemed…agitated. Those storm clouds, they did not move in the same direction as the wind. They were drawn toward Abascar as if tethered to flocks of birds. It seemed almost like an enchantment.”
“Bristles and bracken, boy! I exiled Scharr ben Fray so I wouldn’t have to listen to such nonsense.”
This was the chamber where King Cal-marcus worried. This was the chair a younger Cal-raven had come to call “the Angry Throne.” He learned to stand clear of it. Many attendants bore bruises from his father’s sudden turns of temper. And he was still frightened by the way the firelight sculpted misery into Cal-marcus’s features.
Cal-raven faced hideous beastmen in combat without flinching, but here he could not meet his father’s turbulent gaze. Perhaps this was due to his fear of the day when he would inherit the throne and all his father’s challenges. Perhaps it was his fear that Abascar’s Wintering had buried his father’s spirit in a freeze that would never thaw and that his faint pulse of life was beginning to falter. Cal-raven had lost the sleep of a hundred nights searching for a cure, hoping to chase off the memories that assailed Cal-marcus’s heart. Many a time he had kept his father company, reading to him from the scrolls, but nothing from the library’s cobwebbed shelves could fill the void in the king’s empty heart.
“I am sorry I was not here to stand beside you. But that is not what boils your broth. Something has got its claws into you. I propose we wait until tomorrow to tell the tale of Tabor Jan’s arrow.”
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