New Lands (THE CHRONICLES OF EGG) (2 page)

I HADN’T STARTED
the trip scared out of my mind. In fact, when we first boarded the
Thrush
three days earlier, I’d been feeling pretty cocky. Mostly because right before we left Deadweather, Guts and I had managed to stand down Roger Pembroke and a hundred Rovian soldiers.

How we got to that point is kind of a long story. Pembroke had killed my whole family—sent them off to their deaths somewhere out in the Blue Sea, in a runaway hot air balloon that he’d rigged so it looked like an accident—and when I didn’t die with them, he’d gone to an awful lot of trouble to finish me off.

I don’t think it was anything personal. He just wanted the Fire King’s treasure. And he figured the map to it was somewhere on my family’s ugly fruit plantation, which was why he wound up sailing to Deadweather with a hundred soldiers and marching them up to our front porch.

But somehow, Guts and I escaped, with the only surviving version of the map lodged between my ears.

The “somehow” was mostly Millicent’s doing. She was Pembroke’s daughter, and the person I loved more than anything else in the world. I think that must have been true for Pembroke, too, because he let her talk him into slinking off empty-handed, packing his whole company of soldiers onto a boat back to Sunrise.

The truth was, if it weren’t for Millicent, Guts and I would have been dead as rocks.

But I wasn’t thinking that when the
Thrush
showed up to take the ugly fruit harvest to Pella Nonna in the New Lands, and we hitched a ride on it. And I wasn’t thinking it was just blind luck that a ship had appeared at exactly the moment we needed to get off Deadweather, headed for exactly the place we wanted to go.

I wasn’t thinking we’d only gotten this far because of blind luck and Millicent. Not yet. Instead, I was patting myself on the back for how clever Guts and I were to have pulled it off.

And considering what we’d just gotten away with, I figured the rest of it—finding an Okalu Native, translating the map, tracking down the treasure—would be no trick at all.

So I spent most of that first day at sea sunning myself on the deck like a lazy turtle, daydreaming about what I’d do once the treasure had made us fabulously wealthy.

I’d marry Millicent, that was obvious. I didn’t bother to stew
over minor obstacles like our being thirteen and her father wanting to kill me, let alone whether she’d say yes in the first place.

To my mind, the real challenge was figuring out where to build our mansion.

Deadweather was out of the question. Too many pirates, not enough food, the weather was lousy, and until I’d left for a while and come back again, I’d never realized just how much the smoldering volcano made the whole island stink like rotten eggs.

Sunrise wasn’t an option, either. It was beautiful and all, but the people were terrible snobs. And since Roger Pembroke had plastered
WANTED FOR MURDER
posters with my face on them all over the island, it was likely to be awkward for me at dinner parties and such.

There were the Fish Islands, up north. But the name made me think they probably didn’t smell too good, and I didn’t know anything else about them. I knew even less about the Barkers, down south…Pella Nonna was full of Cartagers…and the rest of the New Lands were nothing but Native tribes and wilderness.

So that just left the Continent. We’d have to sail forty days across the Great Maw to get there, but once we did, we could live in Rovia itself—the setting for almost every novel I’d ever read, a rich and fabled land with glamorous cities and a countryside of gently rolling hills (I wasn’t sure what “gently rolling” meant, but it sounded awfully nice) supposedly chock-full of ancient castles. If any of those were for sale, we wouldn’t even have to build a mansion first. We could just move right in.

I figured I’d get a place like Timberfield, the mountaintop fortress where Billicks the Brave wound up at the end of
Throne of the Ancients.
I’d pass the days with a lot of hunting and falconry, and
at night, Millicent and I would curl up in our massive library and read books to our hearts’ content, surrounded by our six children.

The kids would read books, too, even the little ones.

I was just getting around to naming our firstborn when the quartermaster banged on the dinner plate. Starving, Guts and I quickly gathered under the mainmast with the eight haggard-looking crewmen for our first night’s meal.

And that’s when things started to go sideways.

FIRST, CAPTAIN RACKER
demanded fifteen silver from us for the right to eat while we were on board. We forked it over, but when we saw what we’d paid for—the biscuits were so maggoty that if you set one down, it’d slither off under its own power—Guts just about buried his hook in Racker’s head.

I managed to keep Guts from drawing blood, but then the jokes about my name started.

“Egg, eh? Was mummy a chicken?”

“Nah! She was an omelet! Haw, haw!”

Just the mention of my mother, who I’d never known except as a story Dad told over her grave, made me angry.

“It’s short for Egbert,” I said, trying to sound polite.

“That’s even worse! Haw, haw!”

“Why stick ye with a name like that? Didn’t they love ye none?”

It was a fair enough question as far as my dad was concerned. But that just made me madder. I had to bite my lip to keep quiet.

Then the conversation turned really unsettling.

“Why you headed for Pella?” asked Racker. “Got an itch to die young?”

“What do you mean?”

“Short-Ears’ll kill ye ’fore ye get off the dock,” snorted a snaggletoothed crew member.

Pella Nonna was a Cartager port, the same way Sunrise Island was Rovian. And Cartagers all had freakishly small ears, which was why everybody called them that.

“Wot they want to kill us fer?” Guts asked.

“For the shape of your ears,” said Racker. “Haven’t you heard of the Banishment Law? Ever since the Barker War, Rovians are banned from the New Lands on pain of death.”

“Nuts to that!” spat Guts. “Islander, I am. Never even been across the Maw.”

“It’s not where you’re from, boy—it’s how you look. And talk. You got Rovian ears, Rovian skin, and a Rovian tongue.”

“But that makes all of you Rovian, too,” I said. “And you’re going to Pella.”

Reggie the quartermaster shook his head. “Nah. Droppin’ anchor offshore. Cartagers run boats out, load the ugly fruit. Then off we go. Try to put in, Short-Ears’d hang us dead.”

A heavy lump of dread settled in my gut. “So if we go to Pella…they’ll hang us dead, too?”

The crewmen all nodded eagerly.

“Might even torture ye first,” said the snaggletooth, with a wide-eyed grin that told us he found the idea pretty exciting.

“Could you…maybe drop us on the coast? Farther north?” I was thinking we might be able to avoid Pella completely. After all, we didn’t need a Cartager to translate the map. We needed an Okalu.

“What? And get eaten by Natives?”

“They’d actually
eat
us? The Okalu?”

“Okalu, Fingu, Flut—any of them tribes. Bunch of cannibals.”

“Now, hang on, cap,” the quartermaster chimed in. “They don’t eat the whole of ye. Just yer heart.”

“Reggie’s right,” agreed the snaggletooth. “Cut it out yer chest, munch it down while it’s still beatin’. That’s how they do it.”

“Tell the other one!” Guts snorted.

“True enough, boy. They’re not called savages for nothing.” Racker shook his head. “If you’re dead set on going to the New Lands, you’re best off in Pella. Might stand a chance there if you keep your ears covered. And you speak the language.”

He leaned forward and looked down his thin nose at us. “You
do
speak Cartager, don’t you?”

We didn’t.

GUTS REFUSED TO WORRY
that we were sailing to our deaths.

“Gonna be fine,” I heard him say as we lay awake that first night in the hammocks we’d strung up in a corner of the cargo hold. It was pitch-black down there—I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face, let alone Guts in the next hammock.

“How can you say that? What’s going to stop the Short-Ears from stringing us up?”

“Lucy, fer one.”

“Will you stop calling it that? It’s a
hook.
”

“Yeh—hook named Lucy.”

“But it’s stupid! Might as well name your pants.”

“Pants ain’t gonna get me out o’ no scrapes.”

“And a hook’s not going to kill a city full of Cartagers.”

“Don’t need to—that’s wot her brothers an’ sisters are fer.”

“What brothers and sisters?”

“Ones in the sack.”

We had four pistols and a pair of knives in the rucksack we’d brought with us, but I didn’t see how it changed the odds much.

“You’re out of your mind,” I said. “And how are we even going to feed ourselves? Only got fifteen silver left.”

“Got the necklace. Want money, just sell off a stone.”

Guts had taken a necklace from the Fire King’s skeleton back on Deadweather. It was a long string of gems, crowned by a three-inch firebird pendant made of rubies, diamonds, and the like. After a hundred years in the tomb, the gems were crusted with dirt, and rotted feathers hung from it like clumps of dried seaweed. But it was obvious, filthy as it was, that it was valuable.

“Don’t be stupid! We need that for the Okalu. It belonged to their king—it’s got to be precious to them. If we hack off parts of it to buy food, think how mad they’ll be.”

Guts didn’t say anything.

“And that’s if they don’t cut our hearts out at the sight of us. Or is Lucy going to get you out of that fix, too?”

He still didn’t say anything.

“Are you even listening to me?”

I waited for an answer to come through the darkness.

Then I heard him snore. Unbelievable.

I didn’t sleep that whole night. But not because of the snoring.

What the crew had said about the Cartagers in Pella sounded true enough. In all my favorite books, from
Basingstroke
to
Red Runs the Blood,
Short-Ears were villains—every one of them vicious, black-hearted, and cowardly. Killing us for being Rovian seemed like just the kind of thing they’d do.

I hadn’t read any books about Natives, or even laid eyes on
one, unless you counted the distant glimpses I’d gotten of the silver mine workers slogging away up on Mount Majestic, above Sunrise Island. But there was no reason to doubt what the crew said about them, either.

I started to wonder if we shouldn’t scrap the whole plan and go back to Deadweather. But I knew if I did, Roger Pembroke would find me.

Then again…what was going to stop him from hunting me down in Pella Nonna? Or anywhere else?

As I thought about it, lying there in the dark, my heart started to pound like a drum. Because I realized no matter where I went, he’d be coming for me. Pembroke wanted that map badly enough to kill for it, and as long as he was rich and powerful, and I had the only copy on earth, I was in danger.

Pretty soon, my heart was pounding so hard I could hear it in my ears. I tried to settle it down by telling myself I’d managed to outwit him so far.

But then I thought about everything that had happened over the past few weeks—
really
thought about it—and I realized I hadn’t outwitted anybody.

I hadn’t been clever. I’d just been lucky. And sooner or later, I was going to run out of luck.

Or maybe I already had. Something was going horribly wrong with my body—my heart was racing, I couldn’t move, I couldn’t think, I couldn’t breathe…My chest felt like somebody was stacking cannonballs on top of it.

I needed air. I thrashed against the hammock until it dumped me out on my head. Guts mumbled groggy words at me, but I didn’t answer. I flailed around, knocking against boxes and crates
and ceiling beams and who knows what else until I finally found the stairs and managed to stagger up to the main deck.

At that hour, the Blue Sea was black.

I thought about that as I puked under the moonlight.