The Ale Boy's Feast (5 page)

A hand emerged from the blanket, waving him off. “Bring back that reward. We’ve got spawn to feed.”

In moments the wheels of Weese’s carriage were grinding through the sand. Even though the vawn groaned with effort, their progress was slow. The carriage seemed heavier than usual. Weese noticed this but did not investigate. His thoughts were distracted.

“Saw him,” he sighed. “Finally. With my own two eyes.”

Then he fell into fantasies of collecting his reward from the mages, taking Meladi and the children, and escaping to Wildflower Isle, where he could train up young rioters for the day when the people would take back House Jenta and bury the mages for good.

“Freedom.”

he only place finer for swimming than water is light
.

That’s what she whispers, this woman draped in a shining shroud.

On the smooth stone shore of a river far below ground, she sits with him in a circle of shimmering phantoms, specters who carried him upstream all night. Their boat waits, rocking slowly, tugging at its tether. His mind is in pieces—he cannot remember what happened or where they are going.

The only place finer for swimming than water is light
, she says again.
You’ll see
.

This strange, weightless sheet they’ve cast over him is sticky as a spider web. Through it, everything is coming into focus.

Creatures leap and dive, wriggle and splash in the river—eels and frogs, pad-bellies and wrigglebeaks. Vines shine, their leaves green and broad. The water casts steam thick as cream into the cool air, and he does not know where he ends and the vapor begins.

“You have no oars. But we moved upstream.” He says this, but there is no sound.

She hears him anyway. Who is she?

Yes, it takes time to get used to such things. Where we live, boats tethered to their destination can be drawn against the current by a thread
.

Frail wires like kite strings trail from the translucent sheet that covers him.
They reach back into the dark. The boat in the water may be bound to their destination, but he—whatever he is now—is still bound to some kind of anchor downstream.

He looks back. He remembers violence. Desperate endeavors. Failures. He was trying to rescue someone.

A shape returns to his memory. He glimpsed it as they cast the sheet around him and took him onto the boat. A boy’s body—lying on a mat of weeds and branches that turn slowly on the water in a whirlpool. Arms outspread. Legs bent as if broken. Lips parted. Eyes wide and unseeing. Clad in nothing more than rags.

“Who was the boy?” he asks. “He fell, didn’t he?”

The strange company is whispering stories to one another, testimonies of things they’ve witnessed. But the woman beside him answers.
His work was done. His sufferings are over. He did such great things that stories of his courage are already told on the mountain
.

A word is restored to his mind.
Northchild
. He cannot raise his hands as she does. He is like a balloon, a swirl of cloud in a sheet. “Are you Northchildren?”

It’s what some people call us
. She does not speak with a voice. It’s a wave of sensation between touch, taste, sight, scent, and sound.
Like you, we grew in the Expanse. Our shells shattered, as they all do. We consented to be carried home and restored in an uncorrupted form
.

“Mother.” The word escapes him even before he knows what he’s saying.

I’m here too, son
, comes a voice from the circle. His father? He reaches for their names and for his own.

We were sent to find you
, says his mother.
Your sufferings are over. No more fear. Only mercy
.

“You unstitched me. Just as you unstitched Auralia.”

We untied cords that bound you in a broken shell. Don’t be afraid. On the mountain we’ll take you to the garden, where you’ll be refashioned. Your body will grow back from your spirit. And you won’t suffer any poisons from the Expanse. You’ll be free in the light to move from here to there, from past to present. Free to witness so many amazing things. And we’ll be together
.

“What do you mean—my ‘broken shell’?”

Think of a soldier casting off battered armor after a war
.

“I was a soldier’s son.” He looks to the radiant figure of his father. “I was an errand-runner. I did simple things.”

You were an ale boy. And more. From long before that, you were extravagant
.

He remembers it now. Their gloved fingers passed through him to loosen threads. As he floated among the river weeds, he felt a pain like a needle in his head. But the knot it touched would not unravel. Another at his center held.

You’re a stubborn one
. Her thoughtspeech feels like laughter.
But you’ll let go in time
. She gestures to the kite strings that run back into the dark.
You’ll feel such relief when you do
.

“How is it I can see you? I have no eyes.”

The borders of your senses have blurred. Knowing is easier now, and you’ll remember so much. Beyond your time in the Expanse
.

With her hand on his veil, he feels her memories fill him up. He begins to understand. These witnesses have come to this place, this time, like birds through air, like fish through water, coursing through the fullness.

The only thing better for swimming than water is light
, they like to say.

He remembers now what they mean. Maybe that’s why he loved to float on a raft across Deep Lake under the stars, why he held his breath while swallows weaved in the air over the water, why he thrilled to run through House Abascar’s corridors. These pleasures remind him of how he first flew, how he’ll fly again.

Among his mother’s memories, he learns how these Northchildren came for him. They drifted like snowflakes between innumerable stars. The stars are bells, resonant with sound. The bells are made of cords, tightly woven, lines that swirl and tangle and rush like ocean currents. The cords are made of threads, twisted and braided. The threads are other histories, other worlds.

As the Northchildren slid between the threads, the edges of their wings brushed against them, and the sound the bells made was gratitude. A song. Drawn by the gravity of a particular thread, like leaves drawn into a rushing stream, the Northchildren tumbled suddenly into a waterfall, long and cascading,
which delivered them into an underground river, the same water that runs beside him now.

But the Northchildren did not stay. They rose up through a break in the ceiling, emerging from the mouth of a well, where blue flowers bloomed between the stones. This was the Expanse, a place of peril and poison. But they were safe from such corruption, swaddled in their shrouds.

They ran, feeling the world’s rough textures against their feet. Colors—the hot white of the mountain peaks, the lush greens of the Cragavar forest, the gleaming emerald of Deep Lake, the rust-colored dust and coal black rocks of the high southern plains.

They gathered in a glen. One placed a candle at the heart of their quiet circle. In its luminous bloom, they shared stories of what they had seen. They spoke of events they hoped to witness in this world’s history, to see how all sadness, surprise, triumph, and mystery are drawn together into a whole.

They laughed. They laughed a lot.

If this is what I’ll become, I’m glad
, he thinks.

In their candlelit circle, the Northchildren watched a stand of cloudgrasper trees stretch, soak in sunlight, raise arms and hands in praise, hum with the blood of sap, tremble with birds. They observed this as if it was as rich as any human story, seeing so powerfully that he felt as if he had stumbled through his earlier years in a half sleep.

He realizes now that all he’s known in the Expanse has been a song. Everything he’s seen, everything he’s overlooked—a testimony, inviting him to answer.

When mystery sent you into the Expanse
, his mother tells him,
you were invited to follow the questions. So many people cling to what’s not theirs and resist the invitation. But you’ve recognized the endless song, the golden thread, verse by verse. You’ve run after it. And in doing so, you’ve expanded the richness of mystery
.

“I’m ready,” he says. “I’ll surrender these knots now. I’ll go with you to the mountain.”

You’re very brave. This isn’t the first time that the Northchildren have come to unstitch you
.

“It isn’t?”

Here
. She touches his delicate garment.
Remember
.

The images awaken within him, memories from someone else.

As purple storm clouds collide over the forest, a man in a soldier’s riding jacket steps through a break in the wall of an abandoned barn. He holds an infant bundled in his own riding cape.

A woman, wrapped in a blanket, follows him. She’s exhausted, and she takes his arm as they move to an empty horse stall. Kneeling on the thin scatter of white-grass, the man helps the woman lie back against the wall’s wooden planks, then scoops up enough grass to make a soft nest for the child.

“Brona,” she whispers, her voice breaking. “I thought that we would—”

“I know,” he sighs, embracing her. “I was frightened.” His wild eyes speak of fears not yet put to rest.

“You were marvelous,” she sobs into his shoulder.

“You,” he replies, “had a harder battle to fight than I.” He strokes her hair. “It should never have happened this way. In the wild. So many weeks early. Your mother will be furious that she missed it. She’ll make it my fault somehow.”

“But now that it’s happened,” says the woman, “I wouldn’t have it any other way. I wouldn’t bring our son into the world behind Abascar’s walls. That glen was a beautiful place. The leaves were like incense. And the birdsong … the birdsong.”

“I’m just grateful we found a well. And one with such clear, warm water to bathe him.” He offers her the water flask. She drinks some more.

“We should live there,” she sighs, “and drink this every day. As water goes, it’s wine.”

“If it’s water at all.”

As the storm continues without pause outside the skeletal shelter, the man wipes tears from the woman’s face. “You’re trembling. Give your hands something to do.” He opens the pouch at his side and gives her a folded cloth. She unrolls it, revealing a cushion full of pins and needles, two unfinished shoes, and scraps of cloth and grawlafurr hide.

He touches the child’s cheek, then pokes a fingertip into the boy’s delicate grasp. “Our son will never be a soldier. He’s small.”

She tries to sit up. “If you speak any words against our boy, Tar-brona, I’ll run this needle into your ear.” Exhausted, she rests. “You’re not a tall man yourself, and you’re the captain of Abascar’s guard. Even if he’s not meant to be muscular, he’ll have a remarkable mind. For he is our child. And I cannot wait to know his name and see what he will become.”

Wind lashes the trees outside, and thunder shudders the shelter. The man takes the baby and presses his grizzled cheek to that small pink forehead. “Would that he might inherit your gift for craft,” he says, watching the woman work with the needles and hide. “The spells that you know. To craft gloves like mine. Or a scarf.”

“We will give him the best tools, whatever his passion.” Her voice fades almost to a whisper, as if she might fall asleep. “Like these.” Her hand still trembling, she raises up a fistful of long needles of varying thickness. “Each thread-pin has its own name. Each one stitches a particular cord. The larger ones can pull thick, binding lines. But the tiny ones, like these …”

“They have names?”

“The green one, that’s Patcher. The red, that’s Key. Yellow’s the Stitch. Brown, that’s Thorn. These two, they’re thicker. I call them Knife and Spike.”

“And the thread-pin with the bright blue gem?”

“Don’t you love how it gleams? Azure. Like the sky after a storm. It’s my favorite. I use it when I do the heavy stitching and weave things into a whole. I just call it the Pin.” She smiles and shrugs. “I …”

“Shhhh.”

“What is it?”

“Look, my love.”

The infant’s eyes have gone wide, and where he has been gazing without seeing, as if into a fog, he suddenly seems alert, attentive, staring at his mother. New tears spill from her eyes. “He looked before,” she says, “but this time he really sees me.”

And then the child’s hands open. He reaches with his tiny arms as if to grab
what his mother is holding suspended in the space between them—the colored caps of thread-pins that bristle from the cushion.

“He’s reaching,” the man whispers. “He’s reaching for …”

“I see that.”

“Which one? Which one does he want?”

“Make this memory stop!” cries the boy made of cloud.

He knows already what his parents will name him, but he cannot bear to see them decide. For this is the name they called out as their Abascar home burned around them, taking both of their lives.

Northchildren saved you from the fire that claimed us
, says his mother.
They bathed you in this very water. It awakened your gift of firebearing
.