The Thief Queen's Daughter (24 page)

T
HAT EVENING, VEN WENT TO TOWN WITH NICHOLAS FOR HIS
last rounds. While Nick was busy collecting the messages, Ven went north, out to the abandoned pier, and sat quietly on the edge, waiting for a glimpse of multicolored scales or a red pearl cap.

While he waited the sun began to set. Great streams of light were breaking through the clouds, like golden ropes. The thinnest clouds had formed what looked like a glowing road into the west, in colors of pink and yellow and white, leading to a burning orange sun at the horizon.

When finally there was nothing more than a sliver of the sun left, Amariel’s head popped out of the water just off the pier.

“Well, I see you’ve learned not to shout,” the merrow said, flipping her tail and splashing Ven with droplets of salty foam. “What are you doing here?”

“I came to tell you about the Gated City,” Ven said, sitting cross-legged on the pier. “You always say I owe you stories in return for all the ones you told me those nights I was floating on the wreckage. I don’t have that many to tell, but as I learn some, I thought I’d start paying you back.”

The merrow considered, then nodded.

“All right,” she said. “Tell away.”

So Ven began with their entry into the Outer Market, trying to put each part of the story into terms that a sea-dweller would understand. He noticed as he went on that more and more heads seemed to appear, bobbing in the water some distance away from shore. They never quite crested the surface, but Ven was fairly certain they were listening as well.

When his story ended, the heads disappeared.

The merrow floated backward, allowing her beautiful tail to flip out of the water.

“Well, it seems there really
is
a lot to see in the Dry World,” she said casually, drawing patterns in the gentle waves as they crested under the pier. “I guess that explains, at least a little, why you always have more important things to do than come to explore the depths with me.”

“Nothing I have to do is more important to
me,
” Ven said quickly. “It’s usually more important to someone else, someone who gets to tell me what to do. But I really do want to come with you someday.”

“Hmmm,” said Amariel. “I’ll believe that when it happens.” She started to drift away. “But next time you get sent on one of these great adventures, let me know. Maybe I will be in the mood that day to come with you and see what all the fuss is about.”

Ven sat up like a bolt of lightning had hit him.

“Are you serious?” he asked excitedly. “Do you mean it? You would give me your cap and grow legs? And come with me?”

The merrow smiled.

“Perhaps,” she said, preparing to dive. “Perhaps not. We’ll see when the time comes.”

“Yes,” Ven called as she disappeared below the waves. “We’ll see—I’ll see you tomorrow! Or the next day.”

He ran all the way back to the inn, astonishing Nicholas by beating him there.

In addition to the luminaries whom I thanked in the first volume, and who still deserve thanks but not actual
space
in this book, I would like to acknowledge the following helpful people for their contributions to our ongoing archaeological dig:

First and foremost, Dr. Alexander Vandersnoot, Vaarn expedition leader, who has handled every aspect of the dig as well as updating our blog at www.venbooks.com;

Edward “Dip Dip” Hillenbrand, our expedition’s litter bearer, for transporting all our equipment (and, of course, me);

The Flower Sisters, Ella Rose Violet Daisy Iris MacDoodle, and Liliana-Susana-Banana-Chochita-Burrita Valentine, Gwadd caterers extraordinaire, who have kept our archaeological dig team fed and happy through months of dirty, backbreaking work (see their ad in this month’s edition of
The Flower Gourmet
);

Madame Hildegarde Frint, Mistress of Manners and Decorum, for keeping a civil and serene atmosphere among traditionally coarse field-workers. I would especially like to thank her for ransoming me back from the chief of the Womba Looma tribe, and hereby promise to never again spit mango juice at anyone during a sacred Tongue-Waggling ceremony. (It really
was
an accident, Hildy.)

Sir Austen Frappier, famed socialite, for adding cuteness and beauty to an otherwise bleak seaside setting;

Sergeant-Major Blanche McGivney, the Iron Goddess of Mercy, for her vise-like grip on discipline in the ranks and maintaining the dormitories;

“Amazon” Julien Thuan, zookeeper and animal handler of the Royal Menagerie of Sorbold, for his assistance with research regarding prehistoric dogs;

And a grudging acknowledgment of the extremely shoddy work of Hoy T. Toity and Gobble D. Gooke, our interpreters, who really need to practice their Kith diphthongs (lawsuit pending—thanks a
lot
).

—EH

Elizabeth Haydon is now working
to restore the third volume of
The Lost Journals of Ven Polypheme,
The Dragon’s Lair.

Turn the page for a sneak peek for your eyes only.

V
EN WAS DREAMING OF FIRE PIRATES CHASING HIM THROUGH THE
hold of a dark ship when he felt his shoulder being shaken.

He opened his eyes. He could see nothing but inky blackness all around him.

The moon had set, taking any light with it. The stars that had been so bright the evening before had disappeared behind racing clouds. All he could feel was the breath of the wind, rustling the grass around his head.

It smelled like the burnt porridge in the bottom of Char’s cooking pot.

“Get up,” Tuck said quietly. “It’s time to go.”

Ven sat straight up and looked around. He could see the shapes of his friends beginning to move as they, too, shook off sleep. He knew they could see even less than he could, except possibly for Saeli.

“What’s burning?” he asked nervously.

Tuck’s voice came from behind where he sat. Ven had not seen him move.

“Fields,” the Lirin forester said. “The grasslands to the north of here, I’d wager.”

“Is it the dragon?”

Tuck came around in front of him and crouched down. “Maybe. If it is, this fire has caught and spread from a spark. But this itself is not from the beast. Can’t miss the smell of dragon’s breath.”

“Wh-why?” Char stammered from the darkness next to Ven. “What does it smell like?”

The forester was helping Clemency to her feet. He turned and looked at Char for a moment, thinking.

“There’s a dirt smell to it, like wet firecoals,” he said at last. “But sharper, like acid or pitch had been poured into the smoke. Once you’ve smelled it, you never forget it. It haunts your dreams.”

“Great,” Ven muttered. “My dreams aren’t haunted enough.”

“Let’s move out,” Tuck said, hoisting his enormous pack onto his shoulder. “The night-hunting ravens sleep when the moon goes down. Those that hunt by day will be up with the sun. We have to travel fast.”

Ven nodded and slung his own pack onto his back, as did the others. They followed Tuck’s dark outline over the fields, stepping through the highgrass that billowed like waves on the sea.

After what seemed like an eternity of wading through endless scrub, they came to the thicket where their horses stood, the wagon hidden among the trees. Tuck tossed his pack into the back of the wagon and helped the children in, then climbed up onto the board and took the reins.

“Go back to sleep,” he said over his shoulder.

“Yeah,
that’s
gonna happen,” Char said under his breath.

“May as well rest while you can,” Tuck replied. Char jumped. He had forgotten how sensitive the forester’s ears were. “Not a good idea to deal with a dragon when you’re tired.”

“I, for one, don’t think it will be hard to fall asleep at all,” said Clem, shoving aside a sack of cornmeal and moving away from the water barrel, which had leaked a little and dampened the floor of the wagon. “I feel like I could sleep for days.”

Not me,
Ven thought. His scalp was on fire, his fingers tingling. It was all he could do to keep from peering over the edge of the wagon, but Tuck’s warning was still ringing in his ears, drowning out his curiosity for the moment.
Stay down, children. It’s best that anything passing by thinks you are cargo, nothing more
.

Surrounded by blackness, his mind was racing. Ven tried to think of home, of his family, of boring lessons in school, anything to get his thoughts to settle down and allow him to fall asleep again. Hard as he tried, nothing would stick in his brain except the thought that at any moment they might be face to face with an ancient beast able to grant them a wish or swallow them up without having to chew. Despite the danger, the possibility that they might actually be seeing something that most people had only heard about in tales was making his heart pound.

Even more thrilling was the knowledge that, should they avoid the dragon altogether, he might be meeting Nain for the first time, in the mountains, and maybe he would see how his own race really lived. That alone was enough to keep him from being able to sleep.

He thought of the letter he would write to his family, telling them that after four generations, a Polypheme had finally returned to the mountains and had met downworld Nain. While these Nain were not the ones from whom his family had descended, it would still be fascinating to see how they lived and to speak to them in the language Ven had only ever used with his family and a few of the Nain that worked in his father’s factory in Vaarn.
I wonder if they will be able to understand me,
he thought.
No Nain I’ve ever talked to has ever been inside a mountain, either
.

His thoughts raced even more wildly in his head.
Maybe I can finally make up for disgracing the family by making a good impression on those of our own race
. With that thought came sudden panic.
What if the language I’ve learned has changed over the years? What if what I say means something totally different in their tongue? I could be insulting them and not even know it. With my luck, I will start a war between Nain cultures.
His mind was churning along with these crazy thoughts, but Ven was unable to stop them.

Inside his shirt pocket, the thin sleeve of Black Ivory vibrated slightly. Ven put his hand on top of it and was surprised that he could feel warmth, even through the fabric. There was a pleasant buzz on his skin, even through the smooth stone. Without thinking, he slid the tip of the dragon scale out of the protective sleeve and ran his finger over the edge.

All of the breath choked out of Ven. His head spun woozily and he felt sick as he was hauled out of the wagon and up onto the board behind the horses.

Tuck’s voice spoke quietly in his ear, its tone deadly.

“Put that bloody thing away, Ven. Do you
want
the dragon to find us?”

“N-no,” Ven whispered.

Tuck’s grip on his collar tightened. “Well,
I
can feel it when you pull it out of the Black Ivory—it vibrates so strongly that my teeth sting. So if
I
can feel it, don’t you think a
dragon
can? Perhaps from miles away?”

“Sorry,” Ven said. He pushed the scale back into its envelope, and the envelope back into his pocket. The vibration vanished, taking with it the joy that had been coursing through him a moment before.

Tuck shook his head in disgust and released his grip on Ven, who slid off the board and clattered back into the wagon. The eyes of the other children were wide, staring at him in the darkness. Ven’s face flushed hot in embarrassment, so he turned around and settled back down between two sacks of carrots, pretending to sleep.

Great
, he thought.
I’ve just annoyed the king’s forester, frightened my friends, and possibly alerted the dragon to our presence. I wonder if carrying around this dragon scale is making me more stupid than usual.

He sighed miserably. Not since he had been floating on the wreckage of his father’s ship after the Fire Pirate attack had he felt so vulnerable. The edges of the night seemed to be endless, especially when the moon was down. It was a little like being lost at sea, without the safety of the Crossroads Inn to return to.
What have I done, bringing my friends out here, with no settlements around for miles?
he thought.
If something happens to Tuck, how will we ever get home?

He raised himself up a little and glanced back over his shoulder. The wind was growing stronger, battering the wagon and blowing the children’s hair and the manes of the horses wildly about. Behind him Saeli was huddled close to Clem, shivering. The Mouse Lodge steward opened her woolen cape and wrapped it around the small girl’s shoulders.

Just as she did, Ven caught sight of a tiny flicker of light in the fields behind her.

He sat up and peered over the side of the wagon behind the girls. The tiny light had vanished, but suddenly several more winked in the moving sea of highgrass.

Ven spun and looked over the side of the wagon next to him. At first he saw nothing but blackness, but after a moment the little lights appeared within the meadow grass there as well; a few at first, then several more, and finally dozens of them, only to disappear as quickly as they had come.

He reached over the sacks of carrots and grabbed Char by the sleeve.

“Look out there,” he said, trying to keep his voice low. “What
is
that?”

The cook’s mate scooted closer to the edge and peered through the slats in the wagon.

“What’s what?”

“Those flickering lights—can’t you see them?”

“Blimey, I dunno,” Char whispered. “Hey, Clem, come ’ere, quick!”

The house steward raised her head sleepily. “Huummph?”

“Come an’ look at this,” Char insisted.

An annoyed snorting sound came up from the depths of the wagon. “All
right
, just a minute.” The sacks of carrots wiggled as Clem crawled over them, looking less than pleased. “What do you want
now
?”

“There’s about a bajillion tiny flickering lights out there,” Char whispered.

Clem looked over the side of the wagon and stared into the dark.

“Fireflies,” she said. “Lightning bugs. You’ve never seen them before?”

“Never
heard
of ’em,” Char replied as Ven shook his head. “
Lightning
bugs?”

Clemency sighed. “It certainly is obvious that you grew up on the sea, Char, and you in a city, Ven,” she said impatiently. “Anyone who’s ever been in the countryside knows about lightning bugs. You can see them all over the fields where I live, mostly in the summer.”

A soft cough came from the board of the wagon.

“Those are not lightning bugs,” Tuck said quietly. The children looked at each other. Again the king’s forester had heard them over the rattling of the wagon, the clopping of the horses, and the howl of the wind, even though they had been whispering.

Ven raised himself up onto his knees. “What are they, then, Tuck?”

The forester clicked reassuringly to the horses, who had begun to nicker nervously.

“They’re the points of tracer arrows,” he said.

Ven looked out over the side of the wagon again. For as far as he could see around him in the highgrass were thousands of twinkling lights, glittering like the stars above the sea at night. They winked in and out, not moving, hovering in the scrub. He turned to Clem and Char, whose faces were as white as the moon had been.

“Tracer arrows?” Ven repeated.

The Lirin forester nodded, urging the horses forward, though the wagon had slowed.

“Arrows whose points have been dipped in a kind of concoction that glows in the dark. They only glow when they are just about to be fired, sparked by being drawn across a bow string. Their radiance lasts long enough to leave a path of light for others to see, so that the target is easier to hit.

“And behind each one is an archer.”