The Way of the Wilderking (3 page)

Percy, Dobro, and Aidan traveled north from Scoggin Mound by flatboat, then through the treetops. Percy, like his brother, proved a natural tree-walker, swinging and leaping with the easy rhythm of the feechiefolks. They saw neither soldiers nor signs of soldiers in the Feechiefen, in the bordering scrub swamp, or in the pine flats beyond. However, when they made it to the River Tam around dusk on the second day of their travels, it became clear they had nearly waited too long.

On the south bank of the river—the feechie bank—five soldiers from King Darrow's army were guarding a huge mound of supplies ferried over that
day. In the failing light, Aidan could make out bundle upon bundle of steel-tipped arrows, piles of timber axes, two bales of extra uniforms, and stacks of shovels. A string of pack mules stamped and twitched nervously, seemingly aware that they didn't belong on this side of the River Tam. The civilizer guards looked skittish themselves. From their perch in the tree directly above, Percy, Dobro, and Aidan could hear every word they said.

“Look at them cooking fires,” one of the soldiers said. Across the river, fifty fires flickered beneath the sheltering trees of Last Camp. “They look cheerful from here, don't they?”

“Earl, everything looks cheerful compared to this place,” said one of the others. “It feels like this forest is gonna swallow us whole. We got no business over here.” The pitch of his voice rose with that last sentence.

“Keep your leggings on, Hadley,” said a third soldier. “Things'll look a whole lot better tomorrow morning when the rest of the force crosses over.”

Hadley wasn't satisfied. “You reckon we'll even see tomorrow morning? I'm telling you, this place gives me the fantods. Ain't nobody ever come back from this side of the river, Wat.”

“Ain't nobody ever come a thousand men at a time,” Wat answered.

“I don't know. It might be just nine hundred and ninety-five by morning.”

“Hush that talk, Luther,” said Earl. “You're as bad
as Hadley. Besides,” he added, “Aidan Errolson came back alive once.”

“Aidan Errolson!” a fifth soldier said. “I 'bout had a bellyful of Aidan Errolson. Weren't for Aidan Errolson, I'd be home where I belong, mowing hay for my cattle, dandling my new baby on my lap in the evenings.”

“It ain't Aidan Errolson's fault you ain't home on the farm, Cordel,” said Luther. “That was King Darrow's idea.”

“I don't care whose idea it was,” said Hadley. “We got no business this side of the river. The thousand of us ain't going to catch him, even if he's still alive— which I doubt.”

“We couldn't catch him in the Feechiefen even if there was a
hundred
thousand of us,” Cordel agreed. “Even if all hundred thousand of us actually wanted to catch him.”

“What's that supposed to mean?” Luther asked. “You don't want to catch him?”

“Aidan Errolson can go about his business, as far as I'm concerned,” said Cordel. “If I can just go about mine. I got hay in the field, and I got a baby needs dandling, and if King Darrow got a beef with Aidan Errolson, I wish he'd leave me out of it!”

“Seems to me,” said Earl, “a fellow plans to invade my country, burn my crops, carry off my children, he deserves what he gets. King Darrow's right, we ought to be taking the fight to him before he overruns all of civilization with a crowd of stinking feechies.”

“Feechies!” Wat scoffed. “Feechies! This ain't play nursery, Earl. Why you telling nursery stories?”

“What?” asked Earl. “You don't believe the Feechiefen's full of feechies?”

Wat snorted. “Only thing full of feechies is the minds of babies and half-wits. Feechies! It's all hokeypokey. It's all oogey-boogey.”

Dobro couldn't possibly resist such an invitation. He sailed from his perch in the tree and landed on the bale of uniforms where Wat was sitting. Then he flipped over Wat's head and landed on the ground in the middle of the soldiers. “Hokey-pokey!” he yelled. “Oogey-boogey!” He whirled around the civilizers like a dust devil, his arms gyrating, his long hair flapping behind him, roaring and yodeling. Then he jumped on Wat's back and rode the poor civilizer until he tripped over a cypress knee and planted himself in the mud. The rest of the soldiers scattered into Tamside Forest.

Aidan and Percy, meanwhile, scrambled down the tree and climbed down the riverbank into a little rowboat that floated in the eddy. In a matter of seconds, Dobro sailed from the bank and into the boat in a single catlike leap.

Percy nearly had the mooring rope loose when Aidan yelled, “Wait!” and scrambled up the root tangle and disappeared over the bank again. He returned in no time and jumped back into the boat. “Here,” he said, handing each of his companions a blue tunic he pulled from the uniform bale. “We might need these.”

Percy rowed the boat a quarter league downstream, well beyond the last of the civilizers' dying cooking fires, before rowing across to the north side, where they beached their craft on a sandbar.

“Home again, home again,” Percy said softly. He seemed genuinely relieved to be back on the civilizer side of the river, in spite of the danger.

Aidan's feelings weren't so straightforward. He was born and bred in civilizer country. He had spent fifteen of his eighteen years there, most of them happy. But the Feechiefen had begun to feel like home. It certainly felt like sanctuary.

Dobro, of course, had been to the civilizer side of the river before, but he had always stayed in the forests and swamps. Soon he would get his first taste of actual civilization.

Aidan stood in the river and squatted to wet himself all over. He grabbed a handful of sand and scoured his bare chest, back, legs, and face. A cloud of gray swamp mud—a feechie's protective coating against bugs and sunburn—spread in the water around him and drifted downstream toward the Eastern Ocean.

“Come on, Dobro,” Aidan said. “It's time for you to get cleaned up.”

Dobro took a step back, away from the water. “I don't believe I will,” he said. “I done made it eighteen years without getting bathified, and I don't reckon I'll start now.”

“Come on, Dobro,” Aidan repeated. “You can't get civilized if you're covered in mud.”

“How's that civilized,” Dobro asked, “to walk around all pink and shiny? Like a boiled crawfish? Naw, I'd sooner walk around nekkid.”

Percy joined in. “How do you figure to get a civilizer girl to marry you if you smell like swamp rot and look like a lizard?”

Dobro crossed his arms and looked just over Percy's head with an air of exaggerated dignity. “Any gal don't love me for my own self, she ain't worthy of me.”

Aidan's tone betrayed his exasperation. “Dobro, we don't have many hours before sunup. The camp will be waking soon, and then they'll start crossing the river into feechie country. There's the rowboat. You're welcome to it if you want to go home. But if you want to come with us, get over here and let me wash you off.”

Dobro walked slowly toward the water, holding his head down and looking at Aidan through his eyebrows. He put one toe in the water, testing it. This, the same Dobro who thought nothing of diving into the black, alligator-infested waters of the Feechiefen in pursuit of a muskrat. “Ooh!” he moaned. “It's wet!”

Growing impatient, Aidan grabbed Dobro by the arm and dunked him in the water. “Help!” Dobro spluttered, flailing the water to a froth. “He's drownin' me!”

When Aidan began scouring Dobro's muddy back with sand, the feechie wailed like a wounded animal.
“Awww! Awww! He's skinnin' me alive! I'm ruint! Awww! Leave a little skin on me, you cannibal! You monster!”

“S-s-s-h-h-h!” Aidan hissed. “If you don't get quiet, a thousand civilizers are going to be down here to watch you bathe.”

“Nine hundred and ninety-five,” Percy corrected.

Dobro finally got quiet. Dripping and sulking, he had the look of a cat forced to submit to a bath at the hands of a child. Aidan finished the job in short order. Dobro, it turned out, was shockingly white under all that mud; his skin had never been exposed directly to the sun, after all. He looked like a second moon, like a creature made to be camouflaged on a sandbar. Aidan wondered if he would ever get used to a Dobro who wasn't gray skinned. Dobro, for his part, looked mournfully at his arms and legs, as if they were the limbs of a foreigner.

When baths were finished, Aidan fetched his side pouch from the sandbar and pulled out his prized possession, the steel hunting knife he had hidden there three years earlier. Out of respect for the feechies' aversion to cold-shiny implements and weapons, he had never used it in the swamp; he had pulled it out only to clean and sharpen it every month or so. But now that he was back on the civilizer side of the river, he was glad to see it again. He handed the knife to Percy and pointed to the hair that draped down the back of his own neck. “Cut it off, Percy,” he said. “Make it look like civilizer hair.”

Dobro sobbed quietly while Percy performed the same operation on his hair—his “mane” as he-feechies liked to call it. When the Errolsons weren't looking, Dobro picked up a matted hank of his hair and put it in his side pouch, a memento of the life he had left behind.

The three travelers all donned blue army tunics; Aidan and Dobro wore theirs over their snakeskin kilts. Only Percy's disguise was halfway convincing, since Aidan and Dobro had neither leggings nor boots. Even by moonlight it was clear Dobro wouldn't pass for a civilizer in the daylight. But he was a little less feechiefied, and for the time being that would have to do.

Leaving the sandbar, Percy, Aidan, and Dobro entered the forest and tree-walked upstream, with the river on their left. Some thirty feet above the ground, they traversed Last Camp, where nine hundred ninety-five soldiers slept their last few hours before stepping off the edge of civilization and into the unknown—or so they thought.

The cooking fires had all burned to ashes, and from such a height, Aidan, Dobro, and Percy could see very little. But as they passed over the center of Last Camp, Aidan saw the least glimmer of gold embroidery catch the moonlight; he knew it could only be the battle standard of King Darrow himself, the golden boar under which King Darrow led his troops. It almost made Aidan dizzy to think of his king down there,
so far below him—and dreaming of what? Was he dreaming of Aidan's destruction?

The three travelers hurried across the treetops, in only a few minutes coming to the Overland Trail that led to River Road. Alighting on the ground, they agreed to hide in the forest and sleep until daylight. They would need to be as rested and as clearheaded as possible when the army awoke in a couple of hours.

Both Percy and Dobro were breathing heavily and slowly mere seconds after lying on the moss bed they had found. But Aidan couldn't sleep for thinking about the king who slept just a few hundred yards away. He quietly arose and shinned up a nearby tree. He swung and leaped from limb to limb until he was back at the center of Last Camp. He slunk to the lowest branch of the tree under which King Darrow slept. He could hear his king snoring.

Sitting on that limb, Aidan thought over what Dobro had said earlier: “I don't think you know what a enemy is.” It was time he decided: Was King Darrow his enemy, or wasn't he?

The morning star was rising. The camp would probably be up and stirring in half an hour, maybe even less. Aidan made his decision. He pulled the hunting knife out of his side pouch, clenched the blade in his teeth pirate fashion, and descended as stealthily as a panther toward the sleeping king.

The bodyguards surrounding King Darrow faced outward, their backs to the king, the better to confront whatever danger might come from any point of the compass. It never occurred to anyone that danger might come from directly above. King Darrow stirred when Aidan touched down in the sand beside him. But the guards heard nothing and did not see the knife-wielding phantom who stood over the man they had sworn to protect.

Darrow stirred again when Aidan's cold blade touched his collarbone. But Aidan was sure of his purpose and unflinching in its execution. He lifted the leather strap that rested against King Darrow's neck. When the king was in Tambluff Castle, he wore a medallion of a golden boar, his badge of kingship, on a thick chain of gold. Here in the field, the badge of kingship hung from this leather strap around his neck. Aidan cut it with a single swipe of his knife. As deftly as any thief, he palmed the medallion and dropped it in his side pouch. Then he shinned back up the tree trunk before being noticed by either Darrow or his guards.

Aidan hadn't been back in his treetop perch five minutes when the river mists that covered Last Camp lightened from gray to white in the first rays of dawn. The camp came to life in the morning light. The men were making their final preparations, checking their gear one last time before lining up to cross on the ferries. No one relit the cooking fires. No time for breakfast on such a day as this. The men drank water from their canteens and gnawed stale flatbread, not even sitting down to eat.

King Darrow was up with the rest of the men. He had been a warrior even longer than he had been a king, and he wasn't one to lie about while a campaign was afoot. His hair had gone almost completely white in the years since Aidan had last seen him. That was a shock to Aidan, though perhaps it shouldn't have been; the king was nearly seventy years old. Nor did King Darrow still move with the manly grace of his younger years. A night sleeping unsheltered on the ground had left him stiff in his joints. He was too old to be leading a military expedition into the Feechiefen Swamp. He was too old to nurse the sort of grudge that would drive him to do such a thing. But there he was, giving orders, hearing reports from lieutenants, pointing at maps.

Darrow was leaning over to tighten a boot lace when he noticed that his badge of kingship was missing. He clutched at the ends of the severed strap that hung loose about his neck. Aidan watched as the king patted around his chest and belly for any sign of
the missing medallion. But even as he did so, it was obvious that King Darrow understood the truth: His badge of kingship had been taken.

“My badge of kingship!” King Darrow bellowed, and his voice echoed all the way across to the feechie side of the River Tam. “My badge of kingship! Who has stolen my kingship from me?”

The faces of the four night bodyguards were ashen. Their terror was plain to see. Darrow snatched the strap from around his neck and used it as a whip to lash his bodyguards about the head and shoulders. “My kingship!” he roared. “Someone has stolen my kingship from me!” The guards made no move to protect themselves from the lashing but stood erect and looked straight ahead, absorbing this abuse from the king.

Throughout the camp, all preparations for the crossing stopped as men gaped at the king's outburst. Darrow was still roaring and flailing like a crazy man when a tall, dark-haired young man strode up behind him. In his bearing was all the natural command of a man born to rule. He was the very picture of King Darrow when he was younger, when he still had all his wits about him. “Father,” he said firmly but gently. He put a comforting hand on the older man's shoulder. “Father, no one has taken your kingship from you.”

King Darrow let the strap fall to the ground. The presence of his son Steren brought him back to himself. Aidan, too, was moved by the sight of his dearest
friend in all the civilized world. The mere sight of Steren—the true, the brave, the just Steren—awakened in Aidan a loyalty that had lain dormant during his years in the swamp. Steren stood for all that was good about Corenwalder civilization. Aidan could see in the soldiers' faces a love for the prince that far outstripped any love they still had for his father the king.

“No one has taken your kingship from you,” Steren repeated, “but your
badge
of kingship—I will not rest until it has been returned to you.” He fixed his gray eyes on the bodyguards, convinced that at least one of them knew something of the medallion's whereabouts. The bodyguards, who had stood so bravely under the king's lashing, wilted under the prince's glare.

The long silence that followed was broken by a clear voice in the tree limbs high above the bodyguards' heads. “Your Majesty,” the voice called. King Darrow, Prince Steren, and nine hundred ninety-five Corenwalder soldiers squinted to see Aidan Errolson dangling the badge of kingship from the tip of a hunting knife. The four bodyguards, anxious to make up for their earlier negligence, lifted crossbows to shoot Aidan out of the tree, but Steren raised a restraining hand.

Those soldiers who had been conscripted from Hustingreen knew Aidan by sight, and the whispered news raced around Last Camp: The man they were going to seek had come instead to them.

Aidan bowed in the direction of King Darrow. “Your badge of kingship.” He flipped the medallion toward the nearest bodyguard, who dropped his crossbow in order to catch it. “With all the glad heart of a loyal subject, I return it to my king.” After three years among the plain-spoken feechies, such courtly language no longer came naturally to Aidan. But the assembled soldiers seemed to think it a pretty sentiment. They appeared to be on the verge of applauding Aidan.

King Darrow, for his part, was speechless with rage. Nor did Steren look very pleased with his old friend's gesture. “A loyal subject,” Steren said in clipped tones, “would not have stolen from his sovereign to begin with.”

Some of Aidan's self-satisfaction ebbed away under the stern gaze of the crown prince. “I truly meant it as a gesture of goodwill,” Aidan said, not quite so confidently. “To show His Majesty, and every man assembled here, that I would never do my king harm.”

The king's rage boiled over at this. “You lie!” he shouted. “You have done me many harms! The subjects whose loyalty you have stolen—”

“Your Majesty, I would never—”

“The swamp men you have organized into a hostile army—”

“No, Your Majesty—”

“My own son, whom you almost turned against me …” As if it weakened him merely to speak of such things, the king leaned heavily on Steren, who neither frowned nor smiled at Aidan.

Aidan extended the hand that held the hunting knife. “This morning I held this knife an inch away from Your Majesty's throat, while you slept.” His hand shook as he spoke, and his voice trembled. “If I had meant you any harm, I could have done you harm.”

This statement seemed to get through to the king, whose aspect softened, though only a little. Aidan continued. “I'm about to go away. Pursue me if you must. But I make this solemn promise: I will not cross again into the land of the feechiefolk. You need not look for me there.”

King Darrow snorted. “Why should I believe that?”

“Because I have never lied to you.”

In that moment King Darrow understood Aidan was telling the truth, as he always had. “Why would you make me such a promise?” the king asked.

“Because I am not worth the lives of a thousand men. If you lead these men into the Feechiefen, you will be leading them to their deaths. The feechies are fierce, and they aren't forgiving of outsiders who invade their swamp.”

Aidan paused to let the king and his men think about what he had said. “I will run for my life if I have to, Your Majesty. But you have my word: I won't run that way.”

King Darrow pondered Aidan's promise. Something about it rankled him—the quarry defining the terms of the chase. Years of smoldering hatred
got the better of him. “I will end this now!” he announced. “Archers!”

Fifty archers raised their bows and awaited the distasteful order from their king—to shoot Aidan Errolson down like a roosting bird. But Prince Steren intervened again. “Wait, Father—Your Majesty,” he called. “There is a more honorable way. I will end this myself.” The look he fixed on Aidan was grim.

Among the king's many jealousies was Darrow's jealousy of Aidan's friendship with his son. It pleased Darrow to see Steren taking his side in this conflict. He motioned to the archers to stand down. Steren kicked off his boots and checked to be sure his knife was in its sheath. Aidan watched in mute astonishment, his feet rooted to the limb on which he stood, while Steren climbed swiftly, feechielike, toward him.

Aidan had faced down alligators and wolves, a giant and a rattlesnake, the Pyrthens' thunder-tubes and the consuming darkness of underground caverns, hostile feechies and a thousand men bent on his capture. Now his best friend in all the civilized world was climbing steadily toward him to “end this.” He suddenly felt overwhelmingly tired. The struggle just didn't seem worth it now, not if he couldn't even count on Steren anymore.

But when Steren was just a few feet away, once he was high enough to be sure no one on the ground could see his face, he gave Aidan a smile and a broad wink. “Run,” he whispered through clenched teeth. “And make it look good.”

When Aidan leaped from the limb where he stood to a limb on a neighboring tree, Steren was hot after him, careful to jump precisely where he jumped, to land precisely where he landed. For Aidan it was thrilling to be in the forest again with Steren, as they had been so many times when they both lived in Tambluff Castle. For Steren it was no less thrilling. In the years since their famous boar hunt, Steren had often dreamed of that dizzying tree-walk when he followed Dobro and Aidan through the forest canopy to the greenbog. How many times had he wished he hadn't been too tentative and self-conscious to fully enjoy one of the most exhilarating experiences of his life. How many times had he wished for one more chance to soar and leap through the treetops like this. This time he would enjoy it.

Aidan and Steren made the full circuit around Last Camp, in full sight of the Corenwalder soldiers. Viewed from below, their frolic through the treetops looked like a harrowing, death-defying chase. The men were whipped into a frenzy, shouting and whooping like coon hunters following a pack of hounds on the trail. Aidan spiraled upward into the higher boughs, and Steren followed leap for leap, landing for landing, handhold for handhold. Soon they were well out of sight of their audience, up above the overstory.

In the highest branches of an enormous gum tree, the two friends perched like a pair of egrets. Below them they could still hear the clamorous shouts of a thousand men desperate for news of the chase. But
here they were above it all. All was peace in the treetop. Even the whine of mosquitoes, so incessant in the forest as to go largely unnoticed, was absent here. The sun came to them directly, not filtered through the dense leaves of the forest. They had a straight shot to the bluest sky imaginable. Everything seemed clearer here, more focused. Aidan and Steren were boys again, catching their breath after a frolic.

“Remember the last time we did this?” Aidan asked. “With Dobro?” He paused, chuckled. “Things were simpler then.”

Steren looked across the river and into feechie country. “I don't know,” he said. “Maybe things weren't as simple as we thought they were.”

A long silence prevailed. Neither Aidan nor Steren knew quite what to say, where to begin after three years—and such years as those had been. Finally Aidan spoke. “So,” he said, in that casual way of people who are just catching up, “how's your father?”

Steren gave Aidan a perplexed look, then got the joke, and he laughed until he almost fell from his perch.

“Father,” Steren said when he had regained his composure. “Father … he does better than you might think, judging from your run-in this morning. He's rational most of the time—almost all the time, really. But when he's not …” Steren's voice trailed off. “I'm the only person left who can talk sense to him when he gets that way. And half the time he won't listen even to me.”

“What about the Four and Twenty Noblemen?”

Steren shook his head. “Father doesn't trust any of them anymore. He's outlawed three of them—your father, Aethelbert, and Cleland. Gave their lands to half-wits and flatterers he thought he could control. But now he doesn't trust those men either.

“Think about how many lives are affected every time a king makes a bad decision. Do you ever think about that?”

“No, not really,” Aidan admitted.

“I think about it all the time.” Steren plucked at the leaves where he sat and watched them flutter down through the overstory when he dropped them. “He's quite sane most of the time,” he said. He almost sounded as if he were trying to convince himself. “The best thing I can do is to help manage those times when he's not—try to talk him out of his worst decisions.”

“Isn't that strange? Trying to manage a king?”

“Not half so strange as trying to manage your own father.”

“What about this invasion of the Feechiefen? You couldn't talk him out of that?”

Steren gave Aidan a wry smile. “Any mention of Aidan Errolson, any whisper about the Wilderking, sends him into an insane rage. There's no talking him out of anything when it comes to you.”

“So these Aidanites …” Aidan began.

“You know about the Aidanites?”

“Percy told me about them,” he said, a little embarrassed.

“Those fools are going to tear this kingdom apart, and they don't seem to care.” Aidan saw real anger in the prince's face. “Why they feel the need to force themselves on the ancient prophecies, I'll never know.”