Petronus was rounding the corner, approaching the galley tent, when the muddy bird flapped into camp. It squawked and hopped about until he scooped it up and slipped the unthreaded message from its foot. He opened it and saw Whymer runes.
Your grandson is our honored guest, it read.
Petronus checked the tent first. Then the wagon and the galley and the bathing tent. When Neb didn’t
turn up at any of those places, he went next to the sentries. But the sentries were pulled in closer now that
defense was warranted, and at sundown, the guard had changed.
After he’d done that much, Petronus returned to the camp and organized a search party. The War
Sermon started up as they moved into the city.
But midway through the search, Petronus called them together and sent them back to the camp. The Marsh King’s note was specific enough that he knew they wouldn’t find the boy. While the others drifted back, Petronus stayed on the northern edge of the city and watched the line of forests. Tonight, the War Sermon was particularly cryptic-a string of prophetic utterances about a boy, obscure references to texts Petronus had heard of but never seen. Texts that not even the Androfrancines had seen these two thousand years. Only the memory of these texts survived as references in newer works.
He understood the words but did not understand their meaning. “He’s in the Marsh King’s camp,” Gregoric said.
Petronus turned in the direction of the voice. “You’ve seen him then?” “Aye,” the scout said. “We saw him running with one of their scouts.”
Petronus felt anger, sharp and focused. “And yet you did not stop him?”
“No. For many reasons I’m sure you can cipher out.”
Yes. It would have meant giving away the Ninefold Forest House’s continued presence at Windwir. Petronus did not like the mathematics of it, but it was what it was. He would hope he’d choose differently, but knew that he had been in that position before. Sacrifices for the greater good. Memories of that burning village chewed at him. “Have you seen their camp?”
Gregoric’s voice moved again. “I have not. They’re better woodsmen than Sethbert’s men. And they seem to have kin-clave with us.”
“I found that surprising,” Petronus said.
“We did as well. But we’ll have some better idea of it in the next few days.”
Petronus raised his eyebrows, waiting for Gregoric to finish, but he didn’t speak right away. When he did, his voice was far away and he was running fast. “We will also inquire about your boy.”
Those words settled him somewhat. He still felt the strain pulling at his neck and back, and he swung his arms as he turned back toward camp.
There’s nothing more that you can do here, old man.
As he walked, he thought about the Gypsy Scout’s words. Most likely, it meant that Rudolfo was near and intending to parley with the Marsh King. It would be a first, and to Petronus’s recollection, there had been a rather brief and nasty war between the Ninefold Forest and the Marshers. Four, maybe five years before his assassination. Jakob had captured the Marsh King and showed him his Physicians of Penitent Torture. Then he released him, and the Marshers never bothered the Forest Houses again.
Now they were Rudolfo’s only kin-clave remaining in the world apart from his alliance with Vlad Li Tam. And they had Neb.
Petronus stopped and looked behind him at the dark line of trees against the sky. Remnants of his
upbringing as a Gods-fearing boy momentarily usurped his Androfrancine sensibilities. It happened infrequently, but when it did it reminded Petronus of how fragile the human heart and mind can be when faced with potential loss.
All the way back to camp, Petronus prayed.
Neb
Th»s Nizee Marshers defied Neb’s imagination.
He’d run as fast as he could to keep up with the scout, tearing through the underbrush, ducking and weaving to avoid the branches that slapped him. The scout was fast and big, making no attempt now for stealth.
Neb ran for what felt like leagues before he realized the forest had changed. Fishing nets interwoven with branches concealed mud-smeared, tattered tents. Unkempt men and women, many slack-jawed and empty-eyed, wandered the camp. They wore unmatched bits of weaponry and armor scavenged from two thousand years of skirmishing, and they moved to and fro in silence.
Neb’s guide vanished, leaving him at the edge of camp. A young girl approached him. She was covered in filth, just like the others, her hair shot through with mud and ash, and Neb suddenly realized that it wasn’t simply different values around hygiene. They did this to themselves, painting themselves with earth and ash, for reasons that were sacred to them.
The girl smiled at him, and beneath the caked dirt, he could see that she possessed a coltish kind of prettiness. She was nearly as tall as he was, and he thought perhaps her hair was a mouse brown beneath the mud. Despite the dirt, she had it pulled back from her face and wrapped with a bit of red ribbon.
“The Marsh King summoned you,” she said. It wasn’t a question. “Y-yes,” he said.
She took a step closer to him and he smelled her. It was a distinct scent-the musk of sweat, the smoky smell of the ash, the traces of sulfur and clay in the mud. And apples, he realized. She extended her hand to him. “I will take you.”
He took her hand and felt her gently tugging him along, walking at a quick gait. He studied her as they went. She wore mismatched boots and a long man’s tunic cut down to fit her. Beneath it, a long-sleeved shirt that had once been white. Her calves were bare and gray with dirt. She wore no weapons that he could see.
The Marsh girl led him through a maze of trees and tents, dodging in and out of the Marsh King’s silent soldiers. “Why are they so quiet?” he asked, his curiosity finally getting the better of him.
“It is our faith. We have one voice in war-the voice of our king. So we only speak when necessary.” Neb took her hint and remained quiet until they approached a tent slightly larger than the other, snug
against the side of a low hill. “The Marsh King awaits you in there,” the girl said pointing.
Before Neb could thank her, she vanished, running quickly and vanishing around the side of the hill without looking back.
He swallowed and approached the unguarded tent. Dim light danced inside the filthy canvas structure, and as he pushed aside the free-hanging flap, he realized that the tent was just a foyer. A tunnel had been
dug into the side of the hill, widening into a cave with tangled roots for its ceiling and mud for its floor. Sitting in the center of that cave at the foot of a large triangular idol was the largest man Neb had ever seen. Bits of twigs and food hung in his large black beard, and on his lap he held a massive axe, the head of which glistened in the lamplight like a mirror, throwing back the light and intensifying it. He wore armor of a similar sort-silver and mirrored like nothing Neb had ever seen before. The giant fixed his dark
eyes on Neb, then looked quickly to the left to the idol. It was a meditation bust of P’Andro Whym, from one of the earlier heresies.
“Come forward,” the Marsh King bellowed in the Whymer tongue.
Even without the magicks, the voice was compelling. Neb shuffled forward. He looked around the room as he went. It looked like there was a back entrance-much smaller, certainly too small for the Marsh King, and shrouded with a heavy curtain hastily staked into the ceiling. There were scattered reed mats and piles of ratty blankets.
Neb wasn’t sure what to do next, so he erred on the side of caution and lowered himself to his knees. “I
am here, Lord.”
Again, the Marsh King stared down at him and then looked away to the idol. “I will preach about you tonight,” the Marsh King said. “I will call you the dreaming boy because I have seen you in my dreams.” He looked to the idol, nodding slowly. “Now is set into motion the time of judgment, and the unloved children of P’Andro Whym will be the firstborn of the new gods.” Neb looked at the idol himself but saw nothing there but an old metal god. The Marsh King leaned down. “Do you understand any of this?”
Neb shook his head. “I do not.”
Another glance to the idol, head cocked to hear, then the deep voice continued slowly. “Do you understand what it means to be the reluctant prophet of Xhum Y’Zir? Because someday, you will be.”
“I do not understand, Lord,” Neb said. But the words, when they washed through him, left him shaken. He’d studied the fundamentals of the mystic heresies and he understood the straying from Androfrancine truth. His own dream of Hebda, dead and speaking with him as if he weren’t, was powerful regardless of whether or not it was real. Who wouldn’t listen to the ghost of their dead father?
But the Francines were clear: The ghost was just an aspect of himself, working out problems in his sleep. Except for the part where those dreams came true, the Marsh King and his army perfect proof of that. “How is it that you invade my sleep, Dreaming Boy? What are the things that you show me?” The Marsh
King waited, glancing quickly to the idol. “Who is this resurrected Pope that will avenge the light by
killing it?”
The fear worked its way into his stomach and it lurched. He knew about Petronus somehow. His hand wanted to go to the pocket now and check it again, make sure it was still there. But he didn’t. “I do not know, Lord,” he said again.
The Marsh King roared and leaped to his feet, moving past Neb quickly and moving to the tent flaps. “I will speak with you in the morning.” Neb watched him draw a large silver drinking horn and hold it to his lips. When he brought it down his face was covered in what looked like blood, and his satisfied sigh shook the walls of the tent.
The Marsh King strode into the night, his War Sermon booming out, a storm of words that could be heard as far as twenty leagues away.
Neb was still watching him when the girl approached. He jumped when she touched his shoulder and he turned. The curtain still swayed where she came from. “He will be all night,” the Marsh girl said.
“He’s preaching about me,” Neb said.
She nodded. “He is. The dreams were very powerful.” “What do they mean?”
She laughed. “If I knew what they meant, why would the Marsh King summon you?”
Neb looked at her. She didn’t look as dirty as he’d thought she did. Or maybe it was the light. Her large brown eyes crinkled at the edges, as if she laughed a lot. But there were deep places there that suggested she cried a lot, too. When she smiled, her teeth were straight and white.
“Maybe they don’t mean anything,” Neb said.
She shook her head. “It is unlikely. Most dreams mean something.” She sighed. “But I hope you’re right.”
Neb saw that the thought of it relieved her. “Why do you hope I’m right?” he asked.
She looked to the idol herself for a moment, then back to Neb. “Because the dreams said that many would go to their second death in the fire for the Androfrancine sin.” She shuddered as she said the words.
“And I had something to do with it?” Neb asked, his voice suddenly small.
Neb woke up to a hand on his shoulder and sat up quickly. Winters crouched near him, dressed in a burlap dress that clung to her emerging curves. This close, she smelled of earth and smoke and sweat.
“I brought you breakfast,” she said, pointing to a chipped bowl set at a small table. Neb rubbed the sleep from his eyes. “You’re not eating?”
She shook her head. “I fast today. The world is changing.”
He kicked himself out of the blankets and stood. She stood, too. “Is the Marsh King back?” “Soon,” she said. “Eat first.”
He went to the table and sat on the rickety wooden stool that waited for him there. The bowl was filled with boiled oats that still steamed, and the smell of buttermilk, honey and dried apples made his stomach growl. Near the bowl was a plate holding an assortment of roasted chestnuts, a chunk of bread and a bit of white, strong-smelling cheese.
Winters sat across from him, watching as he ate the food and washed it down with cold water from a metal cup.
“There was a parley this morning,” she said. “All of the lords attended, including Lord Tam of House Li
Tam.”
“Did the Marsh King go?”
She nodded. “Our people were represented.”
He tried the cheese. Its sharpness saturated his mouth, driving out the sweet and sour flavor of the boiled oats. “What do you think will come of it?”
“Nothing but war,” she said. “Though when this hidden Pope declares, I think alliances will shift.” She looked at him. Her large brown eyes hardened. “Of course, the Marshfolk care nothing for Named Land statecraft and even less for Androfrancine politics.”
“Then why has the Marsh King brought his army south?”
Winters scowled. “Curiosity and kin-clave,” she said. “The Marsh King’s dreams have long foretold an end of the Androfrancine light. As have the kings that went before. For many years we even warred with the Androfrancines, thinking perhaps we could bring about that end.”
Neb looked up from his breakfast, surprised. He’d known all his life about the skirmishers, but had never heard a sufficient justification beyond ancient grudges and the residue of madness inEe oed. the Marsher line. “But why?”
She smiled, and in the soft light of the cave it carried a sweetness that he felt tugging at his heart. “Because when the light goes out,” she said, “the dreams of the Marsh Kings will be realized and we will be guided to our new home.”
She reached across the table now and laid her hand on Neb’s cheek. “Dear, dreaming boy,” she said. “If you could see the Marsh King’s dreams, you would weep with joy from the beauty of it. Your father has seen them, and the power of them brought him back from death to parley with you in your sleeping hours.”
Neb wasn’t sure which made him more uncomfortable, the Marsher mysticism or Winters’s hand cupping his cheek. He felt warmth moving through him, and something fluttered in his chest and stomach.
Winters dropped her hand, and he realized from the look on her face that she’d felt the discomfort, too. She looked away and blushed.
“I don’t understand,” Neb finally said. And he meant both the strange feelings this ragamuffin girl stirred up inside of him as well as the Marsh King prophecies.
“We are at the end of our sojourn, Nebios ben Hebda,” she said. “When all that was left of our peoples came to this New World from the lands beyond the Churning Wastes, the first Marsh King wore sackcloth and ashes, bathing himself in the dust of the earth that he came from and calling upon his children to do the same. Strangers in this land, we eschewed the Androfrancines and their light, loving shadow more because we knew the knowledge of the past could not create a safer future-it would merely remake the past. Even P’Andro Whym knew that a day was coming when his sins would be visited upon his children.” Her words tumbled out fast, her eyes alive as she spoke and her sentences rushing together. “A home-seeking is upon us and by the waking and the sleeping dreams, you are the one who leads our pilgrimage homeward.”
Suddenly she was speaking in tongues like the Marsh King, her eyes wide with wonder and fear. Neb saw the muscles tighten in her jaw and neck as she tried to fight the ecstatic utterance, but she couldn’t.
Neb opened his mouth to ask her if she was okay, if there was anything he could do, but his mind wasn’t able to pull the words together into a question. He felt something like panic growing in him, starting in his stomach and spreading throughout his body. He felt arousal and fear and rapture as his body tingled head to toe.
He opened his mouth to ask what was happening to him, and when he did he found himself suddenly speaking in tongues with the Marsh girl, their voices weaving in and out of one another as they finished one another’s sentences in a language that was no language but longing and terror and terrible sadness.
Her eyes Eoma tehad rolled back into her head now, and she fell away from the table to twitch on the floor. Neb felt his own muscles pulling him down as well, but he forced himself to his feet and went to Winters before falling to his knees before her.
Her arms snaked out around him, her strong fingers digging into his skin and pulling him down to the dirt. Holding her close to himself, Neb let his words wash through him and out of him, dancing with her own words as they held one another on the floor. Finally, the fit of language ceased and they lay still, eyes closed, their ragged breath the only sound in the room.
When he opened his eyes, she was staring at him. He felt the ache in his jaw and the rawness in his throat, ragged from words he was unaccustomed to speaking. “I don’t understand what happened,” he said, his voice rough and quiet. “I don’t understand how I could have any part in this.”
She stretched her neck toward him and kissed him on the cheek. “Dear, sweet, Dreaming Boy,” she said with a voice that seemed far away. “Understanding is not always necessary.”
Neb’s muscles were sore now, and he realized suddenly that he was still entwined with the girl. The tingling had become something different. The warmth of her body and the firmness of her hands as she held him were building toward something in him that was frightening and exhilarating all at once.
He disentangled himself quickly, scrambling to his feet. She did the same, and he realized that her face was as red as his. “I’m sorry,” he said.
She laughed. “There is nothing to be sorry for. The spirit moves as it will, so also the body.”
He looked at his half-eaten breakfast at the table, but knew already he wouldn’t be able to finish it. “I
think I should go back to Windwir soon. They will be worried for me.”
A sad looked passed over her face. “I understand. I will see if the Marsh King has returned from the parley.”
She walked close to him, near enough for him to feel her warmth. Then the Marsh girl Winters quickly touched his cheek once more, and left through the back entrance of the cave.
After she’d gone, he sat and thought about her and her people.
A home-seeking is upon us.
Neb hid all of her words in his heart and wondered about the world that had changed.