North! Or Be Eaten (14 page)

“Mister Reteep?” he said. “Is it true that Gnag the Nameless only came to Skree because of us? because he wanted the Jewels of Anniera?”

“Yes and no,” Oskar said after a moment. “It’s true he sent his armies here because he thought you had come this way, but he would have come anyway, sooner or later. Don’t blame yourself for what happened in Skree.”

“But why would he have come, if not for us?”

“You remember your history, don’t you, son? How many times did a wicked man come to power and suddenly find his kingdom too small? The Praxons did it in the Third Epoch. The Shriveners did it when Tilmus the Bent took the throne, and look what happened to the Furrows of Shreve. There’s nothing left but the Woes, a terrible waste where there was once a garden the size of an ocean.” Oskar stepped over a fallen branch. “No, when a king forgets who he is, he looks for himself in the rubble of conquered cities. He is haunted by a bottomless pit in his soul, and he will pour the blood of nations into it until the pit swallows the man himself.”

Janner shuddered. That deep, hungry darkness scared him because he felt it too, though he found he wasn’t afraid of falling into it, not when he thought of his family. It was as if, between himself and that inner darkness, there were many arms reaching out to catch him, arms like the branches of a tree, there to break his fall and give his hands and feet purchase.

“That’s why Anniera was strong, lad,” Oskar continued. “The Throne Warden protects more than the High King’s flesh. He protects his soul by reminding him at every turn what is good and noble and true in the world. The Throne Warden protects not just the king but the kingdom as well. It is his job to remember and to remind. And sometimes, as you have seen, it is his job to sound the horn of battle and swing his blade for those he loves.”

“Do you think Uncle Artham is all right?”

Oskar nodded. “Aye. If he’s survived this long, it’s either because of his wits or because Gnag the Nameless wants him alive, as he does you. Perhaps it’s a little of both. No, I’m certain Peet the Sock Man will show himself again someday. He’s no ordinary man, you know.”

“He’s definitely not ordinary,” Janner said.

“That’s not what I mean,” Oskar said. “It was said that Artham P. Wingfeather shone with Eremund’s Fire.
¹
The wicked fled before him, and for all the years he and your father occupied Castle Rysen, peace and joy ran deep as a river.”

“I remember my mother saying that all the maidens in the kingdom had their eye on him,” Janner said.

“That’s what I’ve read. Did you know they wrote poetry about him?”

“Really?”

“It’s true. Let’s see…” Oskar tapped his chin with one finger. They walked in silence for a few moments; then Oskar cleared his throat and began.

“Who wrote that?” Tink asked.

“I don’t know,” Oskar said. “I found it in a book of Annieran poems. Very valuable.”

“Her name was Alma Rainwater,”
²
Nia said. “She was a good friend of mine. We always thought she would marry your uncle. We hoped she would. But she never made it out of the castle.”

“I’m sorry, highness,” Oskar said. “I know Anniera only through books. Walking with you through this wood is like a children’s story come true.”

Nia smiled. “You have no need to apologize, Oskar. Remembering Alma is good for my heart. Do you know any more of her poems?”

Oskar recited every strand of Annieran poetry he could remember.

The company stopped for lunch, and since they had seen no animals bigger than a meep, Podo risked a fire.

“See this?” he said, indicating an oak with limbs that dipped almost to the ground. “If the fire attracts anything too big for us to handle, we’ll climb that tree until it’s safe to come back down. Any problems with that plan, Reteep?”

Oskar pushed his spectacles to the bridge of his nose and eyed the tree. “Ah! Well! Let’s see…I can’t think of any forest creatures more dangerous than a toothy cow or a hound that are known to be good climbers. Of course, there could be snakes or snickbuzzards—we
are
closer to the mountains now, though not much. And then there are bugs. Stinging bugs like the—”

“All right, then. That’s the plan.”

Janner and Tink fetched firewood while Leeli and Nia rummaged through the packs to find pots and pans and the spices needed to make the dried diggle meat taste more like a pot roast. Once the fire was crackling nicely, they sat around it with nervous eyes on the forest. Since the underbrush was sparse, it was possible to see trees an arrow shot or more away, which was good, Janner thought, because it would be easy to see anything coming. But it also made him feel like he was being watched.

For a long time they sat and ate (too long, Podo insisted), and the conversation led to the three gifts the children had received from Anniera. Leeli and Tink showed Oskar the ancient whistleharp and the sketchbook. He fussed over the whistleharp, his eyes wide and boyish as he recalled to himself its significance in Annieran history. Oskar was speechless as he tilted the pages of their father’s sketchbook into better light and gazed at them through his spectacles. His eyes gleamed with emotion.

“Anniera,”
Oskar whispered as he looked at pictures of the Shining Isle drawn by the High King himself. It was the closest he had ever come to seeing that fair country with his own eyes.

Finally, Janner removed the big, leather-bound book from his pack.

“Fascinating!” Oskar breathed. He reached for the book like a child reaching for a dollop of candy.

“Grandpa says it’s one of the First Books,” Janner said.

“Aye,” said Podo. “I heard it was among the treasures of Anniera but never laid me eyes on it until the night we fled the castle.”

“What are the First Books, anyway?” Leeli asked.

“There are many legends, young princess,” Oskar said. “One is that the Maker himself wrote them and gave them to Dwayne—he was the First Fellow, you know—as a gift for the care and governance of Aerwiar. The Books taught Dwayne the ways of wisdom and guided him as he reigned throughout the First Epoch, which was, they say, about five thousand years ago. Another is that Dwayne and Gladys—she was Dwayne’s wife—wrote the First Books together and that they’re a record of their time ruling the world. Another theory is that the First Books were written by Will, their second son, who caused all manner of problems.”

“Problems?” Janner asked.

“He was called Ouster Will in the histories,” Nia told him. “Here in Skree we have the Black Carriage to scare children while they lie in bed awake. When I was a girl in the Green Hollows, it was stories of Ouster Will that made us shiver in our sheets. They said the ghost of Ouster Will made your house creak in the night, that Ouster Will was the spidery feeling on the back of your neck when you walked through the woods alone.”
³

Janner’s skin crawled. Tink drew a hand across the back of his neck and shivered.

“Ouster Will is as dead in the ground as me Grandpappy Helmer,” Podo snorted. “You and your ghost stories.”

“I’m not saying I
believe
them,” Nia said. “I’m saying Ouster Will was a bad man—bad enough that there are still scarytales about him thousands of years after he died. Why do you look so nervous?”

Podo grunted.

“Where was I?” Oskar asked, patting the big book in his lap the way a mother pats a baby.

“The First Books,” Janner said.

“Ah. Other legends say Ouster Will wrote the First Books. They say he learned many secrets of Aerwiar, secrets the Maker gave to Dwayne, intended for the king and the king alone.”

“What kind of secrets?” Leeli asked.

“Well, over the thousand years that Dwayne ruled—”

“A thousand years?” Tink’s eyes widened.

“Yes. Maybe more. And during his long reign, he guarded the First Well carefully. The well stood at the center of the city, and Dwayne administered its healing waters to the sick and wounded. And Dwayne himself, without meaning to, lived longer than anyone else.” Oskar glanced at Podo. “It’s a long story that we don’t have time to tell right now, but it’s enough to say that Will overthrew his father—killed him—and stole the throne, intending to wield the power of the First Well for his own ends. There are some who believe the First Books were Ouster Will’s record of the secrets he discovered.”

Janner looked at the book in Oskar’s lap with wonder and dread. He wanted to believe the Maker had written it (though that seemed impossible), or that Dwayne, whom Janner had always pictured as a kind old man, wrote it. He shuddered at the
thought that Ouster Will, some villain from the shadows of history, was the author of the book entrusted to him.

Oskar jiggled with delight as he opened the book. “This writing. Do you know what language it is?”

“No,” Nia said. “Like Papa, I never saw the book until the day we fled. I gathered that Esben had it, but I didn’t know where he kept it hidden. He spent much of his time with Bonifer in those last days.”

“Squoon,” Oskar said, looking over the top of his spectacles at Nia. “I know that name.”

“Bonifer Squoon!” Janner blurted. “I remember that name too.” He closed his eyes. “
‘This is the Journal of Bonifer Squoon, Chief Advisor to the High King of Anniera, Keeper of the Isle of Light. Read this without my permission and I will pound your nose.’
Was he Esben’s—er, Father’s—chief advisor?”

Nia and Podo exchanged a glance. “Yes,” she said. “How did you…?”

“His journal was in the bottom of the crate from Dang,” Tink said. “The one we unpacked for Mister Reteep just before I found the map.”
⁴

“I read it,” Oskar said. “In fact, I was reading it when I heard you and Peet fighting the Fangs in front of the jail that night. I assumed it was a forgery or some kind of fiction from Anniera, a children’s book perhaps, fashioned to seem like the real thing for the purpose of feeding young imaginations. But you say this Squoon was truly the advisor to the king?”

“Aye, and Squoon was the type to tell you that he’d pound yer nose, that’s for sure,” Podo said. “Not that he would’ve ever actually pounded it. He was much too cowardly for that.”

“So I was in possession of the chief advisor to the High King’s journal. Right there in Books and Crannies, but now gone forever,” Oskar sighed. “In the words of Vilmette Oppenholm in her essay on the decline of free cupcakes, ‘How awful.’”

“I wonder how that journal ended up in Skree,” Nia said to herself. “Where did you say you found the crate from Dang, Oskar?”

“In Torrboro. Over the years I’ve come across several crates of its kind, probably loot from ships the Fangs pirated between here and Dang. It was a nice surprise, but not unheard of. The journal, of course, had I known it was authentic, would have been a great deal more than a surprise to me.”

“What was in it?” Nia asked.

Oskar thought for a moment. “Nothing that interesting. No mention of first names that I remember—only ‘the king’ this and ‘the queen’ that. He wrote of his trips to and from Dang. He seemed to do a lot of that, supervising shipments and trade routes and such. Odd work for a king’s advisor, especially since he was an old fellow. But I thought little of it, since I believed the journal was a piece of fiction.”

“I remember he spent a lot of time abroad,” Nia said.

“So he was a busy old feller. What does this have to do with the book?” Podo said with a trace of annoyance. Janner could tell he was itching to move on.

“Bonifer and Esben spent much time together in those last days,” Nia explained. “I heard them talking about the First Book more than once. That’s all I know about it.”

“The letters look like Old Hollish, the ancient language of the Green Hollows. Do you remember that from your youth, highness?” Oskar asked Nia.

“I studied Hollish when I was a girl, but no one speaks it anymore.
Old
Hollish is another thing altogether.” She narrowed her eyes at the writing in the book and tilted her head from one side to the other. “Try this,” she said, flipping the book around. “There. I can’t read it, but it’s definitely some version of Hollish.”

“Ah!” Oskar said. “I see it now, too.” He studied the cover and binding of the book. “This isn’t the original cover. Whoever replaced it, however many years ago, didn’t know the language either and placed the new cover backward. What we thought was the first page is actually the last. See?”

It all looked the same to Janner, but it was fascinating nonetheless.

“I think, highness, with what I know of languages and what you remember of Hollish, we might be able to translate this.” Oskar looked at Nia eagerly.

“I don’t know,” she said. “There’s a reason these books were hidden. A reason they haven’t been translated before.”

“But highness, there must also be a reason the book has been preserved all these years.”

“And a reason Father wanted me to have it,” Janner said quietly.

“We really need to get a move on,” Podo said, kicking dirt over the fire. “I know ye’d like to sit all day and have a nice discussion about old, upside-down languages, but we’ve got a long way to go.”

The crunch and snap of breaking branches echoed through the forest.

Janner and Tink leapt to their feet, drew their swords, and took their places on either side of Podo, forming a fierce wall of protection in front of Nia, Leeli, and Oskar.

A toothy cow, bigger than any Janner had ever seen, lumbered toward them.

“The tree!” Podo yelled. “Now!”

Seconds later, they were safe in the swooping limbs of the glipwood oak, looking down at the giant beast as it limped around the trunk of the tree. Blood dripped from its teeth. The cow’s milky eyes rolled, wild and unable to focus.