The Ale Boy's Feast Read Online Free PDF

angry drunkards. “He’s gonna lose more than his fancy red costume.”
    “I think it’s closing time.” Weese pushed back through the swinging doors. Then he took the heavier front door—the sliding gate that would seal the bar—and mightily dragged it shut. Circling the room, he pulled down the shutters, then jumped over the bar to grab his best fightstick—the one with a concealed blade.
    Out front, the red-robed impostor was howling through the herdsmen’s assault.
    Out back, to the crack of a whip, the longbeard’s vawn was galloping away.
Gonna be an uncomfortable journey for that old fool’s backside
, Weese thought.
    Slipping out the back, he hurried to the bundle of blankets where Meladi was still, somehow, asleep. “It’s time, my joy. I’m taking our carriage. I’m off to tell the Aerial that I’ve seen Scharr ben Fray.”
    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.”

2
T HE E VER -W OVEN W ORLD
    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