Chapter 1: Old Thieves Make a DiscoveryAuralia lay still as death, like a discarded doll, in a burgundy tangle of rushes and spineweed on the bank of a bend in the River Throanscall, when she was discovered by an old man who did not know her name.
She bore no scars, no broken bones, just the stain of inkblack soil. Contentedly, she cooed, whispered, and babbled, learning the rivers language, and focused her gaze on the stormy dance of evening sky-roiling purple clouds edged with blood red. The old man surmised she was waiting and listening for whoever, or whatever, had forsaken her there.
Those fevered moments of his discovery burnt into the old mans memory. In the years that followed, he would hold and turn them in his mind the way an explorer ponders relics he has found in the midst of ruin. But the mystery remained stubbornly opaque. No matter how often he exaggerated the story to impress his fireside listeners-“I dove into that ragin river and caught her by the toe!” “I fought off that hungry river wyrm with my picker-staff just in time!”-he found no clue to her origins, no answers to questions of why or how.
The Gatherers, House Abascar, the Expanse-the whole world might have been different had he left her there with riverwater running from her hair. “The River Girl”-that was what the Gatherers came to call her until she grew old enough to set them straight. Without the River Girl, the four houses of the Expanse might have perished in their troubles. But then again, some say that without the River Girl those troubles might never have come at all.
This is how the spark was struck.
A ruckus of crows caught Krawgs attention as he groped for berries deep in a bramble. He and Warney, the conspirator with whom he had been caught thieving so many years ago, were laboring to pay their societal debts to House Abascar. The day had been long, but Krawgs spirits were high. No officers had come to reckon their work and berate them. Not yet. Tired of straining for latesummer apples high in the boughs of ancient trees, they had put down their picker-staffs and turned to plucking sourjuice and jewelweed bushes an applecores throw from the Throanscall.
Warney was preoccupied, trying to free his thorn-snagged sleeves and leggings.
So Krawg smiled, dropped his harvesting sack, and crept away to investigate the cause of the birds cacophony. He hoped to find them eying an injured animal, maybe a broad-antlered buck he could finish off and present to the duty officers. That would be a prize grand enough to deserve preparation in King Cal-marcuss kitchens. Such a discovery might bring Krawg closer to the kings grace and a pardon.
“Aw, will you look at that?” Krawg flexed his bony fingers. The feathered curmudgeons flapped at the air over the riverbank, their gaze fixed on a disturbance in the grass.
“Now, hold on!” called his even bonier friend. “Whatcha got there? Wait for me!” Twigs snapped and fabric ripped, but Warney made no progress. “Speak up now, whatre them flappers squawkin over? Are beastmen coming to kill us?”
“Stop spookin, fraidy-brain,” Krawg growled, and then he gusted air through his nostrils. “There wont be no beastman savages out here in the afternoon.”
“What is it then? Merchants?”
“No merchants.”
“Is it a swarm of stingers?”
“Nope.”
“A fangbear? River wyrms? Bramblepigs?”
“Dont think so.”
“Some young buster sneakin up behind us? Come on now. Whats got them birds so bothered?”
According to his nature, Krawg tossed back a lie. “Theyre just fightin over a mess of reekin twister fish they snatched out of the shallows.” Groundwater closed over his feet as he made his way through the reeds on the riverbank. Increasingly perturbed by the way Krawg was stalking their target, the crows descended to the branch of a stooping cottonbeard tree and pelted him with insults.
As Krawg combed the grasses for an answer, Warney at last emerged from the trees with worry in his one good eye, gripping as if it were a hunting spear the long, clawed picker-staff he had used all day to drag down the higher appleboughs.
Warney seemed barely more than a skeleton wrapped in loose flesh and a rough burlap cloak. “What are they fussin about now if theyve gone and eaten their fill?”
Krawgs vulturebeak nose twitched in the middle of the few undisciplined whiskers that grew where a mustache did not. He leaned forward, apprehensive, and saw not a pile of fish bones but two tiny pink hands reaching into the air.
“One of the fish has got hands!” gasped Warney.
“Shush now! It isnt a pile of fish.” Krawg took hold of the appleknife in his pocket. “Whatever it is, its harmless, Im sure.”
Warney glanced back at the woods. “Dont forget to watch for you-knowwho. Duty officersll haul us in, bottom n blockhead, if they catch us messin with anything other than them berries. Theyll ride their stinkin lizards right through here soon. Come on now…theres a nice bramble just back here. You dont want the duty to string us up in the hangers, do ya?”
“Good creepin Cragavar forest, of all the bloody wonders I ever seen…
Looky!” The braver Gatherer flipped his black hood back from his hairless head and bent to examine the child. Warney remained where he was. “Krawg, youre givin me the shut-mouth again. What is it, old boy?”
“Just a creepin, crawlin baby, it is.” Krawg massaged the flab beneath his chin. “Mercy, Warney, look at her.”
“Its a her? How do you know?”
“Well, howdaya think I know?” Krawg reached for the child, then thought better of it. “Warney, this must mean somethin. You and me…findin this.”He scanned the spaces between trees on both sides of the mist-shrouded river and confirmed that the only witnesses were crows and a tailtwitcher that clung upside down to the trunk of a birch.
Warney splashed into the river shallows and prodded the submerged ground with his picker-staff before each step. The weeds around his ankles whispered hushhh…hushhh…hushhh.
The child convulsed twice. She coughed up droplets of water. And then she made a sound that might have been a laugh.
“Now thats odd.” Krawg gestured to the childs tiny head. “She got brown and silver hairs. Shes seen at least two seasons, Id say. Probably born before that hard freeze we had awhile back.”
“Yeah, gotta gree with ya there.” Warneys eye was white as a sparrows egg in the shadows of his hood.
“And shes not the spawn of those beastmen. Everything about her seems like a good baby girl, not some accursed cross between person and critter. Looks like shes been fed and looked after too…well, until she got tossed into the river, I suppose.”
“Gotta gree with ya there.”Warney now leaned over the child, swaying like a scarecrow in the wind. “Shes better fed than any of us Gatherers…or crows, for that matter.”
The crows were quiet, watching, picking at their sharp toes. Krawg knelt and took to picking at his toes as well, poking at yellow places, which meant he was thinking hard. “Were too far east of House Bel Amica for her to belong to them proud and greedy folk. But how could she be from our good House Abascar? Folk from Abascar only step out of the house walls if
King Cal-marcus tells em to. Too scared of beastmen, they are…these days.”
“Gotta gree with ya there.”
“Do you always gotta gree with me there?!” Krawg snatched the pickerstaff from Warneys hands and clubbed his hooded head. Warney jumped away, growled, and bared his teeth. Krawg tossed the staff aside and rose up like a bear answering the challenge of a rat. Warney, like a rat realizing he has awakened a bear, fled back toward the quiet woods.
“Now dont you get it in your head to leave me here with this orphan,” Krawg called, “or Ill rip that patch off your dead eye!”
“Have ya thought…”Warney paused, turned, and clasped his head with both hands, as if trying to stretch his mind to accommodate a significant thought. “Has it occurred to ya that… Do ya think…”
“Speak, you rangy crook!”
“Oh ballyworms, Krawg! What if shes a Northchild?”
Krawg stumbled back a step and narrowed his eyes at the infant. The tailtwitcher, the crows, and even the river seemed to quiet at Warneys question.
But Krawg at last shook off worry. “Dont shovel that vawn pile my way, Warney.You been eatin too much of Yawnys stew, and your dreams are gettin to you. Only crazies think Northchildren are actual. Theres no such thing.”
They watched the babys hands sculpt shapes in the air. “And anyway,” Krawg continued, glancing northward at the sky purpling over the jagged mountains of the Forbidding Wall, “everybody knows Northchildren are taller, and they drape blankets over themselves.”
Nearby, branches broke with sharp echoes as something moved in the woods.
“Grab for a weapon,” hissed Warney, “because I smell prowling beastmen!”
“Doubtful,” said Krawg, but he bent his knees and sank into the grass.
“Duty officers then!”
In case their overseers were, in fact, looking for them, Krawg shouted, “We better get back to the patches, Warney! I sure dont see any berries out here.”
He lifted Warneys picker-staff and marched to join his friend in the trees. But Warney seemed stuck, as though the girl had tossed a rope and snared his ankle. “You know what they say. If a man leaves a good deed undone, Northchildren will come creepin at night and drag him off into the curse of the-”
“Im not scared of you, butt-guster,” Krawg whispered. “Now hush before anybody hears you!” The girl, aware that she was alone again, began to murmur as if talking with someone they could not see. The Gatherers watched her clap her tiny hands.
A crow took wing from the cottonbeard tree and made a wide circle over the childs bed.
“They want that fresh meat,” Krawg observed. Warney nodded. “Gotta gree with ya…” His mouth snapped shut, and he winced.
Krawg loosed a weary sigh, waved a scornful gesture at the birds, and returned to kneel beside the baby. Warney hopped back to peer over Krawgs shoulder. “Whats that shes lyin in? That isnt a sinkhole.”
“No, somebody carved out this hole with their hands.”
“Not with their hands, no. Look, Krawg…toes. This Northchilds lyin in a footprint!”
Warneys grin signified a victory. “Gotta disagree with ya there!”
The child had gone quiet and still. And that was what Krawg would remember for the rest of his troubled life-the moment when her eyes gathered sunsets burning hues and flickered with some element he had never seen; the way she rested, as though commanded to surrender by some voice only she could hear; the way he clenched his jaw, made his decision.
A wave of wind carried a few slow leaves, a shower of twirling seedpods from the violet trees, spiders on newly flung strands, and a hint of distant music-the Early Evening Verse sung by the watchman of House Abascar to mark the dusk of the day.
“Oh, our backs are strapped now. Theyll string us upside down for certain. Its late, and were bound to be found missin.”Warneys eye rolled to fix on the suns fading beacons. “Lets turn the baby over to the first officer we see, and maybe-”
“What do you think a duty officer sees when he looks at us, Warney? Im the Midnight Swindler, and youre the One-Eyed Bandit! Theyll say we swiped this baby from somewhere. We already been punished for our thievin.
They made us live outside the walls as Gatherers, and theres only one shelf in the pantry lower than that: the dungeons.” Krawg threw the picker-staff down- splack!-against the wet ground. “I cant hand her over, but I cant leave her either. If I do, some officerll ride through here and stomp her into the ground. Weve got to take her. And hide her.”
“Ballyworms!”Warney shuddered. “You n me n a Northchild n all!” A commotion erupted just south of the marsh. First came a three-toned bellow, which the Gatherers recognized as the complaint of a vawn, one of the duty officers reptilian steeds. Then came the din of crushed bracken and shaken trees. It was certainly an officer come to measure their progress.
Krawg bent low and lifted the naked child by the arms. “Shes harmless. Didnt cast no spell on me. Didnt drag me off into darkness. She isnt a Northchild! Theres no such thing.”
“Well, lets hurry it up then,” said Warney, grinning in spite of his fear.
A few minutes later Krawg and Warney reached the shelter of thatched grass roofs and crooked mud walls in the woods just outside House Abascars boundary.There, the kinder sort among the Gatherers would tend to the River Girls needs and protect her from the dangerous sort.
Warney clapped a hand over his mouth, muffling a laugh. “Dont it bring back memories, Krawg? Sneakin off with treasure like this?”
“Warney,” Krawg replied, “weve never, never lifted treasure like this.” Krawg and Warney werent punished for carrying back the child. But they were “strung up in the hangers” and dangled from their ankles there a full day, scraping the filthy gutters of their vocabulary, when it was discovered they had returned without their designated picker-staffs.
Meanwhile, at the rivers edge, water seeped from the soil into the footprint, turned to mud, and solidified. A mist rose, hovered over the place, then wisped away without wind to carry it. It would remain a mystery and a memory to the three men who had found it there-the two troubled Gatherers and one other.
Just after Krawg and Warney had absconded with the child, a solitary rider emerged from the trees and sighted that damp impression in the grass.
The young rider, small and eager, dismounted and studied the outline even as it began to fade. He pulled from the earth a riverstone and touched the face of it with his fingertips, where a dull magic blurred. The stones color warmed, and it softened to clay under his touch.
Sensing the magic, the crows on the cottonbeard branch shrieked and scattered.
The boy etched a mark in the stone as similar to the contours of the footprint as he could-a sculpture, an equivalent. Then he walked up and down the banks awhile, surveying the soil. When the vawn snorted impatiently, he returned and climbed back into his ornate saddle. The two-legged steed stomped off, happy to head away from the water and into the trees.
No one knew of the riders visit to the river. No one saw the record of his discovery, which he kept like a clue to a riddle. And he locked his questions up tight for fear of troubling the volatile storms within the heart of his father, the king.