EPILOGUE

Wilus Caroon slandered the stubborn chill that lingered in the springtime air and struggled with his crutches to climb the stairs on the inside of the bastion wall. Arriving at the top, he found the wagon-chair that waited for him and unfurled the bedbag that he had requested. He sat in the bag, a creature half out of its cocoon, and wheeled himself about on the wall, his raucous complaints subsiding when he observed the trees in their outbursts of beauty.

Tilianpurth was quiet while spring greened the lawns and fattened apple buds among the orchard boughs. Cyndere had gone home to Bel Amica. Ryllion had followed, sullen and prone to tantrums, even though a summons had come for him to return and receive a promotion to the honorable station of captain. Only a few bleary-eyed caretakers remained, setting up ladders for the tiresome task of stripping creepervine from the tower and renovating the prison pit.

Wilus watched young Pyroi the stablehand gathering wildflowers outside the gates. Continuing his ritual of honoring the lost, Pyroi scattered the flowers over new burial markers in the far corner of the bastion’s north yard—tombstones for the prison-house guards killed by the escaping beastman and for the soldiers slain at the Ceremony of Sacrifice.

Looking up, Wilus could see Bauris peering out the tower window and smiling. Tilianpurth’s senior officer might have lost his movement, his speech, his wits, and his station, but he still knew a beautiful day when he saw one. Or perhaps he just appreciated the light more than anyone at Tilianpurth after spending so much time at the bottom of a well.

Several days earlier Ridgie, a young woman posted at Tilianpurth’s front gate, had heard a strange sound coming from the forest—laughter. Worried, she broke the first rule of her recent training and ventured into the trees. The sound led her all the way to the glen and to laughter rising from the well’s dark throat.

Stablehands murmured that beastmen had dumped Bauris down that shaft. But this was curious, for he bore no scars. The fall should have smashed his skull or drowned him. Those days in the depths should have starved him or killed him with cold. And some who paused and shook their heads in sadness at his door mused that death might have been a better end for Bauris than this delirium. But he just smiled and smiled as if enjoying some amusing secret that he could not find the words to express.

That smile annoyed Wilus, so he turned his attention to the world beyond the wall, where the ground was fraught with clover and busy with bees. The woods, ecstatic, raised those branches the snow had dragged down. They shielded chirping choirs and allowed occasional rays of sun to set the younger trees aglow. Melting snows gathered into the dry streambeds, giddy with reunion. Gorrels, the only four-legged creatures oblivious to the animals’ disappearance from the Cragavar, scampered after each other, laying claim to spans of sweet grass.

Ridgie found him on the wall and reminded him that it was his day to scrape the forest for traps. The hunters among the bastion’s small population were frustrated by the gorrels and game birds that they found caught and spoiled by the traps that Ryllion’s men had failed to salvage. “We need this ground for hunting,” they grumbled. So she helped Wilus back down to the stables, helped him climb into a vawn’s sidesaddle, and strapped a quiver of two-headed arrows to his bedbag. With Pyroi’s help, Ridgie rigged hooked spears for the vawn to drag behind.

As the vawn combed the ground and Wilus complained into the afternoon, he heard someone singing. “Another stranger in our woods?” he muttered. “I will not have it.” He followed the sound, spurring the vawn past a flowering glitter tree and down into the glen.

He was momentarily distracted by the well. It had been ruined when last he passed this way. Someone had pieced together a new ring of sturdy stones, then painted them a soft, alluring blue.

But when the singing stopped, he halted the vawn, raised an arrow to his bow. Long, stripped branches were pinned to form an arching frame, and a stretch of canvas covered it, a span of Bel Amican weave marked with spirals depicting the wild Bel Amican tides. This makeshift tent was a soldier’s work.

Wilus was about to prod the vawn forward when a man stood up from where he’d been hiding behind the crumbling stone wall. His face was skeletal, flesh grey, and blotched with scars. He squinted against the sun as if he had spent years in darkness. His hands gripped a makeshift bow. The arrow, also crude, but with a sharp stone tip, was enough to make Wilus pause.

“I’m Wilus Caroon. Bel Amican royal guard. Assigned to cleanse this patch of woods. With your general shakiness and feeble constitution, I’m inclined to drive you away, for you might be carrying plagues. I’ve no kind of notion what manner of man you be. You sleep beneath a Bel Amican tent, but for all I know, you might be leftovers from Abascar.”

“I’ve lived among many from Abascar and suffered alongside them,” the half-starved man declared. “One in particular has a name you will recognize, and what would I have done without her? But do you not know me, Wilus Caroon? Come and sit. I’m eager for news of my people.”

“Who are you to be directing me?”

“A beastman’s slave. Tunnel digger. Corpse hauler. Worse than dead I was. I was made to tend the feelers.”

“Feelers?” The word made Wilus cringe, even though he had no idea what it meant.

“The Cent Regus chieftain means to strangle the Expanse. The feelers work their way like roots. They have teeth. They shatter stone. There are Abascar prisoners in the Cent Regus Core who believe the feelers had something to do with the quake that caused the collapse of their house. Soon there won’t be any refuge left.”

“Who, I say again, with quickly diminishing patience, are you?’

“Ask instead who brought me here. I swear upon my father’s shipwreck that a beastman—yes, a beastman—smuggled me out. He brought me here as a gift, he says, for his new master.”

“His new master.”

“The Lady Cyndere,” said the man, “my sister.”

With no grace whatsoever, Wilus climbed from the sidesaddle, kicked his legs free of the bedbag, and staggered like a drunkard across the clearing. Unfamiliar with joy, he believed himself to be feeling dismay. How could it be that Partayn, heir to Bel Amica’s throne, descendant of Tammos Raak, was alive?

After many questions, and questions repeated, it became clear to Wilus that Partayn was out of his mind. For the man claimed that a beastman was scouting nearby, protecting him until he was strong enough to reach Tilianpurth’s gate.

Above the edge of the glen, high in the coil tree’s boughs, Jordam listened. Sunlight shone through spreads of translucent green leaves fanning in the breeze above him. The forest was steeped in colors.

A newborn gorrel cub watched him, terrified, from a nearby tree branch. Like me, Jordam thought, when I first saw the Keeper.

He had begun to find such pleasure in these thoughts. The whole world was beginning to speak. And it was not merely speech, but it was spoken especially for him. Every moment, every wonder, every ordinary thing a word, suggesting things that nothing in the crude Cent Regus tongue or even Common might reveal. Such distractions helped him endure the lasting ache of his thirst for Essence. And he was certain that the ache was slackening, that its grip on him was failing.

He looked into the trees, to where he had replanted the glen’s snare-scarred apple tree. It was growing at last, branches tipped with bold white buds, roots spreading through a patch of good ground. He had tried to replant it in its grassy plot, but the tree had proved unwilling, roots ripping free of that soft earth. He found a place for it in the firmer ground above the glen, where its roots took hold and he could feed it with water he carried from the well. He had named it “Brother” for the one whose ashes he had, with trembling hands, buried beneath it.

It was a crooked tree now, injured from its ordeal. But perhaps its origins in the summery glen would enable it to bear fruit and offer shade a few years more. He counted the dark lines where the snare had seized its trunk. He thought of the lines on the wall of the old Cent Regus shack and how the ale boy had explained what they meant. “Still growing,” he murmured.

Jordam rolled onto his back, folded his hands behind his head, and watched the trees waver in their ascent toward the sun. There was no white flag above Tilianpurth’s tower and would not be for some time. He began to entertain thoughts of venturing back into the dark, to bring out the slaves and replant them where they belonged. Perhaps he would find O-raya’s colors there. An idea began to take shape.

This is the end of the Blue Strand of The Auralia Thread.

The story will continue in the Gold Strand of The Auralia Thread—Cal-raven’s Ladder—in which the remnant of Abascar must abandon their hideaway in the Cliffs of Barnashum and venture across the Expanse in search of a new home. Cal-raven begins to understand what Auralia’s colors can reveal to him about Abascar’s future. But is it too late for his people to make such a journey?

Cal-raven’s progress leads unexpectedly to House Bel Amica. And when Jordam emerges from the forest at last, he brings a challenge that tests the priorities of Abascar’s king. Endangered by the plotting of the Seers, Cyndere, Cal-raven, Tabor Jan, and Emeriene must make quick, excruciating decisions. And before this strand is finished, a devastating secret will be revealed in the Cent Regus Core.

And what has become of that brave and solitary boy who refuses to give his name? He’s still following the Keeper’s tracks, searching for souls in need of Auralia’s colors.