The Ale Boy's Feast Read Free

alive,” Milora insisted.
    “I reckon you’re right.” Krawg tried to smile kindly, as if to reassure a troubled child. But then he remembered seeing his smile in a Bel Amican mirror and decided against it. “Come with me. Tomorrow we’re takin’ you and Obrey back where you came from.”
    “If you know where I came from, you know more than me.”
    He led her uphill toward the trees. “Thought that glass mine in the mountains was your home. And you went to House Bel Amica because you had a fever.”
    “I was poisoned. The Seers wanted to bring the glass miners to Bel Amica and control them. Frits refused. And suddenly I got sick.”
    “Cruel, them Seers.”
    She shrugged. “They said I had bad blood and that they’d cure me. Said they’d bring back my memories too.”
    “But they didn’t, did they?”
    Milora pulled something off the edge of her cloak—a scamperpinch. It scissored the air with curved, shiny claws, and its many legs flailed. “Look,” she said, strangely unoffended by the ugly marsh-dweller, curious as a child. “He wants a hold on something.”
    “How many years you spent?”
Twenty-five
, he thought.
    “What would you guess?”
    “Nineteen,” he said. He’d learned it was wise to subtract.
    “Wish I knew.” Milora touched a finger to her temple. “Crack in my head. Lots of years have spilled right out somewhere along the way.”
    They walked on in silence, back into the trees, where Krawg beat at the bracken in search of the path he’d made. Then he turned to offer the staff as a walking stick. “Surely your papa knows.”
    “Perhaps. I can’t … I can’t remember him.”
    Krawg began to chew at his lip. Wasn’t Frits waiting for them just ahead in the camp?
    “All I can tell you,” she said, “is that Frits found me on a mountainside. That way.” She pointed northeast. “He woke me and asked me questions. I reached for what any head should hold. But the shelves were bare. I could only tell him this: I’d been looking for somebody. But that, too, was gone.”
    “You still don’t remember?”
    She smiled on a secret. “I do remember. It came back.”
    He kicked at bracken. “Don’t leave me strung up in the hangers, now! Who was it?”
    Milora raised her fists up high, stretching, and the front of her dark woolen cloak parted to reveal her gown, which glittered as if it were made of dark scales. She had woven it from silky flakes brushed from the outer layers of brownstalks. She sighed, smiling softly, and whispered, “Cal-raven. King of House Abascar. I recognized him in the Bel Amican glassworks.”
    Krawg opened his mouth, silent as if a bristlefly blocked his throat.
    “You’re wondering why. Well, I felt a rush of heat when I saw him, like I had hold of something for a moment. But it slipped away. And what would it matter? Cal-raven’s a king. To him, I’m just a homeless stranger whose memories were knocked from her head.”
    Krawg shrugged. “We’re all homeless out here in these wicked woods.”
    “I certainly agree with you there,” she replied.
    Krawg wondered again where Warney had gone. He took a swipe at a hollow mudpod, an abandoned owl’s nest that swung like a pendulum on a dead vine. “Everything’s gone but those puffdragons, darting about and chewing up the peelin’ bark.”
    “Kindling for their bellies,” she said. “Aren’t they marvelous?”
    Krawg flinched.
    Faint red flowered in the distance—torches circling the cluster of tents.
    “Milora!” Obrey came hurtling through the bracken in mad excitement. “They all thought you’d gotten lost! But I knew you were—”
    “What’re you doing alone away from camp?” shouted Krawg. “It’s too dangerous for little girls!”
    Obrey, smug, folded her arms. “I escaped.”
    Milora laughed. “Who—or what—are you supposed to be?” Even in the dusk it was evident that the girl had been braiding coils of red bark into her hair.
    “I’m House Abascar’s queen,”