The Ale Boy's Feast Read Free Page A

Obrey announced. “If King Cal-raven comes back, he’ll need a queen to make him happy.”
    “Well, little queen of Abascar, I hope you’ll pardon me for being late.” Milora gave Obrey a playful shove. “Go on. Tell the others we’re coming.”
    “It’s straight to the dungeon for you!” Obrey shouted, striving unsuccessfully to look serious. “That’s where crooks belong!” Then she burst into giggles and happily fought her way back through the winding weeds.
    “Somebody’s been dreaming,” Milora sighed. “Comes so easily to her.”
    “A few more nights and you and your daughter’ll be home in the glass mine.” Krawg stepped up to the edge of the camp’s broad clearing.
    “It’ll be good to see the workshops again,” she said. “But you’ve got me all wrong. Frits’s glassworks aren’t my home. I wandered there. He calls me Milora because that was his daughter’s name. She died.”
    “Milora’s not your true name?” He scowled. “Somebody must’ve knocked you on the head with a rock.”
    “Well, maybe when I sleep, you’ll hit me with another. Bring everything back.” She took his arm and rested her head on his shoulder. “Thanks for rescuing mefrom that vicious dragon,” she laughed, her voice warm with affection. “You’re a good man, Krawg. You feel like … family.”
    Krawg was so startled he didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
    Milora pulled away to chase after Obrey, but Krawg paused to examine his thorn-shredded leggings. As he dabbed at the crisscrossing scratches on his legs, a memory suddenly seized him. He didn’t have his picker-staff. And Milora wasn’t carrying it.
    He turned around in dismay, afraid that he’d lost it. But, no, there it was.
    He went back several strides, uprooted it from the ground, and then gasped, holding it out before him with two hands.
    The picker-staff was no longer a dull, dark wood. It sparkled, glazed with some kind of glittering golden dust. Flourishes of red grass tassled the ends. And at its base … was it sprouting roots to become a tree?
    He searched the shadows between the tents for another look at his new friend, and a surge of wild hope blazed up behind his ribs like a flame within a lantern.

1
T HE W AYWARD M AGE
    ike anxious road-sweepers, dust columns whirled between the purple dunes, brushing bones, branches, and snakeskins aside in their hurry.
    The muskgrazers, shaggy as haystacks, ignored the whirlwinds. They hung their hairy heads and thrust curly, sinuous tongues into the grit, probing for burrow-birds and redthistle bulbs. After the dust phantoms passed, the cattle shook clouds of debris from their golden hair.
    A large and featherless dust-owl raised a taloned foot, seeking to snatch flea-mice from a muskgrazer’s matted hair. If the owl was quick, she could catch one as it scurried around a haunch or a knee. The muskgrazers, yearning to be free of the itchy, tickling pests, permitted the owl’s attention.
    Watching from beneath his black, wide-brimmed hat, the carriage driver lounged in the shade of a dead parch-tree at the herd’s edge, waiting for his pursuer.
    In this bleak and barren country, hunter and hunted could, using farglasses, track each other’s movements more than a half-day’s travel away. When the driver had noticed the stranger approaching, he determined to wait. No sane man would pursue a carriage across the desert on foot unless he was desperate.
    A sleek red hiss-lizard perched anxiously on his shoulder, watching the top of the northernmost dune. When the stranger appeared, wrapped in a bright red tent of a cloak, stark against the curling wave of evening storm clouds, the reptile tasted the air with her forked tongue.
    Few things amused the driver more than muskgrazers interrupted while grazing. This bright-robed newcomer bothered them. Or maybe it was the advancing storm. Whatever the trouble, they were suddenly eager to move off, skating on the long, bone-railed feet that kept them