The Ale Boy's Feast Read Free Page B

from sinking in sand. But their tongues were still deeply rooted in the ground. Stuck, the muskgrazers choked as they sought to retract those thick, purple lines.
    Rain began to fall as the approaching stranger slid down the dune. “A ride!” he shouted. “I must drink at Mad Sun’s.”
    The driver’s voice was made of dust. “I’m bound for House Jenta.” He raised a Bel Amican rain canopy as if to shield himself, but his mind was on the hidden blade in its rod.
    “Take me to Mad Sun’s, and I’ll buy you all you can drink. Then take me to the Jentan harbor, and I’ll give you more besides.”
    “Boating to Wildflower Isle? Is it true those lonely Jentan ladies are anxious to find good husbands?”
    “Don’t presume to know a mage’s business.” There was a growl behind the mesh of the stranger’s dark, featureless mask. “I’m not asking you why you’re off to bother with those Aerial tyrants.”
    Nervous, the driver’s lizard wriggled down between his vest and his shirt. “You don’t consider yourself one of the Jentan Aerial?” The driver laughed quietly. “Are you the infamous mage who turned against his brothers?”
    The stranger brushed sand from the sleeves of his cloak. “You would have abandoned them too. Who could live among such villains? The Jentan mages tricked their own people into moving off the mainland, then stranded them on that island.”
    “You’re off to join the island uprising?” The driver knelt and tugged the wooden wedges out from under the carriage wheels.
    The stranger didn’t answer. Instead, he pointed to the departing muskgrazers. “I’ve traveled for days without a glimpse of a creature. But down here, they’re still moving in herds. Is the desert discouraging the spread of the Deathweed?”
    The dust-owl remained, her head turned sideways, her gaze shifting from the stranger to the driver and back.
    “That owl knows me,” said the stranger.
    The driver sensed a smug smile behind the mask. “Maybe.” He shrugged. “Or maybe she’s just hungry. But who am I to doubt you? You’re just like the tales say. You travel alone. You commune with the animals. What an honor to meet you, Scharr ben Fray. And out here, on the hairless chest of nowhere.”
    The owl blinked her apple-sized eyes, opened her leathery wings, then rose awkwardly into a zephyr and was gone.
    “An Abascar man, then?” said the stranger. “The accent says so. But I don’t remember you from my years of counseling King Cal-marcus.”
    “I lived there. Once. Before the collapse.” The driver stood and urged the stranger up the rope-ladder steps and into the carriage. “You must have been too busy to notice.” He followed into the shelter.
    As the canvas closed, muffling the sound of the rain, the stranger spoke softly as if casting a spell. “A hundred years I’ve been away from my homeland, counseling kings, questioning birds, digging up mysteries. I’ve missed Mad Sun’s. My stories will buy my drinks. You’ll see.” He did not remove his mask.
    “You talk like I should pay for the privilege of carryin’ you.” The driver could see the stranger’s boastful smile now; the glowstone’s light caught the glint of teeth behind the mask’s dark mesh. “If you’re the prodigal mage of House Jenta, you’d better be ready to prove it. At Mad Sun’s they’re rough on posers.”
    He climbed through the slit in the canvas at the carriage front to seat himself on the driving bench, then affixed his rain canopy to shelter him and seized the storm-slick reins.
    “You’re carrying a lot of bricks,” the passenger mused. “Building something?”
    The driver ignored the question. Soon he heard the stranger rustling around in the carriage, unstacking and restacking the bricks to see what might be concealed in the piles. He smiled and spurred the horses on.
    The horses flinched at the lightning that smote the sand. The storm pummeled the desert until it ran out of rain. They pressed