“Too bad Dagrun didn’t bag the other one.” The man nearest Ren leered. “What I’d give for a piece of that ass.”
The one-eyed man made a puckering sound and drew a curvy silhouette of a woman with his hands in the air. “Tits for days and wasted on Shenn—everyone knows he’d rather have Dagrun.”
Cruel laughter followed that joke.
“Shut your mouths!” Ren said, inserting himself into their conversation. They were gossiping about his sisters and it angered him.
“What’s gotten into you?” said the one-eyed man, taken aback, a little frightened. “We’re just havin’ a bit of fun, boy. What do you care about the Harkans? Ya look like you’re from the Wyrre, anyway.”
Ren stood up. He was taller than the others and young and perhaps a bit intimidating. The one-eyed woodworker’s fingers began to shake from fear or just old age. Ren had the mud-covered eld horn at his side and, likely, the man feared Ren would beat him with it.
“Nothing,” Ren said, and in the silence that followed he recounted their words, comparing them to what Shenn had said in the Shambles. Merit, they said was beautiful, her hair as lustrous and dark as the kohl beneath her eyes. Kepi, if the men were right, was not a beauty like Merit. Kepi was only a few years older than him. Was she once his friend, his playmate? Who was this girl now betrothed to the king of the Ferens? He wondered if she would find happiness in her marriage, but doubted it. The house of Tolemy arranged most marriages and the matching of the bride and groom, beyond the marriage’s political ends, was seldom considered. The women were not treated much better than the boys sent to the Priory. Except perhaps Merit. He wondered about her, about what the men said about her husband. Merit—he knew little of her, save for her desire to keep him out of Harkana. He thought he should hate her, but somehow he guessed he should just pity her. She seemed like one of the older boys in the Priory—sad and desperate, trying to hold on to a power they could not quite grasp.
Talk resumed—there were rumors that Barca had conquered the Wyrre, that the general had slaughtered the royal families of the southern islands and named himself ruler of the kingdom. This last news gave Ren pause. If the royal families were dead, Tye’s imprisonment in the Priory was done. With Ren, Suten Anu had forgone the usual procedure, but it was tradition that the ransoms who were released from the Priory were let go when the moon disappeared from the sky each cycle. It was called the new moon, or Thieves’ Moon. It was a time when boys became men, their childhoods stolen away in the night.
That night, exhausted but awake, Ren gazed at the half disk in the sky and guessed Tye had a pair of weeks, maybe ten days, before the Thieves’ Moon and her release. He tried wandering off into the woods, hoping to escape, but found guards blocking his path, guiding him back to the camp. Ren was not a prisoner, but he was a foreigner, and he guessed the Ferens didn’t want him in the kingdom. If he did not find Adin soon, Ren decided, he would return alone to Solus for Tye’s release from the Priory. She meant something to him. He could not push her from his thoughts; he didn’t want to imagine her alone in the Priory, without his protection, or running through the darkness of the Hollows, alone and vulnerable.
*
The next day he woke with thoughts of the wedding and his sister. The Feren slaves had spent a day loading the wood for the Queen’s Chamber onto dozens of carts, and now they hitched up their horses and headed north, toward the High City, where the wedding would take place. Ren found work with the carters, helping clear brush as the carts moved through the dense forest.
Whenever the caravan stopped at a town or a settlement, Ren asked after Adin, the presumed heir to the throne until Dagrun had taken it by force. Had anyone seen him or heard news of him, did anyone know what had become of him? No, no one had seen him, no one had any news of him. The Ferens scowled and shook their heads at the mention of Barrin, Adin’s father. They called him the Barrin the Black, the Worm King of the Gray Wood. Ren knew little about Feren, but he guessed the old king was not well liked. After a few conversations Ren began to think Adin’s father was not the good king his friend had always imagined and he wondered if Dagrun was not the tyrant Adin had blamed for his father’s death.
Dagrun had taken Adin’s throne, and was now betrothed to Kepi, his sister. Which meant Dagrun was in one way a foe and in another way family, a description that now seemed all too familiar. Perhaps the bonds of family were not what he thought; they seemed now more like chains, links that were unwelcome and hard to break.
When night fell, he slept with the rest of the company, taking space in an abandoned barn and sleeping restlessly in an otherwise empty stall.
As the sun rose the caravan set out for Rifka, but they did not arrive at the Feren capital until the day was nearly spent. In the fading light, they passed between cottages with straw-thatched roofs and walls woven from blackthorn twigs daubed with reddish clay or smeared with brown, hay-speckled dung, the place stinking of garbage, a rumbling sound in the air. The city was dark, and the noise seemed to come from everything, from the very walls of the place, as if the whole city were trembling. When the caravan passed under the gate of ironwood logs, he was struck by a strong urge to turn around and go back. But he passed beneath the gate and into the walls of the fortress nevertheless.
Inside, the sound was stronger and he realized it was actually a song, a keening without words. It was there, within the wall, amid the chaos of the day, that Ren slipped from the company of woodworkers and disappeared into the narrow streets of Rifka.
He followed the rumbling noise through the alleys, past towering war machines, shabby inns, and a torchlit marketplace that sold little but hard strips of dried goat. A group of Ferens in their thin rags was rushing toward the noise too, clutching bouquets of the small white flowers Ren had been seeing in the forest for days. He followed them, not wanting to get too close.