his brother.
Chapter Two
The two brothers stood staring at one another. Percy knew his brother’s voice, and he recognized the broad- shouldered frame shared by all the Errolson brothers. But seeing Aidan in this feechiefied state was disorienting. Percy was sure he had found his brother, and yet he wasn’t sure.
The alligator, meanwhile, saw a second chance to get a bite of civilizer, and it meant to take it. It lunged at Aidan, but Dobro picked up a stick left by one of the wee-feechies and brought it down on the alligator’s snout, then chased it into the water nearby.
“Aidan?” asked Percy. He rubbed fingers in a circle on Aidan’s forehead, trying to get through the swamp mud. “Is that you under there?”
Aidan embraced him. “What are you doing here?”
“Looking for you,” Percy answered. “Bringing a warning.”
Aidan’s eyes narrowed in concern. “What kind of warning?”
“Darrow’s army,” Percy said. “They left Tambluff a week ago, marching for the Feechiefen.”
Dobro had rejoined the conversation by now. “Why you reckon a army of civilizers wants to drown theirselves in the Feechiefen?” he asked.
Percy looked careworn and uncharacteristically somber, older than his twenty-one years. He took a long look at Aidan before he spoke. “It’s you they want, Aidan.”
Aidan went pale beneath his coating of mud. “Why me?” he asked. “What trouble have I been to King Darrow? Why now? I haven’t left this swamp in the last three years.” Aidan hadn’t even seen the king since the night he’d taken the frog orchid to Tambluff Castle. His hard-won offering was met with the king’s implacable hatred and jealousy. Aidan was still a boy then in most ways, a mere fifteen years old. But even then he knew enough to realize his life had changed forever. Rather than provoke further outbursts by the king-and rather than endanger his father and brothers-Aidan had exiled himself to the Feechiefen. There he had stayed ever since, unaware of what was happening in the Corenwald of the civilizers.
“You don’t know about the Aidanites, do you?” Percy asked.
“The Aidanites?” Aidan’s brow wrinkled in confusion.
Percy took a deep breath. This was going to take some explaining. “The Aidanites,” he repeated. “They’re your followers. They think they are anyway.”
Aidan’s head was swimming. “How can I have followers when I’m not leading anybody?”
Percy shrugged. “They call you their king in exile.”
Aidan gasped. “I never claimed to be anybody’s king!”
Percy’s sense of the ridiculous was starting to reassert itself. He couldn’t help but chuckle. “Funny, isn’t it? In a strange sort of way. The Aidanites go around tacking copies of the Wilderking Chant on trees and buildings all over Corenwald.”
Percy launched into the Wilderking Chant: When fear of God has left the land, To be replaced by fear of man; When Corenwalders free and true Enslave themselves and others too; When mercy and justice disappear, When life is cheap and gold is dear, When freedom’s flame has burned to ember And Corenwalders can’t remember What are truths and what are lies, Then will the Wilderking arise.
Aidan interrupted the recitation. “Who are these people?”
Percy shrugged. “I don’t really know. They operate in secret mostly. I don’t know whether there’s a dozen of them or a thousand or ten thousand. But you’d better believe they’ve got King Darrow wound up.”
“Oh no,” said Aidan, holding his face in his hands. “Oh no.” King Darrow had been insanely, murderously jealous of Aidan when he had no reason to be. What must he be doing now?
“The king has declared us all outlaws,” Percy said. “Father, you, me, Brennus, Jasper-Maynard, too, if he ever shows his face in Corenwald again.”
Outlaws. The word hit Aidan like a hammer. Their father Errol, one of the Four and Twenty Noblemen of Corenwald, King Darrow’s most loyal subject. A magistrate for Hustingshire and the entire Eastern Wilderness, Errol had been the only law between Longleaf Manor and Last Camp, fifty leagues away. Now he and his sons were outside the law’s protections; any criminal Errol had ever sent to prison, any jealous rival, any miscreant in Corenwald could commit whatever crime he pleased against Errol or his family, and the law of the land would do nothing about it.
“When did this happen?” asked Aidan.
“About two years ago,” his brother answered. “We left Longleaf in the autumn two years ago.” Outlaws couldn’t own land or pass it on to their heirs, and even if the law allowed it, it wouldn’t have been safe to stay. “King Darrow gave our lands to a Fershal from the Hill Country-Lord Fershal, as he’s called now. He took Father’s place among the Four and Twenty Nobles.”
Aidan felt as if the solid ground below him had turned to quicksand. Errol had shaped Longleaf Manor out of pure wilderness. Its lush plantings and spreading meadows, its teeming fishponds and fruit-heavy orchards had been his life’s work. The man and the land had survived both drought and flood. Errol had protected his lands from the never-ending encroachment of wilderness-from the weeds and creeping vines that flourished in the rich loam of the floodplain, from the bears, cats, and wolves that carried off his stock. He had defended Longleaf from invading armies, twice rebuilding his house and barns after Pyrthen attackers had burned them to the ground. He had seen five sons born there. There his sweet wife had died when he was still a relatively young man. And now Longleaf Manor, which the armies of Pyrth had never been able to take from Errol or his sons, had been given to a stranger.
When he could speak again, Aidan asked, “So where have you been these two years?”
“We’ve been at Sinking Canyons most of the time.”
Dobro whistled. “Sinking Canyons?” he asked. “About a two days’ trot south of Bayberry Swamp?”
“That’s right,” said Percy. “Down in the Clay Wastes. Do you know it?”
“I reckon I do know it,” said Dobro. “All feechiefolks knows about Sinking Canyons. Feechiefolks don’t ever go down in it though. Feechiefolks ain’t skeered of much, but we good and skeered of holes in the ground.” He shuddered. “I peeped over the side of Sinking Canyons once, but you better believe I run off in a hurry. Theto Elbogator told me that hole is still growing, still swallowing up a little more ground every day.” He shivered at the thought of it. “Every wee-feechie in the swamp knows a rhyme about Sinking Canyons. Their mamas teach it as a warning to stay away from that place.” He began a recitation: Fallen are the feechiefolks, In a gully, down a hole. No more fistfights, no more jokes, In a gully, down a hole. To the river, to the woods, In a gully, down a hole. Time to leave these neighborhoods. In a gully, down a hole.
Aidan was getting impatient with this distraction from the matter at hand. He turned back to Percy. “What have you been doing in Sinking Canyons?” he asked. “How do you live there?”
“It’s not all that bad,” Percy answered. “We live off the land, you might say. Lots of fresh game, berries, roots. Father was able to bring plenty of gold when we left Longleaf, and we send somebody to buy supplies every now and then in Ryelan or Duckington, the nearest villages.”
Aidan was growing red in the face. “That’s no way for our father to have to live. He’s sixty-two years old!”
“You boys is livin’ like feechiefolks!” Dobro said. “Living like you got some sense. ’Cept you living in a hole.”
Aidan ignored Dobro. He was rolling now, beginning to warm to his subject. “Thrown off his own land! Forced to live in the wilderness!”
Dobro chuckled. “His own land,” he mocked. “If you civilizers ain’t the beatin’est things. Two civilizers fussing over who owns a piece of land is like two bird lice fussing over who owns the craney-crow.”
Aidan gave Dobro a sharp look but didn’t say anything. Turning back to his brother, he asked, “Does King Darrow know where you are?”
