“Well, yes,” Aidan admitted. “But…”
“He did, he did!” Dobro yodeled. “I seen it with these two eyes!” Dobro had gotten caught up in the mob’s enthusiasm. But a stern look from Aidan silenced him.
“‘With a stone he shall quell the panther fell!’” Wash triumphantly quoted the Wilderking Chant, sticking his chest out and jabbing a finger in Aidan’s direction.
“‘He will silence the braggart, ennoble the coward,’” piped an old veteran, also quoting from the chant. “I was there at Bonifay, young man. I saw that braggart giant go silent. I was one of the warriors of Corenwald who were ennobled again in our most fearful hour.”
“Where you been these three years, Aidan Errolson?” asked a woman Aidan recognized as the village baker.
“Feechiefen,” Aidan mumbled.
“I’m sorry,” the woman called sweetly. “I didn’t hear that last part.”
Aidan cleared his throat and spoke more loudly. “The Feechiefen Swamp.”
“Interesting,” the woman said. Then she lowered her voice for dramatic effect and recited the last three lines of the Wilderking Chant: Look to the swamplands, ye misfit, ye outcast. From the land’s wildest places a wild man will come To give the land back to his people.
“I’m ready to get my land back!” bellowed somebody in the back.
“Me too!” yelled another. “When do we get started?”
The village square erupted again with raucous laughter and good-natured jostling.
“Hear me!” Aidan screamed as loudly as he could. “Hear this well! I will have nothing to do with any rebellion against the king! I will not stand by, either, and let anyone revolt in my name!” But nobody heard him or paid him any mind.
Aidan jumped off the platform to rejoin Percy and Dobro. “Let’s get out of here!” he still had to shout to be heard, even though he was standing beside them. “These people are all fools or traitors!”
“That may be!” Percy shouted back. “But that doesn’t mean they’ve got it all wrong!”
Chapter Nine
Aidan, Dobro, and Percy gave up on getting supplies for their journey to Sinking Canyons. Now all they wanted was to get away from Hustingreen; but that proved to be no easy matter. A group of boys noticed them trying to slip out of the village and followed them, whooping, capering, and pushing each other. Soon the whole village was following them north on the River Road, as if they were on a pleasure outing.
“To Tambluff!” somebody yelled. They were, after all, headed in the direction of the capital city.
“Hurray!” the crowd shouted in response.
Aidan could hear the boisterous, happy conversation between several old men near the front of the crowd. “You gotta like his style,” said one of them. “Bold, determined.”
“I’m with you,” said another. “We know the king ain’t there; he’s off at the swamp with our boys.”
“Hee-hee,” laughed the first. “King Darrow’s in for a surprise when he gets home, ain’t he?”
“But don’t you reckon he left somebody guarding the castle?” suggested a third man.
But the other two seemed unconcerned. “Don’t you worry about that, old boy. If I know Aidan Errolson, he’s got a plan.”
Aidan Errolson did have a plan, but it had nothing to do with storming Tambluff Castle. Taking the River Road was only a ruse. The last thing they needed was a whole village of Aidanites following them to their hideout in Sinking Canyons. Their true destination lay many leagues to the west and south, far from the River Road-far indeed from any road.
On Dobro’s signal, the three disappeared into the forest on the left side of the road, clambering up a convenient tree and soaring through the treetops, hidden from the wondering eyes of the Hustingreeners.
Dobro led the way to the banks of Bayberry Creek. They waded the creek, pausing to cool themselves and to drink of the black water before pushing on to the west and south.
The tangled forest of the bottomlands opened up into a great pine savannah a few leagues below the Bayberry. Confident that the Aidanites couldn’t possibly have tracked them, the three travelers returned to the ground and continued their trek on foot, careful to avoid the few small farms, turpentine camps, and other tiny settlements that dotted the landscape in this part of the island.
By midmorning on the second day after they had left Hustingreen, even those small, isolated settlements were nowhere to be found. Aidan, Dobro, and Percy were entering Corenwald’s Clay Wastes. Unlike most of the island, here the soil was too poor for farming. Even the forests looked thin and degraded. The stately old longleaf pines of the upland savannah were replaced by scrubby second-growth pine trees. A few trees were as tall as seventy or eighty feet, but even those were so spindly they looked as if a good strong wind might snap them in two. In some places the trees formed dense thickets. In others, they were so far apart that even a person with a strong arm could hardly throw a rock from one tree to the next. Without the protection of the longleaf overstory, the waving wiregrass was overrun by vines and briars. It was exactly the kind of vegetation that made tree walking necessary, but the trees were too irregularly spaced for that.
“You won’t be finding no feechies in this part of the island,” Dobro grunted as he slashed through a briar bush with a pole he had cut from a turkey oak. “Can’t swim, can’t boat, can’t tree-walk.”
“So we’re going to be living in a place that’s too wild for the feechiefolk,” Aidan mumbled.
Dobro slapped at the back of his neck and danced with rage. His skin, so white after his first bath, was now an angry red from sunburn and splotched with the purple welts raised by mosquitoes and other biting insects that swarmed in all of Corenwald’s wild places.
“These bugs is about to chaw me down to bones and tallow,” Dobro complained. “How can you civilizers go pirootin’ around without no mud cover and not go crazy account of the itching?”
“We’re just tougher than feechies, I suppose,” Percy said, cutting his eyes over toward Dobro to see his reaction.
Dobro slapped at another bug. “If I wasn’t so miserable,” he said, “I’d whup both of you and show you how tough a feechie is.” He gave a little wiggle, rubbing his knees together to scratch matching mosquito bites on the inside of either knee.
Dobro moaned, “I don’t mind telling you, these skeeters done whupped and defeated me.”
“Dobro, you ought to be ashamed of yourself,” Percy chided. “A full-grown feechie defeated by mosquitoes.”
“There ain’t no shame in that,” said Dobro. “No shame at all. You know who’s the boss of the forest, don’t you?”
“I don’t know,” said Percy. “A bear? A panther? Certainly not a mosquito.”
Dobro gave another slap at his bare arm and launched into a story meant to educate his fellow travelers and keep his own mind off his troubles.
“Mr. Wildcat and Mr. Alligator got to argufying about who was the boss of the forest. Up and down they had it, back and forth, who should and who shouldn’t. They got so aggravated till Mr. Wildcat finally reached back with his off-paw and fetched one across Mr. Alligator’s snout. Ker-blip! ”
Dobro reenacted the blow, swinging his open hand in a sweeping, roundhouse motion.
“Well now, Mr. Alligator was astonished that his old friend Mr. Wildcat would strike a blow against him. His eyes filled up with tears. He turned tail like he was headed back into the water, and Mr. Wildcat figured he’d made his point. He sat down on his hunkers and mewed out a song: None of you critters better give me sauce. I am the champeen, I am the boss. Boss of this river, boss of these trees. All of you critters better ask me please.
“But Mr. Alligator’s tearfulness was just a trick he learnt from Cousin Crocodile. He didn’t even feel that cat’s furry paw against his bony snout. And he sure didn’t have it in his mind to skedaddle from such a fight as that. Naw, he turnt tail so he could reach that sassy wildcat better.
“Mr. Wildcat was strokin’ his chin whiskers and feelin’ mighty bumptious when Mr. Alligator’s tail come
