The Ale Boy's Feast

  Praise for

  The Auralia Thread

  “Overstreet’s writing is precise and beautiful, and the story is masterfully told.”

  —PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

  “The rich details, well-developed characters, and complex story will make this a new favorite among fantasy readers.”

  —LIBRARY JOURNAL

  “With a skillful pen, Overstreet shows a world that exists in another dimension. A true treat to fantasy fans.”

  —AUTHOR’S CHOICE REVIEWS

  “The Ale Boy’s Feast is a great, sprawling poem. Its rich language moves and breathes and awakens every sense. Jeffrey Overstreet has made something beautiful here. His story reminds us that beauty is an agent of grace.”

  —JONATHAN ROGERS, author of The Charlatan’s Boy

  “Jeffrey Overstreet’s imagination is peopled with mysteries and wonders. Reading Raven’s Ladder is like staring at a richly imagined world through a kaleidoscope: complex, intriguing, and habit-forming.”

  —KATHY TYERS, author of Shivering World and the Firebird series

  “Jeffrey Overstreet writes like Van Gogh painted. He is a literary impressionist, and his understated yet vivid narrative style overwhelms the imagination. The Ale Boy’s Feast does more than just tell the end of a story; it invites the reader into the world of the Expanse with a cast of beautifully complex characters to join them in pursuit of the mystery that calls us all.”

  —LINDSAY STALLONES, evangelicaloutpost.com

  “Through word, image, and color, Jeffrey Overstreet has crafted a work of art. From first to final page, this original fantasy is sure to draw readers in.”

  —JANET LEE CAREY, award-winning author of The Dragons of Noor

  “It’s entering a beautiful dream you don’t want to leave, with exhilarating tension that takes you beyond story and into deep truths.”

  —SIGMUND BROUWER, author of Broken Angel and Flight of Shadows

  “A darkly complex world populated by a rich and diverse cast of characters, in which glimpses of haunting beauty shine through. Sometimes perplexing but always thought-provoking, Raven’s Ladder is the work of a fertile and striking creative imagination.”

  —R. J. ANDERSON, author of Faery Rebels: Spell Hunter

  ALSO BY JEFFREY OVERSTREET

  Fiction:

  Auralia’s Colors

  Cyndere’s Midnight

  Raven’s Ladder

  Nonfiction:

  Through a Screen Darkly:

  Looking Closer at Beauty, Truth, and Evil at the Movies

  THE ALE BOY’S FEAST

  PUBLISHED BY WATERBROOK PRESS

  12265 Oracle Boulevard, Suite 200

  Colorado Springs, Colorado 80921

  The characters and events in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual persons or events is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2011 by Jeffrey Overstreet

  Map copyright © 2011 by Rachel Beatty

  Illustration by Mike Heath, Magnus Creative

  Published in association with the literary agency of Alive Communications Inc., 7680 Goddard Street, Suite 200, Colorado Springs, CO 80920, www.alivecommunications.com.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Published in the United States by WaterBrook Multnomah, an imprint of the Crown

  Publishing Group, a division of Random House Inc., New York.

  WATERBROOK and its deer colophon are registered trademarks of Random House Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Overstreet, Jeffrey.

  The ale boy’s feast : the white strand in the Auralia thread / Jeffrey Overstreet. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-72938-5

  I. Title.

  PS3615.V474A78 2011

  813′.6—dc22

  2010051190

  v3.1

  For Anne

  Her imagination inspired the adventure,

  her belief in these stories gave me confidence,

  her listening ear helped me tune the instruments,

  her hard work alongside me made the series possible,

  and her presence was a blessing on the journey

  from the grasses beside the River Throanscall

  to the mists beyond the Forbidding Wall.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map

  Prologue

  1. The Wayward Mage

  2. The Ever-Woven World

  3. The Bird Kite

  4. Awakenings

  5. Warney Fights a Woman

  6. The Secret of Auralia’s Caves

  7. Down to the Deeper River

  8. Fraughtenwood

  9. Cesylle’s Regret

  10. Imityri

  11. Against the Current

  12. A Song for Thesera

  13. The One-Eyed Bandit’s Greatest Theft

  14. Raiders of Raak’s Casket

  15. Viscorclaw

  16. The River Guardians

  17. Homeless Dreamers

  18. The First Feast of New Abascar

  19. The Glassworker Homecoming

  20. Fire in Fraughtenwood

  21. Battle in the Fearblind Ravine

  22. A Fleeting Glimpse of Daylight

  23. Threshold

  24. The Foundation

  25. The Futures of House Bel Amica

  26. Setting the Table

  27. The Ale Boy’s Feast

  28. Breaking Threads

  29. The Ring of Trust

  30. The Great Ancestor

  31. The Falls

  Epilogue

  A Guide to the Characters

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  THEY CALL THE BOY “RESCUE”

  FOR A REASON …

  The ale boy was once an errand runner, almost invisible as he served House Abascar. As he grew up—an orphan raised by House Abascar’s beer brewer and wine-maker—his real name remained a secret, even from him.

  But what he did know proved useful indeed. As he gathered the harvest fruits beyond Abascar’s walls, worked with brewers below ground, delivered drinks across the city, and served the king his favorite liquor, the ale boy learned the shortcuts and secrets of that oppressed kingdom.

  When the ale boy met Auralia, a mysterious and artistic young woman from the wilderness, they formed a friendship that would change the world. Auralia’s artistry shone with colors no one had ever seen, and when she revealed her masterpiece within House Abascar, the kingdom erupted in turmoil that ended in a calamitous collapse. Auralia vanished, as did her enchanting colors. And hundreds of people died.

  Brokenhearted but brave, the ale boy sought out survivors in Abascar’s ruins and helped them find their way to a refuge in the Cliffs of Barnashum. There, led by their new king, Cal-raven, the people endured a harsh winter and an attack from the Cent Regus beastmen.

  During those hard days, the ale boy became a legendary hero. The people called him “Rescue.”

  Afterward, King Cal-raven sought two things: the origins of Auralia’s colors, and the Keeper—the mysterious dream-creature who had inspired Auralia in the first place.

  Cal-raven trusted that the Keeper would lead his people out of their desperate circumstances and into a glorious future. And in that belief, he discovered an ancient, legendary city called Inius Throan standing in the shadow of the north
ern mountains.

  But now his hopes of leading Abascar’s remnant have all but collapsed.

  His people have found protection and provision in the care of House Bel Amica on the western coast. They’ve settled in. Bel Amica’s a dangerous place, even for its own rulers, who have exposed treachery among Queen Thesera’s advisors, the Seers.

  Heightening their peril, the Deathweed—a creature made of roots and branches—has spread across the Expanse, poisoning and killing everything within its reach.

  Worst of all, Cal-raven has made a disastrous mistake. Taking the beastman called Jordam with him as a guide, he left House Bel Amica behind to make a risky journey into the heart of beastman territory. There he hoped to rescue some of his people who were imprisoned and enslaved.

  But even though Jordam and the ale boy offered Cal-raven help, things have gone terribly wrong. Many are dead. The ale boy has fallen from a bridge into a dark abyss. And Cal-raven’s faith in the Keeper has collapsed in the aftermath of a shocking discovery.

  Now, Cal-raven too is lost in the chaos.

  Captain Tabor Jan and the people of Abascar wait in desperate hope for their king to return. Their future seems uncertain.

  Shall they go on alone toward Inius Throan without Cal-raven to guide them?

  Was the promise of Auralia’s colors just an illusion?

  Is the Keeper in their dreams just a figment of their imaginations?

  Did the ale boy perish in the darkness?

  All these questions will be answered in this, the final strand of The Auralia Thread.

  PROLOGUE

  mystery led the old man from the shelter of the trees.

  Krawg, raising his picker-staff like a spear, pursued the creature eastward into the open and watched it plunge down the slope toward the River Throanscall. A flash of green wings, an unfamiliar chirp, and the scampering prey was gone, vanishing into the riverbank grasses that stood shoulder high.

  He paused, remembering Captain Tabor Jan’s orders.

  At the travelers’ suppertime counting, the counters had come up short. Growling, the captain had handed out shrill-whistles and sent seekers to comb the surrounding forest for Milora, a young glassworker who had strayed. The seekers were not to move beyond the safe range of a shrill-whistle as they fanned out through the trees.

  But this southwestern branch of the River Throanscall was an endless sigh as it coursed through the seed-heavy reeds, and that familiar music attracted him.

  “Bird got away, lucky rascal. Must be rough, don’t you think, Warney—havin’ wings but never flyin’?”

  The snarling reply came not from his friend but his stomach.

  “Wish I was carryin’ a gorreltrap,” he sulked. “Whatever it was, I bet it’d crisp up good in a pan. I’m so krammin’ sick of nuts and seeds.” He stirred the dry husks of dead leaves with his harvesting rod and watched the river grasses waver. “Could be the start of a story, I s’pose. There once was a bird who couldn’t fly, until one day when—”

  That blur of glittering green burst from the grasses and bounded toward him. He dropped to the root-rumpled ground.

  It was not a bird but a corpulent puffdragon, flinging itself about like a grasshopper in the autumn twilight.

  Peering out from beneath his leaf-pasted cloak, Krawg watched while the wild wyrm played. It seemed to jump just for the crackle and crunch of it. But at times it paused mid-scamper, attentive, its gill-slit ears flaring and one scaly foot lifted like a hunting hound’s paw.

  Though it was small and lithe as a house cat, it seemed large and dangerous when it trotted to within an inch of Krawg’s nose and spread the sails of those useless, translucent wings, which made a sound like shaken bedsheets. Hoping puffdragons were as day blind as common wisdom claimed, Krawg fought the urge to blink.

  It blasted a sneeze, and the flare singed the rowdy ruckus of whiskers on Krawg’s upper lip. Then the creature wandered off to snuffle through dead leaves for a many-legged meal.

  “We’ll be seein’ more of their kind, won’t we, Warney?” Krawg whispered. “Only fire-breathers can survive in a forest where Deathweed snakes through the ground.”

  He thought of the black branches. At any moment one might thrust up through the soil, impale his chest, and drag him into the ground. Twitchy, he rose and walked down the slope, stabbing the marsh with his picker-staff all the way to the river’s edge. He did not want to think about Deathweed.

  “Here’s another story I might tell. There once was a puffdragon who leapt before he looked …”

  Silverblue water breathed a blanket of mist that beaded on his eyelashes. He’d spent many a day strolling along the Throanscall’s melodious strand north of Deep Lake. But if he listened to complaints from his neck, knees, and back, those days were coming to a close.

  The river’s rush could not drown out the forest’s unnatural groan. Autumn was dawning, but these Cragavar trees were already skeletal, shaking off leaves and shedding their bark, exposing sickly flesh like plague-bearers begging for a cure. They clacked branches together as if to keep themselves awake.

  He tightened his picker-staff grip, desire rotting into resentment. Most creatures of the ground and air had vanished from the Expanse, caught by the underground menace or fleeing its clutches. Krawg had pursued that rusty-hinge chirp, compelled by hunger and, even more, by a longing to see feathers lift a mystery into the air, to hear a song take to the sky.

  So when a cry pierced the dusk and a solitary shadow winged low over the river—a stark and simple rune written on the sky’s purple scroll—he held his breath.

  Beauty.

  He glanced about to make sure he was alone, then smeared his tears with his sleeve. It was a bird. A bird with tousled crestfeathers and a ribbon tail gliding northward. In Krawg’s chest a pang rang like an alarm bell. He wanted to join the bird there, suspended.

  “Ballyworms, Warney. What’s wrong with me?”

  The bird sailed away, tilting, a kite with a broken string.

  “Milora’s gone missing, Warney. But you know who I’m thinkin’ about instead.” He swiped at the reeds on either side, sending seed-heads sluicing into the river. “And, no, it isn’t you.”

  Staring north, he watched the bird merge with the darkling boundary, the Forbidding Wall, which stretched from the western coast all the way into the impassable Heatlands of the east. Those mountains loomed as formidable as the front line of an army. In ancient tales that all four houses embraced, they were all that stood between the Expanse and a terrible curse.

  “We’re not forsaken in the wild anymore, Warney. We’re the king’s helpers now. So why do I fret as much as ever?”

  Perhaps, he thought, it’s because we have no king to serve.

  Jordam the beastman had returned to Bel Amica with several prisoners he had helped rescue from the Cent Regus prisons. But the joy of their arrival was overshadowed by their dire tidings. During the escape many other Abascar prisoners had been caught and slain by the Cent Regus. In that violent frenzy, which also claimed the life of King Cal-raven’s mother, Cal-raven had disappeared. Jordam, having delivered these few survivors, had gone back alone to search for him and any other survivors.

  After several days of silence, Abascar’s Captain Tabor Jan announced he’d take a small company and make the journey that the king had planned, following his map to find that mysterious place where Cal-raven hoped to establish New Abascar.

  “So what happened to you, Warney?” grumbled Krawg. “Why’d you go missing on departure day? The captain wouldn’t wait. And now here I am, on my way north toward Fraughtenwood, with nobody to try out my stories on.”

  He scribbled in the air with the picker-staff. “Once upon a Keeper’s footprint, a naked child was found …”

  The reeds upriver suddenly rustled. For a moment Krawg thought it might be a memory. They rustled again.

  “Freakish teeth of Grandmother Sunny!” He turned his picker-staff so that the apple-hook end was behind hi
m. He’d sharpened the blade end in case he ran into something fierce. But his three practice throws had fallen short of the targets. He didn’t want to miss again. “Let it be something feastable,” he muttered. “Not something nasty and green.”

  A cool line of sweat trickled down behind his ear as he took a step forward.

  Nothing dove into the water. Nothing bolted back to the forest.

  His feet began to sink into the sludge. You’re more scared to see a child than a monster.

  Reaching the riverbank, he carefully parted a curtain of grass.

  At once he remembered his purpose. For there she lay, the missing woman, curled in sleep on a broad riverstone. She still wore the winding white glassmaker’s wrap around her head, but her woolen cloak was dark and heavy—a gift from House Bel Amica’s Queen Thesera. Milora, the glassmaker’s daughter. Milora, mother of that rambunctious child Obrey.

  Krawg drew out the shrill-whistle and put it to his lips.

  That’s when the puffdragon, which Krawg suddenly noticed lying in Milora’s embrace, flicked out its forked tongue and drew back its lip from its flame-blackened teeth.

  He screamed into the whistle.

  The dragon burst from Milora’s arms and was gone. The woman leapt to her feet. And Krawg stumbled and fell with a splash into the shallows.

  Milora flailed like a puppet on unsteady strings.

  “Beggin’ your pardon, my lady,” Krawg blurted. “Everybody’s lookin’ for you.”

  Milora’s eyes narrowed. Then she lifted Krawg’s picker-staff and offered him the apple-hook end. He took it, raising himself from the ground’s dark glue. “I just meant to rest awhile,” she said. “But there’s something about the river. It makes me feel safe. Close to home.”

  “Safe? That was a dragon, not a puppy! You hurt?”

  She ignored him, looking into the eerie evening colors above the mountains—the Northern Lumination. “Any news of the king?”