The Great Unravel, page 2
part #3 of Riddle in Ruby Series
She wiped the rain from her eyes, and she took in her rescuers for a moment. “But who’s going to protect you?”
Avid had finally reached the top guide rope, and she pulled herself hand over hand back to the crowd of waiting reeves. The press parted in a wave for Wisdom Rool. The reeve lord captain hauled Avid up to the lip of the canyon. The mercenaries gave a rousing cheer, and Avid curtsied in response. She was tall, but the lord captain of the king’s Reeve topped her by more than a head, and he seemed twice as wide. Rool clapped Avid on the shoulder with encouragement, and they had a word, after which she nodded. She turned back and gazed across the gorge. Her eyes met Ruby’s, and for a breathtaking moment Ruby thought the girl might try a Work to jump across. It was too far. A hundred yards, at least. Even Wisdom Rool couldn’t make a jump like that. Could he?
Still, excitement fluttered in Ruby’s chest. When the young reeve cadet turned about and made her way back into the crowd, Ruby couldn’t help feeling just a bit disappointed. A pang of . . . was it loneliness?—struck her. The Jabalís clustered about them, faintly ridiculous in their strange carnival, and none of them knew what Ruby had gone through in the past year. Nor did her friends. One of the only ones who truly might understand had just disappeared into the press of reeves standing united behind their leader.
The rain hammered down on Wisdom Rool. It was too far across to see the ropy scars that twisted all around his body, but they burned in Ruby’s mind’s eye as the man lifted his hand to his mouth. “Ahoy, the gorge!” His voice rang out raspy clear over the wind and rushing water.
Petra alla Ferra stepped forward, leaning forward carelessly over the edge, one hand grasping a stump of guide rope. “Ahoy, the Reeve!” she called. Los Jabalís snickered among themselves. Like the crew of the Thrift loved Ruby’s father, they loved this woman, this woman who had led a band of unruly outlaws against the Reeve and won.
“I am Wisdom Rool, lord captain of the king’s Reeve! To whom do I have the pleasure of speaking?”
Alla Ferra tucked a stripe of silver hair back behind her ear and hesitated. Ruby sympathized. The smart move here would be to make up a name, a false identity to throw the Reeve off the scent. Buy some time.
“Captain Petra alla Ferra at your service! My stouthearted companions here are Los Jabalís!” Another murmur rose up around Ruby: one part fear but two parts approval. Ruby ground her teeth. Didn’t they know they were giving away their advantage? Heedless. Careless.
“A brave company indeed to steal from the house of His Majesty, especially in times like these!” Rool called.
“Tell your friends! We are always looking for work!” Los Jabalís laughed in appreciation. “Besides, this massive gorge between us bolsters my bravery! And I am not certain I understand. What is it we have stolen from you? A bangle? A set of solemn churchman’s garb?”
Rool smoothed down his reeve blacks theatrically in response and then pointed at Ruby, sitting exposed on her rock perch. “That girl. She is a prisoner of England, and we would have her back!”
Ruby’s head spun like a top. He was putting on a sharp, a show for the other reeves. He didn’t want her back. In fact, Wisdom Rool was the one who had let her go. He had given her a rope to climb down the cliff, for Providence’s sake. The lord captain and Ruby had made a deal to steal the notes of the tinker they called the Swede. Ruby had lived up to her part, and Rool had helped her escape to her friends. The rest of the Reeve didn’t know that, though. The crowd of black and gray teachers and students loomed behind Rool: a storm waiting to be unleashed.
Petra alla Ferra swung her head about to peer exaggeratedly at Ruby, as if she were some strange bird. She projected relaxation, amusement even. She pointed at Ruby. “This girl, eh?” She held up her hands in an elegant shrug. “Alas, sir. This is not English soil. The bears and wolves are constables here, and it is their law we obey. Besides, even if this”—she tapped her foot on the rock—“were your land, it is currently on the other side of a canyon from you!” At this, Los Jabalís erupted in cheering and jeers. A few of them had gathered some flowers and began tossing them into the gorge like pining lovers. Ruby shook her head. These people were mad. The Reeve would pursue them to the ends of the earth. Ward Corson and Avid were already leading a detachment scaling down the remains of the bridge. Ruby guessed they could cross the river and get up the sheer face of the canyon before nightfall.
Wisdom Rool stood motionless on the other side. He waited until the cheering subsided.
“Very well then! Please remember that I did ask nicely! When next we meet, perhaps it will be within arm’s reach!”
Petra alla Ferra laughed. “Come if you will, Sir Wisdom! If you catch me, I will give you a kiss!” She blew him one then and stepped back onto the firm ground, igniting a new round of cheers from the Jabalís.
Wayland Teach was waiting for her. The moment of sun was gone, and the rain had taken up again in earnest. Distant thunder rumbled in the distance. He leaned in and muttered something in the huntress’s ear. Alla Ferra’s gaze flitted over to Ruby and then back to her father. She nodded once.
Teach walked over to Ruby and said simply, “Come with me.”
What was he about? As the hunters burst into action, finally making ready for their escape, her father led her farther into the little clearing on the other side of the bridge. A small woman stood motionless amid the jumble, her features completely hidden in a metal mask. Ruby’s friends had followed behind, all their mirth suddenly gone. As one they looked to Ruby’s father.
He stared at Ruby, beard dripping in the rain, mouth open as if he were trying to catch the words of a once-remembered song. A kind of fear took her. Her pulse thundered in her ears. Teach offered Ruby his hand, and she took it. He walked her down into the clearing until she stood opposite the woman in the mask.
“Ruby—” said the captain.
She looked up at him, but he said no more.
Petra alla Ferra had followed them. “Only for a moment,” she said to Teach, “and then we must be on our way.”
He looked at Ruby, then nodded.
Alla Ferra cast her eyes about the clearing at her people. Her voice cut through the downpour. “Ready your weapons!”
Muskets, axes, bows, and swords flew into hands. Three hunters took positions just behind the woman in the mask, weapons ready. The one in the middle was a huge brute, and the edge of a wicked carving knife lay between the masked woman’s shoulder blades.
Ruby scanned the faces of her father and her companions for some hint of information. “What is this?”
No one answered.
What was this grand opera about? Who was this masked woman who struck fear into a company of hardened hunters? Why, in the name of Science, stop their flight from the full might of the Reeve for some sort of overblown mummer’s show? Petra alla Ferra drew a chain from around her neck. At the end of the chain was a green metal key. She held it out to Ruby.
“I don’t understand,” said Ruby. A creeping dread scrabbled up her spine. “I say again, ‘What is this?’”
The masked woman had not moved this whole while, hands clasped up under her chin, as if in prayer. Short chains ran down from just below the engraved ears, binding both her wrists in place. The mask itself encased the woman’s entire head. Its weight rested on two broad shoulder supports. The face was that of an Athenian statue, classic and grave. The eyes were plugged, and a tiny hole opened at the mouth. Twisting across the features, engraved chemystral demons warred with scaled and winged angels.
The rain pounded down. It coursed around the iron eyebrows, rushing across the sculpted, empty eyes and down the cheeks, spattering on the rocks at the woman’s feet.
The wearer of the mask waited, the wrist manacles carved with equations that skittered from the eye. Ruby looked about at the circle of staring faces, witnesses half lit in the rain-swept morning.
The huntress handed her the key. “This is for you to do.”
Ruby almost dropped it, slick in the downpour, but caught herself and willed her hand to stop shaking. It wouldn’t. Using both hands, Ruby managed to get the key into the keyhole, just below the right ear of the mask.
She turned it.
Click.
A small handle popped out of the mask at the right temple, and Ruby pulled it across, the metal face opening like a door on hidden hinges. Time slowed as the pieces of the puzzle fell into place. A woman who could terrify an entire clearing of hard cases. The deep concern for Ruby writ large on everyone’s faces. The way the woman stood, like a mirror to Ruby’s own body. It could be only one person. Ruby put her hands down at her sides, clenched tight, and willed herself to look.
Inside the mask, shadowed but dry, lay a face that almost matched Ruby’s, tangled hair yellow instead of black, tiny bird’s tracks at the eyes where Ruby’s were smooth.
“Hello, Ruby,” said her mother.
Ruby Teach quieted her shaking hand, and then she punched her mother square in the face.
CHAPTER 2
CATHERINE: A slavering horde? A devouring plague, the likes of which our world has never known?
FARNSWORTH: (Shudders) Worse.
CATHERINE: You and I, Farnsworth, we have faced down thieves and villains, pirates and scoundrels. What pack of devils awaits outside that sets you cringing, so?
FARNSWORTH: It is your family, my lady.
CATHERINE: Egad. Bar the door. And fetch my musket.
—Marion Coatesworth-Hay,
A Most Tenacious Flame, Act I, Sc. iii
The whole clearing gasped. Someone said, “Ooooooo.”
Fair being fair, Cram had said it himself, but he couldn’t keep it in. Somewhere in the past months the Ferret had learned to throw a punch, and she had whupped out a good one.
Ruby’s mam stumbled back. The big cook propped her up.
Cram cleared his throat. “Good to have you back, Ferret!” Well, someone had to say something. Ruby turned to him, a painful stew of feelings warring on her face. Poor girl. Not the finest way to meet your mam.
Petra alla Ferra stepped into the silence. She slid past the Ferret and in one motion clapped closed the little door on the iron mask and removed the key. She whirled about, and her voice rang out in the still, wet clearing.
“Come, my boars,” she said, fierce and urgent. “The carnival is over. We have made our presence known, families have been reunited, we have these fine people to deliver to our employer, who has promised us many piles of money, and then we can take ship and sail far from this hostile land!” They hollered and cheered. “I tire of these colonies and yearn for fair Barcelona. The hunt is on, meva familia. Split up and lay many trails. We must confuse them as much as possible. May San Huberto, patron saint of hunters, walk across your tracks. We rendezvous at our special hideaway. Quick and quiet as you can. Go!”
And just like that Los Jabalís were on the move. Little flocks of men and women started peeling off from the clearing like pigeons from an angry tomcat. Ferret and the crew were buckling their rucksacks and checking the straps at the far end of the clearing, so Cram hurried over their way past a chokeberry bush.
The bush hissed at him.
He stopped in his tracks. The wee white flowers were quite pretty, but the wild was tricksy and dangerous. The dense, dripping leaves might hide anything. “Could be reeves, could be a mess of ball-tail cats,” he muttered. “Some fella might need to suss this out.” He looked about. Nobody else was paying any attention. He unfastened his butter churn from its strap across his back and crept closer.
The shrub hissed again.
Cram started back a step but then got a halter on his fear. “That ain’t going to get you anywheres, chokeberry. Name yourself ‘friend’ or ‘foe’ this second, or I call out—”
A gnarled knot of a hand shot out of the bush and yanked him forward. He barely had time to squawk. Before he knew it, he was lying on the ground in the middle of a little ring of chokeberry bushes. He scrabbled around, trying to get his legs under him, ready for the next charge. His attacker moved forward into the shady light.
Winnifred Pleasant Black.
Cram sighed a sigh of relief. “Miss Winnie, you scared me right to death!”
The woodswoman hissed again, then whispered, “Quiet, Cram. I need to speak at you.”
Cram blinked at his teacher. “What is it?”
Winnie Black’s six-year-old son dropped soundlessly out of a tree to the ground and pushed his beaver-head hood back from his eyes. “We’s skarperin’.”
Winnie Black knelt a buskin-clad knee on the mud without hesitation and leaned in close, nodding to the boy. “Cubbins and me are making a break for it.”
Cram’s heart sank. “What? Why? Now that we got the Ferret back, things are looking up.”
“For you perhaps.” The woodswoman’s eyes darted back and forth, searching the foliage. She absently scratched the cheek of her hood, the head of a white wolf. “For us, this journey is turning into a mess of hardscrabble pie.”
Cram’s head reeled inside as if someone had hit him with a frypan. “But Miss Winnie, you—you guided us through the wild. You and the captain got yourselves captivated for us! Without you we would have never saved the Ferret.”
The woodswoman nodded, her flat face still. “That’s right, and my bargain to Wayland Teach and the rest of your people is done. Cubbins and me did what we said we was going to do, and now it’s time to go. Alla Ferra don’t want us or need us anyhow. We were just extra critters she got in her trap when she closed it on Captain Teach.”
Cram’s heart beat faster. “But you’ve been teaching me the ways of the woods and moss and beasts and such—”
“And that’s why I grabbed you.”
Miss Winnie’s mount, the great black goat Peaches, pushed her head through the chokeberry branches as if they were lace curtains and butted up against Cram’s elbow. He pulled some corn out of his pocket and fed her. “Why then?”
Black watched him feed Peaches for a moment. “’Cause we want you to come with us.”
Shock lanced through Cram, with joy on the heels of it, but then overtaken just as quickly by sorrow. “I—”
“Before you answer, hear me out. Alla Ferra and Los Jabalís, they’re after your girl Ruby, and they also want Henry and Athena. The captain, too. Sounds like whoever they’re hired out to will offer a pretty penny for their safe return. Now”—her lips quirked—“whose name didn’t I call out?”
Cram licked his lips. She had a point, but these were his people she was talking about. “Mine, but—”
“No buts about it, boy. You are serving them well, but you are traveling back into a world at war. Talk around the campfires is that the French and English are at each other hammer and tongs.” She spat. “And in times like this people like us”—she held his gaze—“like you and me and Cubbins, people like us tend to get smashed on the forge.”
“What do you say? Lady Athena would never—”
“She would never sacrifice you? Never pay your life in exchange for her own?”
“Never.”
“What about for someone she had a duty to? Like this Ruby? Or someone she loved? Like her pa?”
Cram thought for a moment about that. Little vines of doubt started creeping across his shoulders.
Somewhere on the other side of the bushes, someone called, “Last groups, move out!”
Winnie Black stood and wiped her muddy hands on her leathers. “Time’s run out. If we go now, they won’t miss us until it’s too late, and with reeves on their tails, I wager they won’t try to get us back.” She held out her hand, equal like. “You’d be a full partner with us.”
Peaches worbled low in her throat, and Cubbins’s tiny fingers wrapped around his own.
It pulled at him like taffy. Winnie Black had opened his eyes to woodcraft, to the glory of the forests. She had taught him the ways of beast and fowl and, more to the point, how to be his own man. With Lady A. and the Ferret and the rest headed for the cities, he was going back to a place where the measure of him, if anyone noticed him at all, was the measure of his Lady. His belly twisted something fierce.
He looked down at Cubbins, who stared up at him, unblinking. “Brothers?” the little boy said.
You could have knocked him over with a feather.
Cram took a deep breath, and then he carefully unwound the little fingers. He knelt and looked Cubbins in the eye. “I can’t, little beaver,” he said. “Lady Athena and the professor and Ruby . . . I have to stand by them. They’re my people, just as much as you are.”
Cubbins held his gaze. Then he nodded once, gravely. “Don’t get et.”
Cram smiled, but he couldn’t say nothing. He was flat out of words. He stood back up and looked Winnie Black in the eye, like she had taught him, and then took her hand.
Winnifred Black pulled him in and hugged him fierce, and up against her shoulder he breathed in deep her smell of leather and earth and blood. She held him out at arm’s length. “We’re headed back to Harris’s Ferry. If you need me, find me there.”
Cram nodded and forced a smile.
They loaded up onto Peaches, Cubbins up on the ram’s horns. Cram held up his hand in farewell. Winnie Black gave him a grim smile and a nod.
Cubbins held up his hand in return. “Bye, brother.”
Cram smiled against the sadness, because that’s what you did with little ones. “Bye now.”
The woodswoman clucked once, softly, to Peaches, and then the branches shook and they were gone.
Cram sighed, hauled his bag onto his shoulder, and then ran off to catch up with the others.
CHAPTER 3
Birds in the air, flowers in bloom, the earth beneath yer feet. A ramble in them woods? Ain’t nothin’ finer.
’Cept for maybe a pigeon pie.
—Jimmy Two Hands, hunter extraordinaire
Los Jabalís knew their business. Ruby and her crew’s mercenary escorts tore through the forest with a quiet and speed that recalled Ruby once again to the crew of her father’s ship, the Thrift. She could keep up; the Reeve’s training had at least been good for something. But there was nothing quiet about it. When Ruby moved soft, she had to move slow. The pace Los Jabalís set was a headlong dash, and the only way she could match it was to snap limbs and galumph through leaves like the rawest apprentice. Somewhere her old stealth master Gwath was shaking his head.
Avid had finally reached the top guide rope, and she pulled herself hand over hand back to the crowd of waiting reeves. The press parted in a wave for Wisdom Rool. The reeve lord captain hauled Avid up to the lip of the canyon. The mercenaries gave a rousing cheer, and Avid curtsied in response. She was tall, but the lord captain of the king’s Reeve topped her by more than a head, and he seemed twice as wide. Rool clapped Avid on the shoulder with encouragement, and they had a word, after which she nodded. She turned back and gazed across the gorge. Her eyes met Ruby’s, and for a breathtaking moment Ruby thought the girl might try a Work to jump across. It was too far. A hundred yards, at least. Even Wisdom Rool couldn’t make a jump like that. Could he?
Still, excitement fluttered in Ruby’s chest. When the young reeve cadet turned about and made her way back into the crowd, Ruby couldn’t help feeling just a bit disappointed. A pang of . . . was it loneliness?—struck her. The Jabalís clustered about them, faintly ridiculous in their strange carnival, and none of them knew what Ruby had gone through in the past year. Nor did her friends. One of the only ones who truly might understand had just disappeared into the press of reeves standing united behind their leader.
The rain hammered down on Wisdom Rool. It was too far across to see the ropy scars that twisted all around his body, but they burned in Ruby’s mind’s eye as the man lifted his hand to his mouth. “Ahoy, the gorge!” His voice rang out raspy clear over the wind and rushing water.
Petra alla Ferra stepped forward, leaning forward carelessly over the edge, one hand grasping a stump of guide rope. “Ahoy, the Reeve!” she called. Los Jabalís snickered among themselves. Like the crew of the Thrift loved Ruby’s father, they loved this woman, this woman who had led a band of unruly outlaws against the Reeve and won.
“I am Wisdom Rool, lord captain of the king’s Reeve! To whom do I have the pleasure of speaking?”
Alla Ferra tucked a stripe of silver hair back behind her ear and hesitated. Ruby sympathized. The smart move here would be to make up a name, a false identity to throw the Reeve off the scent. Buy some time.
“Captain Petra alla Ferra at your service! My stouthearted companions here are Los Jabalís!” Another murmur rose up around Ruby: one part fear but two parts approval. Ruby ground her teeth. Didn’t they know they were giving away their advantage? Heedless. Careless.
“A brave company indeed to steal from the house of His Majesty, especially in times like these!” Rool called.
“Tell your friends! We are always looking for work!” Los Jabalís laughed in appreciation. “Besides, this massive gorge between us bolsters my bravery! And I am not certain I understand. What is it we have stolen from you? A bangle? A set of solemn churchman’s garb?”
Rool smoothed down his reeve blacks theatrically in response and then pointed at Ruby, sitting exposed on her rock perch. “That girl. She is a prisoner of England, and we would have her back!”
Ruby’s head spun like a top. He was putting on a sharp, a show for the other reeves. He didn’t want her back. In fact, Wisdom Rool was the one who had let her go. He had given her a rope to climb down the cliff, for Providence’s sake. The lord captain and Ruby had made a deal to steal the notes of the tinker they called the Swede. Ruby had lived up to her part, and Rool had helped her escape to her friends. The rest of the Reeve didn’t know that, though. The crowd of black and gray teachers and students loomed behind Rool: a storm waiting to be unleashed.
Petra alla Ferra swung her head about to peer exaggeratedly at Ruby, as if she were some strange bird. She projected relaxation, amusement even. She pointed at Ruby. “This girl, eh?” She held up her hands in an elegant shrug. “Alas, sir. This is not English soil. The bears and wolves are constables here, and it is their law we obey. Besides, even if this”—she tapped her foot on the rock—“were your land, it is currently on the other side of a canyon from you!” At this, Los Jabalís erupted in cheering and jeers. A few of them had gathered some flowers and began tossing them into the gorge like pining lovers. Ruby shook her head. These people were mad. The Reeve would pursue them to the ends of the earth. Ward Corson and Avid were already leading a detachment scaling down the remains of the bridge. Ruby guessed they could cross the river and get up the sheer face of the canyon before nightfall.
Wisdom Rool stood motionless on the other side. He waited until the cheering subsided.
“Very well then! Please remember that I did ask nicely! When next we meet, perhaps it will be within arm’s reach!”
Petra alla Ferra laughed. “Come if you will, Sir Wisdom! If you catch me, I will give you a kiss!” She blew him one then and stepped back onto the firm ground, igniting a new round of cheers from the Jabalís.
Wayland Teach was waiting for her. The moment of sun was gone, and the rain had taken up again in earnest. Distant thunder rumbled in the distance. He leaned in and muttered something in the huntress’s ear. Alla Ferra’s gaze flitted over to Ruby and then back to her father. She nodded once.
Teach walked over to Ruby and said simply, “Come with me.”
What was he about? As the hunters burst into action, finally making ready for their escape, her father led her farther into the little clearing on the other side of the bridge. A small woman stood motionless amid the jumble, her features completely hidden in a metal mask. Ruby’s friends had followed behind, all their mirth suddenly gone. As one they looked to Ruby’s father.
He stared at Ruby, beard dripping in the rain, mouth open as if he were trying to catch the words of a once-remembered song. A kind of fear took her. Her pulse thundered in her ears. Teach offered Ruby his hand, and she took it. He walked her down into the clearing until she stood opposite the woman in the mask.
“Ruby—” said the captain.
She looked up at him, but he said no more.
Petra alla Ferra had followed them. “Only for a moment,” she said to Teach, “and then we must be on our way.”
He looked at Ruby, then nodded.
Alla Ferra cast her eyes about the clearing at her people. Her voice cut through the downpour. “Ready your weapons!”
Muskets, axes, bows, and swords flew into hands. Three hunters took positions just behind the woman in the mask, weapons ready. The one in the middle was a huge brute, and the edge of a wicked carving knife lay between the masked woman’s shoulder blades.
Ruby scanned the faces of her father and her companions for some hint of information. “What is this?”
No one answered.
What was this grand opera about? Who was this masked woman who struck fear into a company of hardened hunters? Why, in the name of Science, stop their flight from the full might of the Reeve for some sort of overblown mummer’s show? Petra alla Ferra drew a chain from around her neck. At the end of the chain was a green metal key. She held it out to Ruby.
“I don’t understand,” said Ruby. A creeping dread scrabbled up her spine. “I say again, ‘What is this?’”
The masked woman had not moved this whole while, hands clasped up under her chin, as if in prayer. Short chains ran down from just below the engraved ears, binding both her wrists in place. The mask itself encased the woman’s entire head. Its weight rested on two broad shoulder supports. The face was that of an Athenian statue, classic and grave. The eyes were plugged, and a tiny hole opened at the mouth. Twisting across the features, engraved chemystral demons warred with scaled and winged angels.
The rain pounded down. It coursed around the iron eyebrows, rushing across the sculpted, empty eyes and down the cheeks, spattering on the rocks at the woman’s feet.
The wearer of the mask waited, the wrist manacles carved with equations that skittered from the eye. Ruby looked about at the circle of staring faces, witnesses half lit in the rain-swept morning.
The huntress handed her the key. “This is for you to do.”
Ruby almost dropped it, slick in the downpour, but caught herself and willed her hand to stop shaking. It wouldn’t. Using both hands, Ruby managed to get the key into the keyhole, just below the right ear of the mask.
She turned it.
Click.
A small handle popped out of the mask at the right temple, and Ruby pulled it across, the metal face opening like a door on hidden hinges. Time slowed as the pieces of the puzzle fell into place. A woman who could terrify an entire clearing of hard cases. The deep concern for Ruby writ large on everyone’s faces. The way the woman stood, like a mirror to Ruby’s own body. It could be only one person. Ruby put her hands down at her sides, clenched tight, and willed herself to look.
Inside the mask, shadowed but dry, lay a face that almost matched Ruby’s, tangled hair yellow instead of black, tiny bird’s tracks at the eyes where Ruby’s were smooth.
“Hello, Ruby,” said her mother.
Ruby Teach quieted her shaking hand, and then she punched her mother square in the face.
CHAPTER 2
CATHERINE: A slavering horde? A devouring plague, the likes of which our world has never known?
FARNSWORTH: (Shudders) Worse.
CATHERINE: You and I, Farnsworth, we have faced down thieves and villains, pirates and scoundrels. What pack of devils awaits outside that sets you cringing, so?
FARNSWORTH: It is your family, my lady.
CATHERINE: Egad. Bar the door. And fetch my musket.
—Marion Coatesworth-Hay,
A Most Tenacious Flame, Act I, Sc. iii
The whole clearing gasped. Someone said, “Ooooooo.”
Fair being fair, Cram had said it himself, but he couldn’t keep it in. Somewhere in the past months the Ferret had learned to throw a punch, and she had whupped out a good one.
Ruby’s mam stumbled back. The big cook propped her up.
Cram cleared his throat. “Good to have you back, Ferret!” Well, someone had to say something. Ruby turned to him, a painful stew of feelings warring on her face. Poor girl. Not the finest way to meet your mam.
Petra alla Ferra stepped into the silence. She slid past the Ferret and in one motion clapped closed the little door on the iron mask and removed the key. She whirled about, and her voice rang out in the still, wet clearing.
“Come, my boars,” she said, fierce and urgent. “The carnival is over. We have made our presence known, families have been reunited, we have these fine people to deliver to our employer, who has promised us many piles of money, and then we can take ship and sail far from this hostile land!” They hollered and cheered. “I tire of these colonies and yearn for fair Barcelona. The hunt is on, meva familia. Split up and lay many trails. We must confuse them as much as possible. May San Huberto, patron saint of hunters, walk across your tracks. We rendezvous at our special hideaway. Quick and quiet as you can. Go!”
And just like that Los Jabalís were on the move. Little flocks of men and women started peeling off from the clearing like pigeons from an angry tomcat. Ferret and the crew were buckling their rucksacks and checking the straps at the far end of the clearing, so Cram hurried over their way past a chokeberry bush.
The bush hissed at him.
He stopped in his tracks. The wee white flowers were quite pretty, but the wild was tricksy and dangerous. The dense, dripping leaves might hide anything. “Could be reeves, could be a mess of ball-tail cats,” he muttered. “Some fella might need to suss this out.” He looked about. Nobody else was paying any attention. He unfastened his butter churn from its strap across his back and crept closer.
The shrub hissed again.
Cram started back a step but then got a halter on his fear. “That ain’t going to get you anywheres, chokeberry. Name yourself ‘friend’ or ‘foe’ this second, or I call out—”
A gnarled knot of a hand shot out of the bush and yanked him forward. He barely had time to squawk. Before he knew it, he was lying on the ground in the middle of a little ring of chokeberry bushes. He scrabbled around, trying to get his legs under him, ready for the next charge. His attacker moved forward into the shady light.
Winnifred Pleasant Black.
Cram sighed a sigh of relief. “Miss Winnie, you scared me right to death!”
The woodswoman hissed again, then whispered, “Quiet, Cram. I need to speak at you.”
Cram blinked at his teacher. “What is it?”
Winnie Black’s six-year-old son dropped soundlessly out of a tree to the ground and pushed his beaver-head hood back from his eyes. “We’s skarperin’.”
Winnie Black knelt a buskin-clad knee on the mud without hesitation and leaned in close, nodding to the boy. “Cubbins and me are making a break for it.”
Cram’s heart sank. “What? Why? Now that we got the Ferret back, things are looking up.”
“For you perhaps.” The woodswoman’s eyes darted back and forth, searching the foliage. She absently scratched the cheek of her hood, the head of a white wolf. “For us, this journey is turning into a mess of hardscrabble pie.”
Cram’s head reeled inside as if someone had hit him with a frypan. “But Miss Winnie, you—you guided us through the wild. You and the captain got yourselves captivated for us! Without you we would have never saved the Ferret.”
The woodswoman nodded, her flat face still. “That’s right, and my bargain to Wayland Teach and the rest of your people is done. Cubbins and me did what we said we was going to do, and now it’s time to go. Alla Ferra don’t want us or need us anyhow. We were just extra critters she got in her trap when she closed it on Captain Teach.”
Cram’s heart beat faster. “But you’ve been teaching me the ways of the woods and moss and beasts and such—”
“And that’s why I grabbed you.”
Miss Winnie’s mount, the great black goat Peaches, pushed her head through the chokeberry branches as if they were lace curtains and butted up against Cram’s elbow. He pulled some corn out of his pocket and fed her. “Why then?”
Black watched him feed Peaches for a moment. “’Cause we want you to come with us.”
Shock lanced through Cram, with joy on the heels of it, but then overtaken just as quickly by sorrow. “I—”
“Before you answer, hear me out. Alla Ferra and Los Jabalís, they’re after your girl Ruby, and they also want Henry and Athena. The captain, too. Sounds like whoever they’re hired out to will offer a pretty penny for their safe return. Now”—her lips quirked—“whose name didn’t I call out?”
Cram licked his lips. She had a point, but these were his people she was talking about. “Mine, but—”
“No buts about it, boy. You are serving them well, but you are traveling back into a world at war. Talk around the campfires is that the French and English are at each other hammer and tongs.” She spat. “And in times like this people like us”—she held his gaze—“like you and me and Cubbins, people like us tend to get smashed on the forge.”
“What do you say? Lady Athena would never—”
“She would never sacrifice you? Never pay your life in exchange for her own?”
“Never.”
“What about for someone she had a duty to? Like this Ruby? Or someone she loved? Like her pa?”
Cram thought for a moment about that. Little vines of doubt started creeping across his shoulders.
Somewhere on the other side of the bushes, someone called, “Last groups, move out!”
Winnie Black stood and wiped her muddy hands on her leathers. “Time’s run out. If we go now, they won’t miss us until it’s too late, and with reeves on their tails, I wager they won’t try to get us back.” She held out her hand, equal like. “You’d be a full partner with us.”
Peaches worbled low in her throat, and Cubbins’s tiny fingers wrapped around his own.
It pulled at him like taffy. Winnie Black had opened his eyes to woodcraft, to the glory of the forests. She had taught him the ways of beast and fowl and, more to the point, how to be his own man. With Lady A. and the Ferret and the rest headed for the cities, he was going back to a place where the measure of him, if anyone noticed him at all, was the measure of his Lady. His belly twisted something fierce.
He looked down at Cubbins, who stared up at him, unblinking. “Brothers?” the little boy said.
You could have knocked him over with a feather.
Cram took a deep breath, and then he carefully unwound the little fingers. He knelt and looked Cubbins in the eye. “I can’t, little beaver,” he said. “Lady Athena and the professor and Ruby . . . I have to stand by them. They’re my people, just as much as you are.”
Cubbins held his gaze. Then he nodded once, gravely. “Don’t get et.”
Cram smiled, but he couldn’t say nothing. He was flat out of words. He stood back up and looked Winnie Black in the eye, like she had taught him, and then took her hand.
Winnifred Black pulled him in and hugged him fierce, and up against her shoulder he breathed in deep her smell of leather and earth and blood. She held him out at arm’s length. “We’re headed back to Harris’s Ferry. If you need me, find me there.”
Cram nodded and forced a smile.
They loaded up onto Peaches, Cubbins up on the ram’s horns. Cram held up his hand in farewell. Winnie Black gave him a grim smile and a nod.
Cubbins held up his hand in return. “Bye, brother.”
Cram smiled against the sadness, because that’s what you did with little ones. “Bye now.”
The woodswoman clucked once, softly, to Peaches, and then the branches shook and they were gone.
Cram sighed, hauled his bag onto his shoulder, and then ran off to catch up with the others.
CHAPTER 3
Birds in the air, flowers in bloom, the earth beneath yer feet. A ramble in them woods? Ain’t nothin’ finer.
’Cept for maybe a pigeon pie.
—Jimmy Two Hands, hunter extraordinaire
Los Jabalís knew their business. Ruby and her crew’s mercenary escorts tore through the forest with a quiet and speed that recalled Ruby once again to the crew of her father’s ship, the Thrift. She could keep up; the Reeve’s training had at least been good for something. But there was nothing quiet about it. When Ruby moved soft, she had to move slow. The pace Los Jabalís set was a headlong dash, and the only way she could match it was to snap limbs and galumph through leaves like the rawest apprentice. Somewhere her old stealth master Gwath was shaking his head.
