“I’d almost forgotten,” said Aidan. “We’ll be together again.” Tambluff University was just around the corner from the castle drawbridge.
“But I don’t know what the professors at the university are going to be able to teach that boy,” Errol remarked. “He knows the old lore better than anybody I’ve ever seen-except the Truthspeaker, maybe. He’s read every book in the library.”
Father and son both fell silent. Both were thinking of the other Errolson, the missing one. Maynard had disappeared two years earlier, less than a year after Aidan moved to Tambluff. He went out hunting in the Eastern Wilderness and never came back.
Everyone had given Maynard up for dead. That was just the way of the Eastern Wilderness: sometimes people went out and never came back. It was a vast and perilous place. Only Errol still held out hope for his son’s safe return. But it was a hope fueled by a father’s love and blind faith-not by any reasonable expectation that Maynard could possibly be alive. But even Errol’s faith had begun to waver. Every day he looked a little grayer.
Aidan had already decided not to tell his father the whole story of why he was headed downriver. He would find out soon enough, whether Aidan told him or not. Now that he saw his father’s troubled state, Aidan was even more convinced it would do more harm than good to explain that King Darrow had sent him on a fool’s errand, an impossible mission he didn’t expect Aidan to survive. “King Darrow has sent me on a mission down the river.”
“Hmmm…” said Errol. “Sounds important.” There was a pause. Aidan looked down at his boots. Errol pressed him. “Too important for you to tell your father about?”
Aidan was between a rock and a hard spot. It would be a disaster to tell his father that he was headed alone into the very heart of the Feechiefen Swamp. Father would be worried sick, and rightly so. He would probably try to stop him from going, command him as his father to stop this insane quest. And Aidan wouldn’t do that. To quit his quest would mean self-banishment. King Darrow had ordered him not to return without the frog orchid.
Not to tell, however, would be a slap in Father’s face. Until recently, Errol had been one of Darrow’s chief advisers. The king did almost nothing without Errol’s knowledge. Had Darrow now entrusted Aidan with a task that was too secret for Errol to know about? Had Errol’s fifteen-year-old son surpassed him in the king’s confidence?
Errol saw the struggle on Aidan’s face. “I understand,” he said. “I won’t ask you to betray your king’s trust.” Aidan nodded his head. But he couldn’t meet his father’s gaze. The silence between father and son was mercifully broken by the clanging of Moira’s dinner bell.
Moira was bringing around pies she had made from plum preserves, but as usual, Percy was so busy talking to the guests that he had hardly touched his dinner of venison and sweet potatoes.
“So if you needed timber at Last Camp,” Percy asked Massey, “why didn’t you just cut down some of the trees down there? Hustingreen to the Big Bend is a long float.”
Massey straightened in his chair and answered self-importantly, “I ain’t a timber cutter,” as if felling trees were beneath the dignity of an alligator hunter.
“Well, if you don’t mind my saying so,” observed Percy, “you aren’t much of a rafthand either.” Percy’s twin Jasper, who had taken off from his studies to eat dinner, couldn’t help but snicker. Ebbe, standing behind Lord Errol’s chair, raised the back of his hand to his mouth as if to conceal a laugh.
Lord Errol intervened, mindful of his guests’ feelings. “Why do you need a raft of timber at Last Camp?”
“We’re building a stockade,” answered Floyd.
“A stockade?” asked Errol. “Who would attack hunters and trappers?”
“We don’t know,” said Floyd. He was grimly serious now. “That’s what’s got us worried.”
“Somebody wants us gone from Last Camp,” explained Massey. “They hide in the woods and shoot up the camp with arrows, throw spears in amongst us.”
“Just the other day,” said Floyd, “Massey was leaning up against a tree resting after a day-long hunt, when a spear come sailing in and stuck in the tree just above his head.”
“Parted my ever-loving hair like a Tambluff dandy,” added Massey. With his right hand he showed the motion of the spearpoint, imitating the noise of an arrow in flight striking a tree: “Sssssssssst-thwonnnngg!”
“I never seen such a near miss,” said Floyd.
“Was it a near miss,” asked Jasper, “or a warning shot? A man who can part your hair with a spear can kill you just as easily.”
“Well, whatever it was,” said Massey, “near miss, warning shot, or friendly hello, we’re building ourselves a fort.”
“And we’re building it strong,” added Floyd.
The diners returned to their plum pies. Errol, poking at his rather than eating it, finally asked the question he always asked anyone from the Eastern Wilderness. “Have you seen my son Maynard?”
Massey and Floyd looked at each other, then at Errol. “No sir,” answered Floyd. “Why?” Errol didn’t answer, only picked more at his pie.
Mostly to fill the dead air, Percy asked, “Do you boys ever run into plume hunters in the Eastern Wilderness?”
Massey looked a little shocked, as if someone had asked him if any of his friends were grave robbers, but Massey did his best to answer politely. “No, plume hunters know they ain’t welcome at Last Camp, and they stay clear of us in the forest too.”
Errol’s face went from red to purple, and he pounded the table. “Percy!” he shouted. “How can you sit at my table and even speak of plume hunters?” He pushed his pie away. His appetite was ruined. “The vile criminals-how I’d like to get my hands on a few plume hunters!
“It’s a mean business, plume hunting. Trading a heron or an egret’s life for two feathers on a dandy’s hat-to pluck a dead bird’s plumes and leave the rest of it on the ground to rot. Nobody gets fed. Nobody gets clothed. Just feathers for a dandy’s hat.”
It was a good thing, thought Aidan, that his father hadn’t been to Tambluff lately. His old-fashioned frontier sensibilities would have been shocked by the extravagance of the latest spring fashions. The Pyrthen Empire may have been Corenwald’s bitterest enemy, but the Pyrthens still defined clothing styles for the known world, and wealthy Corenwalders worked hard to mimic the Pyrthens’ outlandish dress. Men and women alike, bowing and nodding their elaborately plumed hats at one another, bobbed up and down Tambluff’s High Street like tall ships under sail.
“That’s not the worst of it either,” continued Errol. “The navy stopped a smugglers’ ship near Middenmarsh last week. They found bales and bales of plumes.” He paused a minute, finding it hard to finish saying what everyone at the table could figure out for himself. “Those plumes were headed for Pyrth. There’s hardly a plume bird left on the continent. The Pyrthens have used them all up for hats and horse bridles. So somebody is sending them ours… for as long as they last.”
Errol wiped his mouth with his napkin and stood to leave. It was clear from his abrupt manner that he was finished talking about plume hunting. “Percy,” he said, “go get a field wagon and carry me around to see how the melons are coming along.”
Chapter Seven
Aidan spent the rest of the afternoon in the library with Jasper. He was hungry for any old lore related to the frog orchid, the Feechiefen Swamp, or the ways of the feechiefolk.
The two brothers leaned over a huge map of Corenwald, stretched out to cover the whole library table. Here was the kingdom in its entirety. In the north, the high mountains towered over dales, hollows, and high country lakes. A different kind of wildness prevailed there-not the swampy, sandy wildness of Aidan’s native haunts, but a wildness of crags and rocks and waterfalls, of elk and brown bears three times the size of a man.