Robert Redick - The Red wolf conspiracy

From that day on they ate smaller meals, and burned less coal on chilly nights. And when he returned to school his classmates greeted him with a song:

He's Pazel Pathkendle, his daddy went bad,

His mother went mad with a mar-mo-set.

It was enough to make him hope Suthinia would never again feel the need to protect him. But her master plan for her children's safety had not even begun.

Pazel's one advantage was Chadfallow, who still dined with the Pathkendles weekly. The Special Envoy was now the most popular man in Ormael. After the Grygulv disaster the mayor of Ormael sent him back to his Emperor to beg for protection. The doctor returned just as a wild rumor of invasion was spreading about the city-none could say how it started-and cheers greeted him as he disembarked in Ormaelport.

"Your plea has reached the Ametrine Throne," he told the crowd. "You shall hear from the Emperor shortly."

Pazel could not have found a better champion. Everyone knew that Arqual had fought the Mzithrin to a draw in the Second Sea War. Instead of the Traitor's Son, Pazel was now honorary nephew of the Envoy, the man who would save Ormael. The boy understood little of these matters, but he knew Chadfallow had reversed his fortunes, and loved him for it.

Just this once, moreover, Chadfallow had come with a better gift than grammar books. It was a kite in the shape of a hummingbird, which Pazel strung with fishing twine scavenged in the port and flew from the hilltops above the plum orchards. The kite was his prize toy for several months, until the day a sudden calm plunged it into the sea off Quarrel's Cliff.

Walking home that oddly still evening, Pazel remained a child, sniveling at the loss of a toy. But when he reached the stone house he found the courtyard packed with strangers. Big, sweat-soaked men. Gold helmets, shirts of metal plate, black spears crusted with gore. They were milling beneath his sister's orange tree, snatching fruit, breaking branches. On their shields was the gold fish-and-dagger symbol of Arqual. Chadfallow's brethren, come at last.

Children who have never known danger can sometimes grasp its essence in a heartbeat. Pazel stood there only an instant. Then he sprinted around the garden wall, climbed the grapevine at the corner, leaped onto the first-floor roof and slipped through his bedroom window.

The soldiers were in the kitchen downstairs, feasting and bellowing. Of his mother and Neda there was no sign. Pazel was barely eleven, but he saw clearly how everything that comprised his life would vanish into those snatching hands, that belching laughter, which were also Arqual: the real Arqual behind the doctor's finery and gifts. He took the skipper's knife his father had left him, and a thumb-sized ivory whale that had been his mother's nursery toy. Lost, he stood by his neatly made bed. He drank the water he had demanded the night before and then disdained, looking at his books and toy soldiers and model ships until the laughter reached the upstairs hall, and the doorknob turned, and Pazel fled.

From the plum orchards he saw the city burning, her great gates thrown down and the Arquali troops cheering from the wall. He saw twelve warships in port, and eight more stalled on the windless bay. The boom of cannon fire rolled up the hills, followed by the barking of dogs, hysterical and forlorn.

They caught him at dawn, quaking among the dew-damp trees. A gleeful corporal snatched the whale and the skipper's knife, then complained and kicked him because he hadn't kept the blade sharp. When he learned where Pazel lived the man kicked him again, and beat him. Where are the women? he screamed. Two beautiful women! I want them!

When Pazel made no answer the beating grew worse. He covered his head and tried not even to think of Neda or his mother. He feigned unconsciousness, but a point came when he was no longer pretending.

He awoke, bloodied, in a crowd of boys, some of whom he knew. They were all chained to the flagpole in his schoolyard, where a week before he had displayed the kite to jealous friends and boasted of his Arquali "uncle." On the roadside, Ormali captives passed by in horse carts, wearing heavy chains.

The days blurred to an aching trance. Once he woke to hear a voice shouting his name and looked up into the face of a man with mud in his hair and one eye bruised shut, who had somehow escaped his captors and rushed toward him. The apparition fell to his knees and touched Pazel's shoulder, wheezing as though about to expire: "Hold on, child, hold on!" The next instant two Arquali warriors fell on him with clubs. Only hours later did Pazel realize he had been looking at the headmaster.

That morning the soldiers marched them to the Slave Terrace at Ormaelport. The city had banned slavery in his grandfather's time; the Terrace had become a place where lovers watched the sea. But the old stockades where human beings were sold like sheep had never been dismantled, and the Arqualis saw their original purpose at a glance. In later years Pazel tried not to recall the horrors of that morning-the poking and haggling, the shrieks of pain and the sizzle of the branding iron, troublemakers beaten senseless or merely pushed into the harbor, chained. It was too awful; his mind tended to leap forward to the moment just before he himself was to be branded.

The boy just ahead of him was still screaming from the touch of the red-hot iron to the back of his neck, the slavemaster cursing as he pressed a shard of mountain ice to the welt to set the brand. Satisfied, he nodded to the men holding Pazel. But before they could chain him to the branding-post, an Arquali sergeant waded into the crowd and seized his arm.

"This one's already sold," he said.

He was an aging fighter, sighing at each step. He dragged Pazel to the far end of the Slave Terrace, then turned to look at the horrified boy.

"You've sailed?" he demanded.

Pazel opened his mouth, but no sound emerged. He had not spoken in two days.

"I asked if you've sailed."

"Sailed!" Pazel blurted. "No, sir, never. My father was Captain Gregory, but he didn't want me sailing. I'm a natural scholar, he said, and though I'm not a proud boy it's true I speak four languages, sir, and write three well enough for court, and know my complex sums, and he said I was not to be wasted on the mucking ocean when there was such a thing as school, which I rather enj-"

The sergeant slapped him with a leather-hard palm. "School's over, cub. Now listen: you sailed with your father, and you were never ill at sea. Repeat it."

"I… I sailed with my father, and I was never ill at sea." The sergeant nodded gravely. "You ask the old men, the sheet-anchor men, to teach you your rigging, and your knots, and your shipboard stations, your whistles and flags. You'll be learning a new language, see? The language of a ship. Learn it fast, natural scholar, or you'll feel that iron yet."

Then he had put an envelope in Pazel's hand. It was a fine, gilt-edged envelope, sealed with wax the color of a rooster's comb and addressed in an elegant hand:

Captain Onnabik Faral

The Swan

"You'll hand this to Faral," said the sergeant. "None other. You listening, cub?"

"Yes, sir!" But Pazel could not take his eyes from the envelope. The writing looked familiar. But who would help him? Who could, with the city ablaze?

He raised his eyes-and saw the answer looking back at him. Across the Terrace, at a table outside the oystermen's pub, sat Dr. Ignus Chadfallow. In the squalid crowd he looked nobler than ever, like a prince wandered into a ragpickers' fair. Pazel would have run to him at once, but the sergeant grabbed his elbow.

Bending close to his ear, the old warrior said, not unkindly, "The sea's better than chains, lad, but it's a deadly place to be anyone's fool. Beware of smiles, eh?"