Jonathan Rogers - The Secret of the Swamp King

The impostor twisted his mouth into a sneering smile. “Hello, little brother.”

Aidan staggered back a step. The sword hung by his side, loose in his grip. “I don’t understand.”

“Of course you don’t understand,” Maynard snarled. “How could you understand a man going out and getting what nobody meant to give him? You’ve never had to work for anything. You’ve been given everything you’ve ever had. How could you understand?”

Aidan stood blinking. He couldn’t begin to make sense of what was happening.

“You don’t know what it’s like to be a second son,” Maynard continued. It seemed he had practiced this speech many times to himself. “To come so close to being the heir to Longleaf Manor, but instead to spend a lifetime knowing that Brennus is going to get it, that self-satisfied moron, because he was born fifteen months before you were.

“That’s bad enough. But then a lunatic shows up pretending to be a prophet and convinces everybody that your baby brother is the Wilderking.” He waved a hand dismissively at Aidan. “You! The Wilderking!” He barked one short syllable of a laugh. “The fifth son! That was the last act.” Maynard pushed up from his elbow and rose to his feet, looking Aidan in the face. “I wish you’d explain one thing to me: How do you deserve to be the Wilderking more than I do? That’s one thing I don’t understand.”

Aidan didn’t answer. He couldn’t answer. Maynard’s diatribe went on. “Then I saw what the feechiefolk did to the Pyrthens in the Eechihoolee Forest. I realized that if I could train them, arm them, I wouldn’t have to depend on any half-wit prophet to make me the Wilderking.” He shook his head slowly, condescendingly at Aidan. “Where did you think I’d been these two years?”

Aidan spoke at last. “You have broken Father’s heart.”

Maynard’s smug little smile cracked for a second, but he recovered himself. “Father doesn’t have a heart.” Then he added, more quietly, “Not for me.”

The two brothers stared at each other: the future Wilderking and the false Wilderking. A realization dawned on Aidan. “You wrote the letter to King Darrow, didn’t you?”

Maynard laughed out loud. “Of course I did! One of my plume hunters dropped it in the mail wagon.”

Now Aidan was the one smiling. “It was your letter, you know, that made King Darrow send me to the Feechiefen.”

The irony wasn’t lost on Maynard. His scheme to destroy Aidan had instead destroyed his own little kingdom. But he merely shrugged. He gestured at the sword in Aidan’s hand. “So are you going to stab me? Run me through? Cut me into little pieces?” Maynard stood with outstretched arms, baring himself to his brother’s sword. Aidan didn’t raise his hand. Maynard snorted. “I didn’t think so.” He turned toward the water, stepped into the boat, and began to pole away.

Aidan stepped to the water’s edge. “But, Maynard,” he called after him, “how did you do it?”

Maynard laughed his mean laugh. “Ask your feechie friend,” he called back. “Ask Dobro.”

Aidan stood at the verge of the island and watched his brother disappear around the buttress of a cypress tree. He didn’t move, just stared at the upside-down world reflected in the black water. He was so confused. His dead brother was alive. And yet it didn’t seem like good news. He thought of his father, who was so nearly broken by Maynard’s death. What would it do to him if he ever found out about Maynard’s life, the wickedness to which he had applied his energies these last two years? Maynard could hardly have hatched a scheme better suited to hurt his family, to violate everything Father had taught his sons about the responsibilities of Corenwalder nobles. But one question kept nagging Aidan: Was this all his fault? It was Aidan, after all, who planted the seed of this scheme in Maynard’s head. Maynard would have never believed feechiefolk existed if it weren’t for Aidan.

Aidan turned and ran into the forest. Low-hanging boughs closed above his head, blocking out the light and making it impossible for Aidan to tell east from west, north from south. But Aidan didn’t care. Ground vines reached up and slung him to the forest floor time and again. But he staggered on, unseeing. He pushed through thorny thickets, unmindful of the briars that raked across his bare chest and back. He sweated off the gray mud that had been his only protection from the vicious insects of the Feechiefen. But he didn’t even swat at the bugs or slap at their stings. He was too confused and grief-stricken to care. For hours he blundered in the forest on the south end of Bearhouse. He was broken, bleeding, lost-both inside and outside. He couldn’t even remember how to pray.

Then he blundered into a clearing. He stood on the sandy bank of a blackwater pond, a lagoon in the middle of the island. Huge live oaks, hundreds of years old, sprawled their sturdy branches over Aidan’s head. Their beards of gray moss nodded reassuringly in the gentle breeze. The birds that roosted in their tops had begun their warbling evensong.

The pond was a perfect circle, a little spot of order and symmetry in the teeming, chaotic wildness of Bearhouse. This, Aidan realized, was Round Pond that Carpo and Pickro had spoken of, the planned site of a new, bigger forge that would use the pond for a cooling pool and the great oak trees to feed the fires. He rejoiced that this place of tranquility and beauty had been rescued from his brother. He threw back his head to gaze high into the crowns of the overarching trees. The most beautiful white flowers he had ever seen were suspended in mid-air, soaring from branch to branch. And Aidan remembered what had brought him to Feechiefen in the first place.

Here was the spot described in the Frog Orchid Chant, where oak trees bordered a perfectly black and perfectly round pond. In deepest swamp, the house of bears, An orchid in the spring appears On oaken limb around a pond As black as night and round as sun. It floats in air, a ghostly white. It soars and leaps like frog in flight. And in the orchid’s essence pure Is melancholy’s surest cure.

Each orchid was a dazzling white, its wide mouth and three petals forming a body about the size of a bullfrog. And from that main body, two long streamers dangled, long and bent like the legs of a leaping frog. They grew on long stems arching from the high branches of the live oaks. When the breeze blew, the frog orchids bobbed up and down in midair like leaping frogs, their long legs coiling and stretching with the motion.

There were hundreds of them in the treetops, a whole squadron of frogs flying through the evening air. Aidan laughed for the joy of the frog orchids. He cried, too, for their beauty. His melancholy was cured. And a prayer was answered that he hadn’t been able to pray.

The next day, the feechies lit the Bearhouse forge fires again. But this was the last time. They fanned the fires to a white heat only so they could melt their cold-shiny weapons and implements back to raw, unformed metal. North Swamp feechies and Bearhouse feechies alike spent a festive day throwing things into the fire and watching them burn-steel swords and axes, arrows and spears, iron shovels and hammers, padlocks and hinges-anything made of cold-shiny.

They planned a big fire jumping for that evening, but Aidan was anxious to leave. He had King Darrow’s frog orchid, still attached to the tree limb it grew on, and he didn’t want to wait a day longer than he had to, lest the orchid not survive the trip.

The feechies left the forge fires long enough to see Aidan off. He was nearly senseless from the head butting by the time he actually made it to the landing. Before stepping into the boat, Aidan sought out Orlo and Pobo, who no longer answered to the name of Sands. Their heroics leading the attack on the false Wilderking’s palisades had earned them last names. “Orlo Polejumble,” Aidan intoned with exaggerated dignity, “Pobo Smashpine.” He bowed deeply. “I am pleased to make your acquaintance.”