Four Roads Cross (Craft Sequence #5)(72)

The apartment settled as they all prepared for sleep. Through the wall his bedroom shared with Peter’s, Matt heard Hannah and Ellen talking in low voices like the bubbling of a fountain. Donna held him, and he held her back.

“You’re right,” he said.

She pressed her face into the side of his head and hummed satisfaction. “Call for a mason. Set this occasion down in stone.”

“I say that a lot.”

“Not out loud.”

“The girls need space. Seeing Corbin in the hospital like that—he’s sick, has been the last three years, since June left.”

“Sleep, Matt. There will still be problems in the morning.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” he said, but kissed her, said he loved her, and heard her say she loved him back. He waited on his back. His wife’s breathing slowed. The ceiling was an unmapped territory.

Soft ghostlight glowed in the crack beneath the bedroom door: Claire, reading, in the living room.

“Claire, go to sleep!”

Ellen’s voice.

The light shut off with a click, and they slept.





36

The next morning’s dawn found Matt and Claire returning from their rounds. Their golem cart plodded up the long low ridge, beyond which Alt Coulumb’s towers peaked. A flash of color cut across the road from tree to tree, and somewhere, something sang a sweet song.

“Beautiful bird,” Claire said.

“The singer or the flier?”

“Both.”

“The singer’s not a bird. It’s a gracklet.”

She turned to Matt. “What?”

“Spider-lizard kind of thing. Mimics birdsong. You can tell because of the hiss before it sings.”

“Do I want to know why it mimics birdsong?”

“Guess.”

“Gross.”

“Circle of life,” he said, and hummed a few bars of a mystery play song. “Gracklets are good for the forest. They keep the bird-mind from eating people.”

“Now you’re just making fun of me.”

“It’s in the history books. The first Old World settlers came to Alt Coulumb after a plague hit the city, around the fall of the Empire in Telomere. Before the plague, locals used rallybirds to talk with people a long way off, because the birds’ minds tie together. In plague years, the birds escaped, bred uncontrolled—and the more there were, smarter they got. Millions of them lived in the forests at the height. They’d eat crops ripe for harvest, pick a man’s flesh from his bones if they wanted.”

“And the gracklet?”

“A trader went to Southern Kath and found that even though the coastal jungle near Ajaia’s land was full of wild rallybirds, they didn’t get so smart. She asked around and learned that gracklet kept the birds in check. Their song breaks up the bird-mind, and then they eat the birds. The trader, she went into the heart of the forest and came back with a chest full of gracklet eggs. Planted them in the Geistwood, and here we are today.”

“Where did you learn all this?”

“I read a book. Besides, it’s part of the language.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well—the larval stage of your gracklet, called a vurm, looks like a centipede yea long.” He held his hands a foot apart. “They make cocoons in the trees. The rallybirds didn’t realize what was going on until it was too late. But the more they lost, the dumber they all became, and grackle can eat a lot of rallybirds. More food makes ’em breed faster.”

“Okay,” she said, warily.

“Why do you think, when we talk about the virtues of industry and clean living, we say, ‘The rallybird gets the vurm’?”

Golem feet trod down the road with unbroken stride, and wagon wheels rolled.

She hit him in the shoulder, hard.

“Ow.”

She hit him again, then pushed him so he almost toppled over.

“Careful. You’ll spill my coffee.”

“Do you know what a dad joke is?”

“Nothing wrong with a good shaggy-gracklet story.”

“You are a horrible person.” But she had to say it through laughter. He rubbed his shoulder where she’d punched him. “I thought Corbin’s jokes were bad. Do you get them from the same guy? I could tell the Blacksuits and get him locked up, for a nice reasonable time like let’s say forever.”

“Your dad tells jokes?”

“Not as much as he used to.”

He remembered that, dimly—Corbin Rafferty never precisely pleasant, but at least wry, vicious in a way that put all the room but him to chuckling. Recently, though, just mean. “How is he, at home?” Felt dirty to be talking about this after a good laugh, but for once, and maybe because of the laugh, Claire seemed in a mood to talk.

“Drunk a lot. You’ve seen him angry. He gets sad too, when he doesn’t think anyone else sees. Keeping life together is hard for him.”

“Is he—is he hard to you and your sisters?”

“That in the square, that’s as mean as I’ve seen him. He shouts. Shoves. Screams. Breaks things. Sometimes we shout back. Hannah especially. We’re all cats drowning in a bag at home.” Claire flicked the reins, though the golem did not change stride. “After Mom, he tried to keep it together. He drank to take the edge off, I guess. Only Corbin has a lot of edges. You can take off one after another until only a little nub in the middle’s left, and once you’ve gone that far maybe you keep going.”