The Tracker by Jordan Reece Page A

and brothers are very proud to have a tracker in the family. My brother Humber always comes with me on the searches to carry things; my brother Cusano and his wife mind my animals and house when I’m gone. My brother Seton and my mother stay with the family of the missing to make sure they eat and sleep. They care for their animals and babies. The only matter on the family’s plate is to worry. Seton never tells them not to worry. Anything can have happened and he is too wise to give them false hope. But he tells them that they will have an answer. It is the wondering that is the worst. All of us were scrabbles until it became known that I could track; a fluke of nature in my blood raised our circumstances tremendously.”
    “What does that mean? Scrabbles?” Arden asked.
    “Poor. Rough homes, rough land, rough food, rough trade. But everything changes for a tracker’s family. It is a position of honor. Now we don’t have to scratch the dirt for measly vegetables to sell at market, and have my mother clean homes. We work hard but live well instead of working hard and living poorly. My brothers all have fine homes now, and Cusano’s wife is the third daughter of the crier. She never would have looked twice at a scrabbles man, but the beloved older brother of a tracker? Oh, yes, she would look indeed. I hired a scrabbles girl to clean my mother’s home.”
    “No one asked about your mother,” Dieter muttered, his eyes drifting away to the shops.
    “She was bent and brittle at thirty; she is tall and strong at fifty,” the tracker said undaunted. “And she learned to read! Marched herself into school with the little children, put a shiny red apple on the master’s desk, and the master wouldn’t turn out the mother of a tracker. No, no, he just laughed when she apologized for being a few decades late for class and told her to take a seat in the back where the desks were biggest. Being learned had been a dream of hers since childhood, a dream most scrabbles never achieve because they have to work. Now she owns a shelf of books in which she takes great pride and gives reading lessons to any interested scrabbles in the evening so that they might be poor but not foolish. And no more three meals a day of dust porridge for her! She can afford the best meat at the butcher’s. Have you ever eaten dust porridge?”
    “Modest meals in the orphanage, but never anything called dust porridge,” Arden said.
    “An orphan. That is sad. One eats dust porridge when hungry, and finishes a bowl hungrier than when one started. I never dreamed that I would miss the taste of that, but I have to say, after I was stolen and brought here, I would welcome it.”
    “You will not go hungry on this search.”
    “A kind jailor is still a jailor, so don’t pat yourself overly much on the back. Once you get what you want of me, you’ll return me to that horrible old man and his horrible staff and I will go back to being their kicked, starved dog.”
    “Maybe if you wouldn’t try to escape so much, they would be better to you,” Dieter said. “Ever think about that?”
    “Stupid boy, if you were taken from your home and locked in a cage, would you accept this as your lot in life or try to get out? Ever think about that ?” the tracker said in derision. “I want to go home, as you would. I am insulted to be treated this way. I showed my animals more respect than I have been shown low the Cascades.”
    “Arden belongs to the king for his penchant, as all penchants do, and I don’t see him complaining about having to work in the zoo,” Dieter needled. “He does what he is told to do. What about your unwilling searches? How many of those?”
    “Thirteen of them.” The tracker looked at Arden. “So your life is not your own either, eh? Pity. You’re just jailed outside the bars.”
    “I do not consider myself jailed,” Arden disagreed.
    “Yet you are confined. When you accept your bars, when you see them even in your dreams,