The Tracker by Jordan Reece Page B

when you stop seeing them altogether but trust they are still there, when your mind has shrunk to the space that encloses it, that is when you can be let out of your cage. Where will you go? Why would you go anywhere? This is where you belong, so here you stay. Perhaps for an orphan it does not feel so limiting. There is no mother with a Sevenday dinner and a cheery hearth fire for you. No siblings either? No. So you have no three big brothers coming up the stoop to see if you’re around for a card game, or a roof thatching after a storm.” He gazed at Arden with pity. “Thirteen unwilling searches, and this will be fourteen. In one of them I will strike it lucky and escape. I am not a dog or plaything for those who can afford me. In the pearls, the tracker belongs to all from scrabbles to high society.”
    “Someone will just reclaim you there,” Dieter said with assurance.
    “Hah! Let them try! I was only caught because I went low the Cascades in search of a boy who went missing. Desperate for a little adventuring and Dava was missing on purpose. But he didn’t say goodbye to his parents or leave a note on his pillow, just upped and vanished, and they wanted me to put their minds at ease. Humber and I reached an inn at the highest of the High Reaches and there I was set upon by Lord Zamin’s baboons. We fought, we fought hard, but we were grossly outnumbered. They dragged me away and left Humber bloody on the ground. Let Zamin send his baboons into the Cascades! It won’t end with a tracker recaptured but a pile of rocks over a pool of blood. The twists and turns in the mountains hide the pearls well even from dragon flyers, should Zamin send those for me next. I will never be bothered again. And I will have the criers of the pearls announce that no tracker will track low the Cascades ever again. Runaway goats, adventurous boys, people would rather wash their hands of them than lose their trackers. I will be back there soon enough. Fourteen, now, that is a lucky number.”
    “Lucky for us since we have a penchant to control you and unlucky for you,” Dieter clarified.
    “For Dagad’s sake, squire, stop taunting the beast,” Master Maraudi said. “Whatever has gotten into you? Come ride up here beside me.”
    “Can’t respect something that doesn’t respect its own work,” Dieter said, obeying the order. Then all was quiet save the clopping of the horses.
    Few lived upon Shattered Hill, and those that did had homes only at the gentle swell of its lowest points. In olden times, the Odri royal family had lived in the palace at its top, and fine apartments were beneath it for ambassadors and visiting courtiers. All of it had fallen in war over five hundred years ago, and the ground was charmed by the spell of a talented but vengeful green-growth penchant from Hav. No one could rebuild there, though some had tried periodically over the centuries.
    Arden had heard of Shattered Hill in his sporadic history lessons. The palace and surrounding buildings had literally shattered, collapsing the roofs and scattering great white stones of its walls everywhere. Parts of walls still stood here and there alongside the steep road they traveled, jutting up like fangs with their fallen comrades resting among weeds. Attempts at newer construction were more whole, but weeds had grown up the walls and were inexorably pulling them down. The penchant’s spell was still effective after all this time. The weeds could not be cut or untangled from the buildings; they could not be poisoned or vanished by another spell. Until the power gave off, if it ever did, this place would only ever be a monument to the old Havanath-Odri-Loria wars.
    To see this place was grand. Generations of royal children had once run through these overtaken gardens; courtiers in fine dress had swept down the walkways to now decrepit apartments. The search party rode up the hill, past the remnants of the palace and to a grassy field that stretched to the