Blightborn by Chuck Wendig Page B

sweet songs of the two gods in his ear.
    And right now he needs a message bad.
    Eben moves to the floor, and it groans beneath him as he clasps his hands together and makes a silent entreaty to the Lord and Lady in their manse above, begging them to come to him and guide him, to bless him with a message once more.
    He doesn’t know how long he sits like that, but soon his knees begin to ache, and the shadows in the room shift with the passage of the sun. His face pulses with a heartbeat that feels like the heavy hooves of spooked cattle stampeding across the dead and blasted earth, and each beat brings a widening, thickening aura of pain. It moves beyond the margins of his skin, feeling as if his head is growing, swelling, twice as big, then twice that again, then as big as the face of the fallen Wheatley clock tower, then bigger than this house, then the moon, then the sun, then—
    Outside. Voices.
    He scrambles to stand.
    Eben goes to the second-floor window and peers out over the street as a fancy, fat-bottomed boat slides into town, the quartet of sails bulging with the wind the way a child’s cheeks puff out as he tries to blow spit-bubbles. The boat slows, and a drag-anchor drops.
    First one off the hovering yacht is a spindly, gawky thing—a young girl whose copper-wire hair is all akimbo, and when shehits the ground, he sees the wobble in her knees. She doesn’t have her sail-legs.
    Next onto the ground is a little towheaded urchin who crawls from the mast like a monkey and lands like a spring—one hop, then a second.
    Third off is a man almost as old as Eben himself—a man both lean and paunchy, with mussy hair tucked under a crumpled blue hat. The man moves slowly, peering out from under the brim of that hat with a dark, muddy gaze. Looks like he’s been run through a corn-press, Eben thinks. He recognizes the signs of sin. The wages of a wasted life.
    Last off: another boy. Teen. This one built like a bull, with broad shoulders, thick neck, and a head to match.
    The bull whoops and turns his finger like a carousel.
    “All right,” he says. “Take a few. Poke through the buildings. They might be here or might’ve stayed here.”
    That one’s the captain then.
    The gawky girl puts her hand over her brow like a visor.
    “You think Cael and the boys would’ve stopped here?” she asks.
    The other boy scowls. “Don’t ask me stupid questions, Wanda. Just close that flytrap you call a mouth and do as I say, okay?”
    Eben smiles.
    He just found a new path toward vengeance. He utters a small prayer of thanks to the Lord and Lady and quickly gets to swaddling his face with some dirty rags he found in the kitchen downstairs.
    Then the Remittance Man hurries to meet some new friends.
    Wanda doesn’t like being hated. And Boyland Barnes Jr. hates her. She’s used to being dismissed, sure. Pushed aside or looked over or downright forgotten, but nobody’s ever seemed to hate her before, and the look in his eyes tells her that Boyland is the first. His gaze wills her to wither, and she does, though she imagines a day when she does not.
    Wanda wonders why he hates her so bad.
    Cael, she figures. It’s irrational that he’d hate her as much as or more than Cael, but Momma always told her that you can’t count on people to make as much sense as you want them to.
    Still, it wounds her that Boyland despises her for something she didn’t even do. Hate by association.
    Damn that Cael.
    And damn her for the butterfly flutter in her chest and belly any time she thinks of him. Even that name: Cael .
    She wants him back. She needs him back.
    Because Cael is her Obligated.
    That has to mean something out here. That is a bond that counts. It’s not just love. It’s a promise.
    And Wanda is real about her promises.
    Still. Boyland may hate her, but Rigo’s father, Jorge, doesn’t seem to care one whit about her. She doesn’t think he’s looked at her once in the couple-few days they’ve been out here. And as for