Praise for - waterbrookmultnomah.com · Praise for Auralia’s Colors “Through word, image, and color Jeffrey Overstreet has crafted a work of art. From first to final page this

Praise for Auralia’s Colors

“Through word, image, and color Jeffrey Overstreet has crafted a work of art.From first to final page this original fantasy is sure to draw readers in. Auralia’s

Colors sparkles.”—JANET LEE CAREY, award-winning author of The Beast of Noor

and Dragon’s Keep

“Jeffrey Overstreet’s first fantasy, Auralia’s Colors, and its heroine’s cloak of won-ders take their power from a vision of art that is auroral, looking to the returnof beauty, and that intends to restore spirit and mystery to the world. The bookachieves its ends by the creation of a rich, complex universe and a series of dra-matic, explosive events.”

—MARLY YOUMANS, author of Ingledove and The Curse of the

Raven Mocker

“In Auralia’s Colors, Overstreet masterfully extends the borders of imagination.Whereas so many writers sacrifice characterization for plot or substitute weird-ness for substance, Overstreet does neither. His characters are richly crafted butstill recognizably human and, therefore, inhabitable. This is a wild and intricatetale, a high-octane, full-throttle fantasy. Fasten your seat belts.”

—GINA OCHSNER, author of The Necessary Grace to Fall and People I Wanted to Be

“The late John Gardner said that a good story should unfold like a vivid andcontinuous dream. With Auralia’s Colors, Jeffrey Overstreet has crafted just sucha story, one that will leave readers ready to dream with him again.”

—JOHN WILSON, editor, Books & Culture

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“ Jeffrey Overstreet weaves myth and reality, hope and loss into his tapestry, andhe ties off The Red Strand with a cataclysmic flourish.”

—KATHY TYERS, author of The Firebird Trilogy and Shivering World

“Welcome to the land of the fangbear, the muckmoth, and the MidnightSwindler. To a story brimming with lovely literary rewards and a cast of charac-ters by turns loathsome and hilarious, winsome and mysterious. It’s not oftenone gets to be present at the birth of a classic, but Auralia’s Colors is that kindof storytelling. A true delight on so many levels.”

—CLINT KELLY, author of the Sensations Series: Scent, Echo,

and Delicacy

“In this new fantasy novel,Auralia’s Colors, Jeff Overstreet weaves together a widecast of compelling characters and an intriguing story in the setting of a worldboth imaginative and arresting—a world phantastic in both old and new mean-ings of that word. Readers will care what happens both to the characters of thetale (all of them) and to the realm of Abascar itself and will not want to putthis book down.”

—MATTHEW DICKERSON, coauthor of From Homer to Harry Potter:

A Handbook on Myth and Fantasy and Ents, Elves, and Eriador:

The Environmental Vision of J. R. R.Tolkien

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JeffreyOverstreet

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AURALIA’S COLORS

PUBLISHED BY WATERBROOK PRESS

12265 Oracle Boulevard, Suite 200Colorado Springs, Colorado 80921A division of Random House Inc.

The characters and events in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual personsor events is coincidental.

ISBN: 978-1-4000-7252-1

Copyright © 2007 by Jeffrey OverstreetMap copyright © 2007 by Rachel Beatty

Published in association with the literary agency of Alive Communications Inc., 7680 Goddard Street, Suite 200, Colorado Springs, CO 80920, www.alivecommunications.com.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form orby any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by anyinformation storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

WATERBROOK and its deer design logo are registered trademarks of WaterBrook Press,a division of Random House Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Overstreet, Jeffrey.

Auralia’s colors : the red strand of the Auralia thread / Jeffrey Overstreet. — 1st ed.p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-4000-7252-1I. Title.PS3615.V474A95 2007813’.6—dc22

2007017881

Printed in the United States of America2007—First Edition

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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For Anne

whose poetry awakens the ears of my earsand opens the eyes of my eyes

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Contents

Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi

1. Old Thieves Make a Discovery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

2. The Concert of Stitching . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

3. A Basket of Blue Stones . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19

4. The Merchants’ Daughter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28

5. The Ale Boy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47

6. Summoner and Stranger . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59

7. Night on the Lake . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69

8. The Unguarded Gallery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78

9. Breaking the Blacklode . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90

10. A Day of Rain and Robbery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103

11. Promontory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114

12. Stricia’s View . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128

13. Cup, Dagger, and Mask . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140

14. Auralia’s Colors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153

15. Cal-raven Comes Home . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165

16. Inquisitors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 182

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17. Radegan’s Gamble . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 194

18. The Dreamers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203

19. The Ring of Trust . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211

20. Blood Tidings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217

21. A Thief in the Underkeep . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 228

22. The Jailer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237

23. Cal-marcus Turns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 245

24. The Promise Broken . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257

25. Laughter in Chains . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 266

26. The Underkeep Opens . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 272

27. The Quake . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 286

28. At the Edge of the Fearblind North . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 293

29. A Storm of Remembering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 300

30. The Remnant of Abascar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 316

Epilogue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 329

x C o n t e n t s

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Acknowledgments

So many people contributed to this, the fulfillment of my lifelong dream. If Ithanked them all in print, that would be a volume in itself.

Above all, I thank Anne, my best listener, my favorite editor, and a poetwhose journal entries enchant me.

I thank my parents, Larry and Lois Overstreet, for investing time, prayer,and resources in my writing. And I thank my brother Jason, who patiently lis-tened to me read my first storytelling attempts when we were very young.

I owe a great debt of gratitude to the many teachers and professors who gaveme encouragement and showed such patience, especially Michael Demkowicz,David Robinson, Luke Reinsma, and Rose Reynoldson.

I am also grateful to Linda Wagner and to the members of her sci-fi/fantasy writing circle—Beth Harris, John and Margaret Sampson Edgell, andPeyton Burkhart—who critiqued the earliest drafts of this story; to my co-workers at Seattle Pacific who endured my zombielike state during the finalmonths; to Wayne Proctor and Fritz Liedtke, who offered suggestions alongthe way; and especially to Danny Walter, whose insightful questions inspiredseveral years of revisions.

As I wrote, I thought of this project as a personal thank-you note to J. R. R. Tolkien for The Lord of the Rings, Richard Adams for Watership Down,

Stephen R. Lawhead for The Pendragon Cycle, Michael Ende for Momo,

Mervyn Peake for the Gormenghast novels, Mark Helprin for Winter’s Tale,

Guy Gavriel Kay for The Sarantine Mosaic, and Patricia McKillip for The Book

of Atrix Wolfe. I hope to personally thank each writer, here or beyond.And finally, thanks to those who gave Auralia a chance to find an audience:

Marsha Marks and her magic telephone; my agents, Don Pape, who believedin Auralia, and Lee Hough, who gave such dependable counsel; Shannon Hill,

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Carol Bartley, and the WaterBrook team, who devoted themselves to theproject with insight and meticulous attention; and to Kristopher Orr, whosecover art takes my breath away.

Of course, all these were woven into the design by a Grand Artist, and Ihope I have captured a glimmer of his glory in these pages for his praise.

x i i A c k n ow l e d g m e n t s

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1

Old Thieves Make a Discovery

A uralia lay still as death, like a discarded doll, in a burgundy tangle ofrushes and spineweed on the bank of a bend in the River Throanscall,

when she was discovered by an old man who did not know her name. She bore no scars, no broken bones, just the stain of inkblack soil. Con-

tentedly, she cooed, whispered, and babbled, learning the river’s language, andfocused her gaze on the stormy dance of evening sky—roiling purple cloudsedged with blood red. The old man surmised she was waiting and listening forwhoever, or whatever, had forsaken her there.

Those fevered moments of his discovery burnt into the old man’s mem-ory. In the years that followed, he would hold and turn them in his mind theway an explorer ponders relics he has found in the midst of ruin. But the mys-tery remained stubbornly opaque. No matter how often he exaggerated thestory to impress his fireside listeners—“I dove into that ragin’ river and caughther by the toe!” “I fought off that hungry river wyrm with my picker-staff justin time!”—he found no clue to her origins, no answers to questions of whyor how.

The Gatherers, House Abascar, the Expanse—the whole world might havebeen different had he left her there with riverwater running from her hair. “TheRiver Girl”—that was what the Gatherers came to call her until she grew oldenough to set them straight. Without the River Girl, the four houses of theExpanse might have perished in their troubles. But then again, some say thatwithout the River Girl those troubles might never have come at all.

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This is how the spark was struck.A ruckus of crows caught Krawg’s attention as he groped for berries deep

in a bramble. He and Warney, the conspirator with whom he had been caughtthieving so many years ago, were laboring to pay their societal debts to HouseAbascar. The day had been long, but Krawg’s spirits were high. No officers hadcome to reckon their work and berate them. Not yet. Tired of straining for late-summer apples high in the boughs of ancient trees, they had put down theirpicker-staffs and turned to plucking sourjuice and jewelweed bushes an apple-core’s throw from the Throanscall.

Warney was preoccupied, trying to free his thorn-snagged sleeves and leg-gings. So Krawg smiled, dropped his harvesting sack, and crept away to inves-tigate the cause of the birds’ cacophony. He hoped to find them eying aninjured animal, maybe a broad-antlered buck he could finish off and present tothe duty officers. That would be a prize grand enough to deserve preparationin King Cal-marcus’s kitchens. Such a discovery might bring Krawg closer tothe king’s grace and a pardon.

“Aw, will you look at that?” Krawg flexed his bony fingers. The featheredcurmudgeons flapped at the air over the riverbank, their gaze fixed on a disturb-ance in the grass.

“Now, hold on!” called his even bonier friend. “Whatcha got there? Waitfor me!” Twigs snapped and fabric ripped, but Warney made no progress.“Speak up now, what’re them flappers squawkin’ over? Are beastmen coming tokill us?”

“Stop spookin’, fraidy-brain,”Krawg growled, and then he gusted air throughhis nostrils. “There won’t be no beastman savages out here in the afternoon.”

“What is it then? Merchants?”“No merchants.”“Is it a swarm of stingers?”“Nope.”

2 Je f f r e y O v e r s t r e e t


“A fangbear? River wyrms? Bramblepigs?”“Don’t think so.”“Some young buster sneakin’ up behind us? Come on now. What’s got

them birds so bothered?”According to his nature, Krawg tossed back a lie. “They’re just fightin’ over

a mess of reekin’ twister fish they snatched out of the shallows.” Groundwaterclosed over his feet as he made his way through the reeds on the riverbank. Increas-ingly perturbed by the way Krawg was stalking their target, the crows descendedto the branch of a stooping cottonbeard tree and pelted him with insults.

As Krawg combed the grasses for an answer, Warney at last emerged fromthe trees with worry in his one good eye, gripping as if it were a hunting spearthe long, clawed picker-staff he had used all day to drag down the higher apple-boughs. Warney seemed barely more than a skeleton wrapped in loose flesh anda rough burlap cloak. “What are they fussin’ about now if they’ve gone andeaten their fill?”

Krawg’s vulturebeak nose twitched in the middle of the few undisciplinedwhiskers that grew where a mustache did not. He leaned forward, apprehensive,and saw not a pile of fish bones but two tiny pink hands reaching into the air.

“One of the fish has got hands!” gasped Warney.“Shush now! It isn’t a pile of fish.” Krawg took hold of the appleknife in

his pocket. “Whatever it is, it’s harmless, I’m sure.”Warney glanced back at the woods. “Don’t forget to watch for you-know-

who. Duty officers’ll haul us in, bottom ’n’ blockhead, if they catch us messin’with anything other than them berries. They’ll ride their stinkin’ lizards rightthrough here soon. Come on now…there’s a nice bramble just back here. Youdon’t want the duty to string us up in the hangers, do ya?”

“Good creepin’ Cragavar forest, of all the bloody wonders I ever seen…Looky!” The braver Gatherer flipped his black hood back from his hairlesshead and bent to examine the child.

Warney remained where he was. “Krawg, you’re givin’ me the shut-mouthagain. What is it, old boy?”

Au r a l i a ’s C o l o r s 3


“Just a creepin’, crawlin’ baby, it is.” Krawg massaged the flab beneath hischin. “Mercy, Warney, look at her.”

“It’s a her? How do you know?”“Well, howdaya think I know?” Krawg reached for the child, then thought

better of it. “Warney, this must mean somethin’. You and me…findin’ this.” Hescanned the spaces between trees on both sides of the mist-shrouded river andconfirmed that the only witnesses were crows and a tailtwitcher that clung up-side down to the trunk of a birch.

Warney splashed into the river shallows and prodded the submergedground with his picker-staff before each step. The weeds around his ankleswhispered hushhh…hushhh…hushhh.

The child convulsed twice. She coughed up droplets of water. And thenshe made a sound that might have been a laugh.

“Now that’s odd.” Krawg gestured to the child’s tiny head. “She got brownand silver hairs. She’s seen at least two seasons, I’d say. Probably born beforethat hard freeze we had awhile back.”

“Yeah, gotta ’gree with ya there.”Warney’s eye was white as a sparrow’s eggin the shadows of his hood.

“And she’s not the spawn of those beastmen. Everything about her seemslike a good baby girl, not some accursed cross between person and critter.Looks like she’s been fed and looked after too…well, until she got tossed intothe river, I suppose.”

“Gotta ’gree with ya there.”Warney now leaned over the child, swaying likea scarecrow in the wind. “She’s better fed than any of us Gatherers…or crows,for that matter.”

The crows were quiet, watching, picking at their sharp toes.Krawg knelt and took to picking at his toes as well, poking at yellow places,

which meant he was thinking hard. “We’re too far east of House Bel Amica forher to belong to them proud and greedy folk. But how could she be from ourgood House Abascar? Folk from Abascar only step out of the house walls ifKing Cal-marcus tells ’em to. Too scared of beastmen, they are…these days.”



“Gotta ’gree with ya there.”“Do you always gotta ’gree with me there?!” Krawg snatched the picker-

staff from Warney’s hands and clubbed his hooded head. Warney jumped away,growled, and bared his teeth. Krawg tossed the staff aside and rose up like abear answering the challenge of a rat. Warney, like a rat realizing he has awak-ened a bear, fled back toward the quiet woods.

“Now don’t you get it in your head to leave me here with this orphan,”Krawg called, “or I’ll rip that patch off your dead eye!”

“Have ya thought…” Warney paused, turned, and clasped his head withboth hands, as if trying to stretch his mind to accommodate a significantthought. “Has it occurred to ya that… Do ya think…”

“Speak, you rangy crook!”“Oh ballyworms, Krawg! What if she’s a Northchild?”Krawg stumbled back a step and narrowed his eyes at the infant.The tailtwitcher, the crows, and even the river seemed to quiet at Warney’s

question.But Krawg at last shook off worry. “Don’t shovel that vawn pile my way,

Warney.You been eatin’ too much of Yawny’s stew, and your dreams are gettin’to you. Only crazies think Northchildren are actual. There’s no such thing.”

They watched the baby’s hands sculpt shapes in the air.“And anyway,” Krawg continued, glancing northward at the sky purpling

over the jagged mountains of the Forbidding Wall, “everybody knows North-children are taller, and they drape blankets over themselves.”

Nearby, branches broke with sharp echoes as something moved in the woods.“Grab for a weapon,” hissed Warney, “because I smell prowling beastmen!”“Doubtful,” said Krawg, but he bent his knees and sank into the grass.“Duty officers then!”In case their overseers were, in fact, looking for them, Krawg shouted, “We

better get back to the patches, Warney! I sure don’t see any berries out here.”He lifted Warney’s picker-staff and marched to join his friend in the trees.

But Warney seemed stuck, as though the girl had tossed a rope and snared his



ankle. “You know what they say. If a man leaves a good deed undone, North-children will come creepin’ at night and drag him off into the curse of the—”

“I’m not scared of you, butt-guster,” Krawg whispered. “Now hush beforeanybody hears you!”

The girl, aware that she was alone again, began to murmur as if talking withsomeone they could not see. The Gatherers watched her clap her tiny hands.

A crow took wing from the cottonbeard tree and made a wide circle overthe child’s bed.

“They want that fresh meat,” Krawg observed.Warney nodded. “Gotta ’gree with ya…” His mouth snapped shut, and

he winced.Krawg loosed a weary sigh, waved a scornful gesture at the birds, and

returned to kneel beside the baby.Warney hopped back to peer over Krawg’s shoulder. “What’s that she’s

lyin’ in? That isn’t a sinkhole.”“No, somebody carved out this hole with their hands.”“Not with their hands, no. Look, Krawg…toes. This Northchild’s lyin’ in

a footprint!”Warney’s grin signified a victory. “Gotta disagree with ya there!”The child had gone quiet and still. And that was what Krawg would

remember for the rest of his troubled life—the moment when her eyes gath-ered sunset’s burning hues and flickered with some element he had never seen;the way she rested, as though commanded to surrender by some voice only shecould hear; the way he clenched his jaw, made his decision.

A wave of wind carried a few slow leaves, a shower of twirling seedpodsfrom the violet trees, spiders on newly flung strands, and a hint of distantmusic—the Early Evening Verse sung by the watchman of House Abascar tomark the dusk of the day.

“Oh, our backs are strapped now. They’ll string us upside down for cer-tain. It’s late, and we’re bound to be found missin’.”Warney’s eye rolled to fixon the sun’s fading beacons. “Let’s turn the baby over to the first officer we see,and maybe—”



“What do you think a duty officer sees when he looks at us, Warney? I’mthe Midnight Swindler, and you’re the One-Eyed Bandit! They’ll say weswiped this baby from somewhere. We already been punished for our thievin’.They made us live outside the walls as Gatherers, and there’s only one shelf inthe pantry lower than that: the dungeons.” Krawg threw the picker-staff down—splack!—against the wet ground. “I can’t hand her over, but I can’t leave hereither. If I do, some officer’ll ride through here and stomp her into theground. We’ve got to take her. And hide her.”

“Ballyworms!”Warney shuddered. “You ’n’ me ’n a Northchild ’n’ all!”A commotion erupted just south of the marsh. First came a three-toned

bellow, which the Gatherers recognized as the complaint of a vawn, one ofthe duty officers’ reptilian steeds. Then came the din of crushed bracken andshaken trees. It was certainly an officer come to measure their progress.

Krawg bent low and lifted the naked child by the arms. “She’s harmless.Didn’t cast no spell on me. Didn’t drag me off into darkness. She isn’t aNorthchild! There’s no such thing.”

“Well, let’s hurry it up then,” said Warney, grinning in spite of his fear.A few minutes later Krawg and Warney reached the shelter of thatched

grass roofs and crooked mud walls in the woods just outside House Abascar’sboundary.There, the kinder sort among the Gatherers would tend to the RiverGirl’s needs and protect her from the dangerous sort.

Warney clapped a hand over his mouth, muffling a laugh. “Don’t it bringback memories, Krawg? Sneakin’ off with treasure like this?”

“Warney,” Krawg replied, “we’ve never, never lifted treasure like this.”

Krawg and Warney weren’t punished for carrying back the child. But they were“strung up in the hangers” and dangled from their ankles there a full day, scrap-ing the filthy gutters of their vocabulary, when it was discovered they hadreturned without their designated picker-staffs.



Meanwhile, at the river’s edge, water seeped from the soil into the foot-print, turned to mud, and solidified. A mist rose, hovered over the place, thenwisped away without wind to carry it. It would remain a mystery and a mem-ory to the three men who had found it there—the two troubled Gatherers andone other.

Just after Krawg and Warney had absconded with the child, a solitary rideremerged from the trees and sighted that damp impression in the grass.

The young rider, small and eager, dismounted and studied the outline evenas it began to fade. He pulled from the earth a riverstone and touched the faceof it with his fingertips, where a dull magic blurred. The stone’s color warmed,and it softened to clay under his touch.

Sensing the magic, the crows on the cottonbeard branch shrieked andscattered.

The boy etched a mark in the stone as similar to the contours of the foot-print as he could—a sculpture, an equivalent.

Then he walked up and down the banks awhile, surveying the soil. Whenthe vawn snorted impatiently, he returned and climbed back into his ornatesaddle. The two-legged steed stomped off, happy to head away from the waterand into the trees.

No one knew of the rider’s visit to the river. No one saw the record ofhis discovery, which he kept like a clue to a riddle. And he locked his ques-tions up tight for fear of troubling the volatile storms within the heart of hisfather, the king.



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Praise for - waterbrookmultnomah.com · Praise for Auralia’s Colors “Through word, image, and color Jeffrey Overstreet has crafted a work of art. From first to final page this