But he somehow survived where so many men died

And he brung the frog orchid away, boys.

He brung the frog orchid away.

And thereby was proven, or so it would seem,

Young Errolson's friendship and love for the king.

Back at the palace, King Darrow the jealous

Mused on the murder he'd planned.

Imagine his gloom when the boy he had doomed

Marched in with the orchid in hand.

Aidan soon understood that his gift was no good,

So he wheeled and ran swiftly away.

He returned again to the deep Feechiefen,

And there he has stayed to this day, boys.

There he has stayed to this day.

The crowd was delighted, but Aidan had heard enough. He pushed his way to the front and mounted the platform. The crowd roared at the sight of him, and the chant quickly arose again: "Hail to the Wilderking! Hail to the Wilderking!"

"Quiet!" Aidan shouted over the noise. "Be quiet! Let me speak!"

Gradually the noise subsided enough for Aidan to make himself heard. "People of Hustingreen!" he yelled. "You have a king! His name is Darrow!"

Hissing sounded from the audience. "Darrow ain't my king!" a voice called.

"Hail to the Wilderking! Hail to the Wilderking!"

"No!" Aidan shouted. "No! This is treason! This is a gathering of traitors!"

Percy watched with some concern as smiling faces turned sullen and grumbling rumbled across the village square.

But Aidan didn't care. "I will have no part of this." He remembered something Bayard the Truthspeaker had told him years before, and he repeated it to the Hustingreeners. "A traitor is no fit king. How can a man be king of Corenwald if he betrays the king of Corenwald?"

Quizzical looks contorted a few faces as Aidan's hearers tried to work out the tricky logic of the question.

"Looks to me like Darrow's the traitor," the village blacksmith shouted. "The way I figure, he's the one who ain't fit to be king!" Heads began nodding again. People were slapping the blacksmith's back and shaking his hand.

Aidan could tell he was losing them again. "People of Hustingreen! Aidanites!" he yelled, straining to be heard. "It is not your job to make the ancient prophecies come true!"

"We ain't making the prophecies come true," Wash yelled back. "You're doing a fine job of that your own self!" The crowd laughed and whooped in appreciation. Wash pressed his advantage. "Aidan Errolson, did you or did you not kill a panther with a stone?"

"Well, yes," Aidan admitted. "But ..."

"He did, he did!" Dobro yodeled. "I seen it with these two eyes!" Dobro had gotten caught up in the mob's enthusiasm. But a stern look from Aidan silenced him.

"'With a stone he shall quell the panther fell!'" Wash triumphantly quoted the Wilderking Chant, sticking his chest out and jabbing a finger in Aidan's direction.

"'He will silence the braggart, enn.o.ble the coward,'" piped an old veteran, also quoting from the chant. "I was there at Bonifay, young man. I saw that braggart giant go silent. I was one of the warriors of Corenwald who were enn.o.bled again in our most fearful hour."

"Where you been these three years, Aidan Errolson?" asked a woman Aidan recognized as the village baker.

"Feechiefen," Aidan mumbled.

"I'm sorry," the woman called sweetly. "I didn't hear that last part."

Aidan cleared his throat and spoke more loudly. "The Feechiefen Swamp."

"Interesting," the woman said. Then she lowered her voice for dramatic effect and recited the last three lines of the Wilderking Chant: Look to the swamplands, ye misfit, ye outcast.

From the land's wildest places a wild man will come To give the land back to his people.

"I'm ready to get my land back!" bellowed somebody in the back.

"Me too!" yelled another. "When do we get started?"

The village square erupted again with raucous laughter and good-natured jostling.

"Hear me!" Aidan screamed as loudly as he could. "Hear this well! I will have nothing to do with any rebellion against the king! I will not stand by, either, and let anyone revolt in my name!" But n.o.body heard him or paid him any mind.

Aidan jumped off the platform to rejoin Percy and Dobro. "Let's get out of here!" he still had to shout to be heard, even though he was standing beside them. "These people are all fools or traitors!"

"That may be!" Percy shouted back. "But that doesn't mean they've got it all wrong!"

Chapter Nine.

The Boss of the Forest Aidan, Dobro, and Percy gave up on getting supplies for their journey to Sinking Canyons. Now all they wanted was to get away from Hustingreen; but that proved to be no easy matter. A group of boys noticed them trying to slip out of the village and followed them, whooping, capering, and pushing each other. Soon the whole village was following them north on the River Road, as if they were on a pleasure outing.

"To Tambluff!" somebody yelled. They were, after all, headed in the direction of the capital city.

"Hurray!" the crowd shouted in response.

Aidan could hear the boisterous, happy conversation between several old men near the front of the crowd. "You gotta like his style," said one of them. "Bold, determined."

"I'm with you," said another. "We know the king ain't there; he's off at the swamp with our boys."

"Hee-hee," laughed the first. "King Darrow's in for a surprise when he gets home, ain't he?"

"But don't you reckon he left somebody guarding the castle?" suggested a third man.

But the other two seemed unconcerned. "Don't you worry about that, old boy. If I know Aidan Errolson, he's got a plan."

Aidan Errolson did have a plan, but it had nothing to do with storming Tambluff Castle. Taking the River Road was only a ruse. The last thing they needed was a whole village of Aidanites following them to their hideout in Sinking Canyons. Their true destination lay many leagues to the west and south, far from the River Road-far indeed from any road.

On Dobro's signal, the three disappeared into the forest on the left side of the road, clambering up a convenient tree and soaring through the treetops, hidden from the wondering eyes of the Hustingreeners.

Dobro led the way to the banks of Bayberry Creek. They waded the creek, pausing to cool themselves and to drink of the black water before pushing on to the west and south.

The tangled forest of the bottomlands opened up into a great pine savannah a few leagues below the Bayberry. Confident that the Aidanites couldn't possibly have tracked them, the three travelers returned to the ground and continued their trek on foot, careful to avoid the few small farms, turpentine camps, and other tiny settlements that dotted the landscape in this part of the island.

By midmorning on the second day after they had left Hustingreen, even those small, isolated settlements were nowhere to be found. Aidan, Dobro, and Percy were entering Corenwald's Clay Wastes. Unlike most of the island, here the soil was too poor for farming. Even the forests looked thin and degraded. The stately old longleaf pines of the upland savannah were replaced by scrubby second-growth pine trees. A few trees were as tall as seventy or eighty feet, but even those were so spindly they looked as if a good strong wind might snap them in two. In some places the trees formed dense thickets. In others, they were so far apart that even a person with a strong arm could hardly throw a rock from one tree to the next. Without the protection of the longleaf overstory, the waving wiregra.s.s was overrun by vines and briars. It was exactly the kind of vegetation that made tree walking necessary, but the trees were too irregularly s.p.a.ced for that.

"You won't be finding no feechies in this part of the island," Dobro grunted as he slashed through a briar bush with a pole he had cut from a turkey oak. "Can't swim, can't boat, can't tree-walk."

"So we're going to be living in a place that's too wild for the feechiefolk," Aidan mumbled.

Dobro slapped at the back of his neck and danced with rage. His skin, so white after his first bath, was now an angry red from sunburn and splotched with the purple welts raised by mosquitoes and other biting insects that swarmed in all of Corenwald's wild places.

"These bugs is about to chaw me down to bones and tallow," Dobro complained. "How can you civilizers go pirootin' around without no mud cover and not go crazy account of the itching?"

"We're just tougher than feechies, I suppose," Percy said, cutting his eyes over toward Dobro to see his reaction.

Dobro slapped at another bug. "If I wasn't so miserable," he said, "I'd whup both of you and show you how tough a feechie is." He gave a little wiggle, rubbing his knees together to scratch matching mosquito bites on the inside of either knee.

Dobro moaned, "I don't mind telling you, these skeeters done whupped and defeated me."

"Dobro, you ought to be ashamed of yourself," Percy chided. "A full-grown feechie defeated by mosquitoes."

"There ain't no shame in that," said Dobro. "No shame at all. You know who's the boss of the forest, don't you?"

"I don't know," said Percy. "A bear? A panther? Certainly not a mosquito."