Free Deadweather and Sunrise by Geoff Rodkey

instantly melted away—somehow, his look and touch had the magical effect of convincing me that he was in charge, and as long as I trusted him, everything would be okay.
    Then he turned and ran toward the lower lawn, where the servants’ shouting was dying down. I turned my attention back to the sky. Within a minute, the balloon had shrunk to a thumbnail over the shoulder of Mount Majestic, blurring into the reddish light of the setting sun.
    A minute after that, it was gone for good.

IN THE CLOUDS
    T ell me, Egg—what do you know about the Fire King?”
    It was ninety minutes after my family had disappeared, and I was sitting with the Pembrokes at a giant slab of a table in the formal dining room of Cloud Manor, which I’d just learned was the name of their mansion.
    It was strange—I’d never heard of a house with its own name—but so were a lot of things, all at once: I was wearing a silk shirt, and I’d just had a hot bath, and upstairs was a feather bed in a big room with huge windows that I’d been told was mine to sleep in, and all through dinner the Pembrokes had treated me as an honored guest, offering me first helpings of everything and calling me Egg, which no one had ever called me before.
    And of course I’d just watched my family sail away over the horizon in a giant runaway balloon. That was shock enough all on its own, and to suddenly find myself living like a grand duke right on top of it was so disorienting that I’d started to feel like I’dslipped loose from reality and was floating in some kind of dream world, where any second the room might fill up with flying dragons and unicorns.
    So I guess it’s understandable that when Roger Pembroke asked me about some king I’d never heard of, I wasn’t levelheaded enough to wonder why he was asking, or to answer with anything smarter than “The what king?”
    Millicent piped up. “The Fire King! Hutmatozal. Don’t you know the legend?”
    “No. Sorry. Is he Rovian?”
    Pembroke chuckled. “Oh, heavens, no. He was a savage. Ruled the Natives in this area about a hundred years ago. Your father and I—”
    “You don’t know about the Fire King’s treasure? Or the Fist of Ka? It’s absolutely—”
    “Millicent.” Pembroke stopped her with a little wave of his fingers. Then he turned back to me. “Your father and I were speaking. He showed me a parchment he had with him. In Native writing. Do you know where it came from?”
    “Not exactly.”
    “What do you mean?”
    He leaned forward, his ice-blue eyes watching me closely. I thought very hard. If this was some kind of test, I wanted to make him happy by passing it.
    “I think he copied it. From something he’d found. There’s a cliff up above our house, called Rotting Bluff. Looks out over the sea. We keep a cannon there, just in case. Every so often, Dad goes up to clean it. He went up yesterday. Came back sort of… distant. Like he was thinking hard about something. Went outagain, same direction. Only that time, he took a parchment and pencil. Then this morning, he brought us here. To talk to the lawyer about it, I think.”
    “Did he tell anyone else about it?”
    “I can’t imagine. He doesn’t talk very much. Not to anybody.”
    “Not business associates? Or friends…?”
    “Don’t think he has any of those.”
    “Which?”
    “Either.”
    Pembroke was sitting back in his chair now, his eyes still fixed on me. His look made me nervous. I couldn’t tell if I’d said too much, or not enough.
    Millicent jumped in again. “Daddy’s an expert on the Fire King. He’s got loads of books about Natives, and he’s searched all over Sunrise for the Fist.” She turned to him. “What was in the parchment, Daddy? Was it a clue to—”
    He cut her off. “It was nothing, Millicent. Native gibberish.”
    Then he smiled at me, which was a huge relief. “Thank you, Egg. It makes sense now. Millicent’s right—I’m fascinated by Native history. It’s quite a challenge,