Free On the Edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness by Andrew Peterson Page B

ma’am.”
    Nia smiled down at Leeli and put a hand on her hair. “It was beautiful.”
    â€œBut why would the dragons do that?” Janner said. Nia’s answer was a shrug. “And why wouldn’t Gnorm have just taken the jewels and killed us anyway?” He felt like every question led to another, and his head was swimming.
    Nia took Janner’s shoulders in her hands and looked him square in the face. “Because I told him I could cook the finest maggotloaf in the four seas and that if he let you go, I’d cook it for him every third day of the week, once the meat had plenty of time to fester. I told him I had a secret recipe that involved hogpig sweat. The gold was just to get his attention, you see. Fangs have a weakness for jewelry.” 1
    â€œYou know how to cook maggotloaf?” Tink said.
    â€œI have no idea. I suppose I’d better learn,” she smiled. “Now, enough questions from you three. Janner, what happened to your neck?” She turned him again into the lamplight to see the bright red splotch on his neck, where Slarb’s venom had dripped on him.
    â€œFang venom. From the one called Slarb,” he said, touching his neck with the tips of his fingers. “The one that attacked Leeli.”
    â€œSo that’s what happened,” Nia said. “Why did he attack you?”
    Nia put an arm around her crippled daughter, who recounted the events with Janner and Tink adding bits as the Igibys continued up the lane. Nia listened until Janner told about the two rocks that struck the Fangs in the alley. She stopped walking.
    â€œAnd you saw no one? No sign of who might have thrown the rocks?”
    â€œNo one.” Janner looked puzzled. He saw his mother’s brow crease as they continued walking. His head buzzed with questions.
Where had she hidden all those jewels—enough to buy half the town of Glipwood? And why did she keep the secret from the family all these years? Couldn’t they have used just a bit of it to make their lives a little easier?
Janner had never seen so much gold in one place, and the thought that they had been in his family all these years made him—what? Angry? Thankful? Janner didn’t know what to feel, as if his insides were as clumsy as his outsides.
All that gold, all those precious stones, gone
.
No, not gone. Adorning Commander Gnorm’s fingers and wrists.
Janner wondered what their family needed and didn’t have and was humbled to realize that there was nothing. He had to admit to himself that his mother and Podo had provided all that they needed. The jewels wouldn’t have changed a thing, except that without them Janner would still be sitting in that jail cell with his siblings.
Still,
he thought with a sideways glance at his mother,
what else was she hiding?
    But his tumble of thoughts was interrupted by the sound of someone singing.
    On the lawn in front of old Charney Baimington’s 2 cottage a small fire was burning. Several people lounged around it, listening to Armulyn the Bard sing. The orange glow of the fire lit his face and cast a large shadow on the house behind him. Armulyn was singing a song of Anniera, and his eyes seemed to glow with their own light as he looked out past the dark around him. It was as though he could see before him the fair island itself with its kingdom of sailors and poets, its high green mountains and shaded vales, the bright city where a good king once reigned and the people sang in the fields while they gathered the harvest. Somehow, Janner felt that it was more than just a song. Armulyn had put his secret dreams to music. Janner felt pulled to those mountains, and he saw it in the faces around the campfire too.
    The song ended and for a moment before the applause, the small gathering of listeners was silent. Janner looked up to see that his mother’s face was wet with tears and that she, like the bard, was staring into the distance.
    â€œWhy