The Swamp Warden by Unknown Read Free Book Online

Chapter One: Ripples in the Fen
    Fear the scaled ones. Rhyn had heard the expression from his parents and the other elders in the village his whole life, and they had heard the expression from their parents, and back farther than anyone could remember. No one knew who had first coined the phrase, but Rhyn knew whoever did had lived in a swamp, this one or another, for he had learned the lesson that the villagers of Crossfen now taught their youth.
    Fear the scaled ones.
    An alligator had attacked two fishermen, out in the swamp on the sodden edge of the river that flowed toward Lake Encarthan. Crossfen children gathered on the pier to watch Rhyn prepare for the hunt. He coiled fishing line, checked that the fillet knife in its leather sheath was sharp, set a heavy club and a fishing pole in the skiff, and filled a bucket with fathead minnows. They quivered, too weak and thickly packed to flop, their flesh the dull silver of a tarnished fishhook in the lantern light.
    “Scaled ones aren’t like us,” Rhyn said. “I don’t mean lizards, the ones that walk on two legs and hunt with spears. They’re more like you and me. I’m talking about animals—gators, eels, fish. They live in the muck, breathing in silty water. They’re always cold, right down to their skinny bones. Their eyes are always open, always watching. We can never understand them, and that’s what makes them dangerous.”
    “Eels don’t have scales,” one boy said. He had a sullen mouth, and bits of dried porridge clung to his face. “And they aren’t dangerous anyway.”
    Rhyn stared until the boy shuffled one foot behind the other and looked down. “Some eels don’t have scales, that’s true. But don’t ever think something in the water isn’t dangerous.” He put down the lantern and rolled up one sleeve. A puckered, hairless divot in his flesh caught the light. “Capsized once and an eel bit me there while I was in the water. All the filth and rotten fish bits in its teeth set the wound festering. Had to cut a chunk out lest I lose my arm.”
    “How did you capsize?”
    Rhyn cursed silently. “It was a storm. I know, we don’t get storms here. But it happened. Two years ago, out there.” He gestured to the blackness. “Brought a rotten tree down on my skiff and capsized us. I was lucky to live through it.”
    The children maintained a solemn silence. Rhyn finished loading the skiff and stepped lightly aboard. He settled into place and untied the line. As he pushed off, he looked up at the children. “Fear the scaled ones. They’re not like us.”
    “Fear the scaled ones,” the children chorused. Rhyn floated away from the pier and into the swamp, until the lights of Crossfen hovered like fireflies in the distance.
     
    ∗ ∗ ∗
     
    The skiff slipped in near-silence through the murky waters. The lantern hung from a pole curving off the bow, its light catching on the ripples that spread out from the boat.
    Rhyn shuttered the lantern, leaving only cracks of light spilling out from the metal plates. He fixed a minnow to the line and trailed it behind the skiff as he drifted, quiet and dark.
    Sheets of yellow-green scum broke apart as the skiff sliced through them and bobbed away in wrinkled patches. Long loops of vine brushed Rhyn’s shoulders. A hum of insects hovered around the skiff. Gnats landed on his face and hands, tried in vain to puncture the tough skin there, and flew on. The throaty cry of a whippoorwill drifted through the trees.
    An hour passed, then two. Rhyn shifted position to keep his legs from growing numb. He reeled in the line and replaced the minnow with a fresh one. His thoughts drifted back to the children on the pier, watching him, growing smaller as he slid into the dark.
    He thought of Cara.
    His mind wandered that well-worn trail, favorite moments from childhood, secrets whispered in the dark, fishing together on the pier. He remembered them dancing in the Bent Reed while Mart played the fiddle. Rhyn had