Later, much later, he woke to the sounds of music, feeling refreshed and wondering at the racket. The Rootshooters were celebrating, with Joe scraping on the fiddle and the others joining in throaty voices. One of the miners, his white skin streaked with circles and smears of coal, put a long hollow twig to his lips. The resonating drone echoed around the cavern, making the walls vibrate as his cheeks puffed in and out. Even Mucum, his face flushed red with drink, was beating on a drum as their newfound friends danced and sang, turning the tale of the boy and the mealworm into the stuff of myth and legend. When they saw Ark standing uncertainly at the door, they cheered again and plied him with a cup of hard cider.

“Yow be one of us now!” shouted Joe above the clamor. “Yow saved me life and that makes yow me kin-brother. I am at yowr service ’til the day Oi be dead, boyo!”

Ark was embarrassed, but he got the gist. He was their lucky mascot. If he could keep away the worms, then their one main predator was dealt with. But this ignored the fact of a far more dangerous predator that stalked their whole country. He needed to go; he’d realized it the moment he woke up. He was running out of time.

“I can’t stay!” said Ark, but Joe didn’t hear him in the din of celebration. This was a night for feasting. After all, what could possibly go wrong now?

21• INFANT TERRORISM

“Your daughter is hereby charged with … umm … terrorist activity!”

Petronio hung back in the shadows as Alnus delivered the charge. The surgeon apprentice couldn’t decide what he was enjoying more, the guard’s evident unease about arresting a four-year-old girl or the look on Ark’s mother’s face as the truth dawned on her.

“Are you crazy?” said Mrs. Malikum, barring the doorway of her shanty home with a broom. “She’s only a child!”

“Forgive me, ma’am!” And Alnus really meant it this time. “I’m only following orders.”

“Orders! I’ll give you orders!” She came at the skinny guard with the broom handle first, thrusting it like a spear, suddenly catching him off balance.

It was Salix who saved his colleague from toppling over the safety rope on the edge, grabbing at Alnus’s arm and leaning back with all his weight. Once he checked that Alnus hadn’t tried flying for real, Salix easily disarmed the distraught mother, tossing the broom over the branchway, where it twirled around and down, clacking and echoing against the trunk until it vanished from view. He pushed past her into the gloom of the one-room hovel and scooped up the child, who instantly began to scream at the top of her lungs while Mr. Malikum feebly tried to rise from his sickbed.