Son of the Hero (11 page)

An emptiness swelled up inside and reached out to engulf me, a series of sensations that I had no precedents for. My throat got tight. My heart seemed to flutter. But even those commonplaces were somehow different,
strange
. The pain was there, but something bottled it up tight, sealed it off in a cold chamber somewhere to wait for a more appropriate time. My mind tried to reject the reality. Maybe I was trapped in a fairy-tale world with dragons and wizards, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t con myself into believing that death was any less final because of that. I looked at the body at the side of the room. I had never let myself dwell on this possibility. Deep down, I guess I had never been able to completely shake the feeling that Varay was some kind of mental aberration, that none of my adventures were real.

Too late the waking. I walked across the room and stood next to the bench. I played the light along the supine form and kept staring. Death was real, and reality was an ulcer’s fire in my gut. Closing my eyes didn’t make the pain go away, and opening them didn’t alter the reality.

I heard a slight shuffling behind me. Mother and Uncle Parthet had come in together. I turned around while Mother lit two candles.

“How did it happen?” I whispered instinctively.

“Nine days ago,” Mother said, answering a different question. I turned to look at the body again, another question leaping to my mouth. Mother answered this one before I could get it out. “He was Hero of Varay. The magic of his initiation protects him now, more than it could in life. His flesh will remain whole until he is properly interred.”

“But no magic can bring him back,” I said. It wasn’t a question.

“No magic can bring him back,” Parthet agreed softly.

I moved between Mother and Parthet and walked outside, flicking off my flashlight. An appropriately chilled breeze did what grief had been unable to do, bring tears to my eyes, blur my vision. When I blinked my eyes clear, I saw Lesh and Timon, both looking apprehensive, perhaps in echo to my pain.

“The Hero of Varay is gone from us,” Parthet said behind me. His voice wasn’t loud, but the words seemed to hang in the air and reverberate.

Lesh was a soldier, but at that moment he was no more hardened to death than I was. Muscles rippled under the skin of his face as he fought to hide any display of grief. “We share your loss, lord,” he said, and his voice nearly betrayed him. Timon cried openly, tears streaming down his face, leaving tracks in the dust we had all picked up along the way. He turned and clung to Lesh, who held his shoulders, hardly aware that the boy was there.

“What about the men he had with him?” I asked when I turned and saw that Mother had also come out of the cottage.

“The two soldiers fell with him,” she said. “The squire survived. Harkane’s duty is to see to Carl even in death, until he is properly laid away. I sent him on toward Basil as soon as we moved your father here and got the others buried.”

“We didn’t meet anyone on the road,” I said.

“Likely he would have hidden at the first hint of riders,” Mother said. “He was quite distraught, frightened. He was on foot, so he could hardly have reached Basil yet. I didn’t know for sure that you would come. I couldn’t be certain.”

I shrugged to take some of the sting from my reply, but my voice left the bitterness in. “Perhaps if I had known something about Varay before this came up.” I stared at Mother. She didn’t say anything, but she didn’t look away either. “What do we do next?” I asked.

“Take your father back to Basil, where he belongs,” Mother said.

“We’ll need a wagon,” I said. I didn’t want to just drape Dad across the saddle of a horse the way the old westerns used to show.

“There’s a wagon and horse here,” Mother said.

“What about the farmer? We can’t just waltz off with his property.”

“He has no further use for them. The Etevar’s warlord laid a heavy hand around Thyme in his haste to draw your father. Dozens of people have been killed or taken as slaves. We thought there was just a small band of soldiers at Thyme, but the Etevar sent at least forty soldiers and his new wizard as well.”

“Is he still here?” Parthet asked. I assumed he meant the other wizard. Mother shook her head.

“Lesh, will you hitch the wagon and bring it around?” I asked.

He bowed. “At once, Highness.”

“Just back of the house, Lesh,” Mother said. He bowed to her and left, taking Timon with him.

“You’ve learned of your heritage,” Mother said to me.

“Some of it.” I didn’t want to talk about that yet. All it could was make me angry, and there wasn’t time for that. “Can you tell me what happened here?”

“The telling takes time.” We walked to a bench that leaned against the front of the cottage. Mother and I sat. Parthet stood facing us.

“We had the call for help some three weeks ago,” Mother started. “Word had reached Basil that the Etevar had taken Castle Thyme again—a castle your father wrested from him once before. It was a direct challenge, a slap in the face. We knew it might be a trap, but your father left the same day. He had a good idea what he would do, what to expect. He
did
have more than twenty years’ experience at this sort of thing. He knew how long he should be gone too. When he didn’t get home or send word, I came after him. Only Harkane, his squire, was still alive. He had found this place and had started to carry your father here. They had been ambushed. Perhaps the attack on Thyme was staged just to draw your father, as we feared. The young Etevar held an old grudge over the death of
his
father. There were soldiers in Castle Thyme. Your father knew that, of course, but he didn’t know that there were more lurking outside, waiting for him. The wizard shielded them. There was a long running battle, but time wasn’t working right. That’s the way Harkane explained it. The Etevar’s warlord could bring out fresh troops from the castle and keep up the pressure far too long.” Mother turned her head away from me.

“Are they still there?” I asked.

“There’s still a garrison. I don’t know if the warlord remains, but the Etevar’s new wizard left before I arrived.

“We’ve had rumors of this new wizard in Dorthin,” Parthet said. “No one knows who or what he is, but the talk is that he’s a completely new force out of Fairy.”

I wasn’t sure what significance that might have, but I knew that my immediate future had been decided. Talking about it after the fact, it sounds like a moment of sheer stupidity, or some sort of cosmic hocus-pocus, but there was no time of considering options, no hesitation, and if it sounds like something from a bad movie script, I can’t help that. Back at Castle Basil, everyone had talked about me as the Son of the Hero. The Hero was dead, though. I had a new trade now—short-term, at least. In fact, my entire future might be extremely short-term. High drama. Stirring music in the background. All that hokum. A certainty wrapped itself around me and squeezed like an anaconda. Louisville and Northwestern belonged to a past that could never be the same. For the present at least, I belonged in Varay. It wasn’t even a matter of conscious choice. Maybe the decision would have been harder if there had been a special girl back home, but there wasn’t, not at the moment. There were a couple I might miss from time to time, but that didn’t matter. Nothing mattered outside Varay just then—at least, not outside the seven kingdoms. I had a score to settle, a
Mission
to complete.

One time, I asked my father why he had enlisted in the army on his eighteenth birthday. I had asked that question before. His usual response was that after years in an orphanage and in foster homes it was simply the fastest way out. This one time though, he hesitated a long time before he said, “I think I just OD’d on John Wayne movies.” That made a lot more sense once I knew what he had been doing in the years since he came back from Vietnam.

When I got up off the bench and looked around slowly, I think both Parthet and Mother saw the change in me, even in the new darkness. Parthet bowed almost low enough to push a peanut along the ground with his nose. Mother stood, straightened up, and nodded. Nothing was said. A few minutes later, Lesh led up the horse and wagon. The wagon was narrow and high, with a shallow bed set completely above the wheels. It looked as if it might tip over much too easily despite the reverse camber to the wheels.

“It’s sturdy enough, lord,” Lesh said. “It’s been well cared for.”

I nodded. “I’ll need your help inside, Lesh,” I said. It was too late to be starting out—twilight was gone, the night’s early stars were out—but I had to make the start regardless. I wouldn’t stay there, so close to the enemy. Lesh followed me inside. He knelt at Father’s side for a moment, then we carried him out and set him in the back of the wagon and covered him with a light blanket. Mother brought her horse, a beautiful black mare, around from the side of the cottage. She didn’t want to wait either.

“Uncle Parker, you’d better drive the wagon. If the enemy’s still about, we need Lesh mounted, ready to fight.”

“I’m ready for different bruises,” Parthet said quietly.

“I want to put some miles between us and Castle Thyme before we camp. Are we going to be able to get that wagon to the road?”

“There’s a path that keeps us out of direct sight of the castle, but it goes close,” Mother said. “It’s the only way.”

“Then we’ll have to chance it,” I said.

Lesh led the way after Mother made sure that he knew the route. Parthet followed with the wagon. Glory was tied behind the wagon. I put Timon up next to Glory, or as close behind as he could get on the narrow path. Mother and I brought up the rear, with her moving ahead of me when the track got too narrow for our horses to ride side by side. We rode ready for trouble. Lesh had his lance. Mother kept her bow in her hand. I left the bottom two buttons of my shirt undone so I could reach my pistol quickly. Parthet had his staff plus whatever sorceries protected a wizard.

The path was narrow but might have been designed for the wagon … or vice versa. We rode for an hour before we reached what Lesh said was the main road and turned away from the castle and what was left of the village of Thyme. In the dark, we had to ride slowly. I gave Lesh my flashlight so he could pick our path through the trickiest stretches.

I concentrated on sounds, worried that the Etevar’s soldiers might waylay us as they had Dad. We couldn’t go on all night without rest, but every mile we covered took us that much farther from the greatest danger. We finally left the road and moved into a narrow valley. We couldn’t get far from the road with the wagon, though. And there wasn’t enough light for Parthet’s camping magics, so we had to put up with the bugs. We kept watches through the rest of the night, one at a time except for Timon. We let him sleep straight through, better than the rest of us managed, I think. I hardly slept at all—again. Most of the time I stared at the sky and thought about times I had shared with my father, good times, generally. We had had a lot of fun together. All those memories … but he had concealed so much too. The secrets hurt, more as the night progressed. My parents had hidden an entire life, an entire
world
, from me.

When dawn came I was near exhaustion, but we got moving as soon as there was any light at all. The morning’s ride was silent. As the wagon wheels dragged mile after mile under them, the danger decreased, but I remained too lost in my thoughts for talk. And I was so tired that I may have dozed off and on too. At noon, we ate the freeze-dried meals I had been carrying in my pack. They didn’t go far among so many of us, but we weren’t hungry enough for salted beef again. That afternoon, I brought down a small deer with my bow, so we had fresh meat for the rest of our journey. It took three days to get to Basil with the wagon.

After that first morning, I learned more of my hidden heritage. Mother seemed to have a need to talk, and I was content to listen.

The title Hero of Varay was as old as the seven kingdoms. Varay was named for Vara, a legendary superhero who brought the magic out of Fairy and held the land for its more mortal inhabitants as king and hero. Traditionally then, Varay’s Heroes came from outside the kingdom. A Varayan might be King’s Champion, but he was never given the formal title Hero of Varay. “That’s one of the reasons we kept the truth from you,” Mother said. “Your father wanted you to follow in his footsteps—if you chose to. But you remained an outsider, even though you are also heir to the throne. We stopped bringing you for visits when you were five.”

“Why is it so important that I be both king and Hero?”

“The two have never been united in one man since Vara. Our legends promise a new golden age when one man can again hold both titles legitimately. It may be superstitious nonsense, but I don’t know of another time when it’s been possible to test it.”

“More of the same kind of legend that makes the Etevars want to reunite the seven kingdoms under their rule?” I asked.

“Perhaps. But Varay has never sought to dominate the other kingdoms.” Maybe not. Or maybe the Varayan storytellers were just better liars.

“What about the other magic doorways at home? Where do they lead?”

“All to places in Varay,” Mother said. “To Basil, Arrowroot on the Mist, Coriander in the Battle Forest at the edge of Xayber and Fairy. They lead to most of the important places in Varay.”

To the edge of Fairy but not to Castle Thyme? I thought, but what I asked was, “How is it done? How do you create a doorway?”

“The easiest way requires two members of the family, one at each end, linking their efforts through the rings, bringing themselves to each other. One can do it alone, but that takes longer. You have to go to each place and implant the silver, then you have to concentrate to take yourself back through the untried passage to make it permanent. Draining work.”

“Where does the silver come from?”

“It’s a seaweed that grows in the shallows of the Mist, along the shore of Xayber, in Fairy.”

That figured. It wouldn’t be anything convenient. “Do we have a stockpile of it somewhere?”

“No. The silver must be living when it’s implanted in the doorway, and it lives for only a few months after being harvested from the Mist.”