Sons of the Oak (34 page)

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Authors: David Farland

BOOK: Sons of the Oak
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THE BROKEN CHILD
Children have legendary healing abilities. I have seen a newborn babe lose a finger to a dog, and grow it back again. No matter what wound is inflicted, one can always hope for healing with a child.
 
—The Wizard Binnesman
 
 
 
In the mornings Fallion got up and walked the decks. He climbed the rigging for exercise, and enjoined the other children to follow him. His muscles grew strong, but not large. Instead they felt thin and ropy, as if in the prison he had starved enough so that even now his body fed upon his own flesh, and he wondered if he would ever regain his bulk again.
By day he'd practice harder with his weapons now, his mind returning again and again to Rhianna, to thoughts of how it had been when she died upon the beach. Perhaps she'd been killed and eaten by a strengi-saat, but Fallion feared that she'd been taken instead—carried into the trees and filled with strengi-saat babies, the way that she had been when he first found her.
He tried to act normal, to force smiles when he saw his friends or to laugh when he heard a joke. But the laughter always came too late, sounding hollow; and though his lips might turn upward, there was no smile in his eyes.
Borenson and Myrrima worried about him, as did Captain Stalker. But the one who could perhaps have offered the best comfort was Smoker, and he was gone.
“He'll get over it in time,” Borenson said. “He was starved. One doesn't heal from that easily.”
And it was true. The welts around Fallion's wrists tried to heal, but they scabbed over and became infected. Myrrima washed the festering wounds,
but they just seemed to swell the more. Often they would bleed, and four weeks later, when it seemed that the infection had finally subsided, Myrrima had to satisfy herself with the knowledge that the wounds would leave deep and everlasting scars.
But though the scars on Fallion's wrists had begun to heal, the darkness still called to him, and he found himself longing for oblivion.
 
 
 
It was a few weeks after they left that Myrrima was awakened one night in the hold of the ship.
“Nooooo!” Borenson cried, his voice keening like some animal. He began to thrash about, as if enemies attacked and he was holding them at bay. “Noooo!”
Sage woke at the sound, whimpering, and Myrrima shook Borenson awake, carefully.
He'd been troubled by bad dreams for years, and she'd learned long ago that it was best to leave him asleep, let him thrash and weep until the dreams abated. But with Sage crying and other guests on the ship, she dared not let him sleep.
She shook him and called to him, dragging him from his slumber, and when he woke, he sat at the edge of the bed, trembling. His heart pounded so hard that she could hear its every beat.
“Was it the dream again?” she asked. She leaned up and kissed him on the forehead, then secretly drew a rune with her spittle.
“Yes,” he said, still sobbing, but suddenly seeming to regain control. “Only this time, I dreamed that Valya and Fallion were there.”
He had dreamed of Castle Sylvarresta, long ago. It seemed like a lifetime ago, though the dream was as vivid as ever.
Raj Ahten had taken the castle, and then abandoned it on a ruse, leaving his Dedicates behind. Upon the orders of King Mendellas Orden, Borenson was sent inside to butcher Raj Ahten's Dedicates. All of them, any of them, including the king's own son Gaborn, if need be.
Borenson had known that he would have to kill some folk that he had counted as friends, and it was with a heavy heart that he did his duty.
But after slaying the guards and walking into the inner courtyard, he had gone first to the kitchens and bolted the door.
There, staring up at his naked blade in terror were two deaf girls, Dedicates who had given their hearing to Raj Ahten.
It was considered a crime against nature for a lord to take endowments from a child. An adult with enough glamour and voice could beguile a child so easily. For Raj Ahten to have done it was monstrous.
But from Raj Ahten's point of view it had to have been a seductive choice. What true man would slay a child, any child? An assassin who somehow broke into the deepest sanctuaries of a castle with the intent of slaying Dedicates would find it hard indeed to kill children.
No, a decent man would let the children live, and thus give Raj Ahten a better chance to fight back.
Thus, beyond the walls of stone and the heavy guard, Borenson found one last barrier to his assassin's blade: his own decency.
He had managed to fight it to a standstill, but he had never conquered it. Indeed, he hoped that he never would.
“The dream was different this time,” Borenson said, his voice ragged. “The girls were there, as in life, but I saw Fallion there, and Rhianna, and Talon and Jaz … .” He fell apart, sobbing helplessly. She'd seen the way he had been slashing in his dream, murdering his own children.
“I killed them,” Borenson said. “I killed them all. Just like I did in life—thousands of Dedicates, some that I called friends, some that had feasted with me at their tables. King Sylvarresta was there, grinning like an idiot, as innocent as a child, the scar from his endowments ceremony fresh upon him, and I killed him again. How many times must I kill him before he leaves me in peace?”
He broke down then and sobbed, his voice loud and troubled. He turned and buried his face in a blanket so that other guests of the inn would not hear.
Sage had already gone back to sleep.
A single candle was sputtering beside the bed, giving light to the whole room, and by it, Myrrima looked over the children, to see if they were all asleep.
She saw a pair of bright eyes peering at her, reflecting the light of the candle. It was Fallion, his eyes seeming to glow of their own accord.
Well, Myrrima realized, now he knows the truth: the man who is raising him, who has been all but a father to him, is the man who executed his grandfather.
The man whom all call a hero sobs himself to sleep at night.
I wonder what Fallion thinks of us?
She whispered to Fallion, “Don't make the mistakes that we have made.”
Then she turned over and held Borenson. But as she did, she worried for Fallion. This was but another scar for the boy to bear.
 
 
 
Fallion sat on the balcony at the back of the ship, between the barrels where he and Rhianna used to hide, just hoping for a bit of peace. Valya sat beside him.
They were peering out the back of the ship, watching the sun descend toward the sea in a molten ball of pink, the clouds overhead looking like blue ashes falling from the skies.
They had not spoken for a long hour, and finally Valya put an arm around Fallion's shoulders and just hugged him, holding him for long minutes.
“Don't give in to it,” she begged. “Don't give in. That's what my mother wants you to do.”
“What?” Fallion asked.
“She told me not to give you anything—” Valya answered. “No food. No water. No comfort. She said, ‘All that I want is his despair.'”
Fallion had felt despair in the prison, wave upon wave of it. But he'd always held on to some thin hope that he would be released.
Yet suddenly, here on the ship under the bright light of day, it was as if the despair thickened, and he could not escape it.
His mind flashed back to Asgaroth's prophecy. What had he said? “All of your noblest hopes shall become fuel to fire despair among mankind.”
It was almost as if Asgaroth wanted Fallion to become one of them.
But why despair? he wondered. Do loci feed on despair?
Fallion recalled something that Borenson had once told him. The purpose of every war was to cause despair. “We don't fight wars for the love of battle,” he'd said. “We fight to cause despair, to force surrender, so that we can enforce our will.”
He'd gone on to explain that most conflicts seldom reached the point where one side took up arms. The costs of marshaling troops, feeding them, sending them off to foreign lands—or worse, defending your own borders and lands—was too prohibitive.
And so other means had been devised. First, diplomacy took place. Grievances were made, petitions filed.
If the problems were not rectified, then the complainant might wage economic warfare, raiding supply trains going into and out of the country, seizing merchant ships, or convincing other nations to suspend trade.
Only as a last resort, after many warnings, did one invade.
Fallion sat in the sunlight, his mind dulled from abuse, and realized that for reasons that he did not understand, Shadoath was waging war upon him.
That alone seemed to spark his rage.
I will not surrender, he told himself. She will surrender to me.
“What will I have to do to cause your mother despair?” Fallion wondered.
Valya laughed. “Just keep on doing what you're doing?”
“What's that?”
“Smiling.”
Fallion suddenly realized that he
was
smiling. Not a happy smile, but a cruel smile, the kind of smile that Borenson carried with him when he went into battle.
He'd found a reason to live: revenge.
GARION'S PORT
Home is whatever place you feel safest.
 
—a saying of Rhofehavan
 
 
The
Leviathan
sailed near Garion's Port on a cool spring evening almost four months to the day from when it had left the Courts of Tide. The night was cool, marbled with gauzy clouds that shaded the moon, and the brisk wind snapped the sails and lashed the water to whitecaps.
Fallion was stunned at his first sight of stonewood trees. The ship had neared Landesfallen three days ago, but remained well out to sea as it inched north, and so though he saw the gray trees from the distance, rising like menacing cliffs, he had not been able to see them closely.
They grew thick at the base of two cliffs of stark sandstone: the Ends of the Earth, and as the ship eased near the port, Fallion peered up in wonder.
The stonewoods were aptly named. Their massive roots stretched out from gray trunks into the sea, gripping the sand and stone beneath. The roots were large enough so that a fair-sized cottage could rest comfortably in a crook between them. Then they joined in a massive trunk that rose from the water, soaring perhaps two hundred feet in the air.
“There are taller trees in the world,” Borenson told the children much in the same tone that Waggit used to lecture in, “but there are none so impressively wide.”
The roots of the trees soaked up seawater, he explained, which was rich in minerals. Eventually, the minerals clogged the waterways within the trunk of the tree, and over the years, the heart of the tree became petrified, even as it continued to grow. The starving tree then broadened at the base, in an attempt to get nutrients to the upper branches. The tree could even
put down new taproots when the old ones became clogged, thus becoming ever wider, and becoming ever stronger, its heart turning to stone.
The result was a tree that went beyond being
hoary.
Each stonewood was tormented, like something from a child's fearful dream of trees, magnificent, its limbs twisted as if in torture, draped with gray-green beards of lichen that hung in tattered glory.
Within the bay, the water was calm. Fish teemed at the base of the huge trees, leaping in the darkness, and Fallion could see some young sea serpents out on the satin water, perhaps only eight feet long, finning on the surface, seemingly bent on endlessly chasing their tails.
High above, in the branches of the trees, lights could be seen from a forest city.
“Are we going to live up there?” Talon asked her father, fear evident in her voice.
“No,” Borenson said. “We're going inland, to the deserts.”
In the distance, near the city, Fallion saw a pair of graaks flying along the edge of the woods, enormous white ones large enough to carry even a man, sea graaks that were so rare they were almost never seen back in his homeland. Their ugly heads, full of teeth, contrasted sharply with the beauty of their sleek bodies and leathery wings.
The graaks were both males, and so had a ridge of leather, called a plume, that rose up on their foreheads. The plumes had been painted with blue eyes, staring wide, the ancient symbol of the Gwardeen. A pair of young men, perhaps thirteen or fourteen years of age, rode upon their backs.
They're on patrol, Fallion realized. He longed to be up there, riding a graak himself. It was something that his mother had never allowed him to do.
Even if I fell, he thought, the worst that would happen is that I'd land in the water.
And end up a meal for the serpents, a niggling voice inside him whispered, though in truth he knew that a young sea serpent, like the ones he saw finning now, were no more dangerous than a reef shark.
The ship didn't even bother to drop anchor. The captain just let it drift for a bit.
“I'll let you folks row in from here,” Captain Stalker said. “No sense attracting any notice, if you can help it.”
That was the plan. They would row in during the night and follow the
river inland for miles, hoping not to be seen for days perhaps, until they were far from the coast.
Meantime, Captain Stalker would rush home and get his wife, then sail north and scuttle the ship near some unnamed port.
Fallion was suddenly aware that he'd never see Captain Stalker again, and his heart seemed to catch at his throat.
“Thank you,” Myrrima said, and the family grabbed their meager possessions as the crew lowered the boat.
There were some heartfelt good-byes as Fallion and the children hugged the captain and some of their favorite crew members.
Stalker hugged Fallion long and hard, and whispered in his ear, “If you ever get a hankerin' for life on the sea, and if I ever get another ship, you'll always be welcome with me.”
Fallion peered into his eyes and saw nothing but kindness there.
I used to worry that he had a locus, Fallion thought, and now I love him as if he were my own father.
Fallion hugged him hard. “I'll hold you to it.”
Then he climbed down a rope ladder to the away boat. Borenson, Myrrima, and the children were already there, each child clutching a tiny bundle that held all that he or she owned.
Myrrima was deeply aware of just how little they had brought with them: a few clothes that were quickly wearing down to rags, some small mementos, Fallion's forcibles.
We must look like peasants, she thought. She took the oars and rowed out toward the city.
“Make north of the city, about two miles,” Stalker warned her, and she changed course just a little. The sound of waves surrounded them, and the boat splashed through the waters with each small tug of the oars. Droplets from the oars and spray from whitecaps spattered the passengers.
Fallion watched the
Leviathan
sail away, disappearing into the distance. All too soon they neared shore, where small waves lapped among the roots of the stonewoods. The scent of the trees was strange, foreign. It was a metallic odor, tinged with something vaguely like cinnamon.
Two hundred feet up, peeking through the limbs, lanterns hung. Among the twisted limbs, huts had been built, small abodes made of sticks, with roofs of bearded lichens. Catwalks ran from house to house.
Fallion longed to climb up there, take a look around.
But he had to go farther inland, and sadly he realized that he might never set foot in Garion's Port again.
“The Ends of the Earth are not far enough,” he recalled, feeling ill at ease. He scanned the horizon for black sails. There were none.
So the boat crept among the roots until it reached a wide river. The family rowed through the night until dawn, listening to the night calls of strange birds, the rasping sounds of frogs or insects—all calls so alien that Fallion might just as well been in a new world.
As dawn began to brighten the sky, they drew the boat into the shelter beneath the great trees, and found that it was a place of eternal shadows.
The murk of overhanging trees made it as dark as night in some places, and the ground was musty and covered with strange insects—enormous tarantulas, and various animals the likes of which Fallion had never seen—flying tree lizards and strange beetles with horns.
They found a barren patch of ground and met up with Landesfallen's version of a shrew: a tenacious little creature that looked like a large mouse but which defended its territory as if it were a rabid she-bear. The bite of the shrew was mildly poisonous, Borenson was later warned, but not until after he discovered it through personal experience.
The shrew, disturbed by his approach, leapt up on his leg and sank its teeth into Borenson's thigh. The shrew then squatted in the clearing, squeaking and leaping threateningly each time that he neared. Sir Borenson, who had battled reavers, Runelords, and flameweavers, was obliged to give way for the damned shrew.
As Fallion nursed a fire into being, using nothing but wet detritus, the others set up camp.
He marveled at the raucous cries of birds unlike any that he'd heard before, the weird twittering calls of frogs, and the croaks of lizards.
The earth smelled rich, the humus and dirt overpowering. He had been at sea for so long, he'd forgotten how healthy the earth could smell.
But they were safe. There was no sign of Shadoath's pirates. They were alive, and tomorrow they could push farther inland.
For at least today, he thought, we are home.

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