Authors: David Farland

Sons of the Oak (38 page)

BOOK: Sons of the Oak

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As if to emphasize his point, there was a flapping of wings at the mouth of the tunnel, and a graak croaked as it announced its presence. A new rider had just arrived.

Fallion made a mental note to check the wing on Jaz's graak. The membrane could be easily torn and become infected. They'd have to sew the wound closed and let the beast rest for a few days.

“What do we do?” the oldest of the Gwardeen girls asked. “Everyone knows to come 'ere. We could 'ave riders stragglin' in all night.”

And if everyone knows to come here, Fallion thought, then this is no hiding place at all.

He wondered if he should run, just tell the children to fly away. They could go to the Fortress of the Infernal Wastes, and from there head inland.

But there were problems with even that simple plan. Even by flying out of the fortress, they might reveal its location, and Fallion needed to keep it as secret as he could. It had tremendous strategic value.

Besides, he thought, even if we fly away, what kind of life would that be? Would I really be solving anything?

Waggit had always told him not to run from problems, but toward solutions.

“Tonight, I want a sentry at the door,” Fallion said. “And I want another about two miles down the canyon. If any of Shadoath's scouts try to make their way up here, I want ample notice. Depending on their number, we can either choose to fight or to run.”

“And what then?” someone asked. “Do we stay up here forever without any food.”

“Maybe we could fight them,” one boy said. “We could drop shot on them from high up, from our graaks.”

Fallion doubted that such an attack would do much harm, but it was Denorra who objected first. “We might kill a couple o' golaths that way, but for what? It's not likely that we'd 'it Shadoath 'erself. And they'd be on our tails sure then, and we'd be next to die.”

“There are other ways to fight,” Jaz suggested. He nodded toward the
leather bag on the floor, the forcibles in plain sight. To the children the forcibles were more an emblem of Fallion's kingship than his signet ring, for what was a king without endowments? “Perhaps it's time,” Jaz said, peering into Fallion's face.

Valya offered, “Milord, I will give you an endowment.”

“As will I,” Jaz said.

Fallion looked at his friends, and his heart felt so full that he thought it would break.

“I'll not take endowments from the people that I love best,” Fallion said. “Besides, we don't have a facilitator. We must find another way.”

Valya mused, “This may be our chance to strike Shadoath's Dedicates. She has just sacked a city. She'll be taking endowments tonight and sending the new Dedicates to her keep. We know that she sailed east from Syndyllian with her Dedicates in the past. It's likely that she's got them hidden here on Landesfallen, or somewhere nearby. We only have to follow her ship. We could go out in force, hunt for it in the night.”

Fallion wondered if it would work.

The other children looked at Fallion hopefully, and Denorra said, “It's better than sitting on our asses, just waitin' to starveâor for one of 'em to come kill us.”

Could it really be so easy: just fly old Windkris out to where Shadoath hid her Dedicates and dispatch them along with their guards?

But Fallion had no army to attack with, or at least no army that he was willing to risk. He wasn't about to send the children into battle.

He had only his own strong arms, and he doubted that they were enough.

But I've been training for this fight from childhood, he thought. His small size belied his prowess in battle.

What's more, there was a hidden fire within him, yearning to blaze.

He had no endowments, and he knew that if he were to proceed, he would be placing himself in tremendous peril.

I could find her Dedicates, he told himself. I could strike them down.

Afterward, killing Shadoath herself would not be hard. Fallion knew a dozen good warriors who might manage it.

Fallion needed only to seize the opportunity.

He'd never taken a human life with his own hands, and he was not eager to do so now.

But he thought of Captain Stalker's advice: when it comes time to gut a man, you don't cry out or make threats or apologize. Just be the kind of man who quietly goes and takes care of business.

“That's the kind of man I want you to be,” Stalker had said.

Fallion wasn't sure that he trusted the advice, but with nothing but uglier choices before him, it was the only decision that he could make.

FLYING AMONG THE STARS

I rode my first graak at the age of five, and never have I forgot the wonder. Now I am old and fat, and can fly only in my dreams.

âMendellas Orden

As evening fell, Fallion built a fire up, a bonfire that belched smoke and filled the cavern with light.

As he did, he felt a familiar tug. A voice whispered in his mind:
Sacrifice to me.

The time for battle was at hand, and after many years, Fallion gave in.

Yea, Master,
he said in his mind.
My work shall bring you glory.

The children took ashes from the fire and mixed them with water, then daubed them upon Windkris, Fallion's great white graak, painting it black.

In the darkness, he'd be almost impossible to spot. Then Fallion painted his own face and hands black, and wiped the sweet-smelling ashes upon his clothes.

Last of all, he honed his blade to razor sharpness.

Fallion peered through the gloom, taking one last long look at his friends, and then bade them all good-bye.

He felt as if he were looking upon his own children, and it broke his heart to be forced to leave them now, alone and helpless.

He went out to the ledge, untied Windkris's leg, and leapt onto the back of his mount. The graak lumbered forward to the edge of the cliff and leapt, then soared out over the valley.

A wind was rising from the land, and it bore the graak aloft, sent the great painted reptile soaring through the night beneath stars as bright as diamonds.

He circled east and then south, hiding the direction of his approach from any unfriendly eyes, and soared through hidden flyways among the stonewood trees until he reached the hills above Garion's Port.

There, east of the city, his graak perched in a tree, and he watched a small black schooner.

Is it the
Mercy
? he wondered.

He watched for hours as away boats rowed up to it, loading their cargo. Fallion saw humans being carted up by the score, most of them unconscious or incapacitated to the point that they had to be carried.

Sometime well before dawn, still hidden by the darkness and a rising mist, the ship stole out to sea.

He studied the ship's bearings, and knew where it was headed. Valya had said that it sailed due east from Syndyllian. Now it was taking a course southwest. By triangulating the courses in his mind, he was able to fix an approximate location, one that he recalled from Captain Stalker's old chartsâthe island of Wolfram, or one of the other atolls close by.

Fallion waited until the ship was far out to sea before he gave chase.

He flew south through a hidden flyway among the trees until he reached the beach, and then let his mount drop into the mist, so that its wingtips brushed the water and he felt the salt spray in his face.

For long hours he soared above the sea, watching it undulate beneath him, its waves dimpling like the skin of a serpent as it coils.

As he rode, time seemed to pass slowly.

I am growing old, Fallion thought. My childhood is vanishing behind me, failing.

And in the solitude as he rode under the stars, he had a long time to think, to firm his resolve. He imagined the Dedicates' Keep, filled with cruel people who'd given themselves into Shadoath's serviceâtwisted Bright Ones from the netherworld that had grown perfect in evil. Perhaps she used animals, tooâgolaths and strengi-saats and darkling glories.

Monsters. Shadoath's keep could well be filled with monsters.

But there would be others, too. Some of the folk from Garion's Port might be thereâthe innkeeper or his wife, or perhaps the tanner's pretty daughter.

How would he feel about taking her life?

Nix was crying. Jaz held her in the night and tried to get some sleep. The watch fire had burned down to coals and gave almost no heat.

And here so high on the mountain, the air felt thin and frigid, almost brittle. Jaz tried to warm Nix with his body, but could not even keep himself warm.

Fallion had been gone for hours. Jaz could not sleep. The graaks had been restless. Most of them were males, and at this time of the year, they were overwhelmed by the urge to hunt for food for their mates and to search for branches and kelp to use as nesting materials.

All through the night they let loose with
graaak
cries, then rustled their wings, eager to be off.

What would happen if I let the mounts go? he wondered.

He imagined that most of them would head straight for the sea, back to their nests, and try to rear their young. But not all of the graaks looked to be adults. The adolescents, those under nine years of age, wouldn't have bonded with a mate yet, and would be more likely to remain close to their masters, soaring along the mountain ledges to hunt for wild goats or heading to the valleys to hunt for rangits and burrow-bears.

They'd return after they fed, and that was the problem. They might attract unwanted attention.

The only thing that he could do was to leave the graaks tied to their iron rings. Let them sit quietly and feed off of their fat. In a few days, without food or water, the reptiles might dieâor worse, they might gnaw off their own feet in an effort to escape.

He imagined the graaks coming after the children, so crazed by hunger that they were willing to eat their masters. It had happened before, many times.

Jaz pitied the creatures. He knew what it felt like to be chained to a wall, with no food or water.

At long last, Jaz slept.

It seemed that he had only been down for a minute when he heard a guttural cry, and woke, his heart pounding in his throat.

Several of the graaks grunted, and he heard the rush of wings. Someone was riding away!

Jaz leapt to his feet. Nix was gone.

He raced outside and saw that the sun was rising, a great ball of pink at the edge of the world.

Down below him, he saw a graak flying just above the trees. Nix was riding it.

Gone to get food, he realized, and water. The children would need it.

Jaz was filled with wrath and foreboding. But there was no stopping her now. He could only hope that she did well.

Now was the time for her to get supplies, if she was to have any hope at allânow, before Shadoath's troops looted all of the nearby towns.

Fallion had warned them all not to go scrounging for food. But you cannot command a child to starve, Jaz realized.

For all of their sakes, he wished Nix luck.

Shadoath waited on a pinnacle of a mountain, studying the night sky. She had three dozen endowments of sight, but even then she was blind in the right eye, and everything in her left eye looked as if it were shrouded in the thinnest of mists.

To the west, her golath armies were marching through the night, fanning out. The golaths were tireless, and by dawn they would have prodded beneath every rock and mossy log within twenty miles of Garion's Port, looking for Fallion and Valya.

Shadoath had tried to follow the flyway, had taken it through several long detours and dead ends. Without someone to lead, her graak had lost its way.

At last she'd come to the end of it, rode out above some trees. She'd wondered if perhaps the children's hideout was somewhere just at the end of the flyway, there in the jungle, and so she'd landed her graak and searched on foot for a time, sniffing in the shadows for the scent of children, listening for human cries, all without luck.

But late in the afternoon she spotted a pair of graaks far to the east and suspected that the hideout had to be elsewhere.

She'd lost sight of them as they flew into the mountains.

Now for the first time she spotted something in the distance, miles away: a sliver of white, almost like a cloud, appearing and then disappearing, appearing and disappearing.

A graak, she realized, flapping its wings in the dawn. She could even make out a shadowy rider.

Perhaps one of the children was on patrol or carrying a message. In either case, it meant that the child would return.

And when that happened, Shadoath would follow the child to the hideout.

BOOK: Sons of the Oak

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