Sons of the Oak

In the dim hours of morning, Shadoath strode through the tunnel under the palace gate. The stone walls were charred and darkened. The bodies of those who had been too close when the flameweaver had immolated himself were stretched out on the ground, their clothing incinerated, flesh charred and burned beyond recognition. Twenty-seven people had died there at the heart of the flames.

Some had been soldiers, others prisoners. But judging from the skeletal remains, none were children.

Fallion and Jaz had escaped and taken Valya with them.

Shadoath seethed.

She had hundreds of endowments of stamina to her credit, but even those had barely kept her alive. Gone were fingers and an ear, her right eye and most of her vision. Gone was the better part of her nose.

Her face was a mass of scars. Every inch of her was a searing pain. She would live, but never again would she be beautiful.

Her son Abravael came up behind her, the sea ape knuckling along at his back.

“Captain Stalker will go to Landesfallen,” Shadoath said. “We’ll find him there.”

“How do you know?” Abravael asked.

“He has a wife there, and a son. He knows that I know where they live. He has no choice but to rescue them.”

“He’ll have a good lead on us.”

“Ships will come soon enough. Stalker will be wallowing his way to Landesfallen with a hold full of cargo. He’s at least six weeks out. We’ll lighten our load. With any luck, we’ll meet him at the docks.”

Rhianna listened through Oohtooroo’s ears, and her heart ached. She longed to warn her friends. But the sea ape’s body would not respond to even her most urgent needs. Rhianna was a prisoner.

Shadoath turned to Oohtooroo and smiled. She must have realized Rhianna’s distress. She reached up and scratched the sea ape’s head. “Good girl, Oohtooroo. Good sea ape. You’ll help us catch those nasty people, won’t you? And when you do, we’ll have fresh meat for you-the tasty flesh of a young boy.”

At the words “fresh meat,” Oohtooroo grew excited and began grunting. She leapt in the air repeatedly and banged the earth with her mighty fist.

Shadoath smiled cruelly, peering not into the ape’s eyes, but through them, as if into Rhianna’s mind, and through Shadoath’s scarred visage, Rhianna saw the torture that she had in mind.

She would feed Fallion to the sea ape, and Rhianna would be able to do nothing as the ape ripped the flesh from his body, tearing away strips of muscle in her teeth, while Fallion screamed in pain.

That night, as Myrrima and Borenson lay abed with the children sleeping all about, Borenson took stock of the situation.

Fallion had taken the news of Rhianna’s death hard.

“I was sworn to protect her,” Fallion said.

Borenson had been a guard. He knew how much it hurt to lose a charge.

“We can’t always protect the ones that we love,” Borenson said. “Sometimes, even after all that we can do, we lose them.”

“I was able to save her from the strengi-saats once before,” Fallion objected. “Maybe she’s still out there. Maybe she needs our help.”

“Myrrima searched everywhere,” Berenson said. “She’s just…gone.” Fallion had insisted on blade practice before bed, despite his worn and weakened condition.

With muscles wasted from fatigue, with mouth swollen from thirst, Fallion reeled across the ship’s deck in the lantern light, his eyes glowing unnaturally, fighting like a crazed animal.

Afterward, he had cried himself to sleep.

Borenson worried about him. One by one, it seemed that Fallion was losing everyone he loved. What would happen when he lost them all?

Would there be room left in his heart for anything but hate?

“We got Fallion and Jaz back,” he told Myrrima as he lay spooned against her, whispering into her ear. “But if Shadoath is still alive

…? You’re sure that she’s alive?”

“I saw her and heard her cries,” Myrrima said.

“Then what have we won?”

Myrrima wasn’t sure. “We have Valya. We could pretend to hold her hostage if Shadoath comes for us.”

“Do you have the heart for such games? Neither one of us would ever put the girl’s feet to the flames or cut off an ear.”

“Shadoath doesn’t know that,” Myrrima said.

“At least we have a head start,” Borenson said.

Some of Shadoath’s ships had burned, but others still patrolled the ocean. Captain Stalker had assured them that Shadoath would hunt them with a vengeance in short order.

He’d had his men go down to the hold and begin dumping his cargo, throwing overboard anything that they couldn’t eat. It would ruin him financially, but he was worried only for his life. Captain Stalker intended to get to Landesfallen as soon as possible. There, he’d get his wife, the last surviving member of his family, and take the northern route to some unnamed port.

As Myrrima lay in bed, she whispered to herself as much as her husband, “I wish I could have beaten her. She has too many endowments.”

“If Shadoath has endowments, then she has Dedicates,” Borenson said in a dangerous tone. “Did you see any sign of them?”

“No,” Myrrima said. She glanced pointedly toward Valya, who lay asleep on the floor. The child didn’t know where to find her mother’s Dedicates. Borenson had already asked her. But she had been able to provide a clue. Her mother’s Dedicates had always been taken east, perhaps to some hidden port in Landesfallen or to another island, in a ship called the Mercy.

In time, Myrrima hoped that the girl might provide more clues to the whereabouts of Shadoath’s Dedicates.

Borenson held Myrrima tightly. She could tell that he was worried. He had played the assassin once in his life, and now it seemed that fate was casting him in that role again. Myrrima knew that he could not bear it.

She couldn’t ask Borenson to hunt down Shadoath’s Dedicates. Nor did she believe that she could do it herself. Besides, Gaborn had not told them to fight. He must have known the dangers that they would face better than they did.

There was only one other hope.

“Do you really think that we’ll be safe once we reach Landesfallen?” Myrrima asked.

Borenson hesitated. “ ‘The ends of the Earth are not far enough,’ Gaborn said. Once we reach Landesfallen, we’ll have to go past them, far past. Deep into the inlands.”

Only the coasts of Landesfallen were well inhabited. Here and there, where the roots of the stonewood forests touched the sea, cities had been built in the trees.

Shadoath would have a hard time searching even the coast. But the inland desert? That was huge, big enough for a man to get lost in and never be found.

“We’ll be safe,” Borenson said hopefully. “We’ll be safe.”