The Lady Myrrima finished drawing her own runes, and then looked up at Iome, as if seeking her approval, and assured her, “There will be heavy fog on the river tonight.”
Iome nodded, grateful to have Myrrima beside her. Once, years ago, they had been young maidens. Iome’s own endowments of metabolism had aged her, and though Myrrima had taken such endowments, too, she still looked young, perhaps in her early forties, still beautiful and voluptuous. Myrrima’s powers in wizardry kept her young. Any man who saw her on the street would ache for her.
Iome felt like a wraith in her presence.
Don’t flatter yourself, Iome told herself, there isn’t even a ghost of beauty left in you.
And it was true. Iome had aged gracefully in some ways, but her skin and flesh were going. After having given up her own endowment of glamour to Raj Ahten, she’d never been able to force herself to seek glamour from another woman. Draining a woman of both her physical beauty and her self-confidence was too cruel. Iome would never subject another person to such torment.
And so I am a wraith, she thought, and I will leave my children in Myrrima’s care. In time they will grow to love her more than they could ever have loved me.
Myrrima walked around the boat, and with her wet finger, she anointed the eyes of each person. “This will help you see through the fog,” she whispered.
Iome took her own place, standing at the rudder, feeling both sad and comforted by her vision of the future. She threw her cowl over her face and shrugged her shoulders, adopting the part of some anonymous old trader, while the children lay down in hiding, and Borenson and Iome’s own guard, Hadissa, sat just under the lip of their shelter.
Fallion’s pet ferrin whistled and lunged out of the cubbyhole, then hopped around the boat, giving soft little barks of alarm at the idea of being surrounded by water.
Fallion whistled, “Hush,” in Ferrin, a command that was soft and not too judgmental, a command that might be spoken by a ferrin mother to her child. Not for the first time Iome marveled at how swiftly the boy had learned the creature’s tongue.
Like his father, she thought.
Rhianna backed away from the creature and asked, “What’s that?”
“That’s Humfrey,” Jaz said. “Our ferrin.”
“Oh,” Rhianna said. But there was a hesitancy in Rhianna’s tone that made Iome suspect that the girl had never seen a ferrin before.
“Did you know that ferrins lay eggs?” Jaz asked. “They’re not like other mammals that way. They lay eggs. We saw the cobbler and the baker digging out a ferrins’ lair last spring, and there were eggs in it. Humfrey hatched out of one of the eggs.”
A young page set a small chest at Iome’s feet, and it tinkled softly with the sound of metal clinking against metal.
Borenson looked up at the page and said needlessly, “Careful!” but the damage had already been done.
In the box was a fortune in forcibles, hundreds of them, like little branding irons, each painstakingly crafted with runes on the end that would allow her sons to draw attributes from their vassals. Surely a few of the forcibles had been damaged-nicked or dented.
“They can be repaired,” Iome said.
As the guards shoved the boat from the dock, out into the oily waters, Iome took comfort.
Things can be repaired, she thought: Fallion’s hand, the forcibles, our kingdom.
And as she steered out into the current, which would carry them inexorably through the tunnel, past columns of twisted limestone, Iome whispered to herself, “Hurry the day. Hurry the day.”
7
A man who has not sworn himself to the service of the greater good is no man at all.
The longboat cast off, water lapping at its sides, and thudded against the cavern wall. Fallion’s wounded hand still hurt, and he had to wonder at his own bravado.
He peered around at the other children hidden among the crates. Their eyes were still bright in the torchlight, and their faces frightened.
In the mornings and evenings, when the guards traded shifts at the castle, they would hail each other, raise their blades to their foreheads, and salute one another.
Fallion now drew his own blade, turned first to Rhianna, then to Talon, then to Jaz, and softly spoke the oath, “Sworn to defend.”
It was more than mere words to Fallion, more than idle comfort that he offered. It was a bond that he knew would have to define him for as long as he lived.
Rhianna studied him. She had seen her mother’s trinkets stolen, along with her most beloved possession, her horse. Her mother had taken counterfeit coins in trade. She’d been lied to and hurt and used by men who professed love. Finally, she had been hunted down and killed by the man who professed to love her most.
Never trust anyone. It was a promise that Rhianna had made to herself long ago. But sometimes, she found, you had to trust people a little.
Could Fallion be one of these people? she wondered. We’ll see…
Rhianna saluted him with her own dirk, and Jaz likewise, while Talon merely gave him a determined look and clutched baby Erin to her chest as each of them said in turn, “Sworn to defend.” Even the little ferrin Humfrey, excited to see so many drawn blades, leapt up with his sharp knitting needle and chirped a single word, “Kill!”
And it was done. The guard Hadissa turned back, looked at Fallion and the other children, smiling, and at first Fallion imagined that the dangerous little man was laughing at them, as if it were child’s play, but then he saw a gleam of approval in the assassin’s dark eyes. Hadissa smiled because he understood. They were children no more, for the four of them were sworn as one.
The longboat caught the current and slid from the docks into the darkness so that suddenly they were in shadow. Fallion could not see the faces of the other children at all.
He peered forward as the boat glided past pillars of dripping limestone into the oily darkness. Everyone fell silent. Water dribbled from the ceiling, so that silver notes plinked magically all around. There was nothing to hear but the sounds of the boat and the small sounds of children breathing, and there was little to smell.
In the utter darkness, Fallion felt that he was sliding away from his old life, into a new one, and there was little that he could take with him. He caught himself falling asleep and, raising his head, decided to practice an old trick that Waggit had taught him.
“Remember this day,” Waggit had said. “Hold it in your mind for half an hour before you go to sleep, and the lessons that you have learned will remain with you for a lifetime.”
So Fallion tried to hold the day in his mind, recall all of his lessons. At the widow Huddard’s cottage, he had learned that a Runelord’s art was to learn to see the value hidden in others, and to then mold men and use them as tools. So he swore that he would seek to understand others, to recognize their hidden assets and help them become the best that they could be.
He had also learned that he was to flee to a hard land, and that he could thrive there if he worked. He swore to himself to work hard.
Then he had met Rhianna, and Fallion wondered if his father had sent him to save her.
She could be important to my future somehow, he thought.
And from Borenson and his mother, Fallion learned that he had had powerful enemies even before he was born, and that he had come to this world with a purpose, one that he still did not understand.
