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.”
41
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.
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
