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.
42
Home is whatever place you feel safest.
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.
