gauzy clouds, as if from distant lightning.
Fallion’s personal guard, Sir Borenson, laughed and said, “You don’t smell evil. It’s a storm you smell.”
Daymorra glanced back, troubled. She was a rugged woman from beyond Inkarra, with strange skin as gray as a tree trunk, black hair as fine as flax, and black eyes that glinted like lightning. She wore a simple outfit of ebony cotton covered by a supple leather vest, with an ornate steel buckler that covered her belly, and a slave’s collar of silver around her neck. Neither Fallion nor anyone that he knew had ever seen anyone like Daymorra until she had shown up at the castle six months earlier, sent by Fallion’s father to join the guard.
“Humans may not smell evil,” Daymorra said. “But I’ve garnered endowments of scent from a burr. They know the smell of evil. Something is there, in trees. Evil spirits, I think.”
Fallion knew of men who had taken endowments of scent from dogs, but he had never even heard of a burr. Daymorra claimed to have taken endowments of hearing from bats, grace from hunting cats, and brawn from a wild boar. The skill to draw attributes from animals other than dogs was unheard of in Fallion’s land. If her story was true, hers was an exotic amalgam of powers.
Fallion rose up in his saddle, drew a deep breath, and tasted the air. It was so heavy with water, he could smell tomorrow’s morning dew, and the air was just cool enough that he could feel the first thrill of winter in it.
I do smell something, he thought. It was like an itch, an electric tingle, across the bridge of his cheek.
Daymorra eyed the barrows distrustfully and shivered. “One should give dead to fire or water, not leave evil spirits in the ground. We should turn back now.”
“Not yet,” Waggit argued. “We don’t have far to go. There is a thing that the boys must see.
Daymorra’s nostrils flared; she reined in her horse, as if thinking, then urged it ahead.
Fallion’s younger brother Jaz had been watching the side of the road for small animals. Fallion’s first vivid memory had been of discovering a frog-like a bit of gray-green clay with a dark mask. It had hopped over his head and landed on a lilac leaf when he was only two. He’d thought it was a “squishy grasshopper,” and felt the most amazing sense of wonder. After that, Fallion and his brother had become obsessed with hunting for animals- whether they be hedgehogs in the fields above the castle, or bats in the guard towers, or eels and crayfish in the moat. Jaz spoke up, “What is a burr?”
Daymorra frowned, then made big eyes and spoke as she rode. “A fawn, I think you call it. It is a forest fawn?”
Jaz shrugged and looked to Fallion for help. Though Fallion was only a few months older than his brother, Jaz always looked to him for help. Fallion was both much larger than Jaz and more mature. But even Fallion had never heard of a “forest fawn.”
Waggit answered, “Among the islands where Daymorra’s people come from, the burr is a small antelope-not much taller than a cat-that lives in the jungle. It is a timid creature. It is said that the burr can taste the thoughts of those that hunt them. The fact that Daymorra was able not only to catch one, but to take an endowment from it is…remarkable.”
They rode around a bend in silence, plunged below a thin cloud, and climbed again, only the thud of iron-shod hooves and the slithering sound of ring mail announcing them. To the left, the dull sun floated on the horizon like a molten bubble in a vat of ore. For the moment there were clouds above him and below, and Fallion pretended that he was riding through the clouds. The road ahead was barren, riddled with rocks and roots.
Fallion caught a movement out of the corner of his eye, glanced to his right, under the shadowed pines. A chill crept up his spine, and his senses came alive.
Something was under the shadows. Perhaps it had just been a raven flitting under the trees, black against black. But Fallion saw Borenson reach down with his right hand and grasp his long-handled warhammer, whose metal head had a bird on it, with spikes sticking out like wings.
Fallion was young enough to hope that a bear hid in the woods, or a huge stag. Something better than the ground squirrels and cottontail rabbits he’d been spotting along the road.
They crested a small hill, overlooking a vale.
“Look there, my young princes,” Waggit said soberly to both Fallion and Jaz. “Tell me what you see.”
A cottage squatted below, a tidy home with a freshly thatched roof, surrounded by ruby-colored roses and butterfly bushes. Birds flitted everywhere-yellow-headed bee eaters hovering and diving around the bushes.
A woman was out late, handsome, in a burgundy work dress, her hair tied back with a lavender rag, raking hazelnuts onto a ground cloth while her red hens clucked and raced about pecking at bugs and worms in the freshly turned leaves.
The woman glanced uphill at the riders, no doubt alerted by the thud of hooves on hard clay, the jangle of weapons. Worry showed in her eyes, but when she saw Borenson, she flashed a smile, gave a nod, and went back to work.
Hearthmaster Waggit whispered to the boys, “What do you know of that woman?”
Fallion tried to let his mind clear in the way that Waggit had taught him, to focus. He was supposed to gaze not just upon her face or figure, but upon the totality of her-her clothing, her movements, the house and possessions that she surrounded herself with.
Waggit was teaching the boys to “read.” Not to read characters or runes upon a parchment, but to read gestures and body language-to “read” people. Waggit, who had mastered several disciplines in the House of Understanding, insisted that “Of all the things I teach you, reading the human animal, as is taught in the Room of Eyes, is the skill that you will invoke most in life. Reading a person well can mean the difference between life and death.”
“She’s not married,” Jaz offered. “You can tell because she doesn’t have any clothes but hers drying on the line.” Jaz always tried to speak first, making the easy observations. That only made Fallion’s job harder.
Fallion was being tested; he struggled to find something more insightful to say. “I don’t think she wants to get married…ever.”
Behind him, Sir Borenson gave a sharp snort of a laugh and demanded, “Why would you say that?”
Borenson knew this land, this woman. His snort sounded almost derisive, as if Fallion had guessed wrong. So Fallion checked himself, and answered. “You and Waggit are her age. If she wanted a husband, she’d smile and look for a reason to talk. But she’s afraid of you. She keeps her shoulders turned away, like she’s saying, ‘Come near me, and I’ll run.’ ”
Borenson laughed again.
Waggit asked, “Is he correct?”
“He’s got the widow Huddard right,” Borenson said. “Cool as midwinter. Many a man has wanted to warm her bed, but she’ll have nothing to do with any of them.”
“Why not?” Waggit asked. But he didn’t ask Borenson or Jaz. Instead he looked at Fallion, probing, testing.
What he saw was a handsome boy with black hair, tanned features, nearly flawless. His face still swelled with the fat of a child, but his eyes held the wisdom of an old man.
Waggit studied the boy and thought, He’s so young-too young to plumb the depths of the human soul. He is, after all, only a child, without even a single endowment of wit to his name.
But Waggit also knew that Fallion was of a special breed. The children born in the past few years-after the Great War-were different from children born in the past. Stronger. Wiser. Some thought that it had to do with the Earth King. As if the rise of the first Earth King in two millennia had bestowed a blessing upon their seed. It was said that children in the rising generation were more perfect than their forefathers, more like the Bright Ones of the netherworld than normal children.
And if this was true of the get of common swineherds, it was doubly true of the Earth King’s firstborn, Fallion.
Fallion’s brother Jaz was nothing like Fallion. He was a kind boy, small for his age, and already distracted by a salamander pawing through the dead leaves by the roadside. He would be a thoughtful prince someday, Waggit imagined, but nothing special.
But Fallion had a greater destiny. Even now he gazed down upon the widow, trying to discover why she would never marry.
Her little cottage at the edge of the wilds was so… lush. The garden behind the house was lavish for a lone woman, and it was kept behind a tall fence so that her milk goat, which stood in the crook of a low apple tree, could
