children ran out of the shadowy retreat into the sun and rolled about on the green grass.
It was a short journey to the Toth Queen’s Hideout. Fallion did not want to make it, but he had to. He needed to see if any of the children had survived.
When he returned from the netherworld, rising up from the world gate, he was surprised to find that Rhianna had waited for him. Her graak was high above, circling the field.
There was a fire in him now, a constant companion, endlessly burning.
He flew by the bright light of the sun, with Rhianna beside him, and at the fortress he found a twig and summoned a flame, and held it as if it were a candle.
As he held it, he peered at his hands and saw that they looked smoother than before, as if they had been shaved. The hairs on the back of his arms had turned to ash. He reached up, found that the hair of his head had met the same fate. He’d come perilously close to bursting into flame.
He hesitated outside the entrance to the tunnel and steeled himself. Nix could be there, dead, or Denorra or Carralee or any of a dozen other children that he had been training. He loved them as if they were brothers and sisters. He did not know if he could look upon their corpses and remain sane.
Rhianna landed her own graak and stood at his back.
“Stay out here,” he told her.
He took a deep breath and dove under the stone arch, into the blackness.
Inside, he found the corpses. It had been a bloodbath, and the sight of it left him ill, but he was relieved not to find Jaz or Nix or several others.
There was no sign of Valya.
He searched everywhere in the little tunnel, following it back into the mountain for nearly a mile.
One of the most dangerous times to ride a graak is on the takeoff, he thought. And a certainty filled him. He knew where to find Valya.
He raced to the mouth of the cave and peered down, two hundred yards below.
In the full sunlight, his eyes made out her form.
Valya lay on the rocks at the edge of the stream, her arms and legs splayed wide, as if she were reaching out to embrace the heavens. Her skin looked as white as parchment.
He let out a strangled cry, and Rhianna came up behind him, put a hand upon his shoulder, and tried to offer some comfort.
He left Rhianna on the bluff, and had his graak land beside Valya, and then waded through the shallows and pulled her to shore.
He’d never touched a human body that felt so cold. It wasn’t just the cold of death. The water had leached the heat from her, too.
He brought her up on the shore and peered into her face. Her eyes were closed, her face expressionless. It did not look as if she had died in pain.
Fallion combed her dark hair with his fingers, and just held her against his chest for a long time, until the body warmed a bit.
He did not know what to feel for her. Pity. Sadness. Regret.
I promised to set her free, he told himself. But what did I give her? If she could talk now, would she thank me for what I’ve done, or curse me?
Late that night long after the sun had set, Fallion and Rhianna flew high into the mountains up onto an arid plateau where an eerie fortress stood, a compound formed of white adobe bricks that gleamed like the bones of a giant in the starlight.
They landed at the gates, only seconds before a weary Sir Borenson arrived, hopping along on a tired rangit.
The travelers dismounted at the same time, and Borenson gave Fallion a long hug. He stared at Rhianna for a long moment, as if trying to place her, and then cried out in recognition.
“Rhianna?”
“Yes?”
“You look older,” he said. “You have an endowment of metabolism?”
She nodded.
“I never knew,” he said, astonished.
He looked to Fallion, his eyes locking on to Fallion’s bald head. “And Shadoath?”
“She’s dead,” Fallion told him. “Shadoath’s dead. In body, at least. I killed her, and her locus has fled.”
Sir Borenson had already seen Jaz earlier in the day. He’d flown ahead, had beaten Fallion here. He knew what Fallion had done, how he’d gone to slay Shadoath’s Dedicates. He’d known the price that Fallion would have to pay.
And now he imagined that by some miracle, Fallion had slaughtered the Dedicates and then slain Shadoath in single combat.
It was not an unreasonable leap of the imagination. The boy was well trained for battle; he was growing tall and strong. And he was a flameweaver.
He saw pain in Fallion’s eyes, and the weariness that can only be known by those who have witnessed terrible evil. He saw light in Fallion’s eyes, like a fire, endlessly burning.
He’s done it, Borenson thought. His hands are every bit as bloody as mine.
Borenson found himself weeping, crying in relief to know that both Rhianna and Fallion lived, but crying more for the innocence that they had lost.
51
Weeks later, long after the uproar at Garion’s Port died down, Borenson and Myrrima found the house that they had once promised to Rhianna and the children.
The new home lay on the edge of a town called Sweetgrass, fifty-seven miles upriver from the Ends of the Earth. So far inland, the stonewood trees were all but a memory. To each side of the valley, the land rose precipitously into red-rock canyons with their fantastic bluffs sculpted by wind, their hills of petrified sand dunes, and their majestic sandstone arches.
But there in Sweetgrass the hot hill country was still far away, as was the dense forest at the ocean’s edge. Instead a clear river ran down out of the canyons, through rolling hills, to form a rich alluvial plain, and there in the deep soil, grasses grew thick and tall.
Land like this wasn’t to be found anymore on Landesfallen, Borenson was told by a local farmer. There were places that you could homestead, desert hillsides so barren that goats could starve even with fifty acres to forage.
“I already own a piece of land like that,” Borenson had said with a laugh.
But this was rich country, grabbed up by settlers eight hundred years in the past. An old widow owned the homestead, the last in her line, and she could no longer maintain it. The farm had fallen into disrepair, all but her little square garden of flowers and vegetables out by the back porch.
So Borenson took his family to have a look. He had heard many a farmer curse the poor soil on their land back in Mystarria, and so he disregarded the shabby state of the cottage and barns, the fallen stones from the fences.
Instead, he gauged the farm by its soil alone. He took a shovel and went out into the fields and began to dig. The topsoil was rich and black, even to a depth of three feet. No hint of sand or clay or gravel or rock-just rich loam.
Land like this is a treasure greater than gold, he knew. Land like this will feed my children for generations to come.
As he dug, the kids raced along the river and chased up a pair of fat grouse and a herd of wild rangits. Little Erin thrilled to see turtles in the millpond and fat trout in the river.
