He woke with a sob, his heart pounding wildly.
In a panic, he threw himself out of bed, fearing that he would retch. It was no dream, after all. It was a memory, a false memory. The girls had been just the first of thousands. The blood of thousands was on his hands.
But in the dream he had refused to kill them.
He felt as if he had made some kind of breakthrough.
He groped through the darkness, moaning in horror at the memory, crawling on the floor, blinded by grief, yet hoping that somehow he had made a transition, hoping that he would not have to relive that slaughter for an eternity.
It had been the first time in days that he’d dreamed of them. Oh, how he wished that he could never dream again.
He reached the front door to the cottage, went out into the yard, and found himself gasping for air beside the well, sick to his stomach and fighting the urge to vomit.
Jaz’s dog, a mutt that had no name, came and peered up at him, perplexed and eager to give comfort.
“It’s okay, dog,” Borenson said.
And so he stood there, leaning against the well, peering out under the cold moonlight, listening to the river as it flowed beneath the hills, and waited for his heart to still.
All was safe on his little farm. All seemed well with the world. There were no assassins from Mystarria. No one knew where the Sons of the Oak might be, or if they did, they did not care.
But the loci still knew that Fallion was their enemy.
So where are they? Borenson worried. Why aren’t they fighting now? Are they really so afraid of him? Or are they plotting something worse?
And then a nagging worry hit him, one that he would chew on for years.
Or maybe they think that they’ve already won?
Borenson admired Fallion, admired and loved him like no other. But always in his memory he heard Asgaroth’s resounding curse: “War shall follow you all of your days, and though the world may applaud your slaughter, you will come to know that each of your victories is mine.”
Those who knew Fallion best considered him to be a quiet and unassuming hero.
But Borenson had seen the destruction after Fallion’s battle at the port of Syndyllian. He’d seen the fire- gutted ships. He knew what kind of damage the boy could wreak.
The loci were said to be cunning and subtle. Are they plotting something more? Borenson wondered. Or do they just leave him alone because they know that they have already won?
Borenson came into the house a few mornings later to see Fallion sitting in front of the hearth, peering into the fire, smiling as if at some secret, a faraway look in his eyes.
“What’s going on?” Borenson asked.
“Trouble,” he said. “There’s trouble ahead.”
“What kind of trouble?” Borenson looked about the house. Myrrima had gone outside to feed the sheep. Most of the little ones were still asleep.
“I remember why I came here,” Fallion said.
“To Landesfallen?”
“To this world.”
Borenson peered into Fallion’s eyes.
Fallion continued. “Once the world was perfect. Once it was whole and complete. But when the One True Master sought to take control, she tried to bind the world under her dominion, and it shattered into a million million worlds, all of them hurtling through space, all of them broken and incomplete, each of them a reflection to some degree of the One True World, shadows, each of them like shards of a broken mirror.”
Borenson knew the legends. He merely nodded.
“Now,” Fallion said, “the shadow worlds have turned. Now they’re coming together, a million million worlds all set to collide at a single point. Here.”
Borenson could not imagine any number so vast, and so he imagined a dozen balls of dirt, like little islands in the sky, all crashing together with explosive force, knocking down mountains, sending seas to hurl beyond their shore. “Everyone will be killed,” he said, unsure if he believed that it were even happening, unsure if it could happen.
“No,” Fallion said. “Not if it happens as it should. Not if the pieces fit together. The world won’t be destroyed. It will be healed. It can be perfect once again.”
“You really think this will happen?” Borenson asked.
Fallion turned his face upward. “I’m going to make it happen.”
Borenson drew back in astonishment, unsure whether to believe the boy. But something inside him knew that Fallion was serious. “When?” he asked.
“Soon. A year or two,” Fallion said. “I must return to Mystarria.” He turned and peered into the hearth, and his eyes seemed to fill with fire. “There’s a wizard at the heart of the world, one who seeks to heal it, a woman. I must find her, warn her of the dangers of what she is doing.”
“Averan?” Borenson asked. He’d never told Fallion about the girl, or anyone else for that matter. Gaborn had warned him not to. The work that she was doing was too dangerous, too important.
“So that’s her name,” Fallion said. “She’s the one that made me what Iam…”
The Heir of the Oak, Borenson realized. More perfect than children born in ages past. More like the Bright Ones of the netherworld.
At midwinter, Borenson learned the truth of what had happened at Shadoath’s Keep. A traveler came upriver, bearing news. The children in Shadoath’s Keep had been rescued, and were being given over to loving homes.
Did Borenson want one?
“No, thank you,” Borenson said. “I’ve got more than I can handle as it is.”
But Borenson dug the details from the stranger, and learned the truth of Fallion’s battle: Fallion had faced Shadoath at the height of her power, and had put her down.
Borenson had once wept for the boy’s lost innocence. Now he found himself weeping in gratitude to learn that the boy had retained it.
“He did not repeat my mistakes,” he told himself over and over.
That was something grand.
It was only three weeks later, in early spring, that Fallion solved the mystery of the death of his father.
From the time that they arrived in Sweetgrass, he’d heard rumors that the Earth King was seen in the area mere days before he died.
Back home in Mystarria, Fallion had dared imagine that his father had been murdered by Asgaroth, and that someday he would avenge him.
So Fallion collected rumors of his father’s whereabouts.
He was delivering eggs to the innkeeper in Sweetgrass, a lean man named Tobias Hobbs, when one of the guests at the inn said, “There’s an oak tree growing up on Bald Mountain, not two days’ walk from here.”
“An oak tree?” some stranger asked. “How would you know?”
And Fallion wondered how he would know indeed. There were stonewood trees down by the sea, and white gums along the river, and king’s pine in the mountains, and leatherwood and other types of trees that Fallion couldn’t even name. But there were no oaks in all of Landesfallen, and Fallion himself could barely remember what they looked like. His only real clue was a button that he kept in an old box, a gold button with the face of a man, his hair and beard made up of oak leaves.
“I’m sure. It’s the only one in all of Landesfallen,” the stranger was saying.
And so, on a hunch, two days later Fallion took a pack and followed the river upstream, past the towns of Mill Creek and Fossil, and then turned inland and climbed Bald Mountain.
He reached the top near sundown, and there discovered the oak tree, a young tree with golden bark, new leaves unfolding in green while only a few tattered brown remained from the previous fall, and boughs that spread wide over the ground, as if to shelter the world beneath.
Fallion circled the tree.
They called him a son of the oak, but he had not seen one in so long that he had almost forgotten how
