Sons of the Oak Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  PROLOGUE

  1 - PERFECTING THE DARKNESS

  2 - THE CUT THAT CURES

  3 - OF RINGS AND THRONES

  4 - THE STRONG SEED

  5 - ASGAROTH

  6 - THE FLIGHT

  7 - SWORN TO DEFEND

  8 - THE SIEGE

  9 - TRUST

  10 - THE CHARGE

  11 - MISTRESS OF THE HUNT

  12 - A BREAK IN THE CLOUDS

  13 - THE CURSE

  14 - THE COURTS OF TIDE

  15 - A PRIVATE RECEPTION

  16 - SENDINGS

  17 - SMALL ARMIES, SMALL VICTORIES

  18 - THE LEVIATHAN

  19 - STREBEN

  20 - SMOKER

  21 - A KILLER IN THE DARK

  22 - THE JUDGMENT

  23 - INVISIBLE CHILDREN

  24 - THE PRICE OF A PRINCE

  25 - SMALL BATTLES

  26 - ROUGH WATERS

  27 - SYNDYLLIAN

  28 - THE BEACH

  29 - THE MERRY JIG

  30 - ON THE BEACH

  31 - LEFT IN THE DARK

  32 - THE CELL

  33 - THE SEA APE

  34 - A CHILD OF EVIL

  35 - THE RANSOM

  36 - DYING BY DEGREES

  37 - BECOMING ONE

  38 - THE RESCUE

  39 - THE FURY

  40 - A MOTHER’S VENGEANCE

  41 - THE BROKEN CHILD

  42 - GARION’S PORT

  43 - THE NIGHTMARE RETURNS

  44 - HEIR OF THE OAK

  45 - THE HUNT

  46 - THE RISE OF A KING

  47 - FLYING AMONG THE STARS

  48 - THE ATOLL

  49 - THE TORCH-BEARER

  50 - FIRE IN THE HEAVENS

  51 - FALLION’S END

  Also by

  Copyright Page

  To Rick and Amy White, with gratitude for their friendship

  and support through a difficult time

  PROLOGUE

  Asgaroth sent his consciousness across the stars, past nebulae of flaming gases, past black holes that sucked in all matter, beyond galaxies dying and gone cold, until he stood upon the broken remnants of the One True World before his master, Shadoath.

  She appeared to him as a goddess of shadow, a petite woman, sleek and elegant, her supple limbs the very definition of grace, raven hair cascading down bare shoulders, her smooth skin as flawless as perfect virtue, her lips so red that blood would envy it.

  A shadow slanted across her face, hiding her features, but her eyes sparkled like black diamonds.

  She sat upon a marble dais in a garden, with trees twisting up like thick serpents, their dark leaves hissing in a hint of wind, while among them sweet doves sang their night songs.

  In the hollows among the trees stood her guardians, those who worshipped her, those whose love enslaved them. Once, in a previous life, Asgaroth had grown a cancer on his shoulder. For weeks a fevered hump had amassed, swelling so quickly that he could almost watch it. He knew that it would kill him in time, and had watched it with morbid dispassion, until finally one day the skin above it had grown so taut that it could no longer hold, and a rip appeared. From out of it he saw the cancer: a grotesque fleshy head with a mouthful of crooked teeth, a single milky eye, and some ragged hair.

  He had looked upon it with dispassion, laughing. “It is my true self revealed at last!” he’d whispered.

  But those who guarded Shadoath were more twisted still, mere humps of flesh with crooked backs that surely could not attain higher thought. They seemed to sprout heads and arms almost at random. He saw one that had three full hands budding from a single arm, yet it held a silver scimitar in one of those hands with expertness, its swollen fingers like red claws wrapped painfully about the hilt.

  Shadoath watched him approach with dispassion. They had spoken countless times before, over the millions of millions of years.

  “Mistress,” Asgaroth whispered. “The torch-bearer has chosen a new form.”

  Asgaroth showed her a vision of Queen Iome Sylvarresta, her womb swelling with new life, a spirit shining like a fallen star beneath the flesh.

  Shadoath showed no emotion. It had been ages since this torch-bearer had last shown himself. He had been in hiding, for centuries, purifying himself, firming his resolve.

  “What does he desire?” Shadoath asked.

  Asgaroth showed her a vision of the world of the Runelords, a world healing after the fierce battles between the reavers and the Earth King, a world healing more than any world should, a world remaking itself in the shape of the One True World. “He has found it: a world that holds the memory of the master rune. The restoration is at hand!”

  This caused Shadoath to rise. Once, so long ago that even the memory of the events had faded, so that now it was only a legend, the Dark Master had sought to seize control of all creation, had sought to bind all that existed to her. But her efforts had failed, the master rune itself was broken, and at that time, the One True World had shattered, splintering into a thousand thousand shadow worlds, each but a dim reflection of the perfect world that had been.

  With its destruction, the knowledge of the master rune was lost. Long had Asgaroth believed that reality was like a shattered crystal, each shadow world a shard of what had been. And one of those shards would still know the shape of the master rune.

  Now, they had found that shard. And with the knowledge, the master rune could be rebuilt. The shadow worlds could be bound in one, all worlds colliding to make a perfect whole.

  “He will seek to bind the worlds,” Shadoath said.

  Both Shadoath and Asgaroth had amassed a wealth of knowledge about magic. But neither knew the key to binding the worlds, to bringing forth the restoration.

  “Then we must make sure that he is under our sway,” Asgaroth said. “After his birth, it will take time before he fully awakens to his power. The torch-bearer will be vulnerable.”

  “Then we should plant the seeds of his destruction now,” Shadoath said. “You know what to do. Open a gate to his world, and I will bring my armies and join you.”

  Asgaroth smiled. Shadoath’s resources were unbounded, her cunning unsurpassed, her cruelty inspired. Compared to her, the monster Scathain who had lost against the Earth King was but a worm. She had defeated the torch-bearer countless times before. She would defeat him one last time, in this the most desperate of contests. For this time it was not a single world that hung in the balance, it was all creation.

  “An open gate awaits you,” Asgaroth said, and he showed her a vision of a tiny village, burned to slag there among the woods. Chimneys of blackened stone were all that was left of the houses. On a patch of ashes, among ash-covered bones, green flames glowed, creeping along the ground.

  At that moment, the Earth King Gaborn Val Orden was taking a late meal. He set down his wine goblet and felt vaguely disturbed. He tilted his head as if listening. He felt something … . A keen sense of danger that prickled the hair on his scalp. But it was distant, in the future. And it was not targeted at a certain person. It was diffuse, and vast. It was an evil large enough to lay waste to an entire world.

  1

  PERFECTING THE DARKNESS

  No one can truly be called a man so long as he basks in the light of his father and mother. For until we are forced to stand alone, we never know the measure of strength that abides within us. And once a boy’s father dies, he cannot be called a child any longer.

  —The Wizard Binnesman

  This was the face of the Earth King: Skin the shade of dark green oak leaves, fading in the fall. Old man’s hair of silver webs. A sorrowful face as full of furrows as the rind of a rotting apple.
And green-black eyes that were wild, hunted, like the eyes of a stag in the forest.

  That is how Fallion, at the age of nine, remembered his father. A father he had not seen now for three years.

  Strange then, that on an autumn evening as Fallion rode on a mountain track outside Castle Coorm with his younger brother Jaz and Hearthmaster Waggit beside him, and a small contingent of guards bristling front and back, the image of his father should intrude so heavily on Fallion’s mind.

  “Time to turn back,” the point guard, a woman named Daymorra, said in a thick accent. “I smell evil.”

  She nodded to her right, up a hill where fences of stacked gray stones parceled out some cowherd’s lands and formed a dam that held back the leaning pine forests of the mountains above. There, at the edge of the forest rose a pair of barrows, houses for the dead. In the swiftly falling darkness, the shadows under the trees were black. And above the mountain hovered a haze, purple and green like a bruise in the sky. Strange lights flashed among the 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 not get the vegetables.

  Bushes and trees had been planted around the house to break the wind and offer shelter to birds—bee eaters and sparrows that, like the chickens, cleared the garden of worms and beetles.

  Wicker flower baskets hung from the eaves of the cottage, drawing honeybees, and Fallion did not doubt that the widow Huddard knew where the hives lay.

  This woman lived in harmony with nature. Her home was a little island paradise surrounded by rocky hills.

  Fallion said, “She works hard. Nobody around her works as hard. We’ve seen a hundred cottages along the road, but none like hers. She doesn’t want to raise some man like he was a baby.”