This would be no formal duel. The opponents would not bow to each other with their blades pressed to their foreheads. There would be no third party to moderate. There would be no interference from the law. The man primarily responsible for upholding the law was already here, breaking it.
There would only be swords and sweat and death.
Tharadis considered walking away. He didn’t mind being called a coward; it was better than dying to appease his brother’s hatred. That wasn’t what stopped him from leaving. It was Owan’s empty gaze, one utterly devoid of anything resembling passion. He didn’t look forward to killing Tharadis. He wasn’t fueled by rage, rage that would dissipate over time. No. Owan meant to kill him, one way or another. He would try to kill Tharadis today, whether or not Tharadis sought to defend himself. It was merely something that had to be done.
Tharadis knew that all those months of training hadn't tipped the balance in his favor. But if he had to die, he would die fighting.
Before Tharadis even knew what was happening, Owan had his sword out and rushed him. The tip of his blade was coming too fast, he had no way to parry it, so Tharadis stumbled out of the way as he dragged his father’s blade free of its sheath. Owan stepped back to shake his head.
“You disappoint me, brother.” When Tharadis was back on his feet, sword held out in front of him, his breathing panicked and fast, Owan pressed the attack again. Tharadis could only parry. Owan was simply too fast and too skilled. The few openings he left were closed as soon as Tharadis recognized them. Owan unleashed a flurry of blows faster than he ever had before. Defense was all Tharadis had, and he knew it wasn’t enough.
Still, none of Owan’s strikes connected, not even for a glancing blow. None of them seemed to have been pulled, but Tharadis suspected Owan was good enough to fake a genuinely deadly assault. If he truly wanted to kill him, he would without hesitation. All of this was for show. But why? What was he holding out for?
Tharadis didn’t dare relent in his defense. Perhaps this was merely a test. If it was, Tharadis had no intention of failing it.
Then, just as quickly as they had started, the rain of blows stopped. Owan let the tip of his blade sink almost to the grass as he watched the crowd off to Tharadis’s left.
Tharadis himself wasn’t sure he wanted to take his attention off his brother long enough to see what had caught Owan’s eye. But when he caught a glimpse of sable hair, the edges of which flashed red when the sun hit it right, he couldn’t help himself.
Serena was there.
Tharadis didn’t know what he expected to see if she should come—pain, despair, the emptiness he saw in her eyes that day, the same emptiness that would frequently visit Owan’s expression—but it certainly wasn’t what he saw when she looked into his eyes.
Happiness.
It stunned him. If Owan had walked over and stabbed him then, Tharadis wouldn’t have even noticed until his heart stopped.
She was, somehow, happy.
It wasn’t fleeting, ephemeral contentment or momentary pleasure or even a reprieve from the pain that always haunted her, but pure, unrestrained happiness.
She was beyond beautiful. It took him a moment to realize that the wreath of flowers woven throughout her hair was hearthsflame. Her hands rested on her belly, which Tharadis was surprised to see was bulging slightly.
A child.
My child.
“Now you know,” Owan said quietly. His face was stricken. “Now you know why only death can come of this.”
Tharadis lowered the tip of his father’s sword, pitching his own voice so no one other than Owan could hear it. “It doesn’t have to end this way. You can walk away from this. No one has to know who the father—”
“They will know. They will know I am the father.”
“Fine. But don’t do this.”
Frustration warred with disbelief on Owan’s face. “You’re willing to give up everything over this?”
“Of course not,” Tharadis said. “Death gains me nothing I wouldn’t already have in life, however meager that may end up being.”
Owan smiled sadly. “You have an odd way of trying to convince me.” The smile withered. “But I’m afraid you’ll fail, no matter what you say.”
Tharadis tossed the sword in the grass. “Then you’ll just have to execute me for a criminal. I will no longer be a part of this.”
Owan’s eyes fixed on the sword lying at Tharadis’s feet. “Our father’s sword.” He looked up, cocked his head to the side. “Have I told you how he died?”
Tharadis folded his arms. “No. You didn't.”
Owan nodded and stepped closer. “I hadn’t trusted you for quite some time, not with how often you went to my house when I was gone. So I had one of my men stay behind to follow you, just to make sure nothing … out of the ordinary, happened. He came as soon as he could and told me what he heard that night. I was in a fit, of course. Father tried to calm me down.” He shrugged. “He tried to hold me back from doing what needed to be done. I ran him through.”
The words were like a fist in Tharadis’s stomach. “Liar.”
“No, brother. It’s true.” Owan lifted the sword in his hand. The Warden’s sword. “I pierced his heart with my sword. Ask Rellin. He watched me do it. Our father died at my hands.”
“You’re just telling me this because you want me to fight you.”
“Of course. But that doesn’t make it any less true.”
Tharadis bent to pick up his father’s sword and felt his rage boil through him. Tharadis stared at the blade, at the scratches and dings. An old sword, for an old man. An old man who never had a chance, who never thought his own son could raise a weapon against him. He died, likely disbelieving Owan’s fury and what it would cause him to do.
A senseless death.
Without quite knowing what he was doing, Tharadis raised his sword over his head, the blade sideways, parallel to his shoulders. For some reason, it just felt right to hold it that way. Natural.
“Ah.” There was a touch of amusement in Owan’s voice. “The Fool’s Salute. I can’t imagine where you learned that one. It seems fitting, though, doesn’t it? A couple of fools, trying to kill each other.” He raised his own sword to mirror the salute, then brought it down and thrust toward Tharadis’s heart.
And was deftly parried. The tip of his father’s sword pierced Owan’s leg.
First stroke.
Owan cried out, backed away, favoring the wounded leg. His eyes widened in surprise, then narrowed. “Interesting.” He winced as he began slowly limping in a circle around Tharadis.
It was misdirection. Owan sprang forward, lightning-quick, his sword a bolt of death. Tharadis parried it easily. Owan avoided his previous mistake and didn’t lean into the thrust. Had he, his shoulder would have been skewered.
Why the hearthsflame? Serena had asked on that day when this all began.
Because that’s what drove him.
It drove him now.
With his sword, Tharadis began to draw.
The design was firmly fixed in his mind. Each cut curved out from a single point fixed in his vision, swirling and branching, layered upon each other. There was a rhythm and an order to his cuts. Each subsequent stroke of his sword had to be made at the right time. It was a design he had drawn a thousand times before, one he had perfected in his mind and in his wrist. He had never drawn it with a sword, had never needed to, but he found that it wasn’t all that different from what he had used in the past. Neither dirt nor paint was his medium now; blood was. Owan’s blood.
Tharadis proceeded to create his masterpiece.
Their roles were reversed. Owan was no longer the teacher. No, he was the one learning a lesson now.
He would learn that the hearthsflame refused to yield to death.
Tharadis’s wrists were numb with the ringing shock of steel on steel. His muscles burned as if liquid fire flowed through his veins, yet he dared not—could not—quit. The design trumped all. T
he hearthsflame was the expression of the universe. Tharadis merely realized that expression in physical form.
Owan couldn’t stand against his relentless assault. His face was streaked with sweat. His hair clung to his skull. Blood seeped through his tunic from a dozen cuts. With each barely-deflected stroke, his movements became more sluggish, weaker.
The flower was done. Tharadis completed the design by creating the oval, whipping Owan’s sword from his hand in the process. The Warden’s sword flipped once, twice, and flopped to the ground at Serena’s feet.
The tip of their father’s sword hovered at Owan’s chest as he fell to a knee.
Fury pulsed through Tharadis in a torrent. It took all of his willpower to keep his sword hand from shaking. “Do you relent?”
Owan’s panting slowed. “I’m sorry, brother.” Owan smiled sadly. “I’ve never been good at much of anything except killing. Not much of a husband, a son, or a brother. I’ve done a fair job as Warden, though, I think. For a little while, anyway. But that’s all.” His smile faded. “I can’t do this anymore, Tharadis. Be the better man. Be everything I could not.”
Owan gripped their father’s blade in his hands, twisting it so as to wrench it out of Tharadis’s hands. Tharadis saw what he was doing and tightened his grip, but that was just what Owan had wanted him to do. Owan threw himself forward and, weighted against Tharadis’s grip, the sword pierced his heart.
* * *
The night air by the sea was balmier than up on the plateau, where the city lay. Clouds of insects buzzed around, unnoticed by the people gathered around the lacquered canoe. The shadows cast by flickering torches stabbed into the wet sand were all that moved. A crowd nearly as large as the one that had witnessed the duel circled around the canoe, hands folded and heads bowed.
Only Tharadis, his mother, and his little sister Esta stood at the canoe’s side. Tharadis rested a hand on Esta’s shoulders. She gripped the gunwale tightly in her own small hands but didn’t cry. Their mother, however, leaned forward, hands on the canoe’s side and tears in her eyes. The shroud, covered with dunblossoms, only came to Owan’s neck. His face looked like their father’s had in death. Tharadis knew how broken she felt inside. But she held her head high and, though she cried, radiated a strength that endured. Perhaps she, too, knew of the hearthsflame.
Serena. Tharadis closed his eyes briefly. Where are you?
He had wondered if she would come. As Owan’s widow, she had an honored place here among the family of the deceased. But she had disappeared utterly since his death. Rellin, the ranking officer of the Watch, had sent search parties out to the lowlands yesterday. Esta, who had recently determined to cause as much trouble for her mother as possible, tried sneaking along with one of the search parties and almost got lost herself. Rellin was kind enough to deliver her, kicking and screaming, back to their mother’s house personally.
Rellin. Tharadis had asked him about what had happened with Owan and their father on the day that he died. What Owan had said was true; he had had Tharadis followed, and when he found out what happened, flew into a rage. Owan had immediately tried taking his own life, and their father had stopped him. But Owan would not be stopped. They struggled. Father died.
Owan had been crushed. It had been an accident, but he was responsible, nonetheless. The guilt consumed him more absolutely than his grief at losing his wife’s heart, and he knew he was not fit even to take his own life.
But Tharadis, Owan had believed, could be. If only he were a little stronger.
He could even be Naruvieth’s Warden.
Rellin had not asked Tharadis to take the position. But he made it very clear that Rellin himself was only the acting leader of the Shoresmen and had no designs on being anything more. And the other Shoresmen who had seen the duel had no qualms with Owan’s unspoken suggestion.
Tharadis had yet to give him an answer.
Larril, Naruvieth’s sole Patterner, strode out of the crowd to stand near the canoe. He had changed out of his typical red tunic for one of coarse, undyed fabric that was nearly the length of a robe. His deep eyes were even wearier of the world than usual. Once he stood next to the canoe opposite Tharadis’s mother, he raised his hands to address those gathered.
“Here lies a man sworn to protect us,” Larril called out. “A man committed to the safety of all in Naruvieth. Though no man is perfect, perhaps we should look at the comforts we enjoy and the security we feel as testament to this man’s worth. He was many things to many of us. Some of us knew him as family. Others only as the sword held high in defense of justice. But all of us knew him, and all of us were touched by him in some way. Let us now reflect on this man’s life as it was.”
He stepped away as Tharadis circled around to the other side of the canoe. He brushed his fingers along the hilt of his father’s sword, laid atop the shroud. Both he and his mother lifted the canoe up from the small wooden platform it rested upon. It was surprisingly light, considering that Owan was not a small man.
Larril said, “And so we commit the body of the man toward its journey across the Astral Sea in search of a better place, in search of Farshores. May it meet the spirit there and be united once again.”
Tharadis and his mother waded out to their knees. The sea did indeed look like a sea filled with stars as its gently lapping waves reflected the clear night sky. Once the canoe reached the end of the Calmness a few miles out, where the churning Restless Ocean began, its journey would end. It would never reach Farshores, or any shores for that matter. It would be thrashed to pieces, and its remains and the remains of the man wrapped within it would be pulled into the dark depths.
Death was not the beginning of some new journey. It was merely the end of one.
The canoe drifted across the water, becoming indistinguishable from one of the wavering points of light reflected from the sky. Soon it was lost to sight.
“What will you do about your brother’s child?” His mother’s voice was muted with sorrow. It wouldn’t carry to anyone else, save perhaps Esta and Larril.
“I will protect her.”
“Her?” His mother turned to him.
After a moment, Tharadis realized he was answering two questions at once. “Or him, whatever the child turns out to be. But I will make sure that this world is safe for her.” For my child.
For Serena.
“Then you’d better get to work, Warden.” His mother’s steps sloshed as she walked back to shore.
Though she couldn’t see him, Tharadis nodded.
When he turned, he saw everyone beginning to disperse and return to their homes. Standing there waiting for him, hair black as night, was the woman he loved, carrying the child they had made inside her.
She had come back at the last, to see her husband leave her life forever. Her wet eyes met Tharadis’s, and then she, too, turned to head back to her home.
Tharadis let her go.
Chapter 38: The Wishing Well
It seemed as if an eternity had passed since Tharadis had last seen Serena’s home. He hadn’t known what to expect. Would it look exactly the same as it had months ago? Would it have fallen into disrepair, a product of her despair at losing her husband to her one-time lover? No matter how he imagined it, the one possibility that hadn’t occurred to him was, of course, the reality. Seeing it as he walked around the bend in the trail with a wicker basket full of food tucked under his arm, he couldn’t help but smile at seeing how wrong she had proved him. Serena’s stubbornness was unmatched.
The house had been re-roofed with new shakes, freshly cut by the look of vitality in the bright red wood. It looked like madrona. Leave it Serena to fell and split one of the hardiest of trees by herself while pregnant. Tharadis saw her in his mind’s eye, legs spread apart, sweat soaking through a thin linen shift, determination burning in her eyes as she swung her long-handled axe awkwardly around the bulge of her belly as if defending the world against a horde of sheggam invaders, merely to fix a roof that didn’t real
ly need fixing.
Tharadis chuckled to himself when he heard the distant sound of wood being split and realized he could probably see such a scene with his own eyes. He left the basket on the table inside the house and went out the back door toward the sounds of chopping.
Dry, gray moss crumbled like ashes beneath his sandaled feet as he stepped into the drytree thicket behind Serena’s house. A scattering of clouds, rare any time of the year, scudded across the sky, sometimes muting the light that streamed through the narrow, needle-like leaves. The air was still, and the wood was silent saving the falling of Serena’s axe and crackle of Tharadis’s footsteps. Here and there forest creatures, small rodents or mottled gray lizards scurried away at his approach, and the odd bird took to wing as he passed by.
Tharadis felt oddly naked without his father’s sword at his hip. He kept wanting to rest his hand on the hilt that was no longer there. He still wore the studded leather swordbelt over his embroidered green tunic, though it felt extravagant compared to the loop of woven hemp he used to wear before he began training for the sword. He supposed that once he was truly Warden, he would have to get himself his own sword, but for now, the Watch’s dulled practice swords would have to do.
The chopping stopped. Serena must have paused to take a break. Try as she might to prove otherwise, she had to share her body with another person who required energy, too. It wouldn’t be good for the baby if Serena to worked herself to death.
Not the baby. Our baby.
Tharadis halted as the truth of that suffused him. He was going to be a father. He and Serena would bring new life into the world.
He had known it abstractly, but not until that moment that he realized just how that would change his life—change him. His future rolled out before him like the unfurling of a golden carpet, glittering in the sunlight. He hadn’t been sure he’d been ready, that this would be something that he could handle, what with all the change he had been dealing with in his life. At times, he felt overwhelmed, though most of the time it was just a subtle anxiety he felt, one that he could only name as fear of the unknown. The events that would shape his future were still unknown, but at least one thing was certain—he would be a father.
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