by K. C. May
“Do I need to get the drenching horn?” Liera asked, eyeing him sideways.
GJ downed the liquid without further complaint, handed the cup back to his mother, and laid his head on Gavin's thigh. Liera and Rogan bid them goodnight and ambled toward their bedroom. Gavin blew out the lamp and stroked GJ's soft hair, disturbed at how warm his forehead felt. He whispered the stories he used to tell his daughter of bards in colorful costumes and ladies in long flowing gowns; of lordovers and men-at-arms and challenges of honor. Gradually, his nephew drifted to sleep.
If his own son had not died in his mother's womb, Gavin imagined he would have been much like this young boy who reminded Gavin more of himself than of Rogan - overly active, daring and fearless.
He gently lifted GJ's head from his leg and stood. He crept to the bedroom Jaesh had given up for him, and undressed. While he lay on the bed waiting for sleep to overtake him, the soft moans and rhythmic creaking from the next bedroom made him smile. His brother had a happy life.
* * * * *
The leaves whispered of promises unkept as they shivered in the trees and tumbled across the forest floor. A copper-haired girl with tiny freckles on her nose beckoned him. She was Caevyan, yet he called out “Dagaz!” as he ran after her. His legs were wooden and unbending, the ground soft like sand. “Papa!” she called, then ran away. Always elusive, staying ahead of him. She turned and waited, beckoning.
Her eyes were the color of the sky.
Gavin awoke with a gasp and sat upright in bed. The dream. He had that damned dream again, like an itch in his mind.
The first time he'd had the dream, with Mama leading him to the cave, was the night the baby chicks died. He'd awoken to the sound of Papa shouting his name in the early dawn and cursing in anger. Gavin had promised to light the heater in the coop before he went to bed, but he forgot, and the baby chicks - nearly three dozen of them - froze to death that night.
The chicks were long gone, as was his father. But the dream always reminded him of fuzzy yellow chicks, stiff with cold, dead because of Gavin's broken promise. He couldn't shake the notion he was forgetting something. He just didn't know what.
The covers lay on the floor, jumbled in a heap. He rose and pulled on his trousers, then headed to the kitchen for a drink of water.
As he made his way through the great room, his eyes open barely wide enough to navigate the house, he glimpsed a huge yellow egg glowing on the couch, with a spot of red near the center. Blood. Gavin snapped his eyes open. No egg, just his nephew.
GJ whimpered. The blanket lay halfway off the couch, the pillows for his leg scattered on the floor.
The poor boy. Gavin was no stranger to pain, but he couldn’t imagine the agony of a broken thigh-bone. No child should have to endure that. He knelt beside the couch and lifted GJ's splinted leg to replace the pillows beneath it. A warm tingling sensation spread from his palm to his wrist and up his forearm, heating as his hand lingered. He pulled his hand away and it cooled to normal.
What's this? Gavin let his hand rest over the bandage on GJ's thigh where the skin had been stitched back together. The longer he held it over the wound, the hotter it felt. Any second, he would see flames licking his skin. A gurgling sound rose in his throat as he gritted his teeth and endured the burning. Just when he thought he couldn't take it any more, he pushed into an odd white calmness that fluttered in his mind. There he became aware of a current flowing within him - not from the wound, but to it. Around him, the room was oddly quiet, as though his ears were stuffed with cotton. He heard the thumping of his own heart and the whisper of his lungs as he breathed. Finally, the tingling slowed and his hand cooled.
His arm trembled with exhaustion and he turned and sat on the floor, leaning his back against the couch. Sweat covered his skin. He felt suddenly chilled. What had just happened? Examining his hand, an alien thing, Gavin felt the room start to spin. His mouth watered. The sharp taste of vomit rose in his throat. He lowered his head and concentrated on calming his stomach. Black spots clouded his vision, narrowing his field of view until he saw nothing at all.
* * * * *
A cool, wet cloth bathed Gavin's face. He opened his eyes. In the dim glow of a lamp, Rogan's face leaned over him.
“Morning.” Rogan grinned and offered a hand. Gavin grasped it and pulled himself upright. “Somethin' wrong with Jaesh's bed?”
“What happened?” Gavin croaked, looking around. How did he get there? He remembered some kind of tingling. Heat. Pain.
“I'm guessing you fainted.” Rogan handed Gavin a glass of water, which he took gratefully and drained. “Puked all over yourself.”
“Aw hell, did I?” Gavin looked down at his chest and stomach, but his skin looked clean and dry.
“Cleaned you up.”
“My thanks.”
“I should be the one thanking you.”
“Huh?”
Rogan nodded toward GJ sleeping quietly on the couch. “This is the first night he's rested so well. What were you doing?”
“I went to get some water and noticed him fretting in his sleep, so I put the pillows back under his leg.”
Rogan smiled. “You must have a magic touch.”
Arlet Stronghammer's words came back to Gavin: Magic healing that is. Could he have somehow received magic powers? “The Rune Stones,” he whispered. The hazes he saw around GJ and Sithral Tyr. The quick healing. Maybe King Arek had used the gems to store his magic power for his heir. If the gems had been meant for the king's heir, then whoever ascended to the throne was supposed to receive the magic.
Bloody hell! He would need to give the magic to Edan once he claimed the King's Blood-stone, but how? To keep the power and not accept the throne would be like stealing from the king. There had to be a way to transfer the magic.
Rogan was staring at him.
Gavin let out an embarrassed chuckle. “The world's a strange place sometimes, ain't it?”
“Come on,” Rogan said. “Let's go outside and cut some logs for the stove.”
Rogan led the way outside where the sun was just beginning to lighten the sky. He picked up an axe and handed a second to Gavin. The two of them split wood side by side. Gavin missed times like this, working beside his brother in the comfortable silence of togetherness.
“So, the third rune is solved,” Rogan said. A rooster from a neighboring farm announced the dawn.
“Yeh.”
Neither of them spoke for a minute.
“Won’t be long now afore we have a king.” Rogan put a log on the stump and split it with a single blow.
“Not long at all,” Gavin replied, splitting a log. He wondered whether his brother suspected him.
They chopped for a few minutes longer.
“Think he realizes what the hell he’s getting his self into?” Rogan buried the axe in the stump and turned to Gavin with hands on hips.
Gavin searched his brother’s eyes. Rogan knew. “Yeh. He knows full well.”
Rogan paced, shaking his head. “I don’t understand. You don’t want another family, you don’t want to live tied down to anyone. Do you want to be king?”
“No. Hell no.”
“So why are you pursuing this thing?”
“I can’t help it. Ever since I was a boy, I’ve been having dreams. They’ve changed over the years, but someone’s always waving at me to follow them: first Mama, then for years it was Papa. Now it’s Caevyan. They’re leading me to the cave.”
“People whose death you took the blame for,” Rogan noted.
“I never blamed myself for Mama’s death.”
“Yeh, you did. You were so young then, but you kept asking if she died because you were bad. But they’re still just dreams. When you wake up, you can choose to go or not, and you keep going.”
“Rogan, when the answers to the runes come to me, they whisper in my head all day and night. I have to solve them or I’d go mad.”
Rogan gave him a sideways look. “You sure you haven’t
already gone mad?”
“Heh, probably been there and back.”
“You’re on a road you don’t want to be traveling and you got no map. It worries me, Little Brother.” Rogan put a hand on Gavin’s shoulder.
“Look, here’s what I’m thinking. If I don’t solve the last rune, if someone else does--”
“Gavin!” His name sounded strange coming from Rogan’s lips. “Nobody else has solved the damned things in two hundred years. What makes you think someone is going to wander up to that final rune, figure it out and save your bony ass at the last minute?”
“I could give the King's Blood-stone to someone else. Someone more fit to run the country than me.”
“If you’re not fit to rule Thendylath, what makes you think you’re fit to select her king? What makes you think that any man not capable of solving the runes his self would be wise enough to sit on the throne?”
“Edan could do it. He's learned, wise and has good judgment. He'd make an excellent king.”
Rogan laughed. “If you think Edan would take the reign off your shoulders, then I'm betting you don't know him as well as you think you do.”
“He will,” Gavin grumbled. He had to.
“Little Brother, King Arek put those gems into the tablet for a reason. The fact that you’re solving the runes when the realm’s loftiest scholars could not -- don’t that tell you somethin'? I like Edan. He's an honest, respectable man. But there’s more to being king than reading books, talking good and wearing fancy clothes. It takes somethin' you’ve got that nobody else has.”
“I’ll figure it out,” Gavin insisted. “One way or the other.”
Rogan sighed deeply. “Papa was right.”
Gavin’s blood went cold. “What?” Talking about their father with Rogan always made him uneasy. Rogan didn’t know the whole truth surrounding their father’s death. So many times, Gavin had started to tell him, to confess how he’d disobeyed their father and went off with his bow, alone, how he’d shot the bear cub, thinking it was a turkey dinner waiting to happen. Even now, he heard Papa’s screams when the wind kicked up. Sometimes in the fragile moments between sleep and wakefulness, he jerked upright at the image of Papa trying to climb the tree, the bear sow catching him, the claws, the blood... When Gavin wasn’t dreaming of Caevyan and the cave, he often dreamed of picking up body parts strewn across the forest floor, and a twelve year old boy sobbing as he dragged them home, mile after mile, wrapped in a blanket.
No. Gavin dared not confess his error. He prized Rogan’s love too much to risk it.
“He worried about you,” Rogan said. “Said you don’t understand responsibility. You either run away from it, or you take what’s not even yours. Said one day you’d find yourself overburdened with the weight of your broken promises, failing to see how they got you where you are.”
A chill ran across Gavin's neck. How could Papa have known? Gavin’s broken promise had ultimately caused Cuttor Kinshield’s death. How could he have known far enough in advance to have voiced his concerns to Rogan?
“Listen to me, Little Brother. I hate what I’m about to say, but I got to say it. I know you better than anyone else. I know your strengths and your flaws. You ain’t a refined gentleman or a poet or a scholar, but you’re a decent human being. You got a head for fairness, and your honor is solid -- you can’t be corrupted. You work hard, you help others, and you never ask nobody for nothin'.”
Gavin listened quietly, his head hung.
“I know you don’t want to hear this any more than I want to say it,” Rogan went on, “but if you’re the one solving the runes, then this is your destiny. You’re the one that King Arek meant to take the--”
“No!” Gavin barked. “Don’t say it, Rogan.”
The two brothers stood face to face, their eyes locked onto one another’s. Rogan’s were soft with sympathy. “All right,” Rogan said. “I’ll speak of it nevermore.”
* * * * *
The men stepped into the kitchen just as Liera walked in the front door. She balanced a basket of eggs on her hip and clutched a pail of milk in her hand. Gavin set down the armload of wood he carried, went to her, and took the pail.
“Gavin,” she said, “I set out some shirts I made for you, and some of Rogan’s trousers.”
“Hold a minute,” Rogan said, setting his load of wood on the floor. “Every time he borrows my clothes they come back shredded or not at all.”
“Oh, stop,” Liera chided him as she carried the eggs to the kitchen. “They’re too small for you.”
“They keep shrinking in the waist,” Rogan complained with a grin. “You’ve been to Feanna’s?”
“Yes, she’ll be over this afternoon.” Liera gave Gavin a mischievous grin.
Gavin set the pail of milk on the table. “Who’s this now?”
“Feanna’s our neighbor,” Liera said. “I invited her for supper. She lost her husband last year to the lung blight. The fool waited too long afore calling the healer, then slipped into the lasting sleep and never awoke. Tragic, just tragic. She cooks meals for orphaned children and collects outgrown clothes from the neighbors to dress them in. A real sweet lady.” She threw a smile over her shoulder at Gavin as she started preparing breakfast. “You’ll like her.”
“I’ve got to leave for Ambryce this morning,” Gavin said. “Your match-making will have to wait.”
“Gavin, you can’t leave yet -- you just got here. Besides, I told her I’d introduce you.”
“I appreciate the thought, but I need to be on my way,” Gavin said. He didn’t want to suffer through the company of a poor lonely widow who talked incessantly about her dead husband and tearfully knitted booties for the babe she would never bear.
“What’s your hurry, Little Brother?” Rogan asked as he fed wood into the stove. “We've barely had a chance to catch up.”
“After I take care of my business in Ambryce, I promise I’ll come back. But don’t think you’re going to marry me off to your widow friend.”
“Gavin, don’t be a curmudgeon,” Liera said. “She’s a lovely lady.”
“Does she tumble easy?” Gavin asked with a grin.
“Gavin Kinshield!”
Jaesh walked into the kitchen, his red hair standing on end. Gavin rubbed Jaesh’s head. “Morning, Bed Head.”
Jaesh batted away his uncle’s hand, laughing. “Uncle Gavin, are you going to teach me to ride your battle horse this time?”
Gavin lost his smile. “Sorry, Jaesh. I got to leave for Ambryce this morning.”
Jaesh hung his head. “Oh.”
“Look, I’ll be back soon and then I’ll teach you, I pro—”
“Promise. I know. I heard you last time you said that. And the time before that.” Jaesh pushed past Gavin and went outside, letting the door slam behind him.
“I feel terrible,” Gavin said quietly. “But what can I do? I got to go.”
“You’ve been telling him that for two years, Little Brother,” Rogan said. “Have you ever kept a promise you made?” He lit the stove and shut the wood box.
“It hasn’t been two years,” Gavin said. “Has it?”
Liera nodded with a defeated smile. “Just about.”
Then it struck him. Papa knew because Gavin had been making and breaking promises all his life, even as a boy. Afraid to be pinned down to what he feared he couldn’t live up to. “Damn it,” he whispered. “Damn it all to hell and back.”
This wouldn't do. Jaesh was growing into manhood and Gavin visited too rarely to share in any of it. Jaesh had been the first baby he’d ever held, the first person ever to look up to Gavin as a man, and now look at what a disappointment his uncle had become to him. Gavin made a silent promise – to himself – that he would come back as soon as he delivered Calewen’s Pendant and got his new sword.
“Papa?” GJ sat up on the couch with a confused expression.
“I’m here, Son,” Rogan said. He went to sit by GJ’s side.
“I dreamed a
little girl put white butterflies on my leg and made it all better.”
Gavin’s daughter had been especially fond of butterflies. The blood drained from his head and he reached for the table to steady himself. He did not need to ask whether the little girl in GJ’s dream had copper colored hair or blue eyes or freckles on her nose.
“Well, how’s it feel?” Rogan asked his son. He winked at Gavin.
GJ thought for a moment. “It doesn’t hurt. Mama, my leg doesn’t hurt.”
“I’m so glad, love. Maybe the pain tea is finally working,” Liera replied. “Let’s get ready to eat, and I’ll fix you some more.”
GJ started to get up from the couch.
“Take it easy, Son,” Rogan said with a hand on the boy’s chest. “Don’t try to get up just yet.”
“But Papa--”
Rogan’s stern look stopped the argument. “Just because it’s feeling better doesn’t mean it’s healed.”
But it was healed, and Gavin knew it.
Chapter 14
Trader’s Square sat just inside Tern’s gate. Canopies and carts lined the streets in front of the shops and attracted shoppers and merchants, beggars and cutpurses, leaving little room for travelers to squeeze past them to get into the city proper.
Daia looked in awe at the vast city rolling out before her. She’d grown up within its familiar and comfortable walls, but knowing she could run into a disapproving relative or one of her father’s business associates made her neck itch.
The merchant Yardof stopped his wagon, and Daia collected the rest of the payment for their escort before striking a deal for one of his gargoyles. She selected one of the light-colored wooden figurines, shoved it into her leather pack, and shook hands with Yardof and his daughter. Naylen waved mournfully from the wagon’s bed as it headed into the belly of the city, slowly devoured by the crowd.
Daia turned to JNese. “Where’s our outpost? I need to get the money Tennara's been collecting before I return to Sohan.”
“Come on, I'll show you,” JNese said.
Daia dismounted to walk beside JNese toward the southwest. Cirang led the way atop her horse.
