The Wizard Binnesman’s work, Fallion realized.
He took the staff and the book out into the bright sunlight and squinted as he peered around.
Father wouldn’t have left these, Fallion told himself. His body will be nearby.
Behind him was all rock, a sheer rise of petrified sand dunes, the stone cascading down as if to make a stairway into the heavens.
Below was the hillside, covered with sparse grasses.
The only place that a body could be hidden was there beneath the tree.
Fallion took the staff and prodded the old leaves beneath the tree. They formed a mat, brown leaves splotched by dark lichens and mold. Many had gone skeletal, showing only the bones of leaves.
There Fallion struck something round and heavy, and a skull rolled out from the leaves, grayed by age, its walls thinning as it decalcified.
“There you are, Father,” Fallion whispered, picking up the skull.
He prodded some more and found a collection of bones, a few thin ribs, finger bones, and a hip. There was no sign of foul play, no dagger protruding from the back, no arrow in the heart. Just bones.
Finally Fallion understood.
Father had been a wizard, an aging wizard. Just as a flameweaver carried an elemental of flame within him, or one of the wind-driven would unleash a cyclone, something of the earth had to make its way out of his father upon his demise.
Fallion peered out over the valley, the land that he called home. From up here, he could see the river snaking through green and peaceful fields, cottages down below with red-and-white cattle or black sheep dotting the fields. There were orchards and hay fields stretching as far as Fallion could see.
Fallion’s father had not been murdered. He had been old and decrepit, dying.
So he sought out a fertile place, and had planted himself there.
He wanted me to be here, Fallion realized. He wanted me to be where he could watch over me.
Fallion had never really known his own father. At times he had wanted Waggit to be his father, or Borenson, or Stalker. And as such children do, he had learned from each of those men, had taken something of them into himself.
Squatting there in the shade of the oak, Fallion pulled open the book and began to read, determined to become intimate with a father he had never really known.
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Sons of the Oak r-5 Page 41
