David Farland - The Sum of All Men

The cruelty inherent in such an idea left Iome numb. She looked at Raj Ahten, her heart breaking. She could not say yes.

The Wolf Lord nodded to one of his men. “Bring in the girl.”

The guard left the chamber, returned quickly with Chemoise. Chemoise, who should have been in the Dedicates' Keep, comforting her father. Chemoise, who had already suffered so much this week, lost so much to Raj Ahten.

How had Raj Ahten known what Iome felt for her dear friend? Had Iome betrayed the girl with a glance?

Chemoise had wide, frightened eyes. She began weeping in terror when she saw the King lying on the floor. Shrieked when Raj Ahten's guard took her to the broken window, poised to throw her over the edge.

Iome's heart hammered, as she watched her childhood friend begin to gibber in fear. Two lives. Raj Ahten would be killing two—Chemoise and her unborn child.

Chemoise, forgive me for this betrayal, Iome wanted to say. For she knew, she knew with her whole soul, that surrender was wrong. If no one had ever surrendered, Raj Ahten would be dead by now. Yet she also knew that to give her glamour to Raj Ahten would benefit him little, while it saved the lives of Iome's friends.

“I cannot give you an endowment,” Iome said, unable to disguise the loathing in her words. She could not give it to him. Not to him personally.

“If not me, a vector, then,” Raj Ahten offered.

Something in Iome's heart tripped. A balance was found. She could give her beauty—give it for her father, for Chemoise. So long as she did not have to give it to Raj Ahten. Her voice broke as she said, “Bring your forcible, then.”

Moments later the forcibles were fetched, along with a wretched woman who had given her glamour. So Iome looked upon the hag in dirty gray robes and saw what she would become, and struggled to see what beauty had ever been hidden inside the woman.

Then the chants began. Iome watched Chemoise, still poised on the ledge, and silently willed her beauty away, willed herself to buy something lovely and eternally precious with it. The life of a friend, and the baby she carried.

There was a rustling in the darkness, and a tiny glowing streamer of phosphorous fire as the facilitator approached, put the forcible low on her neck, almost against her bosom.

For half a moment, nothing happened, and someone whispered, “For your friend. Do it for your friend.”

Iome nodded, sweat pouring down her brow. She held the image of Chemoise in her mind, Chemoise holding a child in her arms, nuzzling it.

Iome felt the unspeakable pain of the forcible, opened her eyes, saw the skin of her hands dry and crack as if they burned in the infernal heat. The veins rose on her wrists like roots, and her nails became brittle as chalk.

Her firm young breasts sank, and she grabbed at them, feeling the loss keenly. She regretted the trade now, but it was too late. She felt...as if she stood in the river, and the sand at her feet flowed out from under her, undermining her. Everything that was hers, all her beauty, her allure, flowed out and away, into the forcible.

Her lustrous hair withered and twisted on her head like worms.

Iome cried in pain and horror, and more flowed out from her still. For a moment, it was as if she gazed into oblivion and saw herself, and loathed what she saw. She understood for the first time in her life that she was nothing, had always been nothing, a no one, a cipher. She feared to cry out, lest others take offense at the sound of her wretched voice.

That is a lie. I am not so ugly as that, she cried out to Raj Ahten in her soul. My beauty you can have, but not my soul.

And then she moved away from the precipice, and felt only...alone. Utterly alone, and in unspeakable pain.

Somehow, she managed a rare feat: she did not faint from the rigors of the forcible, though she imagined that her whole body would be consumed in the fires.

Cold black river water swirled around Gaborn's thighs, like a dead hand trying to pull him downstream. Rowan, in the darkness on the bank just above him, groaned fiercely in pain, doubled over.

“What's wrong?” Gaborn whispered, hardly daring to part his lips.

“The Queen—she's dead,” Rowan whimpered.

Then he understood. After years of loss of feeling, years of numbness, now the whole world of sensation rushed upon Rowan—the cold of the water and of the night, the pain of her bruised feet, her fatigue after a hard day's work, and countless other minor injuries.

Those who gave an endowment of touch, once all their senses returned, felt all the world anew, as if for the first time. The shock of it could be phenomenal, even deadly, for the sensations came twenty times stronger than before. Gaborn worried for the young woman, worried that she might not be able to travel. The water here was bracing cold. Certainly he could not hope to bring Rowan through it.

Yet, even worse, if the Queen was dead, Gaborn feared that Raj Ahten was slaughtering the other members of the royal family—King Sylvarresta and Iome.

Commitments. Gaborn had made too many commitments. He felt overwhelmed. He'd accepted responsibility for Rowan, dared not move her, dared not try to take her through the river. Yet he'd also promised to save Iome, to go to her.

Gaborn wanted to kneel in the river, let it cool the burning wound in his ribs. Overhead, a slight breeze made the branches of the alders and birches sway. Here in the deep shadows, he could see the water downstream, reflecting the orange firelight.

Binnesman's garden was aflame. On the far bank of the river, the nomen were grunting, shadows moving in a greater darkness, trying to spot Gaborn. Yet he was well hidden here in this thicket, so long as he didn't move. The Frowth giants hunted in the shallows downstream. He suspected that he could swim out of here alone, flee Castle Sylvarresta and bear the news of its fall to his father. He was a fast swimmer. In spite of the fact that the water was shallow, he thought he might make it. But he couldn't hope to do so with Rowan.

Gaborn could not possibly leave Castle Sylvarresta.

I swore to Iome, he realized. I took an oath. She is under my protection, both as a Runelord, and now as a part of my vow to the earth. Both were vows he could not lightly break.

A day earlier, in the market at Bannisferre, Myrrima had chided Gaborn for not making commitments easily. It was true. He dared not make them.

“What is a Runelord,” his mother had taught him as a child, “but a man who keeps an oath? Your vassals give you endowments, and you grant them protection in return. They give you wit, and you lead wisely. They grant you brawn, and you fight like a reaver. They bestow stamina, and you work long hours in their behalf. You live for them. And if you love them as you should, you die for them. No vassal will waste an endowment on a Runelord who lives only for himself.”

These were the words Queen Orden had taught her son. She had been a strong woman, one who taught Gaborn that beneath his father's callous exterior, there lived a man of firm principle. It was true that in years past, King Orden had purchased endowments from the poor, and while some considered this behavior morally suspect, a way of taking advantage of the poor, King Orden had seen it differently. He'd said, “Some people love money more than they love their fellow men. Why not turn such people's weakness into your strength?”

Why not indeed? It was a good argument, from a man who sought only the betterment of his kingdom. Yet in the past three years, his father had given up the practice, had quit taking endowments from the poor. He'd told Gaborn, “I was wrong. I'd buy endowments still, if only I had the wisdom to judge other's motives.” But the poor who sought to sell endowments usually had many reasons for doing so: even the most craven of them had some ennobling love of family and kin and could therefore imagine that by selling an endowment, they were performing an act of self-sacrifice. But then there were the desperate poor, those who saw no other way to escape poverty than to sell themselves. “Purchase my hearing,” one farmer had once begged Gaborn's father after the great floods four years past. “What need have I of ears, when all I hear are the cries of hungry children?” The world was full of despairing creatures, people who for one reason or another had given up on life. Gaborn's father had not purchased the farmer's hearing. Instead, he'd given the man food to last the winter, timber and workers to rebuild his home, seed to plant for the coming spring.