David Farland - Sons of the Oak

Rhianna was borne into a dank tunnel, where men with lanterns waded ahead of them, splashing through shallows as black as oil, in a tunnel where the walls of rounded stone were covered with green algae, and water and slime molds dripped from every crevice.

Rhianna peered up at Sir Borenson and admired his fine beard, which was red at the chin but going to silver on the side. In her opium haze she felt that every hair looked abnormally strong, as if each was spun from steel, while the sweat rolling down Borenson’s cheek was like wax melting off a candle. She imagined that he too would melt away.

She closed her weary eyes for a bit, and her heart seemed to soar.

Do I want to go with them? she wondered. What would Mother say?

But Rhianna didn’t even know if her mother was still alive, or if she was alive, how Rhianna would ever find her.

And she knew one other thing: her mother would want her to leave this place, run far away to hide.

She woke to find that Sir Borenson had stopped and that he was setting her in the back of a boat.

They were in a cave now, and above them she could see muddy gray stalactites dripping mineral water. Dark water churned and swirled all around the boat; they were in an underground river.

The smell of minerals and ripe cheese filled her nostrils. Rhianna peered up to a tunnel overhead.

Of course, she realized, the water keeps the tunnels cold and moist, perfect for aging cheese. That’s probably how they discovered the river, cheese-makers tunneling through the rock, widening the caves.

The boat was long and wide of beam, like the ones that traders sometimes used to cart freight up and down the River Gyell. At the prow, the carved head of a heron rose up, its long beak pointing downriver; the gunwales were wide and carved to look like feathers, but there was no other adornment. Instead the boat had been painted a plain brown, and was loaded with crates. A crevasse between the boxes made up the sleeping quarters, and a dingy canvas stretched over the top served as a small tent.

Myrrima knelt at the edge of the water, drawing runes upon its surface with her finger, whispering as if to the river. Rhianna saw her draw a rune of fog, a rune of protection from Air, and runes of blessing for battles ahead. She dipped her arrows in the water one by one.

For a moment Rhianna had a vision of her uncle in the morning sun under the Great Tree, teaching her to scry runes as he traced them for her in the dust, then erased them with his hand, and had her repeat each one. Those had been happy times.

The old crone was at the front of the boat, loading the boys in, her voice tender and comforting, and Rhianna thought that this woman must be their grandmother.

“Where are we?” Rhianna suddenly asked, worried.

“We’re on the Sandborne,” the crone whispered, “above where it flows up out of the ground.”

Rhianna tried to focus. The Sandborne was a small river that came out of the hills three miles from Castle Coorm, then joined the River Gyell. She puzzled for a moment, trying to imagine just where they might be.

Borenson laid her under the tarp, upon a bed of straw. His daughter Talon came and sat beside her, giggling, as if this was some great game, all the while balancing baby Erin, who was still just a crawler, asleep in the crook of her arm. Then Borenson handed them a basket full of fresh beer bread, a shank of ham, a few pear-apples, and candied dates stuffed with pistachios.

Rhianna felt frightened and tried to rise up, but Borenson saw her fear. He spoke to one of the guards that bore a torch, “Your dirk.”

The man tossed it to Borenson, and he passed it to Rhianna, let her hold it close, as if it were a doll. “Quiet now,” Borenson said. “Make no noise.”

Then the other children piled into the tiny space as Rhianna traced a rune upon her blade: death-to-my-enemies.

Rhianna glanced up. The old crone was staring at her severely, but to Rhianna it was not a look of anger-more of a question.

Rhianna suddenly realized that this was no grandmother at all. This was the queen. But without her courtiers and finery, Rhianna had not recognized her.

Iome studied the injured Rhianna and thought, She is a rune-caster. What a special child. I should have let her have a forcible when I could.

The Lady Myrrima finished drawing her own runes, and then looked up at Iome, as if seeking her approval, and assured her, “There will be heavy fog on the river tonight.”

Iome nodded, grateful to have Myrrima beside her. Once, years ago, they had been young maidens. Iome’s own endowments of metabolism had aged her, and though Myrrima had taken such endowments, too, she still looked young, perhaps in her early forties, still beautiful and voluptuous. Myrrima’s powers in wizardry kept her young. Any man who saw her on the street would ache for her.

Iome felt like a wraith in her presence.

Don’t flatter yourself, Iome told herself, there isn’t even a ghost of beauty left in you.

And it was true. Iome had aged gracefully in some ways, but her skin and flesh were going. After having given up her own endowment of glamour to Raj Ahten, she’d never been able to force herself to seek glamour from another woman. Draining a woman of both her physical beauty and her self-confidence was too cruel. Iome would never subject another person to such torment.

And so I am a wraith, she thought, and I will leave my children in Myrrima’s care. In time they will grow to love her more than they could ever have loved me.

Myrrima walked around the boat, and with her wet finger, she anointed the eyes of each person. “This will help you see through the fog,” she whispered.

Iome took her own place, standing at the rudder, feeling both sad and comforted by her vision of the future. She threw her cowl over her face and shrugged her shoulders, adopting the part of some anonymous old trader, while the children lay down in hiding, and Borenson and Iome’s own guard, Hadissa, sat just under the lip of their shelter.

Fallion’s pet ferrin whistled and lunged out of the cubbyhole, then hopped around the boat, giving soft little barks of alarm at the idea of being surrounded by water.

Fallion whistled, “Hush,” in Ferrin, a command that was soft and not too judgmental, a command that might be spoken by a ferrin mother to her child. Not for the first time Iome marveled at how swiftly the boy had learned the creature’s tongue.

Like his father, she thought.

Rhianna backed away from the creature and asked, “What’s that?”

“That’s Humfrey,” Jaz said. “Our ferrin.”

“Oh,” Rhianna said. But there was a hesitancy in Rhianna’s tone that made Iome suspect that the girl had never seen a ferrin before.

“Did you know that ferrins lay eggs?” Jaz asked. “They’re not like other mammals that way. They lay eggs. We saw the cobbler and the baker digging out a ferrins’ lair last spring, and there were eggs in it. Humfrey hatched out of one of the eggs.”

A young page set a small chest at Iome’s feet, and it tinkled softly with the sound of metal clinking against metal.

Borenson looked up at the page and said needlessly, “Careful!” but the damage had already been done.

In the box was a fortune in forcibles, hundreds of them, like little branding irons, each painstakingly crafted with runes on the end that would allow her sons to draw attributes from their vassals. Surely a few of the forcibles had been damaged-nicked or dented.

“They can be repaired,” Iome said.

As the guards shoved the boat from the dock, out into the oily waters, Iome took comfort.

Things can be repaired, she thought: Fallion’s hand, the forcibles, our kingdom.

And as she steered out into the current, which would carry them inexorably through the tunnel, past columns of twisted limestone, Iome whispered to herself, “Hurry the day. Hurry the day.”