David Farland - Sons of the Oak

Overhead, the skies were cold and gray. Rain fell. The thin mist that had been on the water all morning held. Iome knew that her hunters would be blinded by it.

She quietly crept up to the top of the riverbank and took a post behind a tree, waiting. She did not have to wait long.

Several fat axmen from Internook came huffing along the river at three times a normal man’s speed.

Fast, she told herself, but not as fast as me.

Iome glimpsed them through the branches, then hid herself for a moment.

She had ten endowments of metabolism, three times as much as these men. They could not hope to match her speed. And suddenly the endowments that had been sending her racing headlong toward her death for these nine years became an asset, here at the end of her life.

When the axmen drew even with her tree, she leapt in front of them; their eyes went wide with shock when they saw her suddenly rush toward them from the mist.

They tried to halt, tried to raise their weapons. One man cried, “Och!” But with greater speed, Iome dodged their blows and with three quick slices took their heads off.

The bodies were still falling when she whirled and raced along the riverbank, following the boat. She remained in the brush along the riverside, but now the land around them opened up into fields for cattle to forage, and there was little cover at all.

In the morning, she raced through a meadow, where cottontail rabbits held as still as stone, ears pricked up, water sparkling in their fur as she passed. A pair of grouse leapt up from a bush, their wings thundering, and in seeming slow motion they winged over Iome’s head.

I am a ghost in the mist, she thought. I am fleet and fierce and untouchable.

Then she heard shouting on the river, and whirled to glance behind her. Just then, the heavens shook and lightning arced from horizon to horizon, and a fierce wind rumbled through the trees, making proud elms bow before it while drier grasses were knocked flat.

Asgaroth, Iome realized. He is blowing the fog away.

There was a shout from the river, and Iome saw that the wind had shoved the boat against the far bank, and now it was stuck there, lodged between two rocks.

Iome looked back upstream, saw dark figures racing through the trees along the bank. She dropped to her belly and eeled through a patch of tall meadow grass toward the boat, then lay concealed behind a fallen log.

Get Asgaroth, she told herself, and the rest will flee. He’s all that matters.

Fallion woke as the boat thudded against the shore, the wind screaming all around.

He grabbed his dagger and leapt up, his hand still aching from his wound, and climbed out of the shelter. Borenson and Myrrima were poling the boat away from the rocks, but the wind was so fierce that their efforts did little good. Fallion looked around, realized that Hadissa and his mother were gone.

“What’s going on?” Fallion cried, and in a moment Jaz was there at his back.

Borenson turned, his face red from effort, and shouted, “Get back inside!”

“Can I help?” Fallion called.

“No!” Borenson shouted, and he turned and peered upriver, his face stark with alarm.

Fallion followed his gaze. A black wind was driving bullets of rain into his face. On the banks, running between trees, dozens of enemy troops rushed toward them.

“Are we going to die?” Jaz asked.

“Get in the shelter,” Borenson shouted, pushing Fallion and Jaz away. The tarp roof of their shelter flapped like a drumhead, thrumming from the wind. Fallion got in the shelter, but scrambled to the back so that he could peer upstream through cracks between the crates.

Something-a strange cloud-was rolling toward them-a ball of night with shadows dancing inside, strengi-saats seemingly carried in a maelstrom.

Lightning flashed overhead and thunder rumbled, troubling the waters. And all around that ball of shadow warriors swarmed toward the boat, moving so swiftly by reason of endowments that Fallion’s eyes could not follow them.

Ahead of the maelstrom, one warrior in the dark tunic of an assassin sprinted toward the boat-Hadissa!

Borenson raced to the door of their little fortress, blocking it with his bulk, and stood guard.

“Hide!” he warned the children. “Find the safest corner.”

Fallion gripped his own dagger. Though he was only nine, he had trained with weaponry for as long as he could remember, and calluses from blade practice had grown thick on his palm and along the inside of his thumb.

Suddenly from the black storm that came rushing toward them came a howl, deep and almost wolflike, but ululating rapidly-like cries of glee with words in them. At first Fallion thought it might be the hunting cries of strengi-saats.

Then he wondered if it might be the wind, howling like some beast. Fallion listened closely.

The ball of wind rolled toward Hadissa, who shouted a battle cry as he turned in one last desperate attempt to meet the enemy.

The wind screamed, and Fallion saw a dark knot of straw suddenly rise up out of the grass and shoot toward Hadissa, hurtling like bolts from a ballista.

The assassin leapt and tried to dodge as he spun in midair. The pieces of straw lanced toward him, and Fallion thought that they had missed, for when Hadissa landed, he stood on the balls of his feet.

But the wind was buffeting him, propping him up like a marionette. It lifted him in the air slowly, letting him spin, so that Fallion could see the ruin of his face.

The straw had pierced his right eye socket, burrowed through his brain, and left a gaping hole out the back of his head. A small tornado whirled through the hole still, sending more bits of straw through his socket, expanding the hole, so that brain matter and flecks of blood hurtled from the back of the wound.

The wind worked Hadissa’s mouth as if he jabbered inanely. Then the wind tossed him high into the air.

Fallion gasped in shock.

Hadissa had always seemed to be a fixture in Fallion’s life, a monolith. Now he was dead.

The maelstrom of dark wind boiled toward the boat.

A ball of lightning hurtled from the blackness and shot toward them. Fallion whirled, placing his back to a box for protection, turning away from the attack.

He peered up at Borenson. The ball lightning sizzled just overhead so that Fallion felt his hair stand on end. There was a crackling sound, a grunt and a cry, and for half a second, Borenson’s chest lit up so brightly that Fallion could see the red of blood and veins in it, the gray shadows of ribs. The blast hurtled him into the air, knocking him overboard.

Fallion let out a startled cry.

Suddenly he was plunged into utter darkness. Then Fallion’s eyes began to readjust.

Myrrima let out a shrill cry and grabbed her bow. Though the wind raged all around, the wizardess seemed calm, collected.

She drew her steel bow to its full and shouted, “Come no farther. You cannot have these children.”

The wind howled and raged. Fallion heard it keen over the boat, ripping trees from the bank by their roots.

Suddenly everything went quiet. For half a second, he just crouched, listening. It was as if the wind had disappeared.

He heard a dull thud, and Fallion felt as if he were at the heart of a storm. He could hear wind swirling around in the distance. Darkness had so enveloped the boat that he could hardly make out Myrrima’s shadow, though she was no more than a dozen feet away.

The enemy was out there, waiting.