David Farland - Chaosbound

Draken just glared.

“You’re being unfair,” the baron said. “You’re angry with him because you think he will try to keep you from the girl you love. That’s natural for a boy your age. You’re getting ready to leave home, start off on your own. When that happens, your mind sometimes plays tricks on you.

“The truth is that your father is raising you the best way that he knows how,” Baron Walkin said. “Your father was a soldier. From all that I’ve heard, he was the best in the realm.”

“He killed over two thousand innocent men, women, and children,” Draken said. “Did you know that?”

“At his king’s command,” Walkin said. “He did it, and he is not proud of it. If you think that he is, you misjudge him.”

“I’m not trying to accuse him,” Draken said, “I’m just saying: A foul deed like that takes its toll on a man. It leaves a stain on his soul. My father knows nothing about gentleness anymore, nothing about mercy or love.

“In the past few months, I’ve begun to realize that about him. I don’t want to be around him, for I fear that I might be forced to become like him.”

Baron Walkin shook his head. “Your father taught you to be a soldier. Every father teaches his son the craft he knows. He is an expert at warfare, and that craft can serve you well.

“But don’t think that your father doesn’t know a thing or two about love. He may be hard on the outside, but there’s kindness in him. You accuse him of killing innocents, and that he did. But killing can be an act of love, too.

“He killed the Dedicates of Raj Ahten, but he did it to serve his king and his people, and to protect the land that he loved.”

Draken glared. “From the time that I was a child—”

“You had to flee Mystarria with assassins on your tail,” the Baron objected. “What loving father wouldn’t teach a child all that he needed to know in order to stay alive?

“And once you were six, you went into the Gwardeen and served your country as a graak rider. You’ve hardly seen your father over the past ten years.

“Take some time to get to know him again,” the baron suggested. “That’s all that I’m saying.”

Draken peered into the baron’s brown eyes. The man’s long hair was getting thin on top, and a wisp of it blew across his leathery face.

“You surprise me,” Draken said. “How can you look past his appearance so easily?”

“Every man has a bit of monster inside him,” Walkin said, flashing a weak grin.

In the distance, Draken could still see the giant loping along, leaping over a fallen tree.

Perhaps the baron is right, Draken thought.

He’d only been home from his service among the Gwardeen for a few months, and the truth was that he’d felt glad of the change. From the time that he was a child, he’d lived his life as a soldier. Now he wanted to rest from it, settle down.

Draken felt so unsure of himself, so uprooted. He wasn’t certain that he had really ever understood his father, and right now, he felt certain that he did not know him at all—not since the binding of the worlds. That hulking brute rushing down the trail, that monster, was not really Sir Borenson.

Of that Draken felt strangely certain.

Borenson’s long legs took him swiftly to the beach two miles inland, where he stood for a moment on a tall promontory and gazed out over the ocean. The waters were dark today, full of red mud and silt. The sun shone on them dully, so that the waves glinted like beaten copper.

But he did not see the ocean, did not focus on the white gulls and cormorants out in the water. Instead he saw a wall. The ocean was a wall.

It’s a low wall, he thought, but it’s thousands of miles across, and I have to find a way over it.

He turned and followed a line of small hills.

As he loped along, he found wildlife aplenty. The rangits were out in force, grazing beneath the shadows of the trees, and as he approached they would leap up and go bounding through the tall grass.

The borrowbirds flashed like snow amid tree branches, their white bellies and wings drawing the eye, while their pink and blue crests gave them just a hint of color. They landed among the wild plum trees at the shaded creeks and squawked and ratcheted as they squabbled over fruit.

Giant dragonflies in shades of crimson, blue, and forest green buzzed about by the tens of thousands, and tiny red day bats that had lived among the stonewoods until yesterday now flitted about in the shadows of the blue gums.

The sun beat down mercilessly, spoiling the dead fish and kelp that lay all about.

So for a long hour Borenson hiked, sometimes struggling to climb rocky outcroppings where perhaps no man had ever set foot, and other times wading between hills in water as quiet as a lagoon.

He’d seen how Draken had turned his back on him there in camp. The boy had been leaning toward Baron Walkin.

They’re getting close, Borenson realized. Draken feels more for him than he does for me.

Borenson felt that he was losing his son.

In his mind, he replayed an incident from yesterday. Rain Walkin had been up, stirring the cooking fire. The other Walkin children had been scurrying about, hunting for any fish or crabs that might be worth scavenging.

Borenson had nodded cordially to the waif Rain, doing his damnedest to smile. But all he had accomplished was a slight opening of the mouth— enough to flash his overlarge canines.

The girl had frowned, looking as if she might cry.

I must have looked like a wolf baring its fangs, Borenson thought.

“Good day, child,” he’d said, trying to sound gentle. But his voice was too much like a growl. Rain had turned away, looking as if she wanted to flee.

Borenson had felt too weary to cater to her feelings.

I’ll have to apologize to that girl for calling her a tart, he thought. The prospect didn’t please him. He hadn’t decided completely whether she was worth an apology.

Besides, he wasn’t sure if she would accept it.

There are many kinds of walls, Borenson thought. Kings build walls around their cities, people build walls around their hearts.

As a soldier, Borenson knew how to storm a castle, how to send sappers in to dig beneath it, or send runelords to scale it.

But how do you scale walls built of anger and apathy, the walls that a son builds around his heart?

When my family looks at me now, they only see a monster, he realized.

Borenson’s size, the bony protuberances on his forehead, the strangeness of his features and his voice—all worked against him.

My wife is already distancing herself from me. I would never have thought that Myrrima would be that way.

Children will shriek when they see me.

Even Erin recoiled from me as she died, he thought. That was the worst of it. In the end I could give her no comfort, for she saw only the outside of me.

They don’t realize that on the inside I am still the same man I always was.

At least Borenson hoped that he was the same.

Borenson felt alone. He worried that he could no longer fit in among his people. He wondered what would happen when he sailed into Internook or Toom. How would people receive him?

With rocks and sticks, most likely, he thought.

But then it occurred to him that he might not be unique. Perhaps others from Caer Luciare had merged with their shadow selves. Men like him might be scattered all across Mystarria. . . .

He sighed, wondering what to do, and trudged over a ridge, seeking footholds among the rocks and bracken. Dead crabs and fish still littered the ground, but these had been left from the binding, not from the tidal wave.

The flood had been violent, of course. The tidal wave had uprooted huge trees and sent them hurtling in its path, and floating debris had been carried along and piled high—kelp, brush, buildings, dead animals and trees—creating something of a dark reef for as far as the eye could see. In some places, the flotsam rose up in a huge tangled mass of logs and ruin.