David Farland - Chaosbound

At the end of a long summer’s day, the last few beams of sunlight slanted through the ancient apple orchard outside the ruins of Barrensfort, creating golden streams among the twigs and branches of the trees.

Though the horizon was a fiery glowering, sullen and peaceful, from the deadwood linnets had already begun to rise upon their red and waxen wings, eager to greet the coming night.

Sir Borenson leaned upon the ruins of an old castle wall and watched his daughters Sage and Erin work amid the tallest branches of an apple tree. It was a hoary thing, seeming as old as the ruins themselves, with lichen-covered boughs that had grown to be as thick as many another tree.

The wind had knocked the grand old tree over two summers ago, so that it leaned at a slant. Most of its limbs had fallen into ruin, and now the termites feasted upon them. But the tree still had some roots in the soil, and one great branch thrived.

Borenson had found that the fruit of that bough was the sweetest to grow upon his farm. Not only were the golden apples sweeter than all of the others, they ripened a good four weeks early and grew huge and full. These apples would fetch a hefty price at tomorrow’s fair.

This was not the common hawk’s-day fair that came once a week. This was the High Summer Festival, and the whole district would likely turn out up at Mill Creek, for trading ships had come to Garion’s Port in the past few weeks, bringing spices and cloth from faraway Rofehavan.

The fallen tree left a hole in the canopy of the orchard, creating a small glade. The grass grew lush here. Bees hummed and circled, while linnets’ wings shimmered like garnets amid streams of sunlight. Sweet apples scented the air.

There can be beauty in death, Sir Borenson thought, as he watched the scene.

Erin climbed out on a thin limb, as graceful as a dancer, and held the handle of her pail in her mouth as she gently laid an apple in.

“Careful,” Sir Borenson warned, “that limb you’re on may be full of rot.”

Erin hung the bucket on a broken twig. “It’s all right, Daddy. This limb is still healthy.”

“How can you tell?”

She bounced a bit. “See? It has some spring in it still. The rotten ones don’t.”

Smart girl, for a nine-year-old. She was not the prettiest of his brood, but Borenson suspected that she had the quickest wit, and she was the most thoughtful of his children, the first to notice if someone was sad or ill, and she was the most protective.

You could see it in her eyes. Borenson’s older offspring all had a fierceness that showed in their flashing blue eyes and dark red hair. They took after him.

But though Erin had Borenson’s penetrating blue eyes, she had her mother’s luxurious hair, and her mother’s broad face and thoughtful expression. It seemed to Borenson that the girl was born to be a healer, or perhaps a midwife.

She’ll be the one to nurse me through my old age, he mused.

“Careful with those apples,” he warned. “No bruises!” Erin was always careful, but Sage was not. The girl seemed more interested in getting the job done quickly than in doing it well.

Borenson had wadded some dry grass and put it in the buckets, so that the girls could pack the apples carefully. The grass had tea-berry leaves in it, to sweeten the scent. Yet he could tell that Sage wasn’t packing the apples properly.

Probably dreaming of boys, he thought. Sage was nearly thirteen, and her body was gaining a woman’s curves. It wasn’t uncommon here in Landesfallen for a girl to marry at fifteen. Among the young men at the Festival, Sage could draw as much attention as a joust.

Marriage.

I’ll be losing her soon, too, Borenson thought. All of my children are growing up and leaving me.

Talon, his oldest, was gone. She’d sailed off to Rofehavan more than three months past, with her foster siblings Fallion, Jaz, and Rhianna.

Borenson couldn’t help but wonder how they had fared on the journey. By now they should have made landfall on the far continent. If all was going as planned, they were crossing Mystarria, seeking out the Mouth of the World, beginning their descent into darkness, daring the reavers’ lair.

Long ago, according to legend, there had been one true world, bright and perfect, shining in the heavens. All of mankind had lived in joy and peace, there in the shade of the One True Tree. But an ancient enemy had tried to seize control of the Seals of Creation, and in the battle that ensued, the world shattered, breaking into millions and millions of shadow worlds, each less perfect, each less whole, than that one world had been.

Fallion, a young flameweaver, said that he knew how to heal the worlds, bind them all into one. Borenson’s older children were accompanying him to the underworld, to the Seals of Creation, to help in his task.

Borenson wrenched his thoughts away. He didn’t want to consider the perils that his children faced. There were reavers in the underworld, monstrously large and powerful. Best not to think of that.

Yet he found it hard lately to think of much else. His children should have landed in Rofehavan. If their ship had made good time, they might soon reach the Seals of Creation.

A new day could be dawning.

“Father,” Erin called, “Look at this apple!” She held up a huge one, flashed her winning smile. “It’s perfect!”

“Beautiful!” he said.

You’re beautiful, he thought, as he stood back and watched. It was his job to take down those buckets that were full.

There was a time a few years ago when he would have been up in the tree with her. But he was getting too fat to climb rotting trees. Besides, the arthritis in his right shoulder hurt. He wasn’t sure if it was the long years of practice with the war hammer or some old wound, but his right arm was practically useless.

It was a silly rhyme that he’d learned as a child. An old gaffer with long silver hair used to sing it as he puttered down the lanes in the market, doing his shopping.

Borenson heard a sound behind him, a suspicious rustling of leaves.

Barrensfort was not much more than a pile of gray rocks. Two walls still rose sixty feet from some old lord’s tower, a broken finger pointing accusingly to the sky. Once it had been a great fortress, and Fallion the Bold had slept here sixteen hundred years ago. But most of the rocks for the outer wall had been carted off long ago. Borenson’s fine chimney was made from the rounded stones of the old wall.

So the courtyard in the old fortress was open to the sky. In a hundred years the rest of the walls might fall in, and a forest would likely grow over the spot.

But for now, there was only one large tree here, an odd tree called an encampment tree. It looked nothing like the white gums common to the area, but was perhaps a closer relative to the stonewood trees down by the sea. It was large, with rubbery gray bark and tiny spade-shaped leaves. Its limbs were thick with fronds that hung like curtains, creating an impenetrable canopy, and its branches spread out like an umbrella. A good-sized tree could shelter a dozen people.

When settlers had first come to Landesfallen, nearly a thousand years earlier, they had used such trees as shelter during the summers while building their homes.