Arathan shrugged.
‘And you barely recovered from a concussion,’ his father continued. ‘It must have hit you like a sleeping draught. I am sorry, Arathan, that you missed most of an enjoyable evening.’ He hesitated, and then said, ‘You have had too few of those.’
‘He called you his friend,’ Arathan said, his tone painfully accusing.
A flatness came to his father’s eyes. ‘He calls everyone “friend”, Arathan. Give it no further thought.’
Arathan glared after him as he walked away.
From a lone, diseased tree upriver drifted the morning cry of a bird and he looked over but could not see the creature among the crooked branches and sullen leaves.
It hides, and it is free.
Free to fly away from all of this.
A short time later they ascended the slope and came out upon the Bareth Solitude, and the way ahead stretched on in ribboned rows beneath a clear sky, and Arathan was reminded of Sagander’s lessons recounting the death of a great inland sea.
As he rode, he thought of water, and freedom.
And prisons.
To the west was the land of the Azathanai, where dwelt protectors who protected nothing, and wise sages who never spoke, and Thel Akai came down from the mountains to share drunken nights no one remembered the next day. It was a world of mysteries, and he would soon see it for himself. With the thought, he felt light in the saddle, as if moments from transforming into a bird, from taking wing in search of a diseased tree.
But the thin sea ahead was bereft of trees, and the beach ridges with their bleached cobbles edged basins of grass and little else.
He wasn’t interested in stabbing his father in the back — that broad back just ahead, beneath that worn cloak. No one would ever wield him like a knife.
Grizzin Farl had told him: his mother still lived. She lived, tormented by grief, which meant that she loved him still. He would find her and steal her away.
In a world of mysteries, there were plenty of places in which to hide.
For both of us.
And we will love each other, and from that love, there will be peace.
PART TWO
The solitude of this fire
SIX
Hust Henarald’s eyes were level and dark, as if to test the weight of the words he was about to speak, to see if they sank claws deep into the man seated opposite him, or merely slipped past. The low light sculpted out the hollows of his cheeks, and above the prominent bones flaring out from his narrow, hooked nose those sharp eyes seemed to have retreated far in their shadowy recesses, yet remained piercing and intent. ‘One day,’ he said, voice rough from years at the forge, in the midst of bitter smoke and acrid steam, ‘I will be a child again.’ He slowly leaned back, withdrawing from the oil lamp’s light on the table, until he seemed to Kellaras more a ghostly apparition than a mortal man.
From outside this overheated chamber, the great machines of the bellows thundered like an incessant heart, the reverberations rolling through every stone of the Great House. The sound never fell away — in all the days and nights Kellaras had been guest to the Lord of Hust Forge, he had felt this drum of industry, beating the pulse of earth and stone, of fire and smoke.
This was, he had begun to believe, a place of elemental secrets, where truths roiled in the swirling heat, the miasmic tempest of creation and destruction clamouring without surcease on all sides; and this man, who had finally granted him audience, now sat across from him, in a high-backed chair shrouded in shadows, both lord and arbiter, ruler and sage, and yet his first words uttered had been… nonsense.
Henarald might have smiled then, but it was difficult to see in the gloom. ‘One day, I will be a child again. Carved toys will caper and dance from my mind, out across rock I will raise as mountains. Through grasses I will proclaim forests. For too long I have been trapped in this world of measures, proportions and scale. For too long I have known and understood the limits of what is possible, so cruel in rejecting all that can be imagined. In this way, friend, we are each of us not one but two lives, for ever locked in mortal combat, and from all things at hand, we make weapons.’
Kellaras slowly reached for the goblet of riktal on the tabletop before him. The spirit was fire in the throat and the only alcohol the Lord was purported to drink, but Kellaras’s first mouthful still rocked through his brain.
‘You hide your sudden acuity well, captain, but I well noted your intensity when I spoke the word “weapons”. To this you cleave, for among the words I have spoken, this alone you understand. I was speaking of all that we lose as the years crawl over us and the past — our youth — falls away.’ He closed both hands round his goblet, and those hands were massive, scarred and blunted, shiny in places from deep burns acquired over a lifetime at his forge. ‘Your lord wishes from me a sword. As a gift? Or does he seek to join the Hust Legion, perhaps. I cannot imagine Urusander’s supporters would be much pleased by a proclamation so overt.’
