Sons of the Oak

Fallion winged away from Garion’s Port, flying slowly, stopping every few miles to let his graak rest, letting his huge mount take its time.

He had come up out of the flyway just moments ago, exiting the stonewood. His troops were flying low above the trees, following the curves of the valley.

A graak is so large that it can be seen hundreds of miles away by a vigilant far-seer. But it can only be seen if it is flying in plain view. Fallion’s troops were expert at flying unseen. Their mounts now were winging over a river valley, the graaks skimming just above the treetops. Flying thus did more than keep the graaks hidden. The warm thermals rising up from the woods coupled with the dense air at lower elevations let the graaks’ wings get a stronger purchase in the air, fly more easily.

Fallion looked all around. Hillsides rose up in every direction. His troops would remain unseen.

The sun was a golden ball in a hazy sky. Far ahead of him, perhaps eight miles, the young Gwardeen flew toward the hideout in a staggered line, each upon the back of a graak.

At the edge of the stonewood, Fallion let his mount perch in a tree and rest. He waited for a long while, listening for sounds of pursuit. He heard none.

It was twelve miles back to the city. Following the children on foot so far would have been all but impossible. The stonewood was almost impenetrable. The huge roots of trees lay in a tangle on the forest floor.

Perhaps a powerful force warrior might manage to follow us, Fallion thought.

But the flyway was meant to baffle such pursuers. It led through dense foliage, over bogs filled with quicksand, up steep cliffs, and wound this way and that so that even if a pursuer spied them from below, he would not know their true direction.

Still the danger was very real. If Shadoath’s scouts spotted them, they could follow the children like bees to their hive.

The only way that Fallion would be able to keep the kids safe would be to have them stay hidden.

Back toward the city rose billowing clouds of smoke. Shadoath, it seemed, had set fire to the ships in the bay, perhaps even to the city itself.

Below him, tangles of stonewood gave way to smaller white gums with stands of leatherwood.

Ahead of him the wind had sculpted the deep red sandstone mountains into bizarre and beautiful configurations, and at the base of the mountains he could see blue-green king’s pine on the ridges.

Here, the landscape opened up into stony fields. There were no farms, no tame herds grazing on the hills, but he spotted various animals found only on Landesfallen-gentle burrow-bears that looked much like young bears from back home, but they had gray hair and ate only grass. The burrow-bears watched him fly overhead as they grazed, unperturbed by the sight of humans or graaks.

There were scores of rangits, lying in the shade of fallen gum trees, that would jump up and leap away, the whole ground trembling as they did, for they tended to jump and land in unison.

There were smaller poo-hares, creatures related to rangits that were the size of large hares, but which hopped much more quickly than any hare.

He saw spiny anteaters that swung their heavy tails like clubs; and once he even spotted a rare arrowyck, an enormous flightless bird nearly twice as tall as a man, a cruel carnivore that could crush a burrow-bear in its heavy beak.

Ahead was a stony mountain of red rock, sculpted by the wind. It thrust up from the trees, and its sides-formed from petrified sand dunes-looked almost as if they had stairs carved into them. Natural ridges in the stone created a stairway that rose up and up.

The Gwardeen had come up into a relatively narrow canyon, and the mountain lay straight ahead. They had already circled it, so that their climb could not be seen from the west.

The graaks flew upward, skimming the treetops, while the mountainsides around them grew steep.

Soon, the rims of a canyon flanked him, the rock walls carved by wind and water into tall columns. The path beneath him was safe. A roaring brook surged through the canyon, its surface white with foam. The steep sides of the canyon gave purchase to only a few king’s pines. There was no way that anyone could climb those rocky banks without being spotted.

Ahead, a stone bridge spanned the canyon. The graaks flew toward it steadily.

They know the way, Fallion thought with pride, giving his mount its head. In moments they passed beneath the monumental arch, and from this point on, he knew that any scouts on his trail would lose sight of him, for there were steep ridges of rock on either side. The canyon split, and his graak winged to its left.

The trail below them looked impassable. The swollen creek rampaged over the rocks; stone columns seemed almost to sprout up out of the river.

A few minutes later, they neared the top of the canyon when the graaks began landing in a shadowed crevasse.

The refuge was almost completely hidden, even from the air. Stone columns rose up all around, sculpted by wind and rain into ugly shapes reminiscent of half-men or gargoyles; the landing site was secreted in their shadows.

Fallion rode up and his graak dropped neatly onto the bluff, just before a dark tunnel.

He leapt down from the beast as a pair of young Gwardeen came to handle his graak. To his right and left, iron rings were set into the stone walls, and each riding graak had a single leg tethered to a ring.

Overhead, a stone arch led to a tunnel. Beneath the arch, the red rock had grown black, stained by mineral salts as water dripped over the ages, and there on the stone was an ancient tothan mural painted in vibrant colors-purples and blacks, titanium white and coral. It showed a scene of a tothan queen-a four-legged creature with two heavy arms-riding upon the shoulders of a huge crowd of lesser toth, as if being borne to victory.

The lesser toth carried long metal clubs as weapons, while sorcerers among them wielded staves made of purple toth bones, as clear as crystal.

Where the queen had been or what battles she had won, Fallion could not guess. Nor did he understand why she had a fortress hidden here in the mountains. But for the thousandth time he hoped that her people were no more.

At the mouth of the tunnel was a huge alcove filled with graaks. Farther back, sitting around an old campfire, a dozen Gwardeen had assembled, along with Valya.

None of the children under Fallion’s command was older than twelve. That was not surprising. The only way to reach this place was by graak, and graaks couldn’t carry the weight of an adult for any distance.

That night, the children huddled in a circle around a small campfire, arguing.

“I say we stay in ’iding,” one young woman said. “We don’t leave the cave till Shadoath’s army is gone.”

“You mean sit and starve?” a boy asked.

“There’s food in the valleys,” an older boy, Denorra, said-the boy who had cut the ropes to the bridge. “The farmers still have some stores.”

The children were having a moot, a counsel where all voices were to be heard.

“The stores won’t last for long,” Fallion said. “It’s just past spring planting season, and the winter’s stores are all but gone. They’ll become scarcer still once Shadoath’s troops finish burning and looting. And what will we do then, rob our own people for food?”

The children all looked up to him. He was their captain, and their friend, and though he tried to refrain from usurping authority in a moot, his voice counted for more than did the voices of some of the smaller ones.

Fallion wandered over to the fire but didn’t sit. Hearthmaster Waggit had impressed upon him the importance of making sure that when he spoke to a crowd, he assume a position of authority.

“He’s right,” Valya offered. “Shadoath is building worldships, and she’ll need slaves for that. She’ll take folks here captive, like she did on Syndyllian. Those who go into hiding won’t be able to hunt or farm. In time, they’ll be forced to forage for food, and that’s when her men will catch them. Shadoath is patient that way.”

She spoke as one who knew, but Fallion noticed how guarded her tongue remained. She hadn’t told these children that Shadoath was her mother.

I wonder, Fallion thought, if Shadoath is just hunting me. Maybe it’s Valya that she’s after. Perhaps Shadoath would even offer a ransom?

He would never think of selling her, of course, but the thought made him curious.

There was a stir at the mouth of the cave as a late rider landed.

One young Gwardeen, a girl of seven, said, “Aren’t we supposed to warn someone if the toth come back? Shadoath is like a toth, ain’t she?”

“The king of Mystarria,” another added. “That’s ’oo we’re supposed to tell. But ’ow do we get ’old of ’im?”

“The king’s already here,” someone said from the darkness. Jaz marched in from the mouth of the cave and nodded meaningfully toward Fallion.

Fallion had not seen his brother in months, and he was amazed at how fast his little brother was growing. Jaz had become tall and lean. He threw a bag at Fallion’s feet. Forcibles inside clanked in their peculiar fashion, echoing loudly in the small cavern, and a pair rolled onto the ground. “You’ll be needing these, Your Highness.”

The Gwardeen children stared at Fallion in disbelief, mouths open in surprise. Could their captain truly be the king in exile?

“Show them your ring,” Jaz urged.

Fallion fished into the pocket of his tunic and pulled out his signet ring-an ancient golden ring with the image of the green man upon it. Fallion had not shown it to anyone in years, not since he’d left Mystarria.

Most of the children fell silent, awed, unsure how to conduct themselves before a king. A couple of the older ones crept up from their sitting position, and managed to kneel.

One child, the girl named Nix, said, “But I thought the Earth King was the king of Mystarria?”

“He was,” Fallion said. “The Earth King was my father. But he died.

That’s part of why I came here: to see if I could discover what happened in his final days.”

Now even the youngest of the children began to kneel, and Fallion saw to his dismay that even Jaz chose this moment to bow.

“What shall we do, milord?” Jaz asked.

A wisely chosen question, Fallion realized. By asking it, Jaz was subtly urging all of the others to submit to Fallion’s will.

They were all looking to him for answers, each of them with eyes shining, full of hope.

I wanted an army, Fallion realized, and now I’ve found one: but only an army of children.

What could they do to battle Shadoath?

Fallion said, “The closest Gwardeen fortress is at the City of the Dead. That’s a four-day march from here, and it holds only four hundred good fighting men. That’s not enough to face Shadoath, not nearly enough.”

He looked to one of the scouts for help, the boy who had first warned him of the enemy approach. “How many men do you think we are fighting?”

“I saw twenty ships, big ones, and lots of away boats. I’d think that each could hold a thousand men.”

Fallion knew that the locals would not be able to repulse so many. Not everyone on the island was Gwardeen. There were plenty of local farmers, the descendants of outlaws. Tough men, many of them. But such folk weren’t necessarily fighters.

Fallion suggested, “Even if anyone can come to our rescue, it will take a good week for them to get here.”

A girl of eight said, “My father told me that there are ten thousand Gwardeen.” She said it as if it were a phenomenal number, an unimaginable host, and the number alone might scare away the enemy. Obviously, she hadn’t been listening when they spoke of the enemy’s numbers.

“Yes,” Fallion said, “but they’re spread out all over the land. It would take a year to gather them all. So we can’t rely on them to save us,” Fallion said. “We have no food, and we can’t forage. We won’t last a year.”

“There’s something else,” Jaz said. “Bright Ones fired arrows at me on my way to the hideout. One of their arrows took my graak in the wing. They’re hiding in the trees along the river, watching for graak riders. Every time one of us tries to fly out of here to forage for food, it gives them one more chance to spot us.”

As if to emphasize his point, there was a flapping of wings at the mouth of the tunnel, and a graak croaked as it announced its presence. A new rider had just arrived.

Fallion made a mental note to check the wing on Jaz’s graak. The membrane could be easily torn and become infected. They’d have to sew the wound closed and let the beast rest for a few days.

“What do we do?” the oldest of the Gwardeen girls asked. “Everyone knows to come ’ere. We could ’ave riders stragglin’ in all night.”

And if everyone knows to come here, Fallion thought, then this is no hiding place at all.

He wondered if he should run, just tell the children to fly away. They could go to the Fortress of the Infernal Wastes, and from there head inland.

But there were problems with even that simple plan. Even by flying out of the fortress, they might reveal its location, and Fallion needed to keep it as secret as he could. It had tremendous strategic value.

Besides, he thought, even if we fly away, what kind of life would that be? Would I really be solving anything?

Waggit had always told him not to run from problems, but toward solutions.

“Tonight, I want a sentry at the door,” Fallion said. “And I want another about two miles down the canyon. If any of Shadoath’s scouts try to make their way up here, I want ample notice. Depending on their number, we can either choose to fight or to run.”

“And what then?” someone asked. “Do we stay up here forever without any food.”

“Maybe we could fight them,” one boy said. “We could drop shot on them from high up, from our graaks.”

Fallion doubted that such an attack would do much harm, but it was Denorra who objected first. “We might kill a couple o’ golaths that way, but for what? It’s not likely that we’d ’it Shadoath ’erself. And they’d be on our tails sure then, and we’d be next to die.”

“There are other ways to fight,” Jaz suggested. He nodded toward the leather bag on the floor, the forcibles in plain sight. To the children the forcibles were more an emblem of Fallion’s kingship than his signet ring, for what was a king without endowments? “Perhaps it’s time,” Jaz said, peering into Fallion’s face.

Valya offered, “Milord, I will give you an endowment.”

“As will I,” Jaz said.

Fallion looked at his friends, and his heart felt so full that he thought it would break.

“I’ll not take endowments from the people that I love best,” Fallion said. “Besides, we don’t have a facilitator. We must find another way.”

Valya mused, “This may be our chance to strike Shadoath’s Dedicates. She has just sacked a city. She’ll be taking endowments tonight and sending the new Dedicates to her keep. We know that she sailed east from Syndyllian with her Dedicates in the past. It’s likely that she’s got them hidden here on Landesfallen, or somewhere nearby. We only have to follow her ship. We could go out in force, hunt for it in the night.”

Fallion wondered if it would work.

The other children looked at Fallion hopefully, and Denorra said, “It’s better than sitting on our asses, just waitin’ to starve-or for one of ’em to come kill us.”

Could it really be so easy: just fly old Windkris out to where Shadoath hid her Dedicates and dispatch them along with their guards?

But Fallion had no army to attack with, or at least no army that he was willing to risk. He wasn’t about to send the children into battle.

He had only his own strong arms, and he doubted that they were enough.

But I’ve been training for this fight from childhood, he thought. His small size belied his prowess in battle.

What’s more, there was a hidden fire within him, yearning to blaze.

He had no endowments, and he knew that if he were to proceed, he would be placing himself in tremendous peril.

I could find her Dedicates, he told himself. I could strike them down.

Afterward, killing Shadoath herself would not be hard. Fallion knew a dozen good warriors who might manage it.

Fallion needed only to seize the opportunity.

He’d never taken a human life with his own hands, and he was not eager to do so now.

But he thought of Captain Stalker’s advice: when it comes time to gut a man, you don’t cry out or make threats or apologize. Just be the kind of man who quietly goes and takes care of business.

“That’s the kind of man I want you to be,” Stalker had said.

Fallion wasn’t sure that he trusted the advice, but with nothing but uglier choices before him, it was the only decision that he could make.