Sons of the Oak

As evening fell, Fallion built a fire up, a bonfire that belched smoke and filled the cavern with light.

As he did, he felt a familiar tug. A voice whispered in his mind: Sacrifice to me.

The time for battle was at hand, and after many years, Fallion gave in.

Yea, Master, he said in his mind. My work shall bring you glory.

The children took ashes from the fire and mixed them with water, then daubed them upon Windkris, Fallion’s great white graak, painting it black.

In the darkness, he’d be almost impossible to spot. Then Fallion painted his own face and hands black, and wiped the sweet-smelling ashes upon his clothes.

Last of all, he honed his blade to razor sharpness.

Fallion peered through the gloom, taking one last long look at his friends, and then bade them all good-bye.

He felt as if he were looking upon his own children, and it broke his heart to be forced to leave them now, alone and helpless.

He went out to the ledge, untied Windkris’s leg, and leapt onto the back of his mount. The graak lumbered forward to the edge of the cliff and leapt, then soared out over the valley.

A wind was rising from the land, and it bore the graak aloft, sent the great painted reptile soaring through the night beneath stars as bright as diamonds.

He circled east and then south, hiding the direction of his approach from any unfriendly eyes, and soared through hidden flyways among the stonewood trees until he reached the hills above Garion’s Port.

There, east of the city, his graak perched in a tree, and he watched a small black schooner.

Is it the Mercy? he wondered.

He watched for hours as away boats rowed up to it, loading their cargo. Fallion saw humans being carted up by the score, most of them unconscious or incapacitated to the point that they had to be carried.

Sometime well before dawn, still hidden by the darkness and a rising mist, the ship stole out to sea.

He studied the ship’s bearings, and knew where it was headed. Valya had said that it sailed due east from Syndyllian. Now it was taking a course southwest. By triangulating the courses in his mind, he was able to fix an approximate location, one that he recalled from Captain Stalker’s old charts-the island of Wolfram, or one of the other atolls close by.

Fallion waited until the ship was far out to sea before he gave chase.

He flew south through a hidden flyway among the trees until he reached the beach, and then let his mount drop into the mist, so that its wingtips brushed the water and he felt the salt spray in his face.

For long hours he soared above the sea, watching it undulate beneath him, its waves dimpling like the skin of a serpent as it coils.

As he rode, time seemed to pass slowly.

I am growing old, Fallion thought. My childhood is vanishing behind me, failing.

And in the solitude as he rode under the stars, he had a long time to think, to firm his resolve. He imagined the Dedicates’ Keep, filled with cruel people who’d given themselves into Shadoath’s service-twisted bright Ones from the netherworld that had grown perfect in evil. Perhaps she used animals, too-golaths and strengi-saats and darkling glories.

Monsters. Shadoath’s keep could well be filled with monsters.

But there would be others, too. Some of the folk from Garion’s Port might be there-the innkeeper or his wife, or perhaps the tanner’s pretty daughter.

How would he feel about taking her life?

Nix was crying. Jaz held her in the night and tried to get some sleep. The watch fire had burned down to coals and gave almost no heat.

And here so high on the mountain, the air felt thin and frigid, almost brittle. Jaz tried to warm Nix with his body, but could not even keep himself warm.

Fallion had been gone for hours. Jaz could not sleep. The graaks had been restless. Most of them were males, and at this time of the year, they were overwhelmed by the urge to hunt for food for their mates and to search for branches and kelp to use as nesting materials.

All through the night they let loose with graaak cries, then rustled their wings, eager to be off.

What would happen if I let the mounts go? he wondered.

He imagined that most of them would head straight for the sea, back to their nests, and try to rear their young. But not all of the graaks looked to be adults. The adolescents, those under nine years of age, wouldn’t have bonded with a mate yet, and would be more likely to remain close to their masters, soaring along the mountain ledges to hunt for wild goats or heading to the valleys to hunt for rangits and burrow-bears.

They’d return after they fed, and that was the problem. They might attract unwanted attention.

The only thing that he could do was to leave the graaks tied to their iron rings. Let them sit quietly and feed off of their fat. In a few days, without food or water, the reptiles might die-or worse, they might gnaw off their own feet in an effort to escape.

He imagined the graaks coming after the children, so crazed by hunger that they were willing to eat their masters. It had happened before, many times.

Jaz pitied the creatures. He knew what it felt like to be chained to a wall, with no food or water.

At long last, Jaz slept.

It seemed that he had only been down for a minute when he heard a guttural cry, and woke, his heart pounding in his throat.

Several of the graaks grunted, and he heard the rush of wings. Someone was riding away!

Jaz leapt to his feet. Nix was gone.

He raced outside and saw that the sun was rising, a great ball of pink at the edge of the world.

Down below him, he saw a graak flying just above the trees. Nix was riding it.

Gone to get food, he realized, and water. The children would need it.

Jaz was filled with wrath and foreboding. But there was no stopping her now. He could only hope that she did well.

Now was the time for her to get supplies, if she was to have any hope at all-now, before Shadoath’s troops looted all of the nearby towns.

Fallion had warned them all not to go scrounging for food. But you cannot command a child to starve, Jaz realized.

For all of their sakes, he wished Nix luck.

Shadoath waited on a pinnacle of a mountain, studying the night sky. She had three dozen endowments of sight, but even then she was blind in the right eye, and everything in her left eye looked as if it were shrouded in the thinnest of mists.

To the west, her golath armies were marching through the night, fanning out. The golaths were tireless, and by dawn they would have prodded beneath every rock and mossy log within twenty miles of Garion’s Port, looking for Fallion and Valya.

Shadoath had tried to follow the flyway, had taken it through several long detours and dead ends. Without someone to lead, her graak had lost its way.

At last she’d come to the end of it, rode out above some trees. She’d wondered if perhaps the children’s hideout was somewhere just at the end of the flyway, there in the jungle, and so she’d landed her graak and searched on foot for a time, sniffing in the shadows for the scent of children, listening for human cries, all without luck.

But late in the afternoon she spotted a pair of graaks far to the east and suspected that the hideout had to be elsewhere.

She’d lost sight of them as they flew into the mountains.

Now for the first time she spotted something in the distance, miles away: a sliver of white, almost like a cloud, appearing and then disappearing, appearing and disappearing.

A graak, she realized, flapping its wings in the dawn. She could even make out a shadowy rider.

Perhaps one of the children was on patrol or carrying a message. In either case, it meant that the child would return.

And when that happened, Shadoath would follow the child to the hideout.