The Heir (Fall of the Swords Book 3) Read online

  The gathered throng greeted their appearance with a hush. Murmuring spread at the sight of Flaming Arrow's bearing a rung. Let them talk, he thought, wishing Rippling Water had shown.

  Ten miles away was the pyre grounds. To accommodate the expected crowds, the Emperor had ordered extra tiers added to the coliseum. At noon, a courier had reported that the coliseum was already full.

  How many people watched my brother's bier make this same journey fifteen years ago? Flaming Arrow wondered. His twin brother's death at three days old had shocked the Empire, profoundly affecting the way the citizens treated him. In their catharsis for the dead twin, they had made a cathexis of the living. Welcome at every hearth, Flaming Arrow had never lacked friends. Adulation and admiration had been his for the asking. They thought him a god.

  Flaming Arrow blinked back tears, feeling terribly, impotently human.

  Even he couldn't bring Bubbling Water back to life.

  The Matriarch's history long and glorious, Flaming Arrow preferred to remember the Bubbling Water he had known personally. His grandmother had always been kind and loving, stern when he got mischievous, instructive without lecturing, quick to anger and quick to forgive. While the Heir had learned government and related disciplines from others, Bubbling Water had taught him about people and nature, art and creation, spirituality and the Infinite.

  Flaming Arrow missed her. Deep within, he wished he were escorting his own mother to the pyre grounds instead. Infinite forgive me my terrible thoughts.

  Aloof and reclusive, Flowering Pine had shunned him during infancy. His care-givers had been mostly servants. After he had started school, the Imperial Consort had him presented once a week at the door of her suite, as if he were an actor giving a weekly performance. Eventually, he had resigned himself to the charade, wanting more than that. The Consort seemed like a statue carved from ice. Flowering Pine's unstoppable mouth had always annoyed Flaming Arrow. He knew it her way of keeping others at a distance. Glancing back toward the castle spire, he wondered if she felt safe in her marble tower. If I'd been born in a hovel in the empty northern lands, she'd have treated me no differently, Flaming Arrow thought, sighing. I can't make my mother give me something she doesn't have. Perhaps she never recovered from my unnamed brother's death.

  With Bubbling Water always near, Flaming Arrow had needed the Imperial Consort little. Never had he lacked for a warm breast when he was young. Half the Empire would have given him succor. At no time in his youth was he without a loving, gentle caress or a protective, comforting embrace. To have these attentions from his mother, though, Flaming Arrow would have given away the Heir Sword.

  Bringing his attention back to the road, he frowned. A few steps ahead was Guarding Bear, his son leading him. He's a shadow of the man I knew four days ago, Flaming Arrow thought, aching inside.

  Bubbling Water's death had taken the life out of Guarding Bear. His appearance now betrayed his age. In a few hours, his hair had turned completely gray. In four days, his wrinkles had become prominent. His sightless eyes now wandered aimlessly, as with dementia.

  Flaming Arrow wondered what kept the General alive, mates of many years tending to die within hours of each other. The greatest general in all seven reigns of the Emperors Arrow is now an empty husk. Oh, dear Lord Infinite, bring Guarding Bear back to us or take him beyond, Flaming Arrow prayed. Please don't leave him like this!

  Holding up the rung with one hand, he wiped his face with the other.

  When the Heir was five years old, Guarding Bear had asked the Emperor Flying Arrow to let him teach the boy. Initially, the Emperor had refused, reluctant to trust the undefeated General.

  Flaming Arrow, however, had known what he wanted, even at five years old. So often had the Heir insisted that Flying Arrow had acquiesced, despite mistrusting the retired general.

  Flaming Arrow got more than he asked for. Guarding Bear had been a rigorous and unforgiving taskmaster. Idolizing the old General, Flaming Arrow had been willing to do almost anything to please him. After ten years of daily instruction, he still was.

  Bringing Bubbling Water back to life was beyond him, however.

  Though the worst affected by the Matriarch's death, Guarding Bear wasn't the only Bear Family member who concerned Flaming Arrow.

  Rippling Water had disappeared shortly after her mother's death. When Flaming Arrow had tried to visit each day, the servants had politely refused to admit him. Respecting their grief, Flaming Arrow had left each time without seeing a single member of the Bear Family, a family he considered his own. I can't remember the last time I didn't see Rippling Water for four days, he thought.

  Flaming Arrow had no siblings. His father was often busy with Imperial matters. His mother rarely emerged from her private suite in Emparia Castle. Daily lessons with Guarding Bear brought Flaming Arrow into constant contact with Rolling Bear, Bubbling Water, and Rippling Water.

  From early childhood, Flaming Arrow and Rippling Water had played with the same toys in the same sandboxes, had bathed with each other, had napped with each other. To the young boy, always having her around seemed natural, inevitable, expected. She eased his loneliness. The Emperor Flying Arrow permitted the Heir few friends, of course, and fewer social contacts.

  As adolescence approached, sexuality inevitably brought Flaming Arrow and Rippling Water together in different ways, and separated them in others. Before puberty, they had regarded each other's nudity as all children would. Their curiosity satisfied, they were curious no longer. At twelve, Rippling Water's body began to change. She became more reticent. Once, she showed him the darker hair at pubis and armpit, and once, let him touch the growing breasts. Once was enough, and she told him she valued her body and privacy. When he began to mature two years later, he showed her the physical changes to his body. Their curiosity satisfied, they were curious then only about coitus itself.

  They remained close during these years, but without the physical intimacy that had formerly characterized their friendship. Although their elders had as much as told them to couple, they had agreed to wait. Lack of desire wasn't the problem. They each desired the other and no one else. Other potential mates wasn't the problem. Neither of them had ever questioned the assumption that eventually they would mate. Love wasn't the problem. Their love for each other was as certain as the rising of the sun.

  Emotional maturity was the problem. Neither was stable emotionally. Both had just emerged from puberty and both wanted the stability of completed educations and budding careers. They had agreed that each year they would pull the problem from its compartment, reexamine all the variables, and decide.

  Sighing, Flaming Arrow trudged along the east road toward the coliseum. His mother locked away in her marble tower, his father always busy oiling the machinery of government, his grandmother dead, his grandfather and mentor nearly catatonic with grief, his betrothed only the Infinite knew where, he felt a loneliness more bitter than limes.

  Flaming Arrow began to weep, wanting to turn back time.

  Chapter 2

  Abject poverty, misery, and squalor. We know little more about Seeking Sword's childhood than that. So little do we know that we could almost say his life began at fifteen. Perhaps it did, in a figurative way. The person he became bears little resemblance to the depravity of his origins. We have no way to account for the compassion, strength and benevolence that so characterized his rule.—The Gathering of Power, by the Wizard Spying Eagle.

  * * *

  Seeking Sword found himself a place to sit on the shiny log, exhausted. His eyes were the gray-blue of hazy skies, his hair the bronze of cooling embers, and his skin the brown of tanned leather. Fifteen years old and six feet tall, he weighed one hundred seventy-five pounds. He still had the narrow shoulders and hips of adolescence, which many mistook for clumsiness. Left-handed and able to fight equally well with either hand, he was anything but clumsy.

  Slithering Snake retrieved his sword from the bushes where the boy had flung it with his
own. His body so lacked oxygen that his peripheral vision clouded with sparkle.

  Their practice clearing was a circle of smooth, packed dirt, which they leveled every year after the winter rains. For ten years the two of them had practiced in this clearing, ever since the boy had shown up one day at the Elk Raider caves and asked Slithering Snake to teach him. The child holding a sword as big as he was had touched the sectathon.

  Seeking Sword had turned out to be an apt pupil. Now the boy was so skilled that he disarmed his every contestant. At every other form of hand-to-hand combat, he was indomitable as well, and showed incredible promise, despite his maleficent parentage and the squalor in which he lived.

  “You're getting better,” Slithering Snake said. “I like the weight shift you put into that last parry—surprised me. You'll have to refine it, though.”

  Seeking Sword smiled, nodding. “It won't work as well on a smaller man. With your bulk, Lord Snake, it worked perfectly.”

  The large man grinned.

  “Listen, my friend, I need to decide something.”

  The large man frowned.

  Seeking Sword plunged his weapon into the ground between his feet. The ruby set in the pommel sparkled. “It's my father, Lord Snake.”

  How could a woman, any woman, deign to let Icy Wind into her sacred cave? Slithering Snake wondered. The man stank like a skunk two weeks dead and had halitosis bad enough to frighten a bear. Uglier than excrement, Icy Wind was as abrasive as sand rubbed into wound, and looked as if any act of coitus would be his last. Only through the Infinite's direct intervention could Icy Wind have sired a child as handsome as Seeking Sword.

  “What about him, Lord Sword?”

  Seeking Sword sighed. “I hate him,” he said, as though describing the weather. “I love him, but I hate him.”

  “He's … not a pleasant man.”

  Nodding, Seeking Sword put his face in his hands. “Remember when Fawning Elk stopped him from beating me?”

  Slithering Snake grunted. “Five, six years ago, wasn't it?”

  On one of the few occasions Icy Wind had come to the Elk Raider cave, Seeking Sword had misbehaved in some way. Icy Wind began to beat him with his staff.

  “What the Infinite are you doing?” Fawning Elk demanded, stepping between them.

  “Get out of my way, wench!” Icy Wind said, swinging the staff at the boy again.

  Somehow, Fawning Elk avoided the blow and slapped Icy Wind.

  “Meddling harpy!” His face red, the old man swung at her. Lunging at his father, Seeking Sword tackled him at the waist, throwing them both off balance. In a tangle they fell to the cavern floor.

  Fawning Elk put her knife to Icy Wind's neck. “If you harm the boy again, I'll peel your skin off in strips and feed them to you!”

  Leaping into the fray, Leaping Elk and Slithering Snake pulled her off Icy Wind and dragged her away.

  Sullenly, pulling the boy behind him, Icy Wind had left the Elk Raider cave and had never returned.

  “I remember, Lord Sword,” Slithering Snake said. “She would have killed him if the Lord Elk and I hadn't stopped her from going after you.”

  “Infinite bless her for caring,” Seeking Sword said. “It didn't stop him, though. That was the first time I realized something wasn't right about the way he treats me.” The boy sighed, biting his lip. His left hand picked absently at scabs of bark still clinging to the log. “How old was I? Six, seven? I don't remember. He dragged me back to our cave and beat me worse than ever before.”

  Slithering Snake winced, nodding. Once, he had visited Seeking Sword at home. Seeking Sword and his father Icy Wind lived under an overhang on the opposite slope of the mountain in which the Elk Raiders made their home. The cave stank of unwashed body. The ceiling and walls were rancid with the smoke of a thousand cooking fires. Discarded bone and other detritus choked the floor. Seeking Sword had tried to clean their cave for Slithering Snake's visit. Icy Wind had beaten him nearly senseless, and Slithering Snake hadn't visited again.

  “Anyway, it's time for me to leave,” Seeking Sword said, weeping softly and closing his eyes.

  Slithering Snake put his hand on the boy's shoulder, not knowing what else to do. He doubted that Icy Wind had fathered Seeking Sword, but had no proof. Icy Wind had appeared with the infant one day at the Elk Raider caves, claiming the boy was his own. The mother had died shortly after giving birth, Icy Wind claimed, in the earthquake that had destroyed Burrow Garrison and stopped the Imperial siege of the Tiger Fortress. The old man also claimed she died before bestowing half her psychic reserve on Seeking Sword, hence his lack of talent.

  His lack notwithstanding, the Infinite had blessed Seeking Sword with incredible luck. In ten years of weapons practice, he had received only one injury. Slithering Snake couldn't count the number of cuts and scratches he'd gotten while teaching the boy.

  Furthermore, where the destitute, half-crazy, obnoxious old man had obtained the boy's sword was a mystery. The blade looked like tarnished brass. The haft was plain, contoured for the hand, and unremarkable except for the single ruby set in the pommel. Slithering Snake had seen many swords more elaborately decorated, but none that color of metal. Modest in appearance, the sword was valuable, its craftsmanship superior.

  The mystery of Seeking Sword and Icy Wind had attracted the attention of Scowling Tiger, the most powerful bandit in the Windy Mountains. Months ago, the bandit general had questioned the sectathon at length, then the two Wizards Melding Mind and Easing Comfort had plied him with further questions. The three men had then interviewed Leaping Elk. Initially, Slithering Snake had thought that the questioning was the bandit general's first move toward inducting Seeking Sword into the Tiger Raiders. Months had passed since then, and Scowling Tiger hadn't offered the boy a position. Why was Scowling Tiger so interested in Seeking Sword? Slithering Snake wondered.

  Sighing, the sectathon scanned the area for human presence, his talent enabling him to detect others from as far as twenty miles away.

  The eye-sore of Icy Wind's psychic signature was the only one within two miles. In all his forty-three years, Slithering Snake had seen few signatures as ugly. The figure tottered toward them, leaning heavily on a staff. Why does Icy Wind need the staff when a medacor can easily correct any infirmity? Slithering Snake wondered. Is it a talisman, as Leaping Elk suspects?

  “Here comes your father,” he said.

  * * *

  A look of resigned disgust passed across Seeking Sword's face. “Just in time,” the boy said, wiping the tears off his cheeks. Sighing, he stood and stepped to his discarded weapons. Quiver, weapons belt, a knife for each moccasin, pack and bow. He slid the sword into a sheath that disparaged the blade it housed. None of Seeking Sword's clothing was of quality workmanship, the boy having made it himself. All of it was better than Icy Wind's rags.

  “The Lord Elk's offer of better clothing still stands, my friend.”

  “As does my refusal, Lord Snake.” Seeking Sword already owed Leaping Elk more than he could repay. For years, Leaping Elk and other members of the Elk Raiders had taught Seeking Sword various disciplines. The boy had often wondered how to repay that debt. I wish Father didn't hate them so much, Seeking Sword thought. If he didn't, I'd join them tomorrow.

  The old man limped into the clearing. Clutching a polished staff were trembling, gnarled hands of shriveled skin, prominent vein, knobby knuckle.

  “Father, you didn't need to come all this way,” Seeking Sword said as usual, the clearing several miles north of their cave.

  “Oh, I know, my son, my only son, but I wanted to see you disarm this bandit. Yes, I did,” Icy Wind said, directing a contemptuous look toward Slithering Snake. Glistening, bloodshot, jaundiced eyes dregged sunken sockets and peered from beneath a precipitous, lupine brow.

  “It's becoming easier, Father,” Seeking Sword said. “I'm getting very good with a sword, good enough I think to join the Elk Raiders.”

  “No! A thousand times, no!
How many times do I have to tell you?!” Spittle slathered a prognathous jaw, the mouth nearly toothless, two rotted stubs remaining.

  Looking toward Slithering Snake, Seeking Sword motioned with his head.

  The sectathon gathered his accoutrements and left without a word.

  Sometimes Seeking Sword argued with his father, sometimes not. Always his responses were mild. The boy smiled apprehensively. “If you won't allow me to discharge my debt to them, then you had better do so yourself, Father.” He had tried many tactics, but never this one.

  Flush crept up the neck, a corded, wrinkled pillar buttressing sagging jowls that hung in scaly folds below cheekbones collapsed into the face. “You impudent little runt, I ought to beat you black and blue for that!” Narrow nostril dripped nasal mucus, sleeved on crusted cloth.

  “You ought to be grateful they taught me how to survive as a bandit!” Seeking Sword replied. “The time has come for me to decide for myself what to do, Father,” he said sadly, sighing. “I'll come visit you when I've found another place to live.”

  “What!” Icy Wind screamed, his voice acid to eardrums. “You'll listen to me, oh yes, by the Infinite, or I'll thrash you so soundly you won't walk for a week…”

  Seeking Sword turned to go. His senses tuned, he spun at the whistle of staff, blocking it with the edge of his blade.

  The explosion blew him backward, stunning him.

  Blinking the flash from his eyes, his ears ringing, Seeking Sword extricated himself from bushes, wiped the blacking and singed hair off his arm, and looked toward his father.

  Laying at the opposite edge of the clearing, Icy Wind rolled his head from side to side with a groan, a hand tenaciously clinging to staff.

  Good, he doesn't look harmed, Seeking Sword thought. Caring only to get away from his father, he sheathed the weapon and started north. Jogging slowly at first, he soon settled into a distance-eating pace.