“You’ve done me proud, lad,” Dovian said. “You know that, don’t you? I wasn’t sure you were coming back from this one.”
Spratling smiled wryly and acknowledged, “It was a bit dicey.”
Dovian studied him, weighing the implications of this, perhaps imagining the understatement it represented. “It is no joy to me that your work is as bloody as it is, but that is nothing we can change. We did not make the world, did we? Did not give it shape and substance and set one man against another. None of that was our doing, was it, lad?”
The young man nodded agreement.
If this was meant to make the older man happy, it failed. It seemed to do just the opposite. The large, unwieldy components of Dovian’s face twisted as if physically pained. He planted a knuckle of his other hand in his eye as if to gouge it out. “I guess my work is done, then. I’ve taught you everything I could. Now look at you: eighteen years of age and already a leader. I’ll not complain now that I know for certain you are a man who can thrive in the world. That’s the best I could do. I’m sorry if it’s no life for a prince-”
“Stop it! Come now, I won’t stay if you’re going to blubber like last time. I come back having taken a league brig and you start in moaning about the past again? I just will not have it. Do you want me to leave?”
Dovian stared at him for a long moment. “At least the men see the royalty in you. No, they do. And don’t you go; you’re not dismissed yet! They do see royalty in you. They don’t know what they’re seeing, but you have got a command over them that’s grand to behold. They follow you where they would never follow other men. I named you Spratling so that none would imagine you are royal. Just one tiny fish like a million others in the sea. But there is no denying it, lad, you’ve nobility spilling out of your eyes, out of your mouth each time you open it.”
“Even when I’m cursing?”
“Even then…” The man seemed to sink farther back into his pillows, pleased by whatever image filled his head. “Even then you were still my Dariel, the prince who sought out the likes of me in the caverns below the palace. Why did you do that, lad? Such a strange thing for a boy like you to be up to, roaming the dark underneath. I’ve never understood it.”
“Don’t try to. Anyway, I cannot remember enough to enlighten you.” Spratling indicated the box he had placed at the edge of the bed. “Would you look at what’s in this chest?”
“You really don’t?”
“No. All I remember and all I want to remember is this life. This-what we have here-is all that matters,” he said, infusing the statement with all the certainty he could muster.
He tried all the harder because it was not true. Not exactly, at least. It was rather that he could not make sense of the memories preceding his life with Dovian. He could not understand them with any sort of clarity. The very thought of those early times seemed to weaken him. They pulled on him with a melancholy power otherwise absent from his days. When he did allow himself to think back to when he was still called Dariel Akaran it was his flight from the war and Val’s role in saving him that he wished to recall.
He had left Kidnaban in the care of a man who called himself a guardian. This soldier had lifted Dariel straight out of slumber one morning and walked away with the boy in his arms. He had explained himself as he walked, though Dariel had been groggy and later could not remember what the man had said to soothe him. They had sailed from Crall to the mainland in just a few hours and were on their feet for two days thereafter. By the third, the man bought a pony for Dariel to ride, as the boy was exhausted, his feet blistered. He was apt to cry at any moment and often asked after his brother and sisters and begged to go back to them or to go home. The guardian was not unkind, but he seemed uncomfortable around children and often stared at the boy as if he had never seen a person cry before and could not for the life of him understand the waste of moisture.
The man explained that his father had arranged for him to be cared for by a friend in Senival. All they had to do was reach him and the boy’s ordeal would be concluded, everything safe, all explained. They headed west and for several days wound their way through a scarred landscape similar to what he had seen of the Cape of Fallon mines, mountainsides bored into, whole swathes in which all the land in view had been maimed by human butchery. These, the guardian explained, were the Senivalian mines. All around went dust-covered laborers, men and boys mostly but also women and some girls. They wore the rags of their lot and all seemed busy, although they paid little heed to their usual work. He heard them shout bits and pieces of frantic news, full of import that he could not fathom, except that none of it seemed good.
Of this place and its significance to his father’s empire Dariel had not the slightest inkling, except that his guardian, on taking in a view of the land tainted crimson by the setting sun, said, “What a hell we’ve made here. A hell with a golden crown that calls itself-” The guardian had stopped short, remembering Dariel, and said that they had better head on. They were almost to their destination.
Coming down a winding road into the mountain town to which Dariel was supposed to have been delivered, the guardian paused. “What’s this?” he asked.
The village had a lovely aspect to it, sitting as it did in a flat valley rimmed by peaks. For a few moments Dariel thought it pleasant to look on, until he noticed the stillness of the place. Nobody moved about the streets. No animals or farmers worked the fields. Not a single puff of smoke escaped the chimneys of the houses. “This isn’t right,” the guardian said. Dariel could not dispute it.
What happened to the townspeople Dariel never knew. They were simply gone, and try as he might the guardian found no sign of the man he sought. He sat down on a log stool, taking in the place, and then he folded his head into his hands and stayed silent in thought for what seemed like hours. Dariel stood nearby, holding the pony’s reins as it cropped the sweet mountain grass.
When the guardian looked up, he was full of purpose. He would go to the next town, he declared. It was over a day’s ride farther west. If he left at that moment he could reach the place by sunrise, and if he found the answers he needed to there, he would be back by nightfall. Perhaps somebody was looking for him. Best that the guardian check things out and return with a better idea how to proceed. He would have to ride fast, though, so he arranged to leave Dariel in a hut just a little way out of town. He left his shoulder bag for the boy, and said this was all for the best.
The man rode away. Dariel heard the clack of the pony’s hooves for some time, and when the sound eventually faded, he was filled with dread. He had not even protested, said not a word. How could he when he knew the man was lying to him?
He spent that night in blackness, trembling and fearful, as small as a mouse and just as helpless. It rained steady and chill for some hours, and when it abated, mist crept through the valley like wraiths. He made no fire, did not think to fetch the blanket from the pack the guardian left, did not even fully recognize the hunger in his belly for what it was. As the bleak reality of his situation was so beyond his power to face, he balked from doing so. Inside, he fantasized his father lived again and was on the way to rescue him. He entertained all sorts of fancies with ravenous hope. Perhaps it was a good thing, too, because when salvation came it was no more predictable or likely than any of his fancies, but he was ready to accept it with open arms.
Sitting now on the stool beside his savior’s sickbed, Spratling asked, “Do you remember the night you found me?”
“Like it was yesterday, lad.”
“That is where I begin, you know? You were a shadow that pushed through the door and found my hiding place-”