He was standing there, feeling helpless, when his mother came in. Karine walked up to him, and he put an arm around her, drawing her against him, surprised by how frail, how small, she felt.
“I understand I am losing two sons today,” she said sadly.
He frowned. In his own wallowing, he had forgotten how his actions would affect the rest of his family. “I’m sorry,” he said awkwardly. “I didn’t mean to-I don’t want to-that is, Father insists-”
“And he’s right,” she said firmly. “He told me what happened in the court. You won’t be safe here, but you should know, Brandon, that I am so proud of you.”
“But-why? I haven’t done anything to make you proud!”
“Shh,” she said quietly, touching a finger to his lips. “I know what you and your brother found. And I know what you did, carrying him out of the delvings by yourself. You are a credit to yourself and to our house.”
He couldn’t speak for a moment, just held her close. Finally he waved his free hand at his wardrobe and chests. “I don’t even know what to take,” he admitted.
“Let me help,” she said practically, bustling over to the chests, throwing the lids open, and clucking her tongue at the mess she saw in each. Yet somehow, in the space of a few short minutes, she had helped him gather together a compact traveling kit. He donned his most durable clothes, wrapped a knife, a waterskin, gloves, and a rope into a spare robe, and strapped his axe to the sheath on his back. The cook brought in some bread and cheese wrapped in dried lambskin that Brandon could carry in his belt pouch. At his mother’s advice, he put on his most comfortable walking boots, leaving both his hobnailed climbing boots and the ceremonial footwear he had worn to the palace behind.
He said a dignified good-bye to his mother, though her courageously dry eyes made him want to cry. “Go,” she whispered into his ear, and the anguish in her voice made him understand her grief and steeled his own resolve. He emerged to find that Harn Poleaxe had come quickly and was being ushered into his father’s study.
“I have reconsidered,” Garren Bluestone said to the hill dwarf when the Neidar and the patriarch were comfortably seated. Brandon stood inside the doorway, watching and listening as his father spoke. “I accept your terms, on two additional conditions.”
“Excellent!” rejoiced Poleaxe before narrowing his eyes. “Conditions?” he said warily. “My offer is on the table: a hundred times a thousand steel pieces for the Bluestone.”
Brandon tried to listen, though his head was whirling with the fast pace of events. He couldn’t even imagine a hundred times a thousand pieces of steel. And what were the new conditions? He had a feeling they involved himself, and his departure.
“The terms don’t change,” Garren declared. “But the conditions are these: I want you to take my son with you when you return to Hillhome. And you must leave immediately.”
Poleaxe blinked, looking Brandon up and down in blunt appraisal. “To the first, I agree,” he said. “Your young son is a hale companion, and of course I will welcome his company. But why the second?” he asked, perplexed. “Is the lad in some trouble?”
“Precisely,” Garren replied. “He can tell you about it when you are on your way. Time’s a-wasting. Can you do it?”
Poleaxe shrugged, the simple gesture seeming somehow grandiose, almost kingly. “I will need an hour or two to settle my affairs. And, of course, I don’t have those steel pieces readily at my disposal. It will take some time to arrange for a moneylender’s draft to be sent up here from the south. You understand, after all this time, I did not anticipate having to conclude our arrangement in the matter of a few minutes.”
“I do understand. Brandon will carry the stone until you have the draft sent. Will that be adequate?”
Harn Poleaxe stroked his beard, his handsome features marked by a pensive expression. “Yes, I agree. We can leave as soon as I’ve settled my affairs; I travel light, and I have nothing that I can’t leave behind for another trip.” He looked at Brandon then rested a hand-a hand that thumped down with the force of a felled tree-on the younger dwarf’s shoulder. “What about you, young Bluestone? Are you prepared for an arduous journey?”
Brandon, speechless, could only nod his head in the affirmative.
Garren cleared his throat then rose to his feet. He removed a key from beneath his tunic, one that he wore on a chain around his neck, and inserted it into a niche in the wall that Brandon had never before recognized as a lock. With a quick turn, he released the catch then pulled open the heavy stone door to reveal a large safe. Within was a single object, wrapped in soft leather, that looked to Brandon to be about the size of a hammer’s head. He set the thing on his desk and slowly, reverently, unfolded the wrapping.
Though, throughout his life, Brandon had seen the Bluestone Wedge depicted on tapestries and shields, on the family’s front door and on his father’s ornate breastplate, but he had always thought it to be an abstract symbol. He had never laid eyes on the precious artifact itself. He was moved by the sight of the actual heirloom. It was just as portrayed: a simple wedge, wide and blunt at one end, while tapered and narrow, though not sharp like an axe blade, at the other. As he had surmised, it was about the size of a regular hammerhead, smaller than the head of a warhammer.
But it was not the shape nor the size of the object that took his breath away. Rather, it was the color. It was not just a turquoise or bluegranite, but nearly the infinite, perfect azure of a sapphire. He imagined he could stare into that stone for hours and never see the same image twice, as if there were countless facets and unique features, dazzling details that would compel him to keep seeking, confound him with wonder at each new discovery.
He shook his head, and it was almost like breaking out of a trance. Harn Poleaxe, he saw too, was similarly transfixed. Garren Bluestone was ignoring the Neidar, watching his son with an expression, Brandon hoped with a pang, that indicated he was proud and satisfied with the object of his scrutiny.
Finally, with a curt gesture, his father pulled the wrapping over the stone again, and the spell was broken.
“Here you go,” he said, hoisting the bundle and handing it to Brandon. “It’s time you two were on your way.
“Now this will be Caergoth, coming up,” Harn Poleaxe said ten days later, gesturing expansively to the large community ringed by fortified walls and towers and crowned by a massive castle, that had been gradually materializing before the two dwarves during their past three hours riding along the road. “Greatest port in southern Solamnia-though they say it’s no match for Palanthas, way up in the north.”
Brandon looked up, startled out of a reverie that had involved both the barmaid Bondall and the heiress Rona Darkwater. He was relieved to see the Neidar hadn’t noticed his inattention.
“So this is where we hire a ship to take us south, across the Newsea?” he asked.
It had been a long, hard ten days. His rump was so sore, he thought he’d never want to sit down again. How could a horse be so damned uncomfortable? And wobbly? And just plain cantankerous? As if to mock him, the animal underneath him shivered and lurched a bit, sending new jolts of pain through his buttocks and lower back.
He squinted, impressed in spite of himself with the vista of the great, fortified city ahead. But it was so confounded bright out there on the plains; he had a constant headache, it seemed, just from trying to cope with the sunlight and the wide vista of sky. Of course, he’d been outside of Kayolin before, exploring the mountains of the Garnet Range, but most of his forays had been through the lush pine forests, and even when he’d been up on the rocky ridges, there always seemed to be stone and cliff and frowning overlook looming over him, intermittently blocking out the blistering rays. For four days they had been out in the wide open, and it seemed as if the clouds had decided to stay permanently out of sight. For four days he had suffered the full blazing glory of the sun.