“No! Wrong! Begin again!”
A sharp blow, delivered impersonally by his father with what was known as the naming stick, across the unprotected, rune-free palm of the hand, focused Haplo’s mind on his lesson. The blow brought tears to his eyes, but he was quick to blink them away, for his father was watching him closely. The ability to endure pain was as much a part of this rough schooling as the recitation and the drawing of the sigla.
“You are careless today, Haplo,” said his father, tapping the naming stick—a thin, pliable branch of a plant known as a creeping rose, adorned with flesh-pricking thorns—on the hard ground. “It is said that back in the days of our freedom, before we were thrown into this accursed jail by our enemies . . . Name the enemy, my son.”
“The Sartan,” Haplo said, trying to ignore the stinging pain of the thorns left stuck in his skin.
“It is said that in the days of our freedom, children such as you went to schools and learned the runes as a kind of exercise for the mind. But no longer. Now it is life or death. When your mother and I are dead, Haplo, you will be responsible for the sigla that will, if done correctly, grant you the strength needed to escape our prison and avenge our deaths on our enemy. Name the runes of strength and power.”
Haplo’s hand left the trunk of his body and followed the progression of the tattooed sigla that twined down his arms and legs, onto the backs of his hands and the tops of his feet. He knew these better than he knew the runes of protection and healing. Those “baby” runes had been tattooed onto him when he was weaned from the breast. He had actually been allowed to tattoo some of these newer sigla—the mark of an adult—onto his skin himself. That had been a proud moment, his first rite of entry into what would undoubtedly be a cruel, harsh, and brief life.
Haplo completed his lesson without making another mistake and earned his father’s curt nod of satisfaction.
“Now, heal those wounds,” his father said, gesturing to the thorns protruding from the boy’s palm.
Haplo pulled out the thorns with his teeth, spat them on the ground, and, joining his hands, formed the healing circle, as he’d been taught. The red, swollen marks left behind by the thorns gradually disappeared. He exhibited smooth, if dirty, palms for his father. The man grunted, rose, and walked away.
Two days later, he and Haplo’s mother would both be dead. Haplo would be left alone.
The lucky and the strong were generally lonely. . . .
Haplo’s mind drifted on a cloud of agony and weakness. He traced the sigla for his father and then his father was a bloody, mangled body and then his father was the Lord of the Nexus, whipping Haplo with the cane of the rosebush. Haplo grit his teeth and forced himself to blink back the tears and bite back the scream and concentrate on the runes. His hand traveled down his left arm, to the sigla he’d drawn there as a boy and those he’d redrawn as a man and those he’d added as a man, feeling his strength and power grow within him. He was forced to sit up, in order to reach the sigla on his legs. His first attempt nearly made him black out, but he struggled out of the whirling mists and peered through the blinking lights of his mind, choked back the nausea, and sat almost upright. His hand, trembling with weakness, followed the runes on thighs, hips, knees, shins, feet.
He expected, every moment, to feel the sting of the thorny cane, the reprimand, “No! Wrong! Begin again!”
And then he was finished and he’d done it correctly. He lay back down on the deck, feeling the wonderful warmth flow through his body, spreading from the name rune at his heart through his trunk and into his limbs. Haplo slept.
When he awoke, his body was still weak, but it was a weakness from prolonged fasting and thirst—soon cured. He dragged himself to his feet and peered outside the large window on the bridge, wondering where he was. He had a vague memory of having passed through the horrors of Death’s Gate again, but that memory was literally ablaze with pain and he swiftly banished it. He was not, at least, in imminent danger. The runes on his body glowed only very faintly, and that was in reaction to what he’d suffered and endured, not reacting to any threat. He could see nothing outside the ship except a vast expanse of aqua blue. He stared at it, wondered if it was sky, water, solid, gaseous, what. He couldn’t tell, and he was too light-headed from hunger to try to reason it all out.
Turning, he stumbled through the ship, making his weary way down into the hold, where he had stored his supplies. He ate sparingly of bread dipped in wine, mindful of the adage “Never break a fast with a feast.” His strength restored somewhat, Haplo went back to the bridge, dressed himself in his leather breeches, white long-sleeved shirt, and leather vest and boots, covering every sign of the telltale runes that marked him as a Patryn to those who remembered their history lessons. He left only his hands free, for the moment, for he would need to steer the vessel, using the magical runes of the steering stone.
At least, he assumed he’d need to steer the vessel. Haplo stared into the aqua-blue whatever-it-was that surrounded him and tried to make sense of it, but he might have been sailing into a dome of air that spanned all the vistas of his vision or about to fly smack into a wall covered with blue paint.
“We’ll walk onto the top deck and take a look around, eh, boy?” he said. Not hearing the usual excited bark that always greeted this statement, Haplo glanced about.
The dog was gone.
It occurred to Haplo, then, that he hadn’t seen the animal since . . . since . . . well, it had been a long time.
“Here, boy!” Haplo whistled. No response.
Irritated, thinking the dog was indulging in a raid on the sausages, as happened from time to time, Haplo stomped back down to the hold, prepared to find the animal looking as innocent of wrongdoing as was possible with sausage grease smeared over its nose.
The dog was not there. No sausages were missing.
Haplo called, whistled. No response. He knew then, with a sudden pang of loneliness and unhappiness, that the dog was gone. But almost as soon as he experienced the aching pain, which was in some ways almost harder to bear than the burning pain of his torture, Haplo felt it ease, then disappear. It was as if his being were opened like a door. A cold, sharp wind blew in and coated with ice every troubling doubt and feeling he’d been experiencing. Haplo felt renewed, refreshed, empty. And the emptiness, he discovered, was far preferable to the raging turmoil and confusion that had previously churned inside him.
The dog. A crutch, as his lord had always said. The lucky and the strong were generally lonely. The dog had served Haplo’s purpose.
“It’s gone.” He shrugged and forgot it.
Alfred. That miserable Sartan.
“I see it now. I was duped, tricked by his magic. Just as my people were duped and tricked before the Sundering. But not now. We will meet again, Sartan, and when we do, you won’t escape me this time.”
Haplo, looking back, was appalled to see how weak he’d grown, appalled to think he’d actually doubted and attempted to deceive his lord. His lord. He owed this new freedom from doubt, this new feeling of ease, to his lord.
“As my father punished me when I was small, so my lord has punished me now. I accept it. I am grateful for it. I have learned from it. I will not fail you, My Lord.”
He swore the oath, placing his hand upon the name rune over his heart. Then he walked out, alone, onto the upper deck of the elven ship called Dragon Wing. Haplo paced the deck, looked up beyond the tall masts with the dragon-scaled wings, leaned over the rail to stare far below the ship’s keel, walked forward to study what lay beyond the snarling dragon’s head that was the prow. He caught sight of something in the distance. Not much, nothing more than a dark splotch against the blue, but from the tingling of the sigla on his skin and the creeping feelings of dread shriveling his bowels, he came to the conclusion that he was looking at Death’s Gate.