Fire - Kristin Cashore [2]
The Gracelings were tools of the kings, and no more. They were not thought to be natural, and people who could avoid them did, in Monsea and in most of the other six kingdoms as well. No one wished the company of a Graceling.
Larch had once shared this attitude. Now he saw that it was cruel, unjust, and ignorant, for his son was a normal little boy who happened to be superior in many ways, not just in the way of his Grace, whatever it might turn out to be. It was all the more reason for Larch to remove his son from society. He would not send Immiker to the king’s court, to be shunned and teased, and put to whatever use pleased the king.
THEY WERE NOT long in the mountains before Larch accepted, bitterly, that it was an impossible hiding place. It wasn’t the cold that was the problem, though autumn here was as raw as midwinter had been on the lord’s estate. It wasn’t the terrain either, though the scrub was hard and sharp, and they slept on rock every night, and there was no place even to imagine growing vegetables or grain. It was the predators. Not a week went by that Larch didn’t have to defend against some attack. Mountain lions, bears, wolves. The enormous birds, the raptors, with a wingspan twice the height of a man. Some of the creatures were territorial, all of them were vicious, and as winter closed in bleakly around Larch and Immiker, all of them were starving. Their horse was lost one day to a pair of mountain lions.
At night, inside the thorny shelter Larch had built of sticks and scrub, he would pull the boy into the warmth of his coat and listen for the howls, the tumbled stones down the slope, the screeches, that meant an animal had scented them. At the first telltale sound he would strap the sleeping boy into the carrier on his chest. He would light as powerful a torch as he had the fuel for, go out of the shelter, and stand there, holding off the attack with fire and sword. Sometimes he stood there for hours. Larch didn’t get a lot of sleep.
He wasn’t eating much either.
‘You’ll make yourself sick if you keep eating so much,’ Immiker said to Larch over their paltry dinner of stringy wolf meat and water.
Larch stopped chewing immediately, for sickness would make it harder to defend the boy. He handed over the majority of his portion. ‘Thank you for the warning, son.’
They ate quietly for a while, Immiker devouring Larch’s food. ‘What if we went higher into the mountains and crossed to the other side?’ Immiker asked.
Larch looked into the boy’s mismatched eyes. ‘Is that what you think we should do?’
Immiker shrugged his small shoulders. ‘Could we survive the crossing?’
‘Do you think we could?’ Larch asked, and then shook himself as he heard his own question. The child was three years old and knew nothing of crossing mountains. It was a sign of Larch’s fatigue, that he groped so desperately and so often for his son’s opinion.
‘We would not survive,’ Larch said firmly. ‘I’ve heard of no one who has ever made it across the mountains to the east, either here or in Estill or Nander. I know nothing of the land beyond the seven kingdoms, except for tall tales the eastern people tell about rainbow-coloured monsters and underground labyrinths.’
‘Then you’ll have to bring me back down into the hills, Father, and hide me. You must protect me.’
Larch’s mind was foggy, tired, starved, and shot through with one lightning bolt of clarity, which was his determination to do what Immiker said.
SNOW WAS FALLING as Larch picked his way down a sheer slope. The boy was strapped inside his coat. Larch’s sword, his bow and arrows, some blankets and bundled scraps of meat hung on his back. When the great brown raptor appeared over a distant ridge, Larch reached for his bow tiredly. But the bird lunged so fast that all in an instant it was