Ilse Witch - Terry Brooks [63]
Bek stared at him in surprise. “Someone else might be my real father?”
Coran Leah fixed him with his steady gaze. “You are like one of my own sons, Bek. I love you as much as I love them. I have done the very best I could to raise you in the right way. Both Liria and I have. Now that you are about to leave, I want no secrets between us.”
He stood up. “I’ll let you get back to your packing.”
He started for the door, then changed his mind and came back across the room. He put his strong arms around Bek and hugged him tightly. “Be careful, son,” he whispered.
Then he was gone again, leaving Bek to conclude that there was as much uncertainty about his past as there was about his future.
Chapter ELEVEN
It was raining again by the time Hunter Predd and Walker arrived aboard Obsidian at the seaport of March Brume, some distance north of Bracken Clell on the coast of the Blue Divide. They had flown into the rain just before sunset after traveling west all day from the Highlands of Leah, and it felt as if the dark and damp had descended as one. March Brume occupied a stretch of rocky beach along a cove warded by huge cliffs to the north and a broad salt marsh to the south. A stand of deep woods backed away from the village into a shallow valley behind, and it was just to the south of that valley, on a narrow plateau, that the Roc deposited her passengers so that they might take refuge for the night in an old trapper’s shack.
March Brume was a predominately Southland community, although a smattering of Elves and Dwarves had settled there, as well. For centuries, the seaport had been famous for the construction of her sailing ships, everything from one-man skiffs to single-masted sloops to three-masted frigates. Craftsmen from all over the Four Lands came to the little village to ply their trades and offer their services. There was never a shortage of need for designers or builders, and there was always a good living to be made. Virtually everyone who lived in the seaport was engaged in the same occupation.
Then, twenty-four years ago, a man named Ezael Sterret, a Rover of notorious reputation, a sometime pirate and brigand with a streak of inventive genius, had designed and built the first airship. It had been unwieldy, ungainly, and unreliable, but it had flown. Other efforts by other builders had followed, each increasingly more successful, and within two decades, travel had been revolutionized and the nature of shipbuilding in March Brume had been changed forever. Sailing ships were still built in the shipyards of the old seaport, but not in the same numbers as before. The majority of ships constructed now were for air travel, and the customers whose pockets were deepest and whose needs were greatest came from the Federation and Free-born army commands.
None of which had anything to do with Walker’s primary reason for choosing to come here rather than to one of a dozen other shipbuilding ports along the coast. What brought him to March Brume was the nature of the shipbuilders and designers who occupied the seaport—Rovers, a people universally disliked and distrusted, wanderers for the whole of their history, who even as mostly permanent residents still came and went from the seaport whenever the urge struck. Not only were they the most skilled and reliable of those engaged in shipbuilding and flying, but they accepted work from all quarters and they understood the importance of keeping a bargain and a confidence once engaged.
Walker was about to test the truth of this generally held belief. His instincts and his long association with Rovers persuaded him that it was his best option. His cousin, the Elven Queen Wren Elessedil, had been raised by Rovers as a child and taught the survival skills that had kept her alive when she had journeyed to