Reign of Shadows - Deborah Chester [43]
Caelan blinked and struggled to focus. He felt as though he were spinning on a string, suspended within his father’s voice. And he was shrinking with every word Beva uttered, losing all that he knew. Losing all that he remembered.
“No,” he said in a whimper, trying to draw back. “I don’t—”
“Trust me,” Beva said. He held Caelan’s face between both hands. His eyes pinned Caelan’s, digging deep. “Follow me into the severance, and I will make you worthy—”
“No!”
Caelan jerked back, breaking his father’s hold. Gasping and shuddering, he dodged when Beva reached for him again and lurched across the ward on unsteady legs, staggering from bed to bed in an effort to reach the door.
Beva came after him. “Stop! You are not strong enough to—”
Caelan turned to him. “No!” he cried. “You are taking my strength. Get away from me.”
Beva stopped, his face white. They glared at each other.
Caelan pulled his sore hand into a fist and began smacking it into his left palm, striking again and again, using the pain to break the awful webs of coldness his father had spun around him.
“I held the warding key,” he whispered, struggling to regain his memory. “The wind spirit had me. Another spirit had Farns. I took the key from my pocket, and it came alive.”
He could feel a flash of heat inside him. His hand began to ache in earnest, throbbing. “I used it to drive the spirits away,” Caelan said.
Long shudders ran through him, and suddenly his mind felt sharp and clear. The hollowness inside him vanished, and he was whole again.
Gasping and blinking, drenched with sweat, he slowly lifted his gaze to his father’s. Horrified certainty spread through him. “You tried to purify me,” he whispered. “When I was hurt and couldn’t defend myself, you tried to sever me and make me into a—a—” He choked, unable to say it.
Beva stepped back and drew himself up, very erect and austere in his white robes. His eyes might as well have been chips of stone. “I was wrong to try this alone,” he said with plain disappointment. “You are stronger than I suspected.”
Caelan’s disappointment was crushing. Beva hadn’t even bothered to deny it. “Why do you hate me so much?” he asked.
“Hate you?” Beva said with a blink. “I do not hate.”
“You want to destroy me.”
“If you are not turned from the path you walk, you will become something reprehensible. I am trying to save you, boy. Let me.”
Caelan’s eyes widened. He thought of how he had handled the warding key, and remembered he had somehow brought it back to life. Despite its awesome power, he had used it, directed it.
He started to shake again. “People die when they hold warding keys. What am I?”
Beva looked at him coldly, offering no comfort or sympathy. “It is said that in the west there are men who walk both worlds, using severance or sevaisin as they will without regard for the patterns of harmony they destroy. It is also said they are not truly men, that demon blood must run in their veins for them to have such unholy powers. They are welcomed in the west, put to use in the evil worked by the emperor and his court of blasphemers. Many join the order of Vindicants and perfect their mastery of the shadow arts.”
Caelan listened to this with growing dismay. He did not want to believe what his father was saying. “But I’m not like that.”
“Perhaps you are. Or will become so.” Beva’s harsh tone was like a slap.
Caelan frowned, wanting to deny it, wanting his father to deny it. “But I am your son. I have your blood. I’m no demon! Just because I won’t obey you—”
“Rebellion is one gateway to the dark path,” Beva quoted without mercy. He gestured at Farns’s unconscious form. “You have endangered my watchman, a servant of long devotion. He will probably die of the madness because of you. What were you leading him to, Caelan?”
“Nothing,” Caelan said, appalled by this newest accusation. “I was only trying to collect my bow from the—”
“Weapons are the handiwork of destruction,” Beva said. “I have had all of them broken—”
“Yes, I saw,” Caelan broke in angrily.