The Sea Devil's Eye - Mel Odom [18]
He accepted the cup anyway and said, "Thank you."
"What an awful place this is," Glawinn commented quietly.
"There are people in Immurk's Hold who still maintain an innocence," Jherek stated, thinking of the girl he'd rescued in the tavern.
"That was a brave and good thing you did back there, young warrior."
"It was foolish," Jherek grumbled, then shook his head. "Come morning, the girl will still be on the island."
"You saved her from a bad night."
"Delayed, is more correct, I think." Jherek turned the cup in his hands, absorbing the heat. The soup smelled delicious, full of spices.
"You've got a headful of dark thoughts," the paladin said.
"I look out there, and I wonder how different I am from those men," Jherek said. "Did I ever tell you how I came to Velen from my father's ship?"
IV
5 Flamerule, the Year of the Gauntlet
"I was twelve," Jherek said. "My father spotted a merchant ship, heavily laden so she was sitting low in the water and dragging down the wind. That night he announced to the ship's crew that we would claim it as a prize the next morning."
Glawinn listened in silence.
"My father is a hard man," Jherek said. "You know the stories they tell along the Sword Coast of Bloody Falkane, and you know that nearly all of them are true. He's unforgiving and merciless, as able to cut down an unarmed man as he is to fight to the death. There is no right or wrong in his world, only what he is strong enough to take."
The rattling of the rigging on the lanyards sounded hollow, echoing the way Jherek felt. Glawinn waited silently.
As he spoke, Jherek felt the heat of unshed tears burning his eyes. Still, even though his voice was so tight it pained him to speak, he had to.
"I loved my father."
"As a child should," Glawinn said.
"I remember how he laughed. It was a huge, boisterous sound. Even though I didn't understand much of what made him laugh, I laughed with him. As I grew older, I stopped laughing and learned to fear him. Then, one day, he saw that in me. My father told me that I had to learn to be hard, that the world was cold and would eat the weak. I believed him, and I believed I was weak."
"That's not true."
Jherek didn't bother to argue. "He had me taken from the small room off his cabin where he'd kept me all that time and put in with the men. They weren't any more gentle than he'd been, though they were careful not to leave any marks that he could see."
In the distance, another longboat drew up to a cog and lanterns moved along its length as the passengers prepared to board.
"For the next eight years, I lived in the shadows of my father's rage. There was never a day I felt peace between us, nor anything even close to love."
"To be the son Bloody Falkane wanted," the paladin said, "you'd have to have been born heartless and with ice water in your veins. Where was your mother?" "I never knew her."
"Your father never spoke of her?"
"Not once," the young sailor replied. "Nor did the ship's crew."
He stared up at the dark sky and refused to let the tears come. How much of it came from what he remembered, and how much because he knew Frennick was down in the hold, he couldn't say.
"The night I chose to leave," Jherek continued, "my father visited me in the hold. He brought a cutlass and placed it in my hand and told me I would take a place in the boarding party in the morning."
"At twelve?"
"Aye. He told me I'd kill or be killed, and in the doing of that, I'd be dead or I'd take my first steps toward becoming his son."
"Lathander's mercy," the paladin whispered.
"I stayed up most of the night," Jherek continued. "I knew I couldn't be part of that boarding party."
"Because you knew it was the wrong thing to do."
His throat hurting too much to speak right away, Jherek shook his head. "No. I only knew I was afraid," he said hoarsely.