“Um… yes, and no. The vreki did kill the majority of the ragions. They do it by grabbing them, flying a hundred metres in the air and dropping them. So yes, the vreki saved the palace that day. But Ashd in particular… I meant it when I said it takes years to form a strong mental bond with a vreki. And very commonly, if one of the partners dies, the other doesn’t survive. It’s too jarring to have a part of your own mind just switch off like that. I didn’t want that to happen to Ashd. Not again. So I…” He gave a wry chuckle. “I suppose I just decided I was going to live, through bloody minded determination.” He sighed, then shook his head. “But I think I’ve well and truly wandered from the point I was trying to make. My point was, Ratch and Gravin weren’t my own children. But I couldn’t have loved them more if they were. So I understand how you feel about Paul. You want to protect him, and the idea of losing him rips at something deep inside you.”
The description fit perfectly with the raw and empty feeling in her chest. “He’s my whole world,” Lynette said, feeling wrung out from Koradan’s story. “After Kai died, Paul was… Well, he was only five years old at the time. And one of the nice things about being married to a warrior was that the whole army – the whole city – looks after the family if anything happens to the husband. I had people cooking food for me, doing my laundry, cleaning my house. I couldn’t have asked for anything more. But the other warriors… Every time they looked at Paul, they didn’t see a child who’d lost his father. They just saw a new warrior in training. Someone who would grow up to follow in his father’s footsteps. And I realised that if I allowed them to drag him down that path, Paul would end up throwing his life away for an ideal, just the same as Kai had done.
“I had to get him away from that. So a year after Kai died, I sold our house in Minia, bought this cottage, and moved us both here. I wanted to give Paul a chance to just be a child, instead of everyone constantly trying to put a sword in his hand. And Varismont didn’t have a nurse at the time, so I had a steady stream of work. I provide services to four or five nearby villages as well. And when you add in growing vegetables and doing my share of tending the goats, it keeps me busy.” Lynette sighed, trying to put her troublesome thoughts into words. “Everything I’ve done for the past fifteen years has been about Paul. I’ve tried to give him the best life I possibly could, but more and more lately, he’s been questioning my decisions and refusing to see reason and resenting me for every word I say. I’m at my wit’s end. I really am.”
Koradan gave her a sympathetic look that was half smile, half wince. “Teenagers are troublesome, no matter what species they are. Or so I’m told.” He sighed. “The thing about children – no matter what gender they are – is that as parents, we are destined to lose them. Children grow up. They move on. They go out into the world and chase after their own dreams. They fall in love and get married and have children of their own. And it always happens so much sooner than we expect it to.
“So the hard truth is that one way or another, you’re going to lose Paul. The thing is, you have a choice abouthowyou lose him. In one option, you let him go. And he goes and finds a role that he enjoys doing – be it a miner, or a blacksmith, or a farmer, or whatever. And he finds a woman – or a man. I’m making a few assumptions here – and makes a life for himself. But then, in an ideal world, he comes back again and tells you about it, and introduces you to his family, and shares his life with you, because he loves you and remembers the good times and wants you to be a part of his future.
“Or the other option is that you refuse to let go of him. But the thing you have to realise is that even if you refuse, he will leave anyway. But this time, he won’t come back. He won’t share his new life with you and invite you to be a part of it, because every time he thinks of you, he’ll just remember the times you tried to hold him back. And then you’ll lose him twice over. Both options are painful, but one more than the other.”
Lynette shook her head. “It’s not nearly as simple as you make it out to be. Paul is my whole world. I gave up a privileged life in Minia for him. I gave up my nursing job. I’ve worked myself to the bone to give him a decent life. How do I just wake up one morning and stop doing that?”
Koradan frowned, but also nodded. “So if you lose him, you feel like you’re losing your entire reason for existing?”
Lynette felt tears in her eyes, but it was a relief to see that Koradan understood her perspective. “Yes. Exactly.”
“I know how that feels. My entire life has been dedicated to the Stone King, in one way or another. And less than a week ago, he called me to his throne and told me that my service was no longer required. The world stopped turning for me when I heard those words.”
Once again, Koradan’s story was creating more questions than it answered, but Lynette held her tongue and listened.
“So we were sent away, and we crossed into the human world, and I assigned myself a new purpose; to find a safe place for my men to live. It’s a tall order, with whole armies and cities against us. But there wasn’t much else for me to do.
“When we arrived here, I had a choice. I could have chosen to fight you, your village, to demand your assistance, and then I could have been offended when you rejected our presence and had my men fight you, and so it would have been extremely unlikely that we would ever find a place to call home, if we went about scaring and threatening humans. And all too easy to blame the humans for our situation. And as crazy as that sounds, it would have prolonged my purpose. I could spend the rest of my life trying to find a peaceful place for my men and their vreki to live, and failing, and be perfectly satisfied with the result.” A wry smile lit his face, a keen understanding of the foibles of that decision.
“But I chose a different option. I chose peace. I chose to negotiate and cooperate with this village, in the hope that even if we aren’t able to settle here long term, we might begin building peaceful relations with humans. With the goal that one day, we will find a place to settle, where we can live in harmony with this world.
“But if we actually achieve that, it means that my self-assigned purpose is complete. And then what? What will I do with the next forty years of my life, besides exercise my vreki and worry about where to find another bottle of whisky at the end of the day?
“I choose to find out. I am choosing, hour by hour, day by day, to walk into the unknown and see where it leads. You have the option to do the same.”
The words made sense. But at the same time, the terror of not having Paul to dictate the hours of her life was paralysing. “What if he gets hurt? What if he gets killed? What if I never see him again?”
“How do you think your own parents felt when you married a warrior, and later, when you moved to a tiny village in the middle of nowhere?”
Lynette thought back… and suddenly froze in horror. Her mother had been overwrought when she’d announced she was marrying Kai. Her father had said nothing, but the pallor of his face had said it all. And when she’d told them she was leaving Minia, the disappointment on their faces had been insulting, that they’d had so little faith in her own judgement.
“I was older than Paul is,” she told Koradan, the hairs all up and down her neck rising. Koradan was wrong. His ideals were noble, but they failed to take into account the particular challenges of raising a child alone. “I had far more experience, and I had a child of my own, and…”
“Do you visit your parents anymore?” Koradan asked. “Or write letters to them?”
Lynette cleared her throat. “Perhaps we should talk about the men still trapped down the bottom of the mine. We’ve explored the shaft, and it’s clear for the first three metres, but blocked with rubble after that. We can clear a portion of it, but there’s a risk the shaft will collapse if we just remove the rocks without adding extra supports. Have you and your men had any ideas about how we might move forward with that one?”
Koradan regarded her quietly for a long moment, then he made a noncommittal sound. “We’ve come up with an idea. Well, the vreki came up with an idea, actually. I don’t know if it’s going to work, but it’s certainly worth a try…”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“What the hell is that?”
Early the next morning, Koradan approached the field where his men were waiting, seeing Sigmore proffering a small, red object for Rodgard to take.
“It’s a tomato. Taste it.”
Rodgard took it, but didn’t eat it, regarding the tomato held between his claws for a long moment. “This isn’t a trick, is it? ‘Taste this, it’s really good’, and it ends up tasting like a merian shat is a cup of sas wine?”
“No, it’s amazing,” Sigmore insisted, turning back to finish adjusting Bel’s saddle. The vreki were lined up and waiting, and Koradan automatically gave Ashd a mental nudge, receiving a surge of satisfaction in return. Ashd had had a good night, then.
“There was a whole bowl of tomatoes at dinner last night,” Sigmore was saying. “And lettuce, which tastes just like ris greens, and carrots, which are… well, carrots.”
