The Heir (Fall of the Swords Book 3) Read Online Free Page A

beneath a precipitous, lupine brow.
    “It's becoming easier, Father,” Seeking Sword said. “I'm getting very good with a sword, good enough I think to join the Elk Raiders.”
    “No! A thousand times, no! How many times do I have to tell you?!” Spittle slathered a prognathous jaw, the mouth nearly toothless, two rotted stubs remaining.
    Looking toward Slithering Snake, Seeking Sword motioned with his head.
    The sectathon gathered his accoutrements and left without a word.
    Sometimes Seeking Sword argued with his father, sometimes not. Always his responses were mild. The boy smiled apprehensively. “If you won't allow me to discharge my debt to them, then you had better do so yourself, Father.” He had tried many tactics, but never this one.
    Flush crept up the neck, a corded, wrinkled pillar buttressing sagging jowls that hung in scaly folds below cheekbones collapsed into the face. “You impudent little runt, I ought to beat you black and blue for that!” Narrow nostril dripped nasal mucus, sleeved on crusted cloth.
    “You ought to be grateful they taught me how to survive as a bandit!” Seeking Sword replied. “The time has come for me to decide for myself what to do, Father,” he said sadly, sighing. “I'll come visit you when I've found another place to live.”
    “What!” Icy Wind screamed, his voice acid to eardrums. “You'll listen to me, oh yes, by the Infinite, or I'll thrash you so soundly you won't walk for a week…”
    Seeking Sword turned to go. His senses tuned, he spun at the whistle of staff, blocking it with the edge of his blade.
    The explosion blew him backward, stunning him.
    Blinking the flash from his eyes, his ears ringing, Seeking Sword extricated himself from bushes, wiped the blacking and singed hair off his arm, and looked toward his father.
    Laying at the opposite edge of the clearing, Icy Wind rolled his head from side to side with a groan, a hand tenaciously clinging to staff.
    Good, he doesn't look harmed, Seeking Sword thought. Caring only to get away from his father, he sheathed the weapon and started north. Jogging slowly at first, he soon settled into a distance-eating pace.
    Three or four times, Seeking Sword slowed to a walk because he couldn't see the path very clearly. His grief filled his eyes and spilled down his face. When his eyes burned so badly he had to close them, he doggedly put one foot in front of the other. More than once he fell. Every time he got back up and continued northward.
    While his relationship with his father had never been ideal, he did love him and was full of sorrow that he needed to leave. I've lost more than my father, he thought. I've lost my youth; I'm not a boy anymore. He knew that to shed his youth he needed to shed his tears. Even then, the past remained, and the tears only mitigated its effects on his present.
    Dark fell. Still he continued, feeling that he neared a destination. In his distress, he recognized nothing familiar. As the moon cleared the trees, he stopped. Shedding his weapons, he sat at the base of a huge oak tree, where dense wood encroached upon meadow.
    The quiet was eerie. No bird sang, no wind blew, no cricket chirped. The feeling of the place was annihilation. That was how Seeking Sword recognized it. Hundreds of acres of broken granite boulder marked the plain where the castle of the Emperor Lofty Lion had once stood. Once, ten years before, Seeking Sword had come here.
    The memory was vivid. At the time, he thought that his father had lost the little sanity left to him. Icy Wind awoke one morning. Without the help of staff, he started northward, ordering the five-year old to accompany him. After two days of hard traveling they had reached this place of death.
    Approaching this oak, Icy Wind smote it with the staff between its two largest branches, splitting the massive trunk. Out of the tree had fallen a sword. The trunk had then closed without a wound. As the boy took the sword from him, Icy Wind collapsed and