Nobody's Son by Sean Stewart Read Free Book Online

first rays glinted on what might have been metal, or bone. The walls of the Red Keep were stone, sagging and moss-eaten. The Tower roof had fallen in. A shadow passed off the Forest like a ghost at cock-crow, blown to tatters by the wind.
    Quickly Mark jammed the black dagger back in his sheath.
    You did it.
    You did it! Did what all the high born bloody heroes failed to do, the princes, the kingdom’s greatest sons for a thousand years. Four-fingered Fhilip and Devid that Dared, lightfingered Silverhand and Stargad the Shrewd: you kicked their arses all ! Delight filled Mark again, hot as rage, sharp as steel. You showed the bastards !
    He would be a great man and ride a great horse and live in a manor with five hundred men. He would be a Duke and live behind stone walls high enough to keep out an army, thick enough to baffle any wind. He and his would be protected , where no war could come. No more would loneliness creep in to take his family away.
    He started down a thin path where once white stones had lain. Far underfoot now. He imagined a wave of time sweeping across the Ghostwood, washing away old dust and old dreams, leaving the Forest glistening and ready for life, eager for the sunrise.
    Oops.
    Shite . No pack. He’d left it behind when he fled from Stargad.
    He faltered. So much for his food, his tent, his spare pair of socks. They were all gone now, lost a thousand years ago.
    Husk’s little hut was long empty, its branches blown apart. A few cherry stones still remained beneath an ancient oak, and a pile of tiny bones at the bottom of a black metal pot that might once have been a helmet.
    Husk… Thoughtfully Mark took out his two medallions, one cedar and one silver. Two serpents hung about his throat, swallowing their own tails. Who was that old moon-mad woman? A woman, maybe, who had died a thousand times one night: and lived once, wreathed in squirrels.
    Like a fierce blaze that falls to embers, Mark’s exultation dimmed; he was filled instead with wonder. He was happy, yes, happier than he had ever been, but it was the happiness of a child. He looked back at the shattered Keep with new eyes.
    He, and the boy he had been, had fled together from the Red Keep’s ruin. That boy sat inside him, waking from a long sleep, remembering what it was to see marvels in a spider web, to hoard up secrets and run from witches.
    Steady on . Mark settled himself on the grass and waited for sunrise. He was too full of feeling to go. Not now, not yet.
    Besides, the incomparable Sweetness lay just across a grassy ditch. He’d never have a better chance to get a sword worthy of a Hero; and he wouldn’t even have to make up its name!
    Mark remembered the way the sword had sung to a hollow place in his heart. He shuddered, recalling Stargad’s crushed face.
    “Well, he won’t miss it,” he growled.

Chapter Two
Before the King
    What a bloody joke , Mark thought a fortnight later as a pair of beefy men in livery started forward to throw him out of Swangard Palace. What ever happened to happily-ever-after ?
    It had taken him two weeks to trudge back from the Ghostwood: two long, cold, hungry weeks without his pack and blankets. Each night he had eaten just a morsel of daydream to fill his belly, and warmed his hands over the thought of his triumphant reception before the Crown.
    But after getting to Swangard it had taken him all day just to get inside the Palace and up to the Spring Room where the King was holding court. By now it was beginning to occur to Mark, as the guards drew their broadswords, that things weren’t going to get any easier for a dirty country boy in this rich man’s world.
    ‘Art tha not cloddish, I’ sooth?’… I guess this means no parade.
    Bastards.
    Mark was hungry. Weary. Filthy. Enraged. And really tired of beefy men in livery. “Stand back, damn your eyes’” he swore. Then he drew Sweetness.
    For one eternal instant, time stood stiller in Swangard Palace than it ever had at the Red