Oath and the Measure by Michael Williams Read Free Book Online

torches of the peasants looked like low and distant stars, and the three of them seemed to enter the thin, dark ranks of the enemy, never falling, but as though they walked blindly into an impenetrable thicket.”
    Sturm shivered. “It is out of that thicket that the son of Angriff Brightblade has emerged, my friends. I shall find Lord Angriff Brightblade, or what has become of him,though the Jaws of Hiddukel stand in the way, full intending to undo me.”
    “Which they well may do, lad,” Raistlin said quietly. “Which they well may do.”
    Sturm swallowed nervously. “Whether they do or no, ’tis time I should test them. Would that I had your wits in my service, Raistlin Majere. Or Caramon’s strength. The High Clerist’s Tower is a fierce place for a backwoods boy.”
    “You are no weakling, Sturm!” Caramon encouraged loudly, startling the little girl by the bar, who scurried into the shadows, trailing rushes. “You can ride, too, and use a sword far better than I can. It’s just that … just …”
    “I’m no swordsman,” Sturm asserted. “Not really. Not like my father was, nor like they’re accustomed to seeing in the north. Nor half as brave, nor nearly the horseman. Ask my mother. Ask our Solamnic friends, who travel south just to tell me these things.”
    Caramon opened his mouth as if to answer, then leaned back in his chair disgustedly. Words once again had mastered him. Somewhere below them, on the road that wound through the vallenwoods of Solace, the whicker of a horse rose out of the whistling night wind, and the harsh shout of a rider followed it.
    “What we both are trying to say,” Raistlin urged, turning away from his thoughts and regarding Sturm with a bright, unsettling stare, “is that if you hear such things in Solace, you’ll hear worse in the Vingaards. This is too early, Sturm. The North is ravenous, and the Order … well, the Order is as you have told us.”
    “It must be now, Raistlin,” Sturm argued, lifting the cup to his lips, tasting the tepid, smoky brew. “It must be now because, above the Code and Measure and my mother’s last stories, I can stand it no longer.”
    “What’s that?” Caramon asked, his mind already elsewhere. But the story continued in his thoughts: the incomparable Angriff Brightblade, master swordsman and hero and noble Knight, who had the nerve to vanish magnificentlyat the siege of Castle Brightblade.
    Who had the nerve to leave behind a son and too many questions.
    “I have to know,” Sturm announced dramatically. “I have to find my father. Yes, yes, he may be dead. But up there, he’s a memory instead of … well, instead of a legend.”
    Raistlin sighed. With a strange, broken smile, he turned back to the fire.
    “Everything my father has done,” Sturm explained, “in the lists, in the Nerakan Wars, in keeping castle and family—”
    “Tramples on your young days,” Raistlin interrupted. He coughed, no doubt a winter cold, and swirled the lukewarm tea in his cup. “This hunt for fathers,” he observed ironically, “is a haunted thing. You have to put a face on the one who is killing you.”
    Caramon nodded slowly, though he did not really understand. His gaze followed that of his brother. The twins sat in silence, staring at the red embers.
    Yes, it is haunted, Sturm thought angrily, looking at the two of them, content in their strangely balanced fellowship. But you will never understand. Neither of you. For no matter what befalls, you have each other to … to …
    To show you who you are.
    And no one is killing me.
    Baffled in the thicket of his own thoughts, Sturm rose from the table. The twins scarcely noticed his departure as he walked into the bracing Abanasinian night. Caramon waved softly over his shoulder, and the last Sturm saw of his friends, they were sitting side by side, framed by firelight and yoked by shadows, each lost in his opposite dreams.

Chapter 4
A Parting Story
———
    Now, with the