quest for Aron for days at a time, then weeks, then cycles.
Wolf Brailing had taken the name of Canus, of the ancient wolves of Brailing, as he prowled the countryside and took down renegade Guard. He restored food and safety to those who sought his aid, then worked with ever larger groups of men in Dyn Brailing and Dyn Cobb, training them to defend farm and family from the very soldiers who had sworn to protect them.
Yes, his father had made mistakes, kills he shouldn’t have made, and thefts that weren’t strictly necessary for his quest—but Aron couldn’t see him as a criminal. He couldn’t agree with the Judgment that had put his father’s stone in Aron’s hands.
“You have to kill me,” Wolf Brailing whispered in Aron’s ear, squeezing his damaged wrists into Aron’s back. “You can’t let me walk away, or you’ll be an oathbreaker like me.”
Aron clung to his father and cried, hearing the truth, knowing it with his graal and rejecting it nonetheless.
“Help me hold my sword and I’ll do it myself,” his father said as he gently separated himself from Aron. Tears streamed across his scarred cheeks. “Just seeing you again, that’s been enough. Knowing what a powerful warrior you’ve become, and how much good you’ll do Eyrie in its time of greatest need. Hand me my blade, son, and let’s have done with this.”
Aron couldn’t stop his own tears, and he couldn’t kill his father, no matter what that meant for his father’s future, or his own. There had been too much killing and death already. Aron wanted no more of it, by his own hand or anyone else’s.
“I won’t,” he said, knowing he’d have to think quickly, or his father would find some way to spare Aron from breaking his vows to Stone.
With all the graal strength he had left to him, Aron struck at his father fast and hard, using a single word, limiting his command only by a mental image of the Adamantine stretching far and wide, mile after mile of dense woods, in which only an old hunter like Wolf Brailing could survive.
Flee, he commanded, watching as his sapphire graal struck his father like a swinging anvil, driving him backward out of the Shrine of the Mother, then sending him toward the gates of Triune at a dead run.
Aron dropped to the ground, drawing his knees to his chest.
He wanted to rip his gray robes off his shaking body and run after his father, but Wolf Brailing had a better chance of reaching the Adamantine alone. Aron doubted his father would take his own life once he left Dyn Brailing, for his death would do nothing to save Aron now.
Though Aron could keep the secret of his crime for a short time, he knew his own truth-seeking graal would give him no peace until he confessed to Stormbreaker, who would be the new Lord Provost of Stone as soon as the dead were counted and laid to rest.
“Oathbreaker,” Aron said aloud, knowing he would be given no quarter, no mercy for sparing his Judged, even if that Judged was his own flesh and blood. The order and fairness of Stone wouldn’t allow it.
Aron himself wouldn’t allow it.
Oathbreaker.
That was his identity now, the full sum of it.
He forced himself to rise and walk, though he wished he could do anything else. Only the desire to see to the welfare of his friends and family of the heart kept him moving forward, back to the castle’s shattered gates.
Aron left Stone’s stronghold, his own ruined home, passing by groups of apprentices and the sheltered returning from the Ruined Keep and running out onto the battlefield to take stock of what had happened in Eyrie. He even brushed past Zed and Raaf, who stood with Windblown, grieving over Lord Baldric’s body. Aron didn’t speak to them, for he didn’t want to taint them with his own crime, should they sense what he had done.
He had eyes only for the small group across the moat, clustered near the center of the battlefield, guarded by soldiers and Sabor and Stregans alike.
Aron knew he would do what he could for Dari and Kate and Nic, if somehow Nic had survived. He would thank Lord Ross and Lord Cobb and Platt, and Snakekiller, if she, too, had lived through the chaos.
Seeing them all once more was more than he deserved, but he would take this small liberty before he gave himself over to Stormbreaker’s sword, and hoped for a