Bek nodded. “We’ll be careful,” he reassured him. “We’ll look after each other.”
“I know you will. I feel better with both of you going rather than only one. Liria doesn’t think you should go at all, either of you, but that’s because she’s a mother, and that’s how mothers think.”
“Do you think Quentin’s sword really does have magic? Do you think it can do what Walker says?”
Coran sighed. “I don’t know. Our family history says so. Walker seems certain of it.”
Bek sat down across from him on the edge of his bed. “I’m not sure we’re doing the right thing by going, and I realize we don’t know everything yet, maybe not even enough to appreciate the risk we’re taking. But I promise we won’t do anything foolish.”
Coran nodded. “Be careful of those kinds of promises, Bek. Sometimes they’re hard to keep.” He paused. “There’s one thing more I have to say. It has occurred to me before, but I’ve kept it to myself. I thought about it again yesterday, when Walker reappeared on my doorstep. Here it is. I have only the Druid’s word that Holm Rowe really was your father and that he sent you here to live with me. I tried to check on this later, but no one could tell me where or when Holm had died. No one could tell me anything about him.”
Bek stared at him in surprise. “Someone else might be my real father?”
Coran Leah fixed him with his steady gaze. “You are like one of my own sons, Bek. I love you as much as I love them. I have done the very best I could to raise you in the right way. Both Liria and I have. Now that you are about to leave, I want no secrets between us.”
He stood up. “I’ll let you get back to your packing.”
He started for the door, then changed his mind and came back across the room. He put his strong arms around Bek and hugged him tightly. “Be careful, son,” he whispered.
Then he was gone again, leaving Bek to conclude that there was as much uncertainty about his past as there was about his future.
ELEVEN
It was raining again by the time Hunter Predd and Walker arrived aboard Obsidian at the seaport of March Brume, some distance north of Bracken Clell on the coast of the Blue Divide. They had flown into the rain just before sunset after traveling west all day from the Highlands of Leah, and it felt as if the dark and damp had descended as one. March Brume occupied a stretch of rocky beach along a cove warded by huge cliffs to the north and a broad salt marsh to the south. A stand of deep woods backed away from the village into a shallow valley behind, and it was just to the south of that valley, on a narrow plateau, that the Roc deposited her passengers so that they might take refuge for the night in an old trapper’s shack.
March Brume was a predominately Southland community, although a smattering of Elves and Dwarves had settled there, as well. For centuries, the seaport had been famous for the construction of her sailing ships, everything from oneman skiffs to singlemasted sloops to threemasted frigates. Craftsmen from all over the Four Lands came to the little village to ply their trades and offer their services. There was never a shortage of need for designers or builders, and there was always a good living to be made. Virtually everyone who lived in the seaport was engaged in the same occupation.
Then, twenty-four years ago, a man named Ezael Sterret, a Rover of notorious reputation, a sometime pirate and brigand with a streak of inventive genius, had designed and built the first airship. It had been unwieldy, ungainly, and unreliable, but it had flown. Other efforts by other builders had followed, each increasingly more successful, and within two decades, travel had been revolutionized and the nature of shipbuilding in March Brume had been changed for. ever. Sailing ships were still built in the shipyards of the old seaport, but not in the same numbers as before. The majority of ships constructed now were for air travel, and the customers whose pockets were deepest and whose needs were greatest came from the Federation and Freeborn army commands.