The Heretic Land Read Free Page A

her home for centuries.’ She shrugged, smiled at him, then turned and walked across the deck towards where a breakfast of bread and smoked fish was being handed out.
    She believes in Venthia?
Bon wondered. But not only was he unsure, he also didn’t think it mattered. Many of his best friends had been devout, believing in things he found bemusing. While he had kept his own frowned-upon beliefs quiet, some of them had sensed his doubts, but their friendships had mostly remained. Mostly.
    He followed her and they ate breakfast together. Though sentenced by their homeland to a life of banishment upon a dying island, for that short time they were content in each other’s company. The constant rolling sea had settled in Bon’s guts, and he was sure it would take many days of shore time for it to settle. But he was no longer throwing up everything he ate. He was already adapting to life beyond Alderia.
    Bon and Lekifound a spot by the railing where they sat and talked as other prisoners were allowed to stroll around the deck. They exercised their minds while others exercised their limbs and bodies, and when the time came for them to be locked up again, the guards did not seem to notice that they descended into the same hold.
    There they sat, talking quietly in the subdued lighting, their voices a murmur against the constant pounding of waves against the hull, other prisoners’ talk and sometimes shouts, and the footsteps of their guards overhead. Destined to deportation, locked away, Bon thought it was some time since he had felt so free. He told Leki about his beautiful wife falling from a tower to her death, and how her passing had seemed to darken his skies and blur his horizons. He told her about his son, Venden, and the boy’s fascination with Skythe – its history, the old war, and what had become of that once-proud island state afterwards – and how Bon’s own studies of Skythe had become an obsession following Venden’s death.
    ‘He was taken and murdered,’ Bon said.
    ‘The Ald deport, they don’t murder.’
    ‘I didn’t say it was the Ald.’ Bon sighed. He frequently relived his losses – staring into an unknown distance whilst awake, and trying to catch his falling wife and rescue his vanished son as he slept.
    ‘Then who?’ Leki asked.
    ‘Venden was a … genius, I suppose. Our only child. He developed very quickly, could read by the time he was four. My wife wanted to send him south to Lakeside for schooling, but I wanted him home with us, and he went to dayschool in Gakota. I walked him there every morning, and collected him every evening.’ Bon drifted for a while, remembering those walks out from their village of Sefton Breaks along the Ton River,Venden asking questions all the time and stopping to examine plants and insects, always delicate, careful not to hurt them. Then on the way home he would relate what he had learned that day, and it wasn’t long past his sixth birthday that he would start questioning some of the things he had been taught. Bon had been surprised at first, and then calmly approving.
A priest came in today
, Venden said once, skimming stones across the river. Bon had nodded, letting his son find his own time to continue.
He said that there are gods in the water and the air, and in fire, and in rock and the mind. But … what about in my hair? And in river mud? And the clouds in the air, and a bird’s feathers? There can’t be a god in
everything
, can there, Daddy?
    The seven gods of the Fade
, Bon had replied, and fear drove a spike into him, because he was simply repeating all the things he had been taught. It was a painful sensation, answering his own unspoken doubt. Venden had stared at him expecting more, and Bon could identify that moment as when he knew that his son was different.
He’ll find his own way
, he thought.
Whatever I tell him, whatever I say now or later, his mind is his own to make up.
That had made him proud, and a little afraid.
    ‘He was marked