Читать «THE SEA DEVIL S EYE (зксм-3)» онлайн - страница 26

"As a child should," Glawinn said.

"I remember how he laughed. It was a huge, boisterous sound. Even though I didn't understand much of what made him laugh, I laughed with him. As I grew older, I stopped laughing and learned to fear him. Then, one day, he saw that in me. My father told me that I had to learn to be hard, that the world was cold and would eat the weak. I believed him, and I believed I was weak."

"That's not true."

Jherek didn't bother to argue. "He had me taken from the small room off his cabin where he'd kept me all that time and put in with the men. They weren't any more gentle than he'd been, though they were careful not to leave any marks that he could see."

In the distance, another longboat drew up to a cog and lanterns moved along its length as the passengers prepared to board.

"For the next eight years, I lived in the shadows of my father's rage. There was never a day I felt peace between us, nor anything even close to love."

"To be the son Bloody Falkane wanted," the paladin said, "you'd have to have been born heartless and with ice water in your veins. Where was your mother?" "I never knew her."

"Your father never spoke of her?"

"Not once," the young sailor replied. "Nor did the ship's crew."

He stared up at the dark sky and refused to let the tears come. How much of it came from what he remembered, and how much because he knew Frennick was down in the hold, he couldn't say.

"The night I chose to leave," Jherek continued, "my father visited me in the hold. He brought a cutlass and placed it in my hand and told me I would take a place in the boarding party in the morning."

"At twelve?"

"Aye. He told me I'd kill or be killed, and in the doing of that, I'd be dead or I'd take my first steps toward becoming his son."

"Lathander's mercy," the paladin whispered.

"I stayed up most of the night," Jherek continued. "I knew I couldn't be part of that boarding party."

"Because you knew it was the wrong thing to do."

His throat hurting too much to speak right away, Jherek shook his head. "No. I only knew I was afraid," he said hoarsely. "I was afraid I would be killed, but mostly I was afraid of what my father would do to me if I froze and could not move, could not make it onto that other ship. I was certain he would kill me himself. So I walked out onto the deck when no one was looking, threw the cutlass into the sea, and jumped in after it. Bunyip sailed on, leaving me in the ocean. I wanted to die, but I started to swim, not even knowing where I was heading. I don't know how long I swam, but I know it was well into the next day before I washed up on Velen's shores."

They were silent for a time and Jherek struggled to ease his thoughts back into the dark places of his mind where he kept them.

"Why are you telling me this?" Glawinn asked.

"Because you seem to see something good in me," Jherek said, "and I wanted you to know it was false. I ran from my father's ship that night."

"You didn't want to kill innocent people," Glawinn objected.

Anger stirred in the coldness that filled Jherek. "Am I any better now? I took a man prisoner tonight only so he could be tortured."