Righteous Anger (Okal Rel Saga #2)

Part 4.1: Return to Fountain Court

188 Post Treaty

It was six years before Horth returned to Black Hearth. He exchanged messages with his parents via Branst, and in that way heard news of the birth of his new brother, Eler, and keep abreast of Mother's subsequent pregnancies.

Bryllit had a baby she named Dorn. When Dorn was eight months old she took him to a genotyping ceremony on Tark. Horth was not invited to attend, but he was thoroughly pleased when she informed him that he was the sire. He got Branst to help him write an announcement, for their parents, declaring that he had a Freedom Price.

Zrenyl had survived the EagleNest debacle. When Dorn was one, Zrenyl married April, on SanHome. The kinf'stan urged Hangst to disown his eldest son, severing him from the right of challenge for the title of Liege Nersal. Hangst refused.

Father was challenged twice, and Bryllit put down another challenger. Branst claimed that most kinf'stan were fed up with Nesak encroachments on Black Hearth. But Bryllit told Horth that a growing minority were getting used to trade with Nesaks.

Horth was not surprised to learn his father won his duels with the kinf'stan. He expected Hangst to win duels.

"Mother doesn't watch any more," Branst told his exiled brother. "She stays up in the nursery with Zer Sarn and little Eler. The runt says he sees it through with her to add his prayers to the Watching Dead, but the truth is Eler's squeamish. And spoiled rotten!" Branst added with a grunt. "Can you imagine you or me or Zrenyl getting away with avoiding a title duel?"

Eventually, the uproar over Zrenyl's marriage ended.

Horth set his heart on becoming a battlewheel captain, like Sinka. To do that, he first had to fly as a relsha and then as an avsha, a hand leader.

A relsha's work in Killing Reach was dangerous. Persistent threats to navigation lingered, purposefully caused by Reetions in their efforts, two hundred years ago, to stop a Sevolite invasion. They had polluted space lanes with clouds of dust, set loose deadly viruses, destroyed habitat, and generally done every okal'a'ni thing imaginable, with no care for future generations. Struggling to set right some small piece of the fallout, Horth was inclined to believe that only soulless beings who cared nothing about rebirth could have been so irresponsible.

After three years, Horth achieved the rank of avsha. He met people he had never imagined existed, and he soul touched criminals he wished he had never experienced, but in the cockpit he was always able to wield his anger like a sword.

He saw enough during the years in Killing Reach to harden his early belief in Sword Law to a diamond-hard conviction. Killing Reach offered more opportunities for studies of that nature than anywhere else in Sevildom. Horth worked with engineering crews to clean up shattered stations that were strewn about with flotsam that included bodies. He evacuated starving stationers, cut off from the flow of trade by their leader's treacherous reputation, who got so desperate that they ate their own children. And he witnessed the hideous outcome of struggles that stupidly destroyed the very habitat they fought over.

War in space destroyed the very means of man's survival in a wasteland cold enough to numb the greatest greed, and huge enough to force perspective on the mightiest of egos.

Pilots flew two days on and five off, leaving Horth time for station-side pursuits. He spent most of that time working as a voluntary apprentice with an engineering detail or working on ships in dock. He felt he ought to know as much as possible about battlewheels if he was going to command one.

But though he made a place for himself in Killing Reach, his heart remained on Fountain Court, and he looked forward to Branst's visits.

Horth was in the officers' gym giving his son a fencing lesson. Little Dorn brought up his shortened sword belatedly. Horth poked him in the chest and the child staggered. Horth took a step back to wait for the four-year-old to overcome his tears. It surprised him that Dorn cried. He had expected any child of his and Bryllit's to be too Vrellish for that.