Kared's Children - Chapter 16

He understood, also, that it might take weeks before they found out what had happened to their friends. A darker thought was they never might find out. He forced that thought away; he ordered himself to hope. In a day or two, he told himself, or at least before the Caravan reached Creg, Dox and Gerald and the others would rejoin them. And though their reunion might be brief, still, in that time they’d know that they’d survived their first obstacle. And in that knowledge perhaps they’d find solace and courage for the tasks ahead.

It was a nice dream, a fantasy. He feared it was.

Despite himself, as they walked, he found his gaze drifting to the east.

. . .

As was his way, Karec walked silently. He didn’t mind Piskin’s chatter or Shaerden’s scolding; each only were attempts to deal with the stresses they all were feeling-but his thoughts weren’t on those stresses. Instead, he was thinking of the mage and all that Benjamin’s words had stirred within him. He hadn’t thought so much of his father, perhaps ever. But the hero which Benjamin had lauded had been to him merely a man, his father, and the deeds which had seemed so important to the Alaran had been to Karec merely a normal part of the world into which he’d been born.

In such a way did the abstract coincide with the commonplace: in the same manner in which the vein of gold coexisted with gypsum or dull, plain rock. For all his praiseworthy efforts, for the legends which no doubt he had earned, Karec Stonen the elder, the savior of peoples, hadn’t been much of a father. Oh, he had let his two sons know that he loved them. He had shown them in many ways-not the least of which was via the strain on his face which would arise when he would allow himself to be domesticated, even if only for a short while, and which he thoughtfully, oh so thoughtfully, would allow his eldest son to see-as if his having brought his sons into the world were not reason itself to demand the most heroic, and the most common, of sacrifices.

Their mother Karec barely remembered. She had died giving birth to Morgan-though Morgan never knew. Their father never had said, but Karec had come to understand, that having to raise them by himself had been just one more sacrifice, one more heroic deed for which their father had expected praise that never had come. What he did know about his father was that as soon as his eldest son was of age, Karec the hero, Karec the adventurer, had left his children to fend for themselves. He had wandered off on yet another adventure, and this time he’d never returned.

Karec now knew of his bitterness; he’d become aware of it over time and kept it as an old pain that long ago he had rationalized and compartmentalized as old heartbreak. He could understand, even, why his father had had to leave. It was in his blood. He’d had a vision that extended beyond any four walls by which he’d ever found himself confined. And the eldest son couldn’t justify being selfish. The results of his father’s efforts, many had felt. The loss of their father was just a cost that no one else ever would have been able to pay; it was his and Morgan’s cost, alone.

At times, their sacrifice, no matter how much they hadn’t intended it, still could feel as though they had. And the recognition for it, that they received any time some new person praised their father, almost could bring a kind of gratitude, as when Benjamin, in praising the hero, had thanked the son for what the father had done. As the hero’s son grew older, too, it had become easier for Karec to understand what his father had done and why. He had measured the cost and decided the value high enough that his sons, too, should pay. In many ways, having already lost his life to the need his father had seen, Karec supposed he owed whatever pleasure he’d found in helping others, as a politician, also to his father. For without that sense he’d had since the day he’d realized his father wasn’t coming back, that his life and responsibilities had been written out for him before he’d been born, he might never have thought to give himself entirely to the greater good as he had.