Blood Heir (Blood Heir Trilogy #1)(82)
The wagon driver found him curled up in the back the next morning and kicked him out. Ramson clambered to his feet alone but for the cloud-filled skies, rolling moors, and endless rain in all directions. He was lost then, without Jonah or his compass. He wanted to crawl into a water-soaked ditch and die right there in the mud, but he was too afraid, and he was too angry.
So he put one foot in front of the other, and every day, he told himself, Just one more day. Just one more day and you can see Jonah again.
Somehow, either by the Deities’ will or by some other miracle, he made it to a town. He stumbled into a bar, holding his pouch of dimes and begging for food and water.
Later that day, a group of older boys waylaid him. They dragged him, screaming and kicking, into a back alley, beat him, took his money and his dagger, and left him to die.
Still, Ramson did not die.
When he finally summoned the courage to hobble out of the alley, night had fallen. His lip was cut and swelling, his nose broken, and his ribs bruised, but he was alive.
This was the world as it really was. Not good and bright and filled with light—but rather, the gray place that Jonah had painted for him, where the strong prevailed over the weak and evil triumphed and flourished.
There was no goodness or kindness in this world. Jonah had told Ramson that—and eventually, the darkness had claimed even him.
Ramson begged the first person he saw, an old man in a horse cart, for shelter. That night, he curled up in the old man’s barn, unable to sleep. He pulled out the balled-up, soaked piece of paper with the name. The ink had bled into the parchment and smudged on his fingers when he tried to smooth out the wrinkles. But he whispered the name to himself over and over again that night. A sense of purpose gathered in his heart, filling his veins with a wrathful, churning energy.
In the early hours of the morning, he stole away with the horse and the cart of the old man who had saved him. He boarded a ship that night and never looked back, even as Bregon turned into a small speck on the horizon and then was swallowed whole by the infinite dark sea.
Weeks later and an ocean away, clutching the piece of paper with that name, he found himself in front of the gilded gates of the most beautiful mansion he had ever seen.
The guard laughed when he demanded to see Lord Alaric Kerlan. “I assure you, he’ll want to see me,” Ramson argued in his broken schoolboy’s Cyrilian.
The other guard roared with laughter. “This one’ll give you a run for your pluck, Nikolay!” he chortled.
Ramson was furious. “You don’t know who I am,” he snarled. “You don’t know how much value I’ll be to Lord Kerlan. And I’ll wager you that if he finds out you turned me away from his gates, you won’t live to see your family the next morning.”
The two guards howled with laughter.
“My, my. I certainly hope I haven’t garnered that kind of a reputation among the neighbors.”
Ramson spun around.
A slight man in a purple bowler hat stood before them. He was middle-aged, but he was the same height and build as Ramson, with a mop of receding brown hair and a twinkle in his eyes. Dressed in an ordinary shirt and breeches, he looked like a friendly next-door neighbor.
The guards stilled, their faces molding into casts. “Lord Kerlan,” they murmured.
Ramson stared. He’d heard his father speak of how the Bregonian criminal had fled to Cyrilia and built an empire on thievery and coercion, one with almost as much power as the Cyrilian throne. Alaric Kerlan was a legend and a monster, a sinister man in the darkness with a smile that sliced.
Yet now he stood at the height of an adolescent boy, a friendly beam on his face. Could this really be the man whom his father spoke of with such bone-deep hatred, that Admiral Roran Farrald sought to bring down?
“What is it that I can do for you, boy?”
Ramson of the Quick Tongue was at a loss for words. He spluttered inelegantly, “I can…I can help you.”
Kerlan looked amused. “What’s your name, boy?”
“R-Ramson. Ramson Farrald.”
Kerlan’s lip curled almost imperceptibly. “A Bregonian boy, then,” he said. “Invite him in, Nikolay. I’d like to hear what brought a young Bregonian so far from his homeland.”
Kerlan had known whose son Ramson was—of course he had known. But Ramson’s arrogance had blinded him. Half an hour later, he found himself in a room, wearing an oversized vest and breeches, with silk slippers replacing his mud-caked boots.
The room was lined with shelves that were neatly stacked with leather-bound books. When Ramson looked closely, he could see gold letters shining off their spines. A large red carpet sprawled across the middle of the floor, tucked beneath an ebony coffee table. The room wasn’t filled to the roof with gold statues, but its opulence pulsed subtly in the lapis lazuli–laced designs on the table and the rare Kemeiran vases dispersed across the shelves.
“Well.” Ramson jumped; he hadn’t even heard the door open. Lord Kerlan drew a gold fountain pen from his breast pocket and gently shut the door behind him. “Have a seat, son. Ramson…was it? Would you like some tea? You look half-frozen.”
Ramson numbly sat himself on the red velvet couch across from the coffee table. Lord Kerlan was still looking at him with that glimmer of amusement in his eyes, and he realized he hadn’t responded to the question. “No,” Ramson said, “thank you.”