CHAPTER 1097: FALLEN CLAW

For a moment, Owain could barely think as he stared at the bear’s head pommel of the sword his father presented to him. From the hilt and sheath alone, it was clear that more than one master had worked on its construction, and even if the materials were common, the craftsmanship was very good. Most knights would be envious of such a weapon, assuming that the blade within was as well-made as everything that surrounded it.

But it wasn’t the sword that claimed Owain’s attention. It was what the sword represented, the cruelty of his father’s ’way out,’ that truly took Owain’s breath away. Exile. Worse than exile. Exile without the right to keep even his own name. His father expected ’Owain Lothian’ to die here, just as surely as Bors himself would die.

Gawain Prescote would wander off to the wilderness of the northern marches with nothing to his name but a sword, a few soldiers, and a bit of gold to draw on, assuming that any bank would honor his father’s letters of credit once word of his death spread. His father wouldn’t even allow him to claim to be a bastard of the Lothian line, because to do that, Bors would have to acknowledge that he’d been unfaithful to his beloved Isla, and he’d never do that, not even to give his son a new identity.

But then, there was another reason to deny any link between dying father and exiled son. Gawain Prescote had little to do with the Lothian family. The instant that Owain accepted this ’way out’, he cleared the way for Loman to take the throne that should have been his by right of birth as the eldest son.

His father wanted to strip everything from him but his life. To reduce his firstborn child to the bastard son of a knight who no one would remember even fifty years from now, with no lands, no wealth of his own... just the most minor of titles and a sword to try to win back even a piece of the status that his father intended to strip from him.

"May I?" Owain asked, his voice thick with emotion as he reached for the hilt of the sword in his father’s hands. It was impossible to say for sure which emotions made his voice so tight and heavy... whether it was deep uncertainty about the future, gratitude for his father’s efforts, stubborn refusal to accept the necessity of fleeing, or choked back tears at his father’s helplessness before his advancing illness, Bors would never know.

Just as the marquis would never know how much fury had been chained up in those two simple words, and how much rage threatened to consume his son if the chains that held his feelings back ever snapped.

"Go on," Bors said, pressing the sword into his son’s hands before taking a few halting steps back to his seat, dropping into it with a relieved sigh before another fit of coughing consumed him.

Steel whispered against leather as Owain drew the blade, feeling the strangely familiar and unfamiliar wood of the hilt as the weapon came alive in his hands. Just like Mountain Breaker, the sword he’d carried since the day his father recognized him as a knight, the wood of the demon’s sacred tree responded to him in a way that no other hilt would, giving it the feeling that it had been carved for his hands and his hands alone.

"Does it have a name?" Owain asked as he set the scabbard down to give the weapon a few restrained practice swings. For a moment, the thought of his father’s head, tumbling from his shoulders to land on the demon-fur rug flashed through Owain’s mind, but he ruthlessly banished the image as soon as it came. Such an obvious attack on his helpless father would gain him nothing, and it could cost him everything instead.

"The man who made it called it ’Fallen Claw’," Bors said as he watched his sun cut several gleaming arcs through the air with the blade. "What do you think?"

"The name fits," Owain said with a reluctant smile as he felt the sword move in his hands. The balance was different from Mountain Breaker, with weight that was closer to the hilt than Mountain Breaker. His former sword suited the man he’d been as a young knight... it was brash, aggressive, and lent itself to heavy, cleaving cuts that would sever demon limbs.

Fallen Claw was different. It wasn’t lighter; it was likely heavier than Mountain Breaker, but the balance was much closer to the crossguard, making it fast and nimble in the thrust, the parry, and the counterattack.

Owain had entered the prime of his life. He was nearly thirty, no longer a young man but not yet an old one. He had close to a decade of experience fighting demons under his belt and reflexes that had been honed relentlessly in daily training with his own soldiers when he didn’t have demons to fight. He risked less and killed more, wasted less motion, made fewer mistakes...

The blade of Fallen Claw recognized all of that. The steel itself was simple, polished, and sharp, with a long fuller that ran the length of the blade to give it strength and further lighten the blade, but it wasn’t weak or flimsy by any stretch of the imagination. It was a sword made for one purpose and one purpose only: to kill. There were no intricate engravings, no inscriptions of sacred passages or pompous family mottos. Just pure steel, sharper than an axe and twice as deadly in the hands of a master swordsman.

"Don’t look so surprised," Bors said with a loud snort. "You think I haven’t been watching you train? You think your old man doesn’t understand what you’ve needed? You outgrew Mountain Breaker long ago. I would have presented a sword like this to you at the start of the war," Bors said, thumping lightly on his chest in a futile attempt to suppress the cough that fought its way free.

"Now, be honest," the old Marquis said. "With a sword like that in your hands, can you carve your own path in the world? Can you conquer the north and teach those weaklings what a real, -COUGH-, a real man is?"

"With a sword like this, I could conquer many places," Owain said as he returned the blade to its sheath. "Your cup is empty," he added before he sat down, carefully observing his father’s complexion as he struggled to control his breathing. "Let me pour you another drink," Owain offered, filling his father’s cup before the old man could object.

"It seems like you’ve thought of everything," the young lord continued as a new plan finally came together in his mind. "When do you need me to go? I, I still have a few affairs to put in order," he said hesitantly, as though the thought of leaving was too much to bear.

"We have a few days yet before the full gathering of the court," Bors said after taking a long, deep drink of the strong red wine that he favored. "I won’t announce Loman as my heir, but I will announce that you are leading a raid into the Vale of Mists. Gilander is a good man. He can tell the people that your ’Ashlynn’ was taken prisoner along with the servants at the Summer Villa."

"So you want me to disappear trying to ’rescue my wife’," Owain said, nodding in understanding. It wasn’t a bad scheme. It allowed ’Owain Lothian’ to die an honorable death attempting to rescue the love of his life and their unborn child. It was a fool’s death, to be sure, but an honorable one at least.

Other men might have called his father’s arrangement a kindness, and with a little gold in the hands of a few minstrels, his ’death’ would become a song of starstruck lovers, bound together in life and death that would be sung in the march for generations. The name ’Owain Lothian’ wouldn’t be forgotten.

But Owain would never accept such a miserable end. He’d decided long ago that he would become the first Lothian Duke, and even though he’d stumbled, he was about to take a tremendous step closer to his goal. He just had to free himself from his father’s overbearing plans before he could take that step.

Fortunately, the old man was helping him to do so even now, and he didn’t even realize that he was doing it...