Chapters (37)
‘Don’t call me that,’ the man spat back, slurring his words. ‘You have no right to call me that. Just as I have no wish to call you my “son”.’
Lann stared down at the man, not sure if he had heard him correctly. His father’s words made no sense, but the cruel expression on Gord’s face caused a frisson of fear to snake its way through the boy.
‘What do you mean?’ Lann asked.
Gord waved the question away and returned his attention to the fire.
His heart thumping, Lann stepped between the man and the flames, forcing the farmer to look at him. ‘Tell me.’
And Gord told him. Told him how Lann had been found that night, a little bundle wrapped in blankets, abandoned in the barn. How Lae had insisted on keeping him, even though Gord knew he would only bring the family heartbreak and bad luck.
‘A foundling, that’s what you are!’ Gord finished, sneering back at the boy. ‘A curse, left by evil spirits to bring us misery!’
Unable to bear any more, Lann ran from the house. The night was dark and he stumbled in the darkness, hot and angry tears falling from his eyes as Gord’s words replayed in his head over and over again. Not wishing to return to the house, he spent a sleepless night in the same barn his mother had first discovered him in all those years ago.
The next day, Gord had given a brief, muttered apology. ‘Just the drink talking,’ he had said. But his eyes told a different story and they told Lann he’d been speaking the truth.
Everything changed for Lannigon from that night onwards. The farmhouse felt different, and Lann made a point of spending as little time there as possible, choosing instead to roam the lands that made up Gord Fetlanger’s considerable holding. He liked nothing more than to climb the craggy hills known as the Maiden’s Fingers or ride his pony down to the river where his mother had come to wash their clothes when she was still alive. That was his favourite place. He would sit on the bank and relive memories of her singing to him as she rinsed the garments, her voice mingling with the river’s own song as it tumbled across the stones and rocks.
He yearned to travel, to get away from this cold place and explore lands he’d heard whispers of. Places that could only be accessed by days afloat on vast bodies of water, or by crossing huge mountain ranges that made the Maiden’s Fingers look like little more than the ancient burial mounds to the east of Gord’s lands.
Little did Lann know that, all too soon, he would leave these lands; and that the far-flung places of his dreams would become reality.