Brothers of the Wind: A Last King of Osten Ard Story

by Tad Williams

I have learned that our first duty is to truth, because without truth, honor itself is hollow.

Amerasu saw truth even when no one else could recognize it.

I could not help feeling like one who trespasses in another’s house by night, hoping only to achieve whatever they came to do and escape before the house’s owner awakes.

I want to scream at the sky, brother, believe me. But we must save our strength to care for the living.

“Such oaths often turn to curses,”

“Why do I do these things, brother?” he asked at last. “What deadly spirit haunts me?”

“You have a poet’s spirit, that is all.”

Beneath the horror that was plain on his face and in his voice, I heard something else: an unimaginable anger, although in that moment I took little notice.

The world was growing dark around me. It did not feel as though the sun would ever rise again.

“Anger . . . breeds anger.”

Suffering simply is. It is what happens despite it that matters.

The Moon Spirits chased one another, each swallowing the one that had gone before.

it was all I could do not to sink to my knees and beg him to change his mind. It was not my own fear of the voyage that made my heart go cold in my breast, though I truly did not want to go, did not want to turn my back on what my own small life might have become to follow my master on his terrible journey. It was my master himself I mourned, and all he might have been. But if there was even the smallest chance his future could be saved, how could I set my own happiness at an equal value?

Did anything but my name belong to me and to me alone?

You have always been more than a servant to me.”

“No! By the Lost Garden itself, no! Listen to me! In all those dream-​lives I saw you die, Pamon. It was a torture as great as anything the worm’s cursed blood has brought me. I lay helpless and saw it—​saw your death—​over and over, in more terrible ways than I could count. In every life where you were beside me as we sailed into the west, I saw you die. If you accompany me, your doom is written.”

“No and no, Lord Hakatri. I refuse your order. I would do anything else, my lord—​I would gladly give my life for you—​but in this one thing I must defy you. If you would rid yourself of me, you will have to summon Captain Iyato to put me in chains first. I will not leave your side in any other way.” “Get out!” Hakatri cried, sounding as pained and miserable as I had ever heard him. “If you will only go in chains, then chains you shall wear. I will not have your death on my conscience, Pamon—​I have done enough damage to those around me. My back is nearly breaking under the weight of my mistakes.”

My first thought as the sea closed over me was a strange one. I am free—! The larger part of me flailed in utter terror, fighting to reach the surface again as the air began to burn in my lungs, but I had been tossed and turned until I had no notion of which way might be up, and the heavy blackness of the stormy ocean crushed me from all sides. I am drowned, I thought. Then, a moment later, as the darkness around me passed into me as well, and life began to sputter out, I thought again, with sorrow but also relief, I am free.

“I will never leave you,” I told him, but of course I had left him already: I was talking only to myself.