The Gathandrian Trilogy 03 - The Executioners Cane

was brim-full of questions.
    The Lammas Lord pushed his way through a pile of broken stones at the side of the hall where the autumn-cycle tapestry had once dwelled. Briefly, Simon wondered where it had gone and if he would see such beauty here again, but already Ralph was indicating them through into a part of the castle Simon had rarely visited.
    “This is where my guests once waited,” Ralph said, “if they wished for privacy. It is not as badly affected as other rooms in my home and there are two or three stools left for sitting. Will this be adequate for your needs, Scribe? If it rains or snows again, you will avoid the worst of the weather.”
    Simon nodded. “Thank you.”
    It was a dismissal, of sorts, but Ralph hesitated before turning. “Do-do you wish me to stay?”
    This time his tone was softer and more hesitant, and the Lost One sensed the concern behind it, compassion too, and understood how he did not deserve this response. “No, Ralph, please, this my father and I must do without others.”
    Simon watched Ralph’s lips purse into a line in the morning gloom, and then with a swirl of his thin cloak Lord Tregannon made his exit.
    He and his father were alone.
    Unable to look into the old man’s face, Simon reached out and drew up a stool.
    “Sit,” he said. “You will have need of rest.”
    For a moment, he thought his father would ignore him, but the old man sighed and did as Simon had suggested. “Would you like something to eat or drink?”
    Not that there would be much of either, but his father shook his head, and it was Simon’s turn to sigh. He could have done with the brief distraction, because he found his heart was beating fast and his thoughts unable to settle. He sat down himself but his legs could not be still. Carefully, he laid the mind-cane upon his knees and felt the soothing warmth flow into his skin. It gave him some necessary ease. It was obvious that being dead and reborn by the power of the gods did not give you the insight you might have hoped for.
    He coughed, and his father gazed at him. A shadow passed between them, an absence of light in the colours of their thoughts, and Simon blinked. From instinct, he grasped after whatever it might have been, but the brief darkness swirled back against him and swallowed itself up so no shadow remained. He must have imagined it, and he was only being foolish. Indeed, the mind-cane sparked a crimson flare to remind him what he was here for, and he shook himself and spoke.
    “It is many year-cycles since we saw each other, father,” he said, such meaningless words to begin with but he could think of nothing else. And as he said them, in his mind he was back at the day they had last met: the smell of the crowd, the beating of the drums; his mother; the rope. Her death. And the stone his father had thrown to drive him away. A betrayal, but perhaps a mercy too, as Johan had once said. How Simon thought he had accepted this possibility, but here with his father in front of him after these long year-cycles of absence, forgiveness of any sort was another matter, one he had not even touched on in his conversation with his friend. Not in reality.
    The old man groaned and rubbed one hand through his grey matted hair. Simon could see the shift in his thought-colours and the gathering darkness of shared memory, a more physical entity than whatever he had glimpsed before.
    He tried again. “Do you think we might be able to find a common field between us? We share the same blood, though you never came to search for me.”
    There it was. The accusation. Simon could taste the bitterness of it on his tongue. It overwhelmed him and the heat from where he gripped the mind-cane plunged upward to his lips.
    “Yes, you never came, ” he leaned forward, lowering his voice. “Whatever Johan suggested of how you might have loved me enough to drive me from danger, you never came looking for me after the danger was past. I was alone, and you were in the end no father to me at all.”
    Without realising it, Simon had risen from his stool and was pacing the few steps it took to reach the wall of the small room Ralph had allocated them, back and forth, back and forth. Realising the pointlessness of the action, he stopped and tried to bring himself under control again. This was no way to talk to his father, however estranged, not if they wished to rebuild some kind of relationship again.
    “You are right.”
    The words came out of nowhere and pierced