Son of Avonar
For teachers, the overlooked heroes and heroines who illuminate and nurture young minds, who inculcate our values and teach self-discipline, who shore up our freedoms, remind us of the lessons of history, and ensure the future of the arts. For a few in particular—Elizabeth Paar and Carol Roehl, Jane Conway, Marcia Stefan, Sister Francesco, Sister Anselma, Robert Patten, David Minter, Katherine Brown—and many others at OLV and Nolan and Rice, who inspired, who shared their devotion to art and literature, or who just flat expected their students to do the difficult, the boring, and the necessary in the name of learning.
CHAPTER 1
Midsummer’s Day —Year 14 in the reign of King Evard
The dawn wind teased at my old red shawl as I scrambled up the last steep pitch of the crescent-shaped headland the villagers called Rif Paltarre —Poacher’s Ridge. A brisk walk to the eastern edge and I seated myself on a throne of rock as if I were a Leiran duchess attending a midsummer fete. But whereas my girlhood friends might celebrate the longest day of the year by watching jugglers, fire-eaters, and tittering ladies stepping through the spiritless mimicry they called “rustic dances,” I beheld color and shape being born from a vast and silent wilderness of gray.
Stretching west for two hundred leagues, stood the snowcapped peaks of the Dorian Wall, their brilliant rose brightening to eye-searing white. To the north swelled the ocean of dark green forest. To the east the ground fell away gently in a stone-bordered patchwork of meadows and farmland to the bronze ripples of the Dun River and the haze-shrouded village of Dunfarrie squatting on its banks. It was a splendid desolation.
As the light grew, I stuffed my water flask into the cloth bag hanging from my belt, snugged the rags I’d wrapped about my hands, and took up the true business of the day— hunting dye plants to barter in the village. The first lesson I’d learned on coming to Dunfarrie, when I had scarcely known that food grew in the ground, much less that it must be coddled and coaxed and worried over, was that those whose bellies are pinched by hunger know nothing of holidays.