Hero Born
It’s in the darkest hour, when all hope is lost, that heroes are born.After witnessing the deaths of everyone he holds dear, Brann is wrenched from his family home and thrust into a life of slavery. Now he must do everything he can to survive.Miles away, word is spreading of a growing evil; a deposed and forgotten Emperor is seeking a weapon to use in his bid to rise once again to power. Ruthless and determined, nothing and no one can stand in his way. Especially not a galley slave like Brann.But heroes can be forged in the most unlikely of ways, and Brann’s journey has only just begun.
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Hero Born
Book One of The Seeds of Destiny Trilogy
ANDY LIVINGSTONE
HarperVoyager
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street,
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 2015
Copyright © Andrew Livingstone 2015
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015. Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com
Andrew Livingstone asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the authorâs imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Digital eFirst: Automatically produced by Atomik ePublisher from Easypress.
Ebook Edition © June 2015 ISBN: 978-0-00-759306-4
Version: 2015-04-28
For Valerie
Table of Contents
âWhen hope is dying, we crave inspiration. And at that hour, we look to heroes.â
The storyteller paused. The ensuing silence spoke as eloquently as the lack of comprehension on the face of the boy behind him. Just moments before, the young voice had cut through the first haze of dusk, stopping him in mid-pace.
âThere arenât really any heroes, are there?â It had been a simple question, a challenge born of childish bravado. But the storyteller could no more leave that seed of doubt behind him than a dog could ignore the scent of a rabbit. It was not his nature. Instead, he must plant a seed of his own.
He drew the sounds and the smells of the early evening deep within him: the wheat in the surrounding fields stirred by the breeze; the vestiges of the cooking fires; the heavy musk, the stamping and the grumbles drifting from the stables; the lazy drone of the insects and the cries of the birds seeking them one last time before handing the predatorsâ dayshift over to their nocturnal cousins.
It was a land basking in the contentment of peace, when heroes were not needed. When heroes were forgotten. There are some who say that peacetime is a curse; that we only appreciate what we have to fight for. He had grown to see much truth in that in recent years. Although he would never welcome a return to even the slightest of the horrors he had witnessed on these and other shores, still he marvelled at, and despaired over, the human spiritâs desire to dismiss and trivialise that which it did not see for itself. And, therefore, to lower its guard.
It was the mindâs greatest defence against terror turning to madness. It was also its greatest weakness if the cause of that terror were ever to return.
Still the storyteller paused, fewer than a dozen steps from the village hall. The weakening autumn sun was setting behind him. That was the way he liked it. Inside, the villagers would be waiting, packed on benches around the concentric circles dug down into the ground, galleries that focused on the stage below in unconscious and incongruous mimicry of the gladiator pits of the southern continent. The world over, people desired performance, whether the blood was in the words or on the earthen floor.
It was an oppressively atmospheric arena. And, tonight, it was his arena.
He would enter with the sun behind, a silhouette in the doorway framed by the deep amber rays. And so the performance would begin. The performance of a master craftsman, and one who loved his art. They would share that love, for they always did. That was what fed his soul, what pulled him from village to village, town to town, day after day, night after night, telling after telling.
He turned, a smooth and balanced movement. Three boys sat on a broken plough propped against the wall of the blacksmithâs workshop. The largest, slightly older and perhaps trying to impress, stood up awkwardly but with determination.
Clearly deciding that failing to understand the storytellerâs reply rendered the manâs words irrelevant, the boy pressed on. âYou must know that. Itâs just all stories to entertain people, isnât it? You add things into it and make it more exciting. You make one person amazing to make it a better story. Admit it.â
The storyteller cocked his head in curiosity. What sunlight was left managed to reach far enough into his deep hood to reveal wry amusement. âIs that really what you think?â His voice was soothing, measured and cultured, with a foreign hint to his speech.
