Forging the Darksword (13 page)

Inside, Joram raised his head from the blankets cautiously. The catalyst had not left
yet.
He could hear the man shuffling about outside, then other footsteps approaching.

“You heard?” Father Tolban asked bitterly.

“Best leave her be,” advised the overseer. “And the kid, too.

“But he should be educated …”

“Bah!” The overseer snorted. “So the brat doesn’t know his catechism? As long as he’s ready for the fields when he’s eight, it doesn’t matter to me whether or not he can recite the Nine Mysteries.”

“If you could speak to her …”

“Her? I’d sooner speak to a centaur. You want the kid, you snatch him from her claws.”

“Perhaps you’re right,” Father Tolban muttered hastily. “I don’t suppose it matters much after all …”

The two walked away.

So that was part of The Difference, Joram thought. I am of noble blood, whatever that means.

But there was something else. There had to be. For, as Joram grew older, he began to realize that this Difference kept him apart from everyone—including his mother. He
could see it sometimes in the way she looked at him when he performed some ordinary task, such as lifting an object in his hands or walking across the floor. He saw a fear in her eyes—a fear that made him afraid, too, though he didn’t know why. And whenever he started to ask, she looked away and was suddenly very busy.

One difference between Joram and the other children was obvious—the fact that he walked. Though he had his assigned tasks and studies to perform during the long day of isolation in the shack, he often spent much of that day at the window, staring enviously at the play of the other children in the village. Every noon, under the watchful eye of Father Tolban, they floated and tumbled about in the air, playing with any object their fancy imagined and their limited skills as growing magi allowed them to create. Joram longed most desperately to be able to float, not to be forced to walk upon the ground like the lowest rank of the Field Magi or that most stupid of creatures according to his mother—a catalyst.

“How do I know I can’t?” it occurred to the six-year-old to ask himself one day. “I’ve never really tried.”

Leaving the window, the boy looked around the shack. Formed from a dead free that had been magically shaped and hollowed out, the tree’s branches had been skillfully laced and twined to form a crude roof. High above Joram, a single branch of the natural tree extended the length of the ceiling. Working industriously, Joram dragged the crude worktable, formed of a stump, beneath the beam. Then he lifted up a chair onto the table and, climbing on it, looked up. Not high enough. Frustrated, he glanced about and spotted the potato bin in the corner. Clambering down, he dumped out the potatoes, hoisted the huge, hollowed-out gourd, and, after a great deal of effort, managed to position it on top of the chair.

Now he could reach the beam, just barely. The gourd wobbling beneath his feet, Joram touched the beam with his fingertips and, with a jump that sent the gourd tumbling off the table, caught hold of the branch and pulled himself up onto it. Looking down, he saw that the floor was a long way beneath him.

“But that doesn’t matter,” he said confidently. “I’m going to float like the others,” Drawing in a breath, Joram was just
about to leap out into the air when suddenly the magical seal was broken, the door flew open, and his mother entered.

Anja’s startled gaze traveled from the table to the chair to the gourd on the floor and, Anally, to Joram, perched on the beam of the ceiling, staring at her with his dark eyes, his pale face a cold, blank mask. Instantly, Anja sprang into the air. Flying to the ceiling, she snatched up the child in her arms.

“What do you think you are doing, my little love?” Anja asked feverishly, clutching Joram to her as they drifted down to the floor.

“I want to float, like them,” Joram replied, pointing outside and squirming to escape his mother’s pinching grasp.

Setting her son down, Anja glanced over her shoulder at the peasant children and her lip curled.

“Never again disgrace me or yourself with such thoughts!” she said, attempting to sound stern. But her voice wavered, her eyes went to the crude device Joram had put together to gain his object. Shuddering, she put her hand over her mouth; then, with a look of revulsion, she hurriedly grabbed down the chair, flinging it into the corner. She turned to face Joram, her face deathly pale, words of reprimand on her lips.

But she couldn’t say them. In Joram’s eyes, she saw the question, framed and ready to ask.

And she was not prepared to answer it.

Without a word, Anja turned on her heel and left the shack.

Joram did, of course, attempt the leap from the roof, daring it during harvest time when he was certain his mother would be too busy to return to lunch, as she had taken to doing now more often. Balancing on the very edge of the beam, the child jumped, willing with all the strength of his small being that he hang suspended in the cool fall air like the griffins, and then drift to the ground, lightly as a windblown leaf ….

He landed, not like a windblown leaf, but like a rock hurled down the face of a mountain. The fall hurt the boy severely. Picking himself up, he felt a sharp pain in his side when he drew a breath.

“What is the matter with my pet?” Anja asked him playfully that evening. “You are very quiet.”

“I jumped off the roof,” Joram answered, looking at her steadily. “I was trying to float like the others.”

Anja scowled, and again opened her mouth to reprimand the boy. But she saw, once again, the question in the boy’s eyes.

“And what happened?” she asked gruffly, her hands plucking at the tattered remnants of her green dress.

“I fell,” Joram answered his mother, who wasn’t looking at him. “I hurt myself, right here.” He pressed his hand against his side.

Anja shrugged. “I hope you have learned your lesson,” she remarked coldly. “You are not like the others. You are different. And everytime you try to be like the others, you will hurt yourself or they will hurt you.”

She is right. I’m not like the others. Joram knew that, now. But why? What was the reason?

That winter, the winter when he was six, Joram thought again that he might have discovered the answer.

Joram was a beautiful child. Even the hardbitten overseer could not help but pause in his daily grind to turn and stare on those occasions when the boy was allowed outside the shack. From being kept constantly indoors during the day, Joram’s skin was smooth and white and as translucent as marble. His eyes were large and expressive, surrounded by thick black eyelashes so long that they brushed his cheeks. His eyebrows were black and set low on his head, giving him a brooding, serious adult air that accorded oddly with his childish face.

But Joram’s most outstanding feature was his hair. Thick and luxuriant, black as the glistening plumage of the raven, it sprang from a sharp peak in the center of his forehead to fall down around his shoulders in a mass of tangled curls.

Unfortunately, this lovely hair was the bane of Joram’s childhood. Anja refused to cut it, and it was now so thick and long that only hours of painful combing and tugging on Anja’s part could remove the snarls and tangles. She tried braiding it, but the hair was so unruly that it sprang out of the braid almost within minutes, curling around the child’s face and bouncing on his shoulders as if possessed of a life of its own.

Anja was extremely proud of her son’s beauty. Keeping his hair clean and well-groomed was her great pleasure—her only pleasure, in fact, since she haughtily held herself apart from her neighbors. The combing of Joram’s hair developed into a nightly ritual—a dismal ritual for Joram. Every evening, after their meager supper and his brief exercise period, the boy sat on a stool at the crudely shaped wooden table while Anja, with her magic and her fingers, lovingly combed out the child’s wild, shining hair.

One night, Joram rebelled.

Sitting home alone that day as usual, he had watched from his window as the other little boys played together, floating and tumbling through the air, chasing after a shimmering ball of crystal their leader, a bright-eyed young lad named Mosiah, had conjured up. The rough game came to a halt with the return of several parents from the fields. The children crowded around their parents, clinging to them and hugging them in a way that made Joram feel dark and empty inside. Though Anja constantly fussed over him and hugged him, it was with a fierce kind of intensity that was more frightening than affectionate. Joram sometimes felt as if she wanted to crush him into her body and make them one.

“Mosiah,” called out the boy’s father, catching hold of his son who, after a quick greeting, was heading back to his play. “Y’er lookin’ like a young lion,” the father said, ruffling his son’s hair that fell in long blond tanks over the boy’s eyes. Drawing the child’s hair between his fingers, the father gently sheared it off with a quick, deft motion of his hand.

That night, when Anja called Joram to the stool and began to take down what remained of the braids in his hair, Joram jerked away from his mother and turned to face her, his dark eyes wide and solemn.

“If I had a father like other boys,” he said quietly, “he would cut my hair. If I had a father, I wouldn’t be different. He wouldn’t let you make me different!”

Without saying a word, Anja struck Joram across the face.

The blow knocked the child to the floor and left a bruised mark upon his cheek for days thereafter. What followed left a bruised mark on Joram’s heart that never truly healed.

Hurt, angry, and alarmed by the look on his mother’s face—for Anja had gone deathly white and her eyes burned with an inner fever—Joram began to cry.

“Stop it!” Anja dragged her son to his feet, her thin-fingered hand digging painfully into his arm. “Stop it!” she whispered fiercely. “Why do you cry?”

“Because you hurt me!” Joram muttered accusingly. His hand holding his stinging cheek, he stared at her in sullen defiance.

“I hurt you!” Anja sneered. “The slap of a hand and the child cries. Come”—she hauled the boy through the door of the shack and out into the mean little village, whose people were settling down to rest after their hard day’s labors—“come, Joram, I will teach you what it is to hurt!”

Walking so fast that she literally dragged the stumbling child through the muddy street behind her (Anja always walked when she was with Joram—an odd circumstance that the other magi noted and wondered at), Anja came to the catalyst’s dwelling at the far end of the village. Using her magic stored from the day’s work, Anja caused the door to burst wide open. She and her child burst through after, propelled by the heat of her fury.

“Anja? What’s the matter?” cried Father Tolban, springing up in alarm from where he had been resting before a cheery fire. Marm Hudspeth bent over the flames, cooking his dinner, this task taking more Life than a catalyst has. The sausages hung suspended over the fire, spitting and cackling very much like the old woman herself, who was preparing gruel in a sphere of magic bubbling on the hearth.

“Get out!” Anja ordered the old woman, never taking her eyes from the astonished catalyst.

“You—you had better go along, Marm,” Father Tolban said gently. He would have liked to add, “and bring the overseer at once!” but the sight of Anja’s glittering eyes and mottled face made him bite his tongue. Clucking and muttering, Marm sent the sausages from the flame to the table, then—staring at Anja and the boy with narrowed eyes—she flew out the door, making the sign against evil with her hand.

Her lip curled in derision, Anja slammed the door shut and stood facing the catalyst. He had not been to visit her
since she had stopped him from educating Joram. She never spoke to him in the fields, if she could help it. So he was astounded to find her in his house, and even more astonished to see her child with her. “What is the matter, Anja?” he repeated. “Are you or the child ill?”

“Open the Corridors to us, Catalyst,” Anja demanded with the superior air she used when speaking to underlings, an air that contrasted oddly with her shabby, patched dress and her dirt-smeared face. “The boy and I must make a journey.”

“Now? But … but …” Father Tolban stammered, completely at a loss. This was unheard of! It could not be allowed. The woman had gone mad! And that brought another thought to the catalyst. He was alone and unprotected in the presence of a wizardess, an
Albanara
if one believed her story, whose Life force he could feel radiating from her like the heat of her anger.

She had probably saved up energy from the day’s work. She wouldn’t have much, but it might be enough to mutate him or wreck his small house. What should he do? Stall for time. Perhaps Old Marm would have brains enough to go fetch the overseer. Trying to remain calm, the catalyst’s gaze went from the mother to the child, who stood beside her silently, half-hidden by the folds of Anja’s rich, tattered dress.

Even in the midst of his fear and mental turmoil, Father Tolban stopped and stared. He had never seen the child up close, Anja always keeping them separated. And, though he had heard rumors of the child’s beauty, the catalyst was certainly not prepared for anything like this. Blue-black hair framed a pale face with large dark eyes. But what was remarkable, besides the child’s extraordinary beauty, was the fact that there was no fear in those wide, shimmering eyes. There was the shadow of pain—the catalyst could see the marks of Anja’s hand upon the child’s cheek. There were traces of tears. But there was no fear, only a look of calm triumph, as if this had all been carefully planned and arranged.

“Immediately, Catalyst,” Anja hissed, stamping her bare foot upon the floor. “I am not accustomed to being kept waiting by the likes of you!”

“P-payment,” stuttered Father Tolban. Tearing his gaze from the strange child, he turned to face the wild-eyed mother, feeling relief flood over him as he ducked into the safe refuge of the rules of his Order. “Th-there must be payment, you know,” he continued more severely, gaining confidence as the rules loaned him the strength of centuries. “A portion of your Life, Mistress Anja, and also a portion of the boy’s, if you travel with him …”