Sorcerer's Son (6 page)

six pieces of silver for the lot.”

“That seems a small price,” said Cray.

“Ah, doubtless you could conjure up whatever amount I asked. I hope it would not turn to ash as soon as you passed beyond the horizon.”

Cray pulled the purse from his belt and spilled six silver pieces into his hand. “My mother does not deal in magic metals,” he said, “else I would not need to buy my armor from you, steward.”

The steward nodded once. “A good point indeed.”

“The money is real, I promise you.” Cray offered the coins on his open palm. “You have set the price, sir. Take it.”

Gingerly, the steward took it. After he had closed the money in his fist, he said, “I must confess, young sir, that I have never trafficked with a sorcerer before.”

Cray smiled to hear himself so described, but he made no attempt to explain that he scarcely knew a hundredth of his mother’s magic. “I will not harm you. You have dealt fairly with me. More than fairly.”

The steward turned toward the door. “If you will follow me, then, I will show you to your bed.”

The pallet was not as comfortable as his bed at home, but it was softer than a mossy pad under a tree. Cray was tired, and not even the snoring of other sleepers in the hall or the occasional bark of a restless dog could keep him awake. He roused at last to morning streaming through the high windows and a group of pages walking among the sleepers to announce breakfast and to clear the floor of pallets. The page who dragged Cray’s pallet to a storage place in a far corner was not much younger than Cray himself. Cray wondered if the boy were bound to be a knight or if, like the steward, he would always remain a servant of the House. The boy was slight. If he planned to be a knight, he had not yet started training. Cray compared his own youthful muscles to the page’s slenderness, and he felt he was well-begun in his life’s goal. His father, he thought, would be proud of him.

A breakfast of bread and cheese and milk was set out on a long table below the dais, and as Cray was eating his share, the steward approached and motioned him aside.

“I have inquired, young sir, but there is none here who remembers your father. I am sorry.”

Cray swallowed his milk at a draft. “I thank you for your efforts, good steward. Truthfully, I had no great hope of finding any trace of him here. But I could not visit without asking. Is my horse saddled and ready?”

“It is.”

Scanning the room, Cray said, “I see your lord is not about. You will have to give him my farewell.”

“I will do that, young sir.”

They walked together to the stables and then with Gallant to the gate. While the steward stood beneath the arch, flanked by the men who guarded the entry to their fortress, Cray led his horse out into the open sunlight and mounted.

“Good luck with your quest,” said the steward. “There is a quest, is there not?”

“There is,” said Cray. He raised a hand in salute and wheeled his horse about. Before him, the road between the fortress and the town stretched out full of foot traffic even so early in the day. He rode toward the town, but at the east gate, from which he had first seen the Great House, he turned Gallant aside and followed the wall around the settlement, to the track that had brought him there. He could not see the forest save in his mind’s eye, but he knew that afternoon would bring him to it. He would have one of his spiders spin a web then, between two trees, and he would tell his mother of his success. He hoped she had not waited up all night, worrying about him while her webs remained blank.

The chain mail in his saddlebags rustled to the rhythm of Gallant’s pace, a metallic lullaby for a boy who yearned for knighthood. He daydreamed as he rode, of the years that lay ahead, of the feel of chain upon his body, of the heft of sword and shield. He would work hard and grow strong and sure, and then he would leave Spinweb for the wide world. Somewhere out there was his father, perhaps dead, perhaps alive and imprisoned by some enemy or enthralled by another woman—Cray would follow the trail to Falconhill, to the East March, to wherever it might lead. His mother had said she did not wish to know his father’s fate, but Cray could not rest so. He had to know the truth, no matter how painful.

He did not plan to tell her of his quest, only that he intended to search for a teacher to help him be the best knight he could. She would weep anyway, when they bade each other farewell. He thought it better not to burden her more than that.

Ť ^ ť

From the shelter of a tree hollow, a gray squirrel watched Cray practice combat against empty air. Its small head was turned sideways, one lustrous eye following the glint of the sword, both ears pricked to the sound of swinging chain mail. Its tiny paws balanced, humanlike, on the crumbling bark that rimmed its hiding place, and its broad, fluffy tail twitched over its back in rhythm to the boy’s movements. The squirrel came often to that tree, and to others nearby, to watch Cray fight imaginary foes in the dappled sunlight of the forest outside Spinweb. It would have come more often yet, but it had a master who required its frequent presence at his castle, in the form of a young, blond girl.

Gildrum could see Spinweb’s walls from that perch. It had come to the forest to see them, to catch a glimpse of her standing at the gate or the parapet or leaning from a window. It had come as a squirrel, many months after leaving as a man. In those intervening months, the demon had sought to drown itself in work, to fill its days and nights with fetching and carrying and traveling to the far corners of the world, to blot her face from its consciousness. It had even taken over tasks that would normally be assigned to lesser demons, on the pretense that Gildrum could do them better, faster, more precisely the way the master wished them done. Yet her face had been with it always, and at last it succumbed to her lure. Rezhyk never knew that there was a day after which every errand that took his faithful Gildrum from the confines of Castle Ringforge included a brief stop outside Spinweb.

It could not enter, not as squirrel nor as flame. No demon could enter a sorcerer’s home without the owner’s invitation, unless its own master were within. The knight could have gained admittance, of course, but Gildrum could not face the elaborate fabric of lies that would be necessary to explain visits only long enough for a greeting and a kiss. Rezhyk’s command of secrecy still held; his servant could not reveal its true identity.

Rezhyk had given Gildrum the squirrel form once, that the demon might move among humans unobtrusively, and never had it used that shape so much as in the forest about Spinweb. It learned to know the other squirrels, the deer, the rabbits, the wind that whipped the castle walls and the rains that drenched them. It saw Spinweb in moonlight and in moonless starlight, in sunlight and storm, and at last that intermittent vigil was rewarded, on a bright spring morning when the dew was still fresh on the grass, shining like diamonds scattered beneath the trees: she stepped from the castle gate, the feathers of her dress rippling in the light breeze, a small child clinging to her hand.

Gildrum gazed long at the child, a brown-haired boy so like Delivev that he could be none other than her son—a sturdy, laughing boy who let go her hand to run barefoot through the wet grass. Cray, she called him, and she told him not to run out of sight. The gray squirrel chittered as they passed by its tree, and the child looked up eagerly and began to make small chittering noises of his own, holding his hand out to lure the squirrel closer. Gildrum was tempted for a moment to go to him, to be cuddled against that small breast, perchance to be touched as well by Delivev herself, but time weighed heavily against the demon; it had watched as long as it dared, and now it had to turn, to scamper back along the branch and dive into a hollow of the tree, to transform into something else, somewhere else.

It did not tell Rezhyk where it had been, what it had seen. Rezhyk, never dreaming that Delivev would bear the babe they had given her, never asked. He had other interests now that he was safe within his shirt of gold, and he had put her out of his mind.

Cray grew straight and strong and more interested in the world beyond Spinweb’s walls than his mother was, and the gray squirrel saw her seldom and him often, if fleetingly. It saw him feed deer from his bare hands and tumble on the moss with wild rabbits. It saw him ride his pony through the dense woods, ducking low in the saddle to keep from being swept off by overhanging boughs. It saw him take up arms, first wooden ones and then steel, stalking the forest as a battlefield, slashing at the trees as if they were his mortal enemies. It saw

and Gildrum the demon found itself proud of Cray’s accomplishments, as if the boy were its own child.

Gildrum knew other demons would laugh at that notion, as they would surely laugh at its love for a human woman; they would say Gildrum had lived too long among humans, that he had absorbed some of their madness. Yet Gildrum wondered why Rezhyk should be any more a father for giving the seed than a demon was for planting it.

My son, it thought, watching with dark, squirrel eyes as Cray rode his great gray horse away from Spinweb.

“I would not wish you to think that I am spying on you,” said Delivev.

Cray sat patiently while she bound his hands to the loom with threads of many colors. “I understand, Mother. You have a right to know where I go.”

“I don’t care where you go, only that you are safe there. The tapestry will trace you like a map, recording not just the motion of your body but that of your heart as well It will show me your joy and your anguish; it will let me share your triumph and your danger. And should you forget your poor mother for too long, it will show me where to send reminders of my love for you.”

“I will try not to forget you, Mother,” said Cray.

She kissed his forehead, then wrapped the threads about his temples, his eyes, his ears, his lips. In two years she had spun spool after spool from virgin wool, dyed with her own hands rather than by disembodied magic, and now she imbued the thread and the loom with Cray’s aura by wrapping them together.

The loom was small, never before used. She had made it recently, felled the young tree with a stone axe, carved the straight-grained walnut with a blade of sharp obsidian, rubbed it smooth with fine sand, pegged it together lovingly. Metal had never touched it, nor was there a nail or a screw needed to hold it together. It lay wholly within her domain, responsive only to her will. She would command, and it would weave the thread into a tapestry of her son’s travels.

She freed him slowly, one color at a time, winding the threads back onto the spools that were racked above the loom; only the uttermost end of each spool had participated directly in the magical process, yet the whole was affected, his aura seeping into the rest like oil penetrating silk. By the time he had ridden out of sight, the thread would be ready for weaving.

He stood up and drew on the gauntlets that had hung at his belt during the spell-making.

“Well,” she said, “I can keep you no longer.”

He kissed her cheek. “Be of good cheer, Mother. Think of the wonderful adventures that lie ahead of me. Don’t weep.”

“I lost you two years ago,” she said, her hands flitting lightly over the sleeves of his surcoat, smoothing them against the chain mail beneath. “Why should I weep at losing you now?” Still, her eyes glittered, and her lips trembled as she spoke.

“The spiders will be with me, Mother. I’ll talk to you often through the webs.” Two years of growth had given him his full height, and now he looked down upon the top of her head when she stood so close to him. Two years of exercise with sword and shield and forty pounds of chain on his body had deepened his chest and filled out his limbs. He could lift her in the crook of one arm. He could swing the sword tirelessly, blow after blow; there were trees in the forest deeply gouged by his blade.

“Will you go to the Great House you visited before?”

He shook his head. “I think they fear me too much there. Almost as much as they fear you.”

“I don’t know why they should fear me. Except that all ordinary mortals fear our kind.”

“They fear what they cannot understand.”

She smiled sadly. “They would never fear you, then. You are one of them. Oh, my son, I would call you back to sorcery if I could!”

He took her hands in his own. “I am half of their kind. And that half is the stronger, Mother. I can’t help it.”

She pulled away. “No, Cray. It is the strangeness of that life that draws you, not your father’s blood. And the first time you cross swords with another human being, you may wish you were here, safe in sorcery.”

“I think not. I think I have the courage to face an armed adversary. And perhaps a fraction of the skill, too.”

She turned from him. “Go then. I have my pets, still, to love; at least they will never take up arms and leave me.”

“I must do what I must do.” He touched her shoulder. “You were alone before my father came to you. You were alone for a very long time.”

“And I was content. I will be content again, Cray. We have nothing to gain from further farewells.”

He passed through the arch of the gate to where Gallant waited, cropping spring grass. Cray mounted easily, remembering how arduous that simple action had seemed when first he donned the chain. Now he wore at least the shirt almost all the time, unless the day was very hot and the padding that separated the chain from his skin made him sweat too much. Shield and helm hung at his saddle, the sword was buckled at his waist, the saddlebags were full of provisions; nothing remained to keep him at Spinweb. He lifted a hand in final good-bye, but his mother was not there to see it, she had not followed him out. Only a gray squirrel saw his farewell from a branch high above the forest track; he chirruped at it as he passed, but it scrambled away from him, claws clicking against the bark.

His first goal was Falconhill, to ask the lord what had become of a young knight named Mellor. He had only a vague notion of where it lay: to the west, his mother had told him when his was only a child’s curiosity; some leagues to the west. He had hesitated to question her more recently, fearing that she might guess his motive. He had not reckoned on the tapestry tracking him, had not realized the extent of her power, though he had lived so close to it all his life. Yet he could not deny her the peace of mind she craved. And so she would see his route, know his destination, and when they spoke through the webs he would have to say that Falconhill was the nearest great holding he could find, where a youth might train under masters to be a knight. He thought she would want to believe that.