Seven Swords

Chapter 6

He paused so long before answering, Irissa began to worry all over again.

'My bearing-beast, Willowisp... my bond brothers of Rule. Sometimes my father, Halvag the Smith.'

'You've never spoken of these things."

They are the past. But you asked.'

She nodded, hiding from her reflection in the glass. 'I never miss anything. I am completely content. I don't truly miss my mother, Jalonia, for I never knew her. I don't miss my father, Orvath, for he confuses me. Finorian frightened me.'

'At least you have the living to not miss,' he said.

'I am an ingrate, I suppose. Perhaps we should . . . visit ...Edanvant. I might miss my grandfather, Medoc, a bit. And Dame Agneda.'

'How... visit?' Kendric almost bellowed with pent-up frustration. 'We cannot leave this cursed paradise of Scyvilla! We rule all we survey other than being wary of an imperial poisoning by an ambitious clan with heirs it desires to install.'

'Then you do miss the freedom of the early days!' Irissa pounced.

Kendric's big fists unfolded into a dismissive gesture. 'Why miss what one cannot reclaim? We are trapped here, Irissa, as our children are. Perhaps it is safer than other lands; certainly it is safe from intrusion. No one has cracked a gate to Rengarth since we did it nineteen years ago.'

'It seems like yesterday,' Irissa mused.

'Look at our children. They make a glass, not of hours, but of years."

'I know. They... seem almost adult, but are still babes in everything other than body.'

'They have been reared in a land that offers little to test them. And Javelle is a young woman.'

'Javelle!' Irissa laid down an Iridesium comb so quickly that a trail of coldstone sparkle momentarily slashed the air. 'What shall we do with that girl?'

'More to the point, what will Javelle do with Javelle? She'll be fine, Irissa. You've always worried about her overmuch."

'Why should I not? She has no magic!' The anguish in Irissa's voice, the way the words seemed torn from her, made Kendric stiffen as if encountering an old enemy,

He was silent for a bit, as was she. The luminous walls and pillars with their living ornaments of water-bound fish rippled tranquilly around them. He finally spoke.

"So?"

'Not even a rudimentary talent, not so much as a trick with a talisman is in her! Even the Torloc men proved it possible to defy their birthright and acquire someone else's magic. Javelle is...magic-mute."

'So?'

'How will she protect herself? Were it not for me... us-'

'Javelle will protect herself as other women do. Most of them do not bear magic.'

'She is not an "other woman." She is Torloc.'

'Half-Torloc.'

Irissa's silver eyes blinked into his mortal brown ones as she became aware of the blind alley into which her assumptions led. If Javelle had been robbed of magic, then perhaps a non-Torloc father was the thief.

Irissa shook her head, denying the charge that neither of them would voice. 'I worry for her so,' she continued softly.

'What about your son?' Kendric asked, a sharpness in his tone she had not heard before.

'Thane? Thane is. . . splendid. He is so gifted, so adept with his magic. I never expected a male Torloc child to be so blessed - it's almost frightening.'

'He is lazy, Irissa."

She half-started up, appalled by the charge.

'I love him, too, but he relies on his magic instead of him self. He is indirect, self-absorbed; he expects everything to be conjured up in one of Scyvilla's crystals for him.'

'Lazy! He saved Javelle!'

'When it would have been better for her to have saved herself.'

'She wouldn't have needed saving if she hadn't run off with your sword - why would she do such a dangerous thing?'

Kendric regarded her, a reply in his transparently honest eves that never reached his lips. His voice was softer when he spoke again, but firm still.

At least Thane felt some obligation to follow Javelle although most of it was probably to report her mischief later. Yes, I'm glad his magic was there to help her, but don't you see? Javelle has always had Thane's magic there to mock her lack of powers. She has always been older but has never been better."

'Wouldn't I give her half mine if I could? I should have, by birthright

Kendric moved to the dressing table, to stand behind Irissa. 'I was born of Phoenicia, a powerful Rengarthian Reginatrix, yet I showed no more bent for magic in my youth than a toad. My Rengarth-forged sword evoked a bit; my alliance with a Torloc seeress conjured even more. Perhaps Javelle has not met her sword or her Torloc yet.'

Irissa threw her hands up into the air, laughing wearily.

'We are too worn and too distraught to discuss such matters now. I never knew you felt so strongly about their different... natures.'

'Why not? They do. Am I immune just because I am not Torloc?'

Irissa's seeress's eyes gentled. 'I never said that, never thought that.'

He sighed, and, being a large man, could have ex tinguished several banks of candles with it. 'No, you merely succumbed to the human trait of worry.' His hand moved to her shoulder, to the green-gold fastening of her tunic. 'I know a cure for that. Are you coming to bed?'

Irissa slipped wordlessly into his embrace, her long, peerlessly dark hair sliding against him like satin ribbons. 'A moment,' she whispered.

She sank down at the dressing table. Kendric returned to the bed, and the illuminated aquariums dimmed as they always did when the couple retired.

Irissa pulled off a heavy bracelet of green gold, and a ring with an exotic stone. Her marriage ring, gate-welded to her middle finger, sparkled through its quintet of inner colors as her hands moved. One rested on the clasp at her shoulder, but first Irissa leaned close to the mirrored globe, so close that Kendric could not see past her hair cloaked shoulder if he should try.

Scyvilla's globular looking-glass had other tricks than three-dimensionality. Irissa could call images into it and page through them like a book. Anything she had seen, she could see again.

So she had evoked her parents' likenesses from far off Edanvant in her more pensive moments, though she would never admit the ... weakness... to anyone, not even Kendric. So she had summoned the faces of old friends and old enemies on more than one occasion.

Now, for the first time, she called up the visage of an old lover. Her first lover, her only lover, Kendric as he had been in the Shrinking Forest of Rindell on the very day she had met him more than twenty years before...

The mirror rippled obligingly, painting a panoply of leafy trees such as she had not seen since Edanvant. Her silver eyes dwelled reminiscently on the weepwillow trees trailing in the dark water, on the darker form of a man clad in Iridesium mail and a blood-rusted tunic.

The Kendric of that day assembled in all the impressive impact of his seven feet of well-armed height, as Irissa had first seen him.

He pulled off his helm and Iridesium hood so she could see his face. Irissa stared, feeling the blood drain from her own face in the present as she confronted the visage from the past.

She had no notion - not then, not even now - of how much Kendric would change, had changed. Irissa leaned closer, as if to see more clearly.

How could she have not known, not noticed? Kendric had aged since she had met him. His hair - it had shrunk back on his brow like the Shrinking Forest itself, stalk by stalk, slow but inevitable. What now were silver strands embroidered to match his tunic's gilt richness had been solid, dark-brown hair to the root of each and every one then.

And the lines of his face that always faded before her fond eyes into a familiarity that would remain ever fresh - they were all additions and subtractions upon a visage that had been as smooth as his Iridesium helm before the first blow was ever struck upon it.

Irissa's palm spun the mirror away. The smoky globe teetered on its brass spit and turned back an empty face - empty even of Irissa's own reflection.

That suited her. She wanted no one to see her shock, least of all Kendric. Tears slid from her silver eyes, anyway. She quickly cupped her hand beneath her chin. The hot liquid that sped down her cheeks hardened like ice in an arctic wind before it reached her wrists.

Tears made into coldstone clinked dryly in her palms. No more than these few fell; they were too betraying. Irissa swept the sparkling stones into a pocket of her tunic, which she unclasped and shed like some outworn skin as she rose.

Donning an expression that she hoped hid her newest and gravest worry, Irissa joined Kendric in the dimness of their bed.

He fell for a long, long time the boy who had birthday. He fell so long he seemed to be flying.

He should have been swimming.

Water oiled past him, black and engulfing. Unse things swathed his limbs and then released them with pressure like clammy hands.

He began to discern lighter shades of darkness, all the more disturbing because there should be no variation in the bottomless midnight of the Dark Mirror.

Great greasy forms slid by, boneless tentacles of olly flesh. Eyes gleamed like stars, faintly red, blue, and green despite their abiding yellow-white glimmer.

He saw huge obsidian walls as thick as shadow and even larger shadows passing on those walls. He looked above to find black water eddying like lace tatted over the water's skin. He breathed the turgid liquid and it breathed him back until he seemed to be part of it all the darkness and the depths and the ever-present shadow.

Helpless, his limbs turned to jelly and his mind stirred around and around in some impenetrable stew. He drifted in the Dark Mirror's endlessly expanding universe. There was no point in protesting his fate until the one he had offended made his fate clear and even then there was no protesting. There never had been.

So, consumed by a curiosity born of living in a strictly limited world, the boy began speculating about the beings that drifted so insensately against himself.

Were they as trapped as he - all gnats caught in some sticky dark web of not-quite-water? Were they air-breathers immersed in an alien element that for once forbore to smother them? Or were they water-sprites – creatures from the over-ocean's deepest underbelly-walcoming him to the eternal fathoms of their unlit worlds?

His calm, he knew, would not appease the one who waited above. Calm never did. Still, calm was the sin he had made into a personal virtue, out of some instinct too dim to name. Sometimes he thought another self hid within his outer semblance, a transparent, peeling kind of self that clung so close he could barely sense it. Sometimes he thought he was not real at all, but a conjuring of the man above.