Seven Swords

Chapter 5

Kendric might have become angry then at Scyvilla's sleight of serving, no matter how much it distracted the children, except that the item arrayed on the next suspended plate looked suspiciously savory.

'Swanfire Lake hind?' Kendric asked, naming a rare example of Rengarthian wildlife.

'See for yourself,' Scyvilla smirked.

Kendric leaned closer, but the torchlight reflected from the globe's shiny, curved sides blinded him. The item remained a tantalizing but undistinguishable brown mass, and he couldn't use his nose to determine the meat.

A lavish display, Scyvilla, but more frustrating than seductive,' he admitted. 'It could be moonweasel tripe, for all I know.'

Across the table, Irissa lifted a puzzled eyebrow. You can't see it?' Her silver eyes turned to the globe politely suspended at her ear. 'Obviously, it's Swanfire Lake hind, your favorite main course, could we come by it more than once a decade. 'Tis plain to see-'

'It's not plain to me-' Kendric began.

Just then the crystal floated around him, drawing toward the center of the table.

'Ah! I see it clearly now. The flame reflection fooled me. And a well-carved hind it is, too. Bring it nearer, Rengarthian. I thought your wish was to feed, not tease us.

'Of course,' Scyvilla murmured. The globe obediently returned to Kendric and deposited its burden on the tabletop. Glass vanished with the customary 'pop' as Kendric inhaled a visible veil of steam rising from hot, basted meat.

'Wonderful, Scyvilla,' he approved. 'I anticipate that you have forgotten none of our weaknesses in the rest of the meal.'

Scyvilla bowed silently as Kendric began attacking his serving.

But Irissa held back from her portion, her dinnertable attention for once on her spouse instead of their ram bunctious offspring. Her restraint was not only due to her inbred distaste for the meat of the hooved creatures that Kendric was as happy riding as rending.

Scyvilla, she feared, had inadvertently revealed a greater wonder than his crystal servants. She ate slowly, her mind elsewhere, worrisome speculation dulling her quicksilver eyes.

Scyvilla's choicest treat arrived after dinner and after the young people had been sent to bed, an event already long overdue because of their escapade.

A last, single globe came floating between Irissa and Kendric at the table's center, filled midway with a green half-moon of liquid.

. 'Borgia!' Irissa raved. We haven't seen borgia since Edanvant! How did you accomplish this, Rengarthian wonderworker?'

Irissa seldom complimented others on their magic - she took her own so for granted. Scyvilla's hood squirmed modestly in the candlelight.

'A... trade secret.'

'Trade?' Kendric said sharply. We are all condemned to remain in Rengarth. How can you trade with anywhere else?'

The hood drooped. You forget. I was the only one of my kind to escape Rengarth, for a time, until your relived birth travail in the Crux Crystal weened me back - and I was ready to come! But what I have seen in the worlds beyond Rengarth's locked gate and tight lips remains somehow so vivid that I can at times... re-create it.'

And you will have none?' Irissa asked courteously, although she knew the answer of long custom. She had never seen a ludborg, which is what she and Ken dric called Scyvilla's kind for reasons they had almost forgotten, eat.

'None, Torloc lady. "Tis my pleasure to serve this night."

'Serve? In what, perchance?' Kendric inquired bluntly. 'Must we lick the crystal - or break it and lap up the residue amid broken glass?"

'Ah, the former Wrathman of Rule is thirsty, I believe. Scyvilla sounded pleased that his offering had whetted Kendric's appetite. 'Patience, please."

The large crystal floated down toward the tabletop, touching, and then spinning until the emerald liquid within swelled to fill the entire globe.

Irissa impulsively lifted her hands to still it. Kendric winced at the imminent loss of good glass and betterliquer. The crystal, a silver and emerald blur now, had distorted its shape somehow ...

The spinning slowed. Kendric blinked. The crystal was reshaping itself, as if being reblown before his eyes. It divided in two and elongated. Then it sprouted wings of glass.

'Enough!' Kendric offered.

The alteration had stopped. Two deep-throated crystal goblets stood at the table's center, formed of glass thin as a fingernail. A pair of delicately delineated swan's wings folded at the cups' bases.

'Much work for two minutes' quaffing,' Kendric grum bled by habit, finding, as usual, that magic made more of itself the lesser the achievement. Nevertheless he snatched the fragile stem before he should lose the vessel's contents.

Behind him, the departing Scyvilla hooted hoarsely.

'It is a bottomless glass, wise Ruler. Treat it wisely.'

'Endless borgia?' Irissa was impressed at last. She lifted the glowing green glass and held it before her as if inspecting a jewel. I presume it is safe-brewed, that Scyvilla knew better than to import lethal borgia."

'What's lethal is the possibility."' Kendric drained his dainty glass in one long draught and sighed, his shoulders relaxing. Empty for a brief instant, the glass glowed emerald-bright again. 'Can it not return a half-portion? I hate to leave a glass half-empty."

Irissa sipped her draught with neat, catlike savoring. 'Scyvilla was kind to prepare this meal - not only to relieve our minds of our day's worry. He knows what it is to be homesick.'

'For where? Edanvant? You think you have a tangle with one unmagicked daughter and a magicked son- imagine what would happen if they shared their world with a who knows-what-?' He paused, flummoxed. 'What would your mother Jalonia's child be to them but an . . . aunt of the same age?'

'If Jalonia bore a girl,' Irissa mused, 'as Scyvilla's casting crystal predicted and we assume.'

'Do you... become curious after all this time?"

Irissa shrugged, the borgia warming her mind as well as her body. I have always been curious, knowing I have a sister or brother I have never seen. You left no relatives behind in Rule when we left, and less behind when we were exiled from our former worlds here in Rengarth.'

'I left custom behind... the way of people and things in a world I was used to.' Kendric spun the glass until the borgia washed its delicate brim like a small, angry storm green sea. 'Familiarity is some comfort."

'But we have been well treated in Rengarth acclaimed as its rightful rulers. There has been peace, even if the Liderions remain strangely aloof. You have found tasks to occupy you, as have I. Our children have grown, safe - save from each other and themselves,' she added ruefully,

"Too safe,' he returned. 'And they grow too fast. Soon they will be of an age to bed-bond or marry. And there are none like them in Rengarth.'

'Girl, boy there are scores of those in Rengarth!'

'None like them,' Kendric repeated.

'But... Javelle has no magic. She is like everyone.'

'Perhaps.' Kendric didn't sound convinced. 'But what of your son, seeress, who is like no one who has ever lived not Torloc, not wizard, not even overambitious Delevant?

'He is a born Torloc seer, the first of his kind, of his gender, to blend the Torloc women's inbred magic with the men's hard-won external powers. There may be those who if they knew of him... even Rengarth would not be safe enough. Perhaps they already do,' Kendric warned.

Irissa set down her gaudy glass. Her face was parchment white against her midnight hair, against the black s***h of the Iridesium circlet that banded her forehead.

'You mean my father, Orvath, who has always feared - or desired - my inborn powers? He would not have the means to enter Rengarth or affect us here from Edanvant ...not even with all the men's talismanic magic combined.'

Kendric nodded thoughtfully. 'Yes. But I wasn't thinking of Orvath.'

Irissa stared uncomprehendingly into his eyes, then paled even more than seemed possible.

Kendric grunted, bending over to pull off his boots. They tumbled down the dais steps as they fell from his hands, wear-softened leather shanks slumping like drunken soldiers.

'You really should have some new boots cobbled,' Irissa suggested from the other edge of their down-deep bed.

'Yes,' Kendric agreed.

He always agreed when Irissa mentioned his need for new boots. Yet he never did anything about replacing the sillac hide, although time had scuffed the vibrant orange to a weak-ale shade. The boots were the last physical remnant of Rule he owned.

He glanced to the sword on its windowside table. It was mind-made - evoked by his acquired magic in a moment of need not the true thing of Rule he had left to bleed gemstones and sink into Rindell Pond. As such, he could never regard it with nostalgia. Besides, it never changed, unlike his boots, which bore the crease of every passing day until the surfaces seamed, like the faces of old friends.

Irissa, despite her comment, had retrieved the boots and set them side by side, as upright as possible, against the clothes chest.

She paused at a dressing table surmounted by a mirrored crystal of smoked glass a birthing present of Scyvilla's that permitted Irissa to consult her own image in three dimensional form and lifted her Iridesium circlet from her head.

'I even dream of you with that thing on,' Kendric remarked suddenly. I've never grown accustomed to seeing you remove it. It's like watching a cat displace its face.'

Irissa turned, her hair permanently waved at the temples by the circlet's daily presence even in its nightly absence.

'How do you think I broke Sofistron's ring of mirrors, if not by removing the circlet and using it as a magical lock pick? But I know your meaning. Seeing you without your sword most of these years... Irissa smiled at the weapon as it lay unsheathed in a sheen of moonlight. 'We have grown staid, Wrathman, in the "lost, limpid Rengarth" we have found. No wonder our children wear on us.'

'Staid? Just... older.'

Kendric spoke matter-of-factly, without thinking. He did not see Irissa flinch at his words, being too busy pulling the embroidered tunic over his head without scratching his face on the chain-of-gold threads worked into the design. Luxury was ever an impediment to a man of his simple upbringing and simpler tastes.

Irissa sat suddenly at her dressing table, regarding herself in the mirror, watching a smaller Kendric in the mirror's marvelously lifelike background.

'It's past midnight. Aren't you tired?' he asked. 'Worry wears on one like water on rock, though I never knew it until I had offspring.' He stretched long arms, yawning.

In the mirror, Irissa saw silver reflect off Kendric's dark brown head and the coiled hairs of his chest. She heard his joints c***k, though he did not.

He did not seem to see or hear as sharply as she any longer or perhaps she simply paid him more attention now that her children had grown independent enough to slip her eternal maternal watchfulness.

'Perhaps you have too little to worry about,' Irissa said lightly. 'Do you ever miss our earlier adventures, our quests through gates and worlds?"

'Miss lean rations and leathery meat and even tougher bedding? Miss magical hocus-pocus and Torloc pride and garrulous cats? No, if I miss anything, it is-'

'Yes?'