Seven Swords

Chapter 60

color welled over its livid body, scale by scale from foot

to head and faded in the reverse order.

Then it paled to pure silver and fell into the grass, coiled and still. The Felabbas came to inspect it. Javelle put her hands to her now-n***d brow. 'I don't

understand.'

The grasses beside her crushed suddenly in a long, wide swath. Javelle, her emotions racked beyond enduring, screamed and crawled to her mother's side. Irissa absently put an arm around her, her eyes and attention never leaving Kendric. Everything seemed far away, unim portant, save her vigil. She would know the last moment even as it came. He would know she was there.

The grasses darkened. Something was lying upon them, a fallen black branch like one of Geronfrey's failed sendings. Its outline hardened limb by limb.

It was a man, a boy, a shadow. 'Eeryon.' Only Thane was still vocal enough to name the essence that lay on the grass. He watched the black eyes lighten to aquamarine, then green with a Torloc glow. Or the lurid green of a borgia glow, old borgia. Briarwhip crawled on its belly to station itself at his half-invisible head.

Javelle stole a look in that direction, then her

eyes

flared

in astonishment. 'Eeryon, why have you gone, and come

again?'

"To come, and go, again.' His voice was faint, as

was the outline of his face. 'You promised it would not

hurt.' 'I never meant... I never spoke seriously.' She crawled over, appalled by a sense of responsibility for something

she didn't even understand.

'But why?' she asked. His head shook. Through his features, she could see the grasses stir and flatten. 'I usually feel nothing when I vanish. This time I felt everything. I felt... alive.'

'You are alive.' Javelle was not prepared to witness another death, to make another leavetaking in her heart. 'You can come with ... us.' A sob choked her to silence.

'Come back to Rengarth,' she finished. 'And... Briarwhip, too." The pools of darkness that were his eyes lifted to the

figure of his faithful hound. 'We belong in Without, as you do not. As... none of you do." He faded, mote by mote of his being, until nothing

remained but the broken grasses. Javelle felt deserted beyond bearing. She hardly noticed another absence the loss of her constant companion since birth. But it struck her suddenly and she turned to pat the grass, trying to see through the thick tears coating

her eyes.

Something rattled in the grasses. Something rasped over

the bent stalks like quicksilver wind. Javelle pursued it,

almost mad to keep something that belonged to her still

- anything!

Silver flashed like running water. Javelle pursued it on

hands and knees, a small child chasing cloud-shadows it

can never catch. The silver snake slithered around the frozen form of Irissa. Javelle plunged on, seeking the glint of her lost birth-snake, feeling nothing now but the chase.

She found it where it had first appeared to the eye of

human, colled around a forehead. Like her father before

her, she rejected this dependency. She reached for it to

tear it free, hardly realizing it was her father the thing had claimed, not seeing the tiny silver teeth biting like needles into the flesh just above his ear. Irissa had, and - waking like a dreamer of dark visions blinded by fresh light caught her daughter's hands in

an Iridesium grip. Her mother's voice rang like bells in Javelle's deadened ears and eyes and heart. 'No! Leave it. It doesn't dispense venom, it feeds on it.'

"It foods on Father-l' She reached again for it, to pry off the sinuous coils so strong and inflexible. 'It feeds on polson, as you sald, Javelle!" Her mother was shaking her with a combination of fear and aggravation Javnile had not seen since she was very young and had

taken some dreadful risk. She barely heard her mother's voice as Javelle suddenly clutched her tightly. 'Javelle, hush, child. You've saved your father. Look, his unnatural color ebbs! See, the snake bloats and bruises with the burden of the taint. So Ilvanis and Neva saved me twenty years ago. So you have carried this

strange metal serpent all your life. It's all right. We're

all right."

Irissa rocked Javelle like a baby while she watched

Kendric. His stiff figure softened, as if the blood were

free to flow in it again. His taut lips parted for the rapid

passage of reviving breaths. Beneath his closed eyelids,

his eyes quivered like flutterbys; his nostrils flared.

At last he moaned and struggled to sit. A fat silver snake

fell to the grass, immobile, forgotten as Eeryon had been

forgotten.

Kendric clapped a hand to his temple as though smash ing a marsh-midge. He blinked and toted up the members of his sober family - Thane serious and white-faced, Javelle smiling at him through reddened eyes, Irissa... Irissa shaken and yet shining in sheer silver joy. He eyed the two cats, who were chasing something quick in the grass. He saw the unfortunate hound hunched over a vacancy in the same grass.

He stretched out his arms and listened for the customary creaks. There were none. He sat up. His back didn't c***k, nor did his knees. He saw plain and straight one of everything, except for the cats. He felt... light, and tight and extremely pleased with himself.

Then he remembered beating Geronfrey back with the

flat of his fresh-forged sword and looked around for signs of the sorcerer. He saw none. He never missed the sober, self-effacing shadow of Eeryon. Yet he saw his family through clear, untainted eyes. He saw a pond and glade and the phantom shimmer

of gates to every place in the worlds one might want

to go, He grinned and announced his general good will toward this world, this place, this moment.

'Nothing,' said Kendric modestly, 'like a little exercise

to get the circulation going again.' He had no idea why they all collapsed upon him with cries of sorro joy and nearly bore him back to the

earth he had just so arduously escaped.

'Maudlin,' said Felabba the Younger, preening its fluffy neck ruff.

'I quite agree,' said Felabba the Elder, biting a knot of

fur on her slack belly pouch.