Seven Swords

Chapter 16

'Anyway, the scenes they show, the things that hap pened in them, are all in the past. Father once said to think of them as a map to yesterday.'

'Father said-?"

'Yes, you never listen to him. But I. . . did, anyway, years ago, when you were only an infant and too young to remember.'

'I walked at six months and spoke at nine. I remember almost everything but my birth,' he protested. 'What would you know that I wouldn't?' 'Something, precocious one. Perhaps there were simply things you didn't pay attention to.'

'Such as-'

Javelle's hand swept toward the tapestry before them. "This. You were always too busy playing with magic and consulting with Mother. Father had less spectacular ways of entertaining me. He told me stories."

'Of the weavings?'

'Of what's in the weavings. Why do you finally want to know now?'

Thane gritted his teeth. Javelle would take her pound of penance one way or another. 'Yes. I finally want to know now. I have an idea...'

'An idea? For weaving your own tapestry? I thought that was women's work.'

'Magic was supposed to be women's work, too, among Torlocs, yet we defy that tradition.'

'You didn't have to say "we" just to include me in what I've always been excluded from.' 'I'm sorry, Javelle... no, I mean it. I look at things a bit differently now. I... need your knowledge of the hangings. I shouldn't have reminded you of what you can't bear to remember."

'No, you shouldn't have.' Javelle shrugged, finding his concession tepid. The exhilaration of her recent solitary ride was dissipating into the old despair she always felt when confronting Thane's magical superiority. 'Anyway, if you want to know about the tapestries and don't want to ask Mother, ask Father.' She stood to leave.

'I can't!' His panic was genuine.

'You can't?' Suspicion had tinged Javelle's voice.

'I mean . . . Father and I have never had much in common.'

'You are both male. Perhaps he'd welcome a chance to tell his son about his old exploits. He wasn't always a dull Ruler in Rengarth.'

'Still Thane thought rapidly. 'I'd rather hear it from you, Javelle. I wouldn't want Father to know how ignorant I've been.'

Appealing to his sister's superiority was a brilliant stroke. Javelle softened and preened at the same time.

'I should think not,' she agreed, jumping back on the table. Which one do you want to hear about first?"

"That one.' He pointed to a mysterious interior scene - a room of many windows each overlooking a different alien vista.

"But that's one of the least interesting ones.' Javelle indicated another hanging, where Kendric, sword raised, fought a whirlwind of crimson dust and robed warriors. What about this when father mind-made the sword and bested Ivrium's Inlands spawn? Father and Mother aren't even sewn into that other tapestry.'

'No.' Thane leaned more intently forward. 'It's the only one they're absent from.'

'And do you know why?'

"Tell me.'

Javelle leaped down and strolled to the wall, standing so as not to obscure the design. She began her lecture.

They are absent because this hanging depicts Geron frey's many-windowed tower room just after Father and Mother had found the proper window back to Edan vant. There were eight gates - some to places of un imaginable horror.. . and some to the dead past. But Father magically sensed the right one and led them both safely through it.'

'Mother must have had a notion, too.'

'Perhaps.' Javelle moved past the other hangings, her eyes tallying scenes of other days, other worlds.

'Do you notice anything about Father in the tapestries?" Thane asked suddenly.

'Notice?'

Javelle paused to stare at a larger-than-life-size Kendric bridling an Empress Falgon in a cave while Irissa waited beside a shoulder-high egg. An iridescent armament of embroidered feathers sheathed the falgon's massive body. Crimson threads glinted in Kendric's dark hair while azure accented Irissa's night-black locks.

'I notice only that I sometimes forget that they were more in other worlds than we see them as here,' Javelle commented.

'More,' Thane prompted, some unspoken worry at his voice. 'More what?"

'More... mighty, magical, more adventurous, more Something lingered at the back of Javelle's mind, a word that refused to step forward, 'More... glamorous. Is that what you meant, that we only see our parents waren in plain threads now?'

He shook his head. I don't know what I meant, or wouldn't have asked. But I mean to study these hanging as closely as Scyvilla reads his casting crystals. The is more in them than meets the eye."

'I know them by heart." Javelle said. 'Or at least I when I was young. If you must mope, I suppose it's better that you do something constructive with your time.

She moved to the door, hoping that Thane would unkink his legs, leap off the table, and follow, saying, "I'm ready for a ride myself. Where were you and where are you going?"

This time he didn't. This time he didn't even say good bye.

Javelle hesitated on the threshold, turning back to see her brother circled by dimly glimmering tapestries in which figures moved as if shaken by a gentle, unseen hand.

She wished she could shake Thane, jolt him out of this new and disturbing reverie. He was ruining the balance of their contrasting characters, leaving her no ground of her own. She was the thoughtful one who cherished past and present. He was the impulsive one hurtling ever forward to the future. Now he had usurped her emotional bent as well as her magic.

She took a last summation of the depictions of her father. Nothing was 'different about them whatever did Thane mean? Father didn't change, Javelle told herself his children did, and that was natural. Children grew and parents grew older, save that Irissa and Kendric were magical exceptions to the rule.

Javelle shrugged and left Thane to brood among the fragile thread-worlds wafting against the walls.

But she found the palace strangely deserted, her mood too vaguely despondent to share with others. She had never realized how much Thane's antics had counter balanced her more somber nature. Without him, she was like a ball deprived of its bounce. She finally wandered into the kitchen and began rummaging food chests in search of something she couldn't name and that most likely was not edible.

Tis but an hour or two 'til dinner,' Arzino, the cook, sang out from behind his chopping block. The heads of coriander roots flew like woodchips.

I'm hungry now.'

You won't be then if you eat now.'

The kitchen staff still resented Scyvilla's usurpation of their role that few nights before. Rengarthians of ordinary talents that is, unmagicked people were proprietary about serving their rulers, a sentiment Javelle normally sympathized with.

I'm starving!' she repeated, pulling a string of tongue sweets from a hamper. The multicolored droplets glistened like beads. Javelle unwound a couple feet of them - observed Arzino's disapproving eye and unreeled another two feet of candy.

'A most merciless huntress,' said a voice at her feet. She looked down to see the white cat coiled imperially into a discarded flour sack as if reclining on swansdown stuffed ermine. It had laced its plumy tail through its entangled legs so that all four feet and its face - nose and toe pads rosy with sleep - rested on a cushion of fur.

'You don't look as if you could hunt a midge,' Javelle taunted.

'Looks deceive,' the cat replied, yawning until its whiskers bristled.

Javelle looped her booty around her arm and left, climbing the back stairs to her favorite reading nook - a long-forgotten window seat set into an awkward twist in the tower.

She had barely settled down with her feet tucked under her when the cat vaulted up beside her.

'Go away, you don't eat tongue-sweets.'

'Your father would say I needed to. You are a thorny girl! Most people would welcome a soft, pliant feline curled beside them."

'Yes, but you are neither of those. I've heard of your exploits in Rule and Edanvant.'

So the prejudices of the parents fall to the child The cat took a mournful tone. A sad world - or rather, worlds."

Javelle paused in stuffing the first ruby tongue-sweet into her mouth. 'You've been in other worlds? What's it like?'

'Different. The cat hiked a hind leg over its shoulder and began thoughtfully tonguing the back of the leg. seem to harbor dim memories older than I... but they ebb and flow like fog, and likely are not half so interesting as I am at this moment."

A dislodged white hair or two fluttered into a shaft of window light while Javelle, speechless, confronted a cat's massive self-satisfaction in the flesh and fur. She was her father's daughter. The past is a valuable lesson we can learn from,' she intoned dutifully.

"The past is overrated.'

'Father says it's the best road to the future.'

'What does he know?' the cat sniffed. 'All cats are older than time, no matter how young, but Kendric the Skeptic is only forty years ahead of the most ignorant babe."

'Forty years!' That seemed an incredibly long time to Javelle.

"Though among mortal men,' the cat conceded, washing its foot, 'that is considered a good sum of survival. I wonder with all of his battles that he has lasted long enough to produce some silver hairs.'

'Silver hairs?"

'Gray, if you must put it in common terms. I always fancy a touch of silver, however. Dark hair is ... un interesting.'

The cat flicked a last hair into the air. Javelle watched it float from side to side toward the cushion. 'Silver hairs,' she repeated.

'Mother has not a one ""Mother" is a Torloc. She will live forever - or what will seem like that.'

'But Father has magic-'

'Acquired, not inbred for generations."

Javelle had tired of the creature's self-satisfied tone. Do you have magic inbred for generations?"

'All cats do.'