Seven Swords

Chapter 3

'It's late,' he said abruptly. 'We are hungry and tired, all of us. I suggest we discuss this tomorrow. The import ant fact is that we are all safe and sound.' His fingers played across the sword hilt in passing, as if including it in their family circle.

Irissa hesitated, then nodded, looking worry-worn despite her endless youth. Kendric's hand stroked her hair as it cloaked her shoulder. She softened suddenly, then moved to the children, a hand on each to guide them from the room and end debate.

Javelle turned.

I’ll follow in a moment,' Kendric said. 'I want to examine the sword. Javelle-'

She slipped her mother's light custody and came over as obediently as a puppy, anxiety riding high in her eyes.

Mother and son were fading from the room, speaking intensely. Thane would want to consult Irissa about his recent exercise of magic. It came instinctively to him, but not always the understanding of it.

Kendric didn't always understand magic, but there were other, less spectacular things he did understand.

Javelle' I'm sorry,' she blurted. 'Nobody paid any attention to the sword anymore. I didn't think anyone would miss it." 'We missed you. A ludborg noticed the sword was gone.

'Oh.'

Kendric sighed and examined the chamber. The royal apartments, as Rengarthians insisted on calling them, had been redesigned to reflect the world in which he and Irissa had grown up. Their luxuries were plain rather than fancy devoid of magic or Torlockian embellishments and even of Rengarthian innovations.

Good stone made walls all around. There were solid stone tables and wooden chairs, a ring of Irissa's tapestries that chronicled earlier adventures - an empty fireplace quite useless in this land of endless summer except in the bordering mountains.

Even the sword looked quite ordinary in this setting, though it was twice-forged and in its second incarnation, being a mind-made copy of the original sword Kendric had borne and abandoned - in Rule.

Now his fingertips traced the Rengarthian runes that inscribed the hilt. His touch or perhaps his thought polished the metal to a glow that grew torch-bright.

Javelle sucked in her breath.

Kendric glanced at her and lifted his hand. The light faded and all was ordinary again.

'Thane can do that now, too, Javelle said softly.

He nodded. 'I wish I had seen the leaveweavers before they vanished. I like to catalogue the creatures of this place; no one here has thought to do that. Consequently legend and reality entwine each other. I like my reality well defined.'

"They were strange, but not so frightening-'

'How much danger were you in?'

She shrugged. 'I'm here.'

'You had the sword. Why?'

'Because . . .'

He waited. She was seventeen now, a young woman in many respects, yet still a child. He would have to drag it out of her and, with Javelle, silence was always her worst enemy.

'Because-' Her eyes met his. He was struck by their purely human magic and perversely proud of it, although they came from no strain he recognized in himself or Irissa.

Javelle's delicate fingers played over the metal below the hilt. She would never touch the hilt in anyone's presence now that it had failed to respond to her. But she looked at it as she spoke, slowly.

The sword showed you the road to your magic. I thought if anything would

'Did it?'

Her head shook, tendrils flying and glinting gold in the sword's dying hilt-light.

Kendric began to sound a bit angry at last. 'If someone - something - had showed me the road to "my magic" when I was your age, or even a great deal older, I would have turned my back on it and marched the other way.'

'Why?'

I didn't want magic. You call it mine, but I have always been its and unwillingly so.'

'Still - you have it.'

'And?'

'And Mother has it. I know what I should have been borna seeress! All the ludborgs predicted great things at my birth... '

'And at Thane's. Ludborgs are prone to that sort of thing. They would have waxed eloquent at the birth of a marsh-midge, had Irissa and I had one.'

Javelle smiled despite herself, out of the corner of her mouth.

'And-?' Kendric prompted.

She sighed. He always knew when there was another 'and.

' Thane has it. He doesn't even have to try.'

"Perhaps you try too hard.' Kendric lifted the sword into the light and turned the hilt until the runes were almost readable. 'So you took the sword and Thane followed. You remind me of myself.'

'You!'

'I prefer action to inaction. Do you realize how much of Thane is what he is because he bears his own curse?" Incredulous, she stared at him.

'He had to follow you. He is not even an heir of Ren garth, since he is not firstborn.'

'But rulership of Rengarth is not important to you, to us! We spring from elsewhere, even though you were conceived here. If we could find a way to leave, we'd probably go home to-'

"To where?"

'Edanvant.'

Kendric laughed and pulled her against the solid com fort of his shoulder. 'Javelle, Javelle, such a glutton for punishment! You want to surround yourself with em powered Torlocs when you pine for power yourself? Believe me, you would not like it. No, not Edanvant.'

'Rule, then.'

'Ruined Rule. Yes, there are many there without magical powers, as there are many here in Rengarth. But they ply other powers in Rule. You would not like them, either.'

'How do you know!' she burst out, pulling away in conviction rather than anger.

He didn't answer directly, instead lifting the sword and balancing it on the floor. Even while he was sitting, the hilt only came chin-high on him. He manipulated the heavy steel as lightly as if it were a reed.

'You got it down yourself?' he said.

'Yes.'

'How?'

'I climb well."

'And-'

'Getting something heavy down is always easier than putting it up again. I let its own weight bring it me - down.'

Then you got it - unseen to the stables and atop Thundermist?"

'It isn't far from the High Seat chamber to the back kitchen passage. I chose the time between meals. And I wrapped it in burlap.'

He nodded gravely. 'Yet... in the leaveweaver circle, you were helpless.'

'I never said-'

'That's how I knew. Irissa was right: your actions mired you deeper than you could withdraw. Don't blame your mother for becoming angry at your escapade; it masks her fear. You could have perished had Thane not followed you.'

'He always follows me!"

'You're the elder. But, tell me, for all your plans, you learned nothing of the sword or of yourself that could have saved you?'

She shook her head in mute discomfort. 'Only that... I don't even know how to court magic. And.. only that you must be very much stronger than I to carry such a thing.'

'Yet you got it."

'But I wearied of it. I don't know what I wanted, what I thought! I only wanted to do something."

'So you did.' Kendric smiled and tilted the hilt toward her. 'Take it.'

'I can't!' 'Show me.'

'I don't want you to see.'

"Take it,' he repeated, his voice and eyes adamant. He was not father anymore, but teacher.

She braced herself for the sword's wearing weight. Upholding it for one more time, one more minute, seemed unbearable.

I've tired from battling it. I was glad when Thane came to bring me back and helped me with it. It's yours, not mine. I should never have taken it.'

'When you believed in it, you could lift it. Now it is as heavy as your despair. You make it unsupportable. Raise it'

'I can't!'

He stood and walked away from the table, leaving her clinging to the upright sword. It seemed both weapon and young woman would sway and fall together. Javelle's silk soft face looked gaunt, tired, in the torchlight. A father would have had mercy on her.

Kendric folded his arms. 'Lift the sword- not high, just enough to lift it to an enemy, to defend yourself."

She regarded him aghast.

She had always seen him as her father. Of course he had seemed large to her childish eyes. Later, she had come to realize he seemed large to everyone else, that he was large beyond the ordinary measure of men.

Still, he had never been too large to crouch by her tottering first footsteps, to catch her when she fell. Nor had he been too great to pace alongside her first bearing beast a squat, odd-hided, snuffling sort of scaled crea ture Scyvilla the ludborg had produced from a Bubblemere exclusively for her, so he said.

Everyone had always heeded her father - except some times her mother. Even Thane at his most balkish had obeyed that deep, seldom-ruffled voice as it floated over their childhood heads until they grew tall enough to hear it on its own level.

Now her father asked Javelle to do something she feared she could not, something she always knew she was un worthy of. She was heir of Rengarth by birthright: by precedence, not merit. By customary right of gender and magic, she had no claim to anything.

Her father frowned. The torchlight struck random silver from his eyebrows and the borders of his dark hair that she had never noticed before. Javelle remained frozen, the act of holding the sword upright a test in itself after her long day of dragging it after her.

Kendric's frown deepened. She couldn't remember him looking so stern, like one forced to do something he loathed.

'If you won't lift it to satisfy me - lift it to save your self.' He could have thundered, but his voice had sunk,

echoing vibrantly in the simple stone-walled room.

She shook her head, tried to shrug her shoulders.

Then her father's burnished brown eyes were no longer looking at her but staring within - within and Without.

The stones lurched under her feet. What bound them gave as they ground apart. A tentative hand reached through the gap, coarse hairs cresting its black skin.

Before her eyes the tissue of the floor gave way, rent like filmy gauzelin. Small red-glimmering eyes peered up at her; a length of hairy body rose from the c***k in the floor.

Javelle saw yellow teeth, a profusion of hairy limbs, all clawed. She saw the glitter of a gold-studded leather vest on the beastly body. Beyond it she saw the stolid, conjuring figure of her father. The worst was knowing how Kendric hated to evoke anything with his magic, least of all a monster from his daughter's darkest dreams.

'It's not fair,' she cried. 'You claim you don't want magic, yet use it to make me confront my absence of it. Father-'

He was a wall of suddenly overly rational adulthood, impervious to her pleas. Between them his horrific evo cation squirmed and thrust its scabrous nether regions through the widening chasm in the floor.

Javelle tightened her muscles until they cramped. The sword point lifted from the floor, then plunged to supporting stone again.

I can't, she told herself. Not alone. Not without magic. Please... if anything of magic dwells within me or without me, upon me or about me, let it show itself. Let me show myself

Her arms strained to raise the blade, tautening until rills of fire ran down them. Her muscles swelled against the silver snake around her upper arm until she felt the metal would snap.

Perhaps in reaction to her struggle, the insensate but mobile thing unwound itself. Javelle felt blood throb back into her upper arm. The snake slithered down her arm to the wrist, wrapping it in a tight cuff of silver scales. The head arranged itself on the back of her hand, the tiny silver tongue that always protruded pointing delicately to Javelle's middle finger.