Seven Swords

Chapter 13

He reached boldly for the animal's lean middle, then froze as if spellbound. 'It can speak. Let it tell us."

There was a silence in which one could hear a cat's tongue rasp over its fur.

"Tell us, Kendric advised the cat.

"There's no telling when Thane might get the urge to see for himself again." Felabba regarded Thane intently. He is a rude boy." Javelle crowed.

'Like his father,' the cat added demurely. Thane and Javelle held their breaths. No one talked to their father in that fashion, especially children and underlings. To their astonishment, Kendric laughed.

This creature must share some passing acquaintance with its undistinguished forebear. It has learned the art of insult somewhere. I confess a certain ... nostalgia for the noxious beast. I have heard nothing but courtly courtesies for so long. Here, young Bitterbones, have some borgía.'

Kendric tilted his goblet, which had filled lip-high again the moment he drained it. Drops of borgia lay quivering like cabochon emeralds on the polished wood.

'Your hospitality, like your wit, is late arriving, Wrath man,' the cat noted, hunching its face over the green liquor, 'and it could use a bowl. Still... this is better than I have had in some time."

'How long?' Irissa sounded suspicious.

The cat quirked a whisker. 'Long enough for me to keep the answer to myself. And as for my gender, I tend a riddle to test your offspring's wits. I am neither male nor female; make of me - and that fact - what you will."

"That's not a riddle!' Javelle objected. That's a statement.'

Now you begin to grasp what Felabba was like,' Kendric said.

All four people hovered over the table to watch the cat daintily lap the drops of borgia. A royal family's life in Rengarth was well ordered. Disruption of routine, even in a furred form, was welcome.

Despite its easy acceptance into the family and Javelle's pleas to the contrary, the cat was not allowed into the dining chamber. Instead it was borne off on the shoulder of a ludborg for a tour of the kitchens that were its proper environs.

'Let it beg for its supper and learn the humility that was so becoming to its predecessor,' Kendric said sardonically, as the family trailed in to dinner.

'Why have we never seen a cat here before, Father?' Javelle asked.

I don't know. They're common enough in other worlds. Common as coldstones.' 'Cat's don't beg,' Irissa put in suddenly in answer to Kendric's next to the last statement. They hunt. I wonder what this one is hunting in Rengarth."

'Us?' Kendric asked lightly in reply. Irissa shivered a little, and his eyebrow lifted. 'It's chill after sunfall, sometimes,' she said, 'despite the summer warmth.' 'Perhaps our bones feel the chill more now,' Kendric in their infancy as Torloc life spans go. Sometimes he suggested without considering that Irissa's bones were seemed to forget entirely that she was Torloc.

'Hmm,' she murmured, then turned to the boy on her

left. 'Thane, I want you to sit with me this evening I ply my tapestry. We should discuss the degrees of farseeing.

'Oh, Mother, must I? I know farseeing backward and forward.'

'Then you shall learn it from side to side. Yes, you must .

Kendric lifted his head from his plate of breaded swan. fish at Irissa's sudden sharp tone. There was an urgency to her of late he could not explain. Sometimes he thought that being trapped in the same land for all these years had worn on her as much as it had on him.

Thane had recognized the maternal imperative as well. though his face still looked ready to advocate his own wishes. In the brewing eye of a family storm, Javelle dropped her knife with a clatter that ended the discussion.

Kendric glanced to his daughter's face. It was set with a control he found alien in one so young. Perhaps Irissa should also speak privately to Javelle more often ...

Then the meal was done and the torches were lighting the chamber on their own initiative, as they always did after dinner, Irissa and Thane were pushing back their chairs in tandem. Kendric had a meeting with citizens concerned about an epidemic of poisoning among their livestock.

Once more a family dinner ended with more questions than answers and every one of them unspoken. Kendric frowned as he patted Javelle's shoulder in leaving. She remained sitting at the table, looking as if her small frame harbored a world's worth of worry. He would have to address the hidden family malaise soon, Kendric decided as he wound his way down the palace stairs to the council chamber. Very soon.

Thane roved around the chamber as Irissa settled herself on a stool by the tapestry stand. Other tapestries of her design huge rectangles of oddly gossamer fabric covered the gray stones. -

Candle flames beat like moths' wings. The tapestry threads gleamed iridescent in the light. Wind rarely rested in Rengarth; even within the strongest stone walls some infiltrating breeze managed to shake whatever it moved among.

You think embroidery work beneath a person of my powers,' Irissa noted from her modest corner of the room. Thane whirled, startled to have his thoughts read. 'You are not a burgher's wife in need of occupation.'

'I am a Ruler's wife, which is even worse, even more designed for idleness. But my work at this stand is hardly idle. Have you ever really looked at my weavings, Thane?"

'Of course. I've seen them since childhood.' Irissa smiled a little at that 'since.' She sheathed her needle in the canvas and turned to her son. 'Look again,' she suggested in such an understated tone that he obliged without question. She watched him comply with mixed feelings.

He was her tapestry, too, this child. This son. Braided before birth from the separate strands of her own and Kendric's selfhood, born to swell upon the loom of life until he stretched to meet the limits of his potential. Yet Thane was both the woven and the weaver of his fate. And his potential was unproven. He was the first birth-born Torloc wizard, a creature of unimaginable magic.

It was into this unproven, childish son of hers that Irissa now poured her deepest, most desperate hopes. Thane's native impatience ebbed enough to let him survey the glittering tapestries. They are histories, aren't they?'

'Recent histories. Of our travels from Rule to the Inlands of Ten to Edanvant and finally Rengarth. Of how we met, Kendric and I, and of what we met with on our journeys.'

Thane waved a hand at the tapestries, that lifted and sank in the interior wind as if buoyed by seawater. The lulling motion lent the illusion of life to the figures worked into the fabric.

I've heard all this,' he said.

"Then listen again,' Irissa said with an iron in her voice that no child of hers had heard yet..

Thane spun to face her, intrigued and ashamed at the same time. Irissa's long dark hair was stirring in the faint indoor breeze.

Thane could see the dancing candlelight strike a rainbow reflection from the black strands. It seemed a length of living Iridesium, vibrant with Irissa's will and power.

Her silver eyes shone like stars in the dark, moonless Rengarthian sky. Thane had, at times in his development. found his mother both beautiful and powerful, though never at the same time. Now he saw the terrible beauty of her inborn power, and wondered how he could ever have underestimated her simply because she was his mother. '

The Torloc quest is sewn onto those walls in threads of blood and tears,' she said. But what is recent history to me and mine is twisted from a master thread of magic longer and older than even some of the worlds we walked I think.'

'You've never spoken like this before.'

'I never had the need.'

I'll listen, Thane said with a humility new to him. Irissa smiled, then felt a tear at her heart, as if the weight of its own being had ripped one of her tapestries along a hidden faultline. He was so young! She was about to ask so much of him. She began. 'You know of the gates we Torlocs followed from world to world in search of Edanvant.

You know how they found that long-lost ancestral place, and how your father and I found the surviving Torlocs there divided, bitter."

'But you reconciled them. You two built the bridge between city and forest, men and women. Why did you leave? I know you - we can't leave Rengarth, that it is a f*******n world save to its own. But why did you leave Edanvant for here and how?' -

'That part we never told you and Javelle.'

'Why?'

'We... didn't want to frighten you.'

'I'm not afraid of anything!'

There it was, twelve-year-old bravado resurfacing in a fifteen-year-old face. So young, Irissa thought, yet.. her only hope.

We had an enemy,' she told him, a powerful sorcerer who craved my powers and secretly knew of and feared Kendric's birthright to Rengarth. Geronfrey has dogged us through many worlds and always sought to... end us.'

That Thane feared. He was still young enough that the unwelcome notion of losing his caretakers, his parents, struck with the impact of an arrow to the heart.

'Even here?'

'Even here. Especially here.'

Thane dropped his head to hide his stricken eyes. "That is why you worry so when Javelle and I explore the land. I thought-' You thought your parents were simply... irrational. Foolish. Mean.' Thane's head dropped even lower. 'If my powers and Kendric's blood were so precious to Geronfrey that he must have them at any cost, think how your particular portion of both would... madden him.'

'You... bested him?'

'We saw him leave horribly, through a window to - Without.'"

'Without permits nothing to survive itself, you said so!' 'So I thought. With Geronfrey, one can never be sure.' Thane took a turn around the room, staring at the tapestries. 'So even in this safest of places, you never felt safe.'

'Rengarth is not so safe. You forget their poisonous politics. Our reign... has been brief. There is much time yet for other clans to usurp the role of Usurper from Geronfrey now that he is apparently banished - and overthrow us. And we never asked for this rulership!'

'No wonder Father worries. So.' Thane turned eagerly. You want something of me. What is it?

You want me to find and destroy this Geronfrey, to free you all from his shadow?' Irissa almost laughed, save that it would have shriveled Thane's burgeoning confidence. If only it were so simple! 'No,' she said calmly. 'We have lived with Geronfrey with the threat of Geronfrey for longer than lived, and we can do so comfortably for many lifetimes, It is not Geronfrey I would have you duel, but a vaguer, more insidious enemy. Mortality.'