Forging the Darksword - Margaret Weis [39]
Inside, Joram raised his head from the blankets cautiously. The catalyst had not left yet. He could hear the man shuffling about outside, then other footsteps approaching.
“You heard?” Father Tolban asked bitterly.
“Best leave her be,” advised the overseer. “And the kid, too.
“But he should be educated …”
“Bah!” The overseer snorted. “So the brat doesn’t know his catechism? As long as he’s ready for the fields when he’s eight, it doesn’t matter to me whether or not he can recite the Nine Mysteries.”
“If you could speak to her …”
“Her? I’d sooner speak to a centaur. You want the kid, you snatch him from her claws.”
“Perhaps you’re right,” Father Tolban muttered hastily. “I don’t suppose it matters much after all …”
The two walked away.
So that was part of The Difference, Joram thought. I am of noble blood, whatever that means.
But there was something else. There had to be. For, as Joram grew older, he began to realize that this Difference kept him apart from everyone—including his mother. He could see it sometimes in the way she looked at him when he performed some ordinary task, such as lifting an object in his hands or walking across the floor. He saw a fear in her eyes—a fear that made him afraid, too, though he didn’t know why. And whenever he started to ask, she looked away and was suddenly very busy.
One difference between Joram and the other children was obvious—the fact that he walked. Though he had his assigned tasks and studies to perform during the long day of isolation in the shack, he often spent much of that day at the window, staring enviously at the play of the other children in the village. Every noon, under the watchful eye of Father Tolban, they floated and tumbled about in the air, playing with any object their fancy imagined and their limited skills as growing magi allowed them to create. Joram longed most desperately to be able to float, not to be forced to walk upon the ground like the lowest rank of the Field Magi or that most stupid of creatures according to his mother—a catalyst.
“How do I know I can’t?” it occurred to the six-year-old to ask himself one day. “I’ve never really tried.”
Leaving the window, the boy looked around the shack. Formed from a dead free that had been magically shaped and hollowed out, the tree’s branches had been skillfully laced and twined to form a crude roof. High above Joram, a single branch of the natural tree extended the length of the ceiling. Working industriously, Joram dragged the crude worktable, formed of a stump, beneath the beam. Then he lifted up a chair onto the table and, climbing on it, looked up. Not high enough. Frustrated, he glanced about and spotted the potato bin in the corner. Clambering down, he dumped out the potatoes, hoisted the huge, hollowed-out gourd, and, after a great deal of effort, managed to position it on top of the chair.
Now he could reach the beam, just barely. The gourd wobbling beneath his feet, Joram touched the beam with his fingertips and, with a jump that sent the gourd tumbling off the table, caught hold of the branch and pulled himself up onto it. Looking down, he saw that the floor was a long way beneath him.
“But that doesn’t matter,” he said confidently. “I’m going to float like the others,” Drawing in a breath, Joram was just about to leap out into the air when suddenly the magical seal was broken, the door flew open, and his mother entered.
Anja’s startled gaze traveled from the table to the chair to the gourd on the floor and, Anally, to Joram, perched on the beam of the ceiling, staring at her with his dark eyes, his pale face a cold, blank mask. Instantly, Anja sprang into the air. Flying to the ceiling, she snatched