Forging the Darksword - Margaret Weis [40]
“What do you think you are doing, my little love?” Anja asked feverishly, clutching Joram to her as they drifted down to the floor.
“I want to float, like them,” Joram replied, pointing outside and squirming to escape his mother’s pinching grasp.
Setting her son down, Anja glanced over her shoulder at the peasant children and her lip curled.
“Never again disgrace me or yourself with such thoughts!” she said, attempting to sound stern. But her voice wavered, her eyes went to the crude device Joram had put together to gain his object. Shuddering, she put her hand over her mouth; then, with a look of revulsion, she hurriedly grabbed down the chair, flinging it into the corner. She turned to face Joram, her face deathly pale, words of reprimand on her lips.
But she couldn’t say them. In Joram’s eyes, she saw the question, framed and ready to ask.
And she was not prepared to answer it.
Without a word, Anja turned on her heel and left the shack.
Joram did, of course, attempt the leap from the roof, daring it during harvest time when he was certain his mother would be too busy to return to lunch, as she had taken to doing now more often. Balancing on the very edge of the beam, the child jumped, willing with all the strength of his small being that he hang suspended in the cool fall air like the griffins, and then drift to the ground, lightly as a windblown leaf ….
He landed, not like a windblown leaf, but like a rock hurled down the face of a mountain. The fall hurt the boy severely. Picking himself up, he felt a sharp pain in his side when he drew a breath.
“What is the matter with my pet?” Anja asked him playfully that evening. “You are very quiet.”
“I jumped off the roof,” Joram answered, looking at her steadily. “I was trying to float like the others.”
Anja scowled, and again opened her mouth to reprimand the boy. But she saw, once again, the question in the boy’s eyes.
“And what happened?” she asked gruffly, her hands plucking at the tattered remnants of her green dress.
“I fell,” Joram answered his mother, who wasn’t looking at him. “I hurt myself, right here.” He pressed his hand against his side.
Anja shrugged. “I hope you have learned your lesson,” she remarked coldly. “You are not like the others. You are different. And everytime you try to be like the others, you will hurt yourself or they will hurt you.”
She is right. I’m not like the others. Joram knew that, now. But why? What was the reason?
That winter, the winter when he was six, Joram thought again that he might have discovered the answer.
Joram was a beautiful child. Even the hardbitten overseer could not help but pause in his daily grind to turn and stare on those occasions when the boy was allowed outside the shack. From being kept constantly indoors during the day, Joram’s skin was smooth and white and as translucent as marble. His eyes were large and expressive, surrounded by thick black eyelashes so long that they brushed his cheeks. His eyebrows were black and set low on his head, giving him a brooding, serious adult air that accorded oddly with his childish face.
But Joram’s most outstanding feature was his hair. Thick and luxuriant, black as the glistening plumage of the raven, it sprang from a sharp peak in the center of his forehead to fall down around his shoulders in a mass of tangled curls.
Unfortunately, this lovely hair was the bane of Joram’s childhood. Anja refused to cut it, and it was now so thick and long that only hours of painful combing and tugging on Anja’s part could remove the snarls and tangles. She tried braiding it, but the hair was so unruly that it sprang out of the braid almost within minutes, curling around the child’s face and bouncing on his shoulders as if possessed of a life of its own.
Anja was extremely proud of her son’s beauty. Keeping his hair clean and well-groomed was her great pleasure—her only pleasure, in fact, since she haughtily held herself apart from her neighbors. The combing of Joram’s hair developed into a nightly ritual—a dismal ritual for Joram. Every evening,