Forging the Darksword - Margaret Weis [47]
Joram thought of him.
He thought of his father every night, as Anja told the story while she combed his hair, and every night when he went to bed, the words “Dead but alive” reached out to him from the darkness. He thought of him every night from then on, because Anja told him the story again and again, night after night, as she combed the tangles from his hair with her fingers.
As some use wine to ease the pains of living, so Anja’s words were the bitter wine that she and Joram drank. Only this wine did not ease pain. Born of madness, it gave birth to pain itself. For at last Joram understood The Difference, or thought he did. Now at last he could understand his mother’s pain and hatred and share in it.
During the day, he still watched the other children at their play, but now his look was not envious. Like his mother’s, it was contemptuous. Joram began to play a game of his own, sitting day after day in the silent hovel. He was the moon, hanging in the dark heavens, staring down at the buglike mortals below, who sometimes looked up at him in his cold and shining majesty, but who could not touch him.
Thus he spent his days. And every night, as she combed his hair, Anja recited her tale.
From that time on, if Joram cried, no one ever saw his tears.
10
The Game
Joram was seven when the dark and secret part of his education began.
One evening after dinner, Anja reached out her hands and ran her fingers through Joram’s thick, tangled hair. Joram tensed; this was always the beginning of the stories, a time that he confusedly both longed for and dreaded every hour of his lonely day. But she did not begin to comb out his hair as usual. Puzzled, the boy looked up at her.
Anja was staring at him, fondling his hair absently. She studied his face, moving her hand to caress his cheek. All the while he could see that she was turning something over in her mind, fingering an idea as one of the Pron-alban fingers a gem to see if it is flawed. Finally, her lips tightened in resolution.
Gripping Joram by the arm, she pulled him down to sit beside her on the floor.
“What is it, Anja?” he asked uneasily. “What are we doing? Aren’t you going to tell me about my father?”
“Later,” said Anja firmly. “Now, we are going to play a game.”
Joram looked at his mother in wary amazement. Never in her life had Anja played at anything, and he had a feeling she was not going to begin now. Anja tried to smile at the boy reassuringly, but Anja’s strange, wild-eyed grins only increased Joram’s nervousness. Yet he watched her with a kind of hungry eagerness. Whatever she did seemed to hurt him, but—like a man who cannot help running his tongue over an aching tooth—Joram could not seem to help touching his aching heart, feeling a certain grim satisfaction in knowing that the pain was still there.
Anja reached into a pouch that hung from a strip of leather she wore round her waist and drew out a small, smooth stone. Tossing the stone into the air, she used her magic to cause the air to swallow it up. As the stone disappeared, Anja looked at Joram with an expression of triumph that the boy found quite perplexing. There was nothing marvelous in the stone’s disappearance. Such feats were commonplace, even in the lowly world of the Field Magus. Now, if she would only show him some of the marvels she had described that were created in Merilon …
“Very well, little pet,” said Anja, reaching into the air and producing the stone, “since you are so unimpressed, you try it.”
Joram scowled, his dark, feathery eyebrows drawing a grim line across the childish face. There it was. There was the hurt. He touched the dull ache.
“You know I can’t,” he said sullenly.
“Take the stone, my sweet one,” Anja said playfully, holding it out to him.
But Joram saw no playful laughter in his mother’s eyes, only purpose, resolution, and a strange, eerie glint. Reaching out, Joram took the stone.
“Make the air swallow it,” Anja commanded.
Still scowling, the boy tossed the stone into the air with an exasperated sigh. It clattered