Forging the Darksword - Margaret Weis [52]
“No,” Joram answered in a tight, strained voice. Taking the stick, he hurled it far away from him. Then, staring at the boulder, his eyes dark and brooding, he repeated, “No. Not at all.”
Watching his friend, wondering uneasily at his unusual interest in such an unpleasant subject, Mosiah saw a shadow envelop Joram with a darkness so intense that the young man almost glanced up to see if a cloud had covered the sun. Strange, black moods descended on his friend sometimes. During these times, Joram remained shut in the shack, while Anja reported defiantly to the overseer that he was sick.
Once, curious and worried about his friend, Mosiah had sneaked back to Joram’s shack one day and looked in a window. There, he saw Joram stretched prone upon the cot, lying without moving, staring up at the ceiling. Mosiah tapped on the windowpane, but Joram neither stirred nor acted as if he heard him. He was lying in exactly the same position when Mosiah crept back to look that night. The sickness lasted a day or two, at the end of which time Joram returned to his work, maintaining his customary sullen aloofness.
But Mosiah had noticed something else, something no one else, perhaps not even Anja, had seen. These fits of black lethargy were almost always followed with fits of the most intense activity. For days on end, Joram would do the work of three men, driving himself to the verge of exhaustion so that he literally walked home in his sleep.
Now Joram stood wrapped in some dark, brooding thought and Mosiah, with the sensitivity and intuitive knowledge that had deepened through the years in regard to Joram, remained with him, knowing that he was—somehow—wanted and needed.
As he stood there, scarcely daring to breathe while Joram wrestled with whatever current demon possessed him, Mosiah studied his friend intently, trying as always to see inside that heavily guarded fortress.
As a result of his hard labor in the fields, Joram was, by the age of sixteen, strong and hard-muscled. His beauty, so striking as a child, had been roughly hewn and chiseled. Like the stone statue of his father, the marks of his inner torment had been carved into his face.
His alabaster skin was tanned a deep, smooth brown from working in the sun. The black eyebrows had thickened, slashing straight across his face in a dark line that dipped down slightly at the bridge of his nose, giving him a look of perpetual fierceness. The smooth, childish roundness of his cheeks had sunken into sharp, angular planes with high cheekbones and a strong jawline. His eyes were large and might have been considered beautiful, with their rich, clear brown color and long, thick eyelashes. But there was such anger, sullenness, and suspicion in those eyes that any who stood too long in their penetrating gaze soon grew nervous and uncomfortable.
Joram’s hair was still the one true beauty left from his childhood. His mother had never allowed it to be cut. Those who sometimes dared to peep through the window of the shack at night, and watch as Anja combed his hair out, whispered in awe that it came down to the middle of his back, falling in long tendrils of black around his shoulders.
Though Joram did not admit it, his hair had become his one vanity. He wore it braided when he worked—a long, thick coil that hung down his back. This in sharp contrast to the other young men, who wore their hair blunt-cut and chin-length. The image of Joram, seated in a chair while Anja combed his hair, caused a story to spring up among the other peasants, who told that a spider with a comb spun a black web of hair around the young man.
This image was in Mosiah’s mind, seeing the black web Joram was spinning around himself, when suddenly Joram lifted his head and turned to his friend.
“Come with me,” he said.
Mosiah started, a thrill tingling through his veins. Joram’s face was clear, the