Forging the Darksword - Margaret Weis [74]
“How could he be among you all that time and you have no notion that he was Dead?” Saryon asked.
They shrugged. “If he was Dead,” said a woman, with a contemptuous glance at Father Tolban. “Joram did the work, same as the rest of us. So he didn’t have Life enough in him to walk the air. Neither do you, Catalyst.” She said this with a sneer and the others laughed.
“He were a pretty babe,” commented one.
“And a comely man,” said another. At this Saryon saw a young girl nod so enthusiastically that she blushed red when she noticed him watching her. “Or he would have been, “the older woman added, “if he ever smiled. But he didn’t, nor laughed neither.”
“Nor cried,” said Mosiah’s father. “Not even when he was little. I saw him take a bad spill once—Joram was always fallin’ or stumblin’ into things, seems like. Anyway, he split his head clean open. Blood ran down his face. It liked to knocked him silly for a bit. A growed man would have cried over that and not felt the least shamed. He had tears in his eyes, too. By the Almin, the lad was only eight or nine. But he gritted his teeth and blinked them back. ‘Damn it, boy,’ I said, running over to help him, ‘let out a holler or two. I would if I’d taken a hurt like that.’ But he only gave me such a look with those brown eyes of ’is it was a wonder I warn’t turned to stone on the spot.”
“It was his mother done it to him,” said the older woman with a sniff. “She was moonstruck, was that one. Wearin’ that fancy dress ’til it fell off her body. Fillin’ his head with stories of Merilon and how he was better than the rest of us.”
“He had beautiful hair,” said the young girl, shyly. “And, I—I think I saw him smile … once. We were working together in the woods and I found a wild rose. He seemed so unhappy most of the time that … that I gave it to him.” The young girl looked down at her hands, flushing. “I felt sorry for him.”
“What’d he do?” The woman snorted. “Bite your hand?”
The others snorted derisively or snickered, causing the young girl to blush and fall silent.
“What did he do?” Saryon asked gently.
Glancing up at him, the girl smiled. “He didn’t take it. He acted almost like it frightened him. But he smiled at me … I think he smiled. It was more with his eyes than his lips—”
“Foolish child,” snapped the woman, who was her mother. “Go home and finish your chores.”
“It’s true, though,” said one of the others. “I never seen hair so thick and black on the head of any living being. But if you ask me, it were a curse, not a beauty.”
“It was a curse,” Marm Hudspeth muttered, peering at the abandoned, tumbledown hovel that had been Joram’s home with an eager gleam in her eye. “The mother was cursed and she passed it on to her son. She chewed at him, gnawing away at his soul. She dug her nails into him and sucked his blood.”
Mosiah’s father laughed derisively, causing Marm to glare at him. “Ye’ve little to laugh at, Jacobias,” she cried shrilly. “Yer own boy’s gone off to find him! Dead? Yes, Joram is Dead and it’s my belief Anja took the Life from him. Drew it out of his body to use in her own! Ye’ve all seen the white scars on his chest …”
“What scars?” Saryon was about to ask. But the conversation ended abruptly when Jacobias, with a show of magical force Saryon found quite alarming considering the magus had worked a full day, angrily vanished into the air. Shaking their heads, the other Field Magi made their weary way to their shacks to get what sleep they could before daybreak found them back in the fields again.
Returning to his own dwelling, Saryon thought about what he’d heard, beginning to form a picture of this young man in his mind. Product of a cursed and unholy alliance, raised by an insane mother, the young man was probably half crazed himself. Add to the fact that he was Dead (Father Tolban had expressed no doubt whatsoever on this point), and it was a wonder he had not murdered or committed some other brutal act before this.
And this was the young man Saryon was supposed to go into the Outland and find?
The priest’s