Sorcerer's Son (25 page)

“The Seer promised ill, Cray. Why don’t you ask him what he hesitates to tell you?”

“That would be rude, Feldar. He has his House’s business to attend to. I am not so important that he would leave off his own affairs to deal with me.”

“I think he would. He seems to have a kind heart. The way he spoke to you last night—it pained him to tell you about the shield, I could see that plainly.”

Cray closed his eyes. “I am of two minds on the matter. I want to know, yet I dread the knowledge. This is the end of the road, Feldar. What he tells me will color my whole life.”

Sepwin laid an arm across his friend’s shoulders. “Eat something,” he advised. “The world always looks cheerier on a full stomach.”

Cray shook his head. “It would be like lead inside me.”

“Better lead than nothing.” Sepwin thrust the trencher at him. “You didn’t sleep well, I can see that At least eat.”

Cray sighed and took a morsel. He chewed without relish. “It’s like dust in my mouth.”

“Your stomach won’t think it’s dust.”

The midday meal had ended for everyone in the hall before Fayr Ballat sent a page to fetch Cray to him.

“I hardly know what to tell you, Master Cray,” he said. “The name Mellor means nothing to my house hold, nor does your description of him stir any memories, though a description secondhand, as yours, carries no great weight behind it. Still, the time, near sixteen years ago, proves to have some significance—the old steward tells me that a sword and shield and suit of chain were taken from the armory, and a horse from the stables, at about that time. Spring it was, he said. He remembers it because he was beaten for allowing such a thing to happen. The armory guards and the stableboys were punished severely, but the thief was never identified. Nor did anyone ever determine where the stolen items went.”

Cray stared at him. “Thief?”

“I know nothing of this myself,” said Fayr Ballat. “I was just a stripling then, my father was lord, and I paid no attention to household details. But I have no reason to doubt the old steward’s memory. I think that sword and shield must be the ones you brought with you.”

Cray’s gaze drifted from his host’s face to the floor at his feet, his head bowing as if the ceiling were pressing down on him. At last he laughed a dry, humorless laugh. “I was prepared to hear almost anything when I came here. I was prepared to discover that he had been driven away from his home for some terrible crime. Now I find the crime was real but petty. And I still don’t know who he was.”

“You have come a long way,” said Fayr Ballat, “for so little. I am sorry indeed.”

“I thank you for your sympathy, my lord. I will trouble you no more.” He began to turn away, but Fayr Ballat’s strong arm stayed him.

“What will you do now, Master Cray?”

“I don’t know.”

“You can’t return over the mountains—winter has already closed the passes. Stay here the season. Begin your training with us; my knights are well versed in their arts.”

“I have no claim on you, my lord,” said Cray. “As my father appears to have been no one, so I am no one as well.”

“You have a strong heart,” said Fayr Ballat. “And, from what the stablemaster tells me, a fine horse. Sword, shield, chain—what more could an aspiring knight need? I care less for bloodlines than for determination and skill. You seem to have the one; we can try to give you the other here at Mistwell. We’ve a long winter ahead of us and only a few young men to train. Another mouth and another arm won’t strain us.” He glanced at Sepwin, sitting on the bench across the room. “Even two mouths.”

“We travel together,” said Cray.

“Does your friend wish to be a knight, too?”

“No, my lord.”

“That’s as well, I think. He hasn’t the shoulders for it. You have. Will you accept Mistwell’s hospitality?”

“You are very kind to offer it. I shall accept.”

“Good lad.”

As Cray crossed the room to tell Sepwin the news, he could not help feeling that something had died inside him this day. He wondered how much his mother could sense through her tapestry—the emptiness in the pit of the stomach, the heaviness of limbs and head, the world as gray as if the very color had drained away from it? There were spiders in his clothing, waiting for the command to spin a web in some secluded place, that he and she could talk, but somehow he could not bring himself to face her just now.

Maybe not for a long time.

Ť ^ ť

Winter was gone, and the snows that still clung to the heights beneath the spring sun were fast melting into icy, rushing rivulets. On every slope, new green was burgeoning, thrusting up through the wet mulch of last year’s growth, and the hares that frequented the passes were shedding their white coats for summer’s brown. Cray and Sepwin had been picking their way northward for some days, moving slowly on a path treacherous with chilly mud. Pebbles rolled under their horses’ steps, loosened by freeze and thaw and flowing water. Once, they encountered a section of the road sunk more than a man’s reach below its former level, and they had to dismount and lead their steeds a precarious, tilting scramble around the hole. Shortly after this, they found a small cave which opened from a cul-de-sac off the road, and they halted there for the night, though the sun was still high. The cave smelled of wolves, but it contained none. The companions built a bright blaze in its entrance, in case any former occupants tried to return. It was their first dry camp since leaving Mistwell.

“I would have waited till a bit later in the season,” said Sepwin, “if the decision had been mine.”

Cray shook his head. He was watching his spiders spin a large web against the cave wall. “I had no patience for waiting. She said we would be back, so let it be soon.”

Sepwin lay with his feet toward the fire, and the mud that encrusted his footgear steamed in the radiant heat, turning slowly to hard clay. “I could wish you weren’t so eager to prove her power,” he muttered. The spiders had done, and even as they scuttled from the web it began to flow gray and opaque. From the silk-covered cave wall, as if from a window cut through the mountainside, light spilled. At Castle Spinweb, too, the sun was high, and the web chamber was brightly lit. A bluebird perched, twittering, on the velvet coverlet; as Cray and Sepwin watched, it took wing and flashed through the high window, into the garden. Not long after that, Delivev came into the room.

She wore black feathers still. Cray had seen her in nothing else all winter, the few times he had crept away from other humans and spun a web where there were no witnesses. She was still beautiful, he thought, but thinner now than when he had left her, and paler than ever from the wan winter sunshine.

“Where are you, Cray?” she asked.

“In a cave some days’ ride north of Mistwell, Mother.”

“A cave? Are you on some quest for your lord?” Cray shook his head.

“I’ve left Mistwell, Mother. I’m going back to the Seer.”

“The Seer

?” Delivev looked at his eyes. “I thought you were happy with the House of Ballat. I thought

that you would stay and find your knighthood among them. They want you, don’t they?”

“They want me,” said Cray. “And they have been more than kind. I have learned so much this winter that I can scarcely believe I knew so little before. And above all, at Mistwell I fought real men, not bundles of cloth or trees, but men who could dodge and strike back, men with far more skill than I. Though I gave a good account of myself, I think. I shall always be grateful to the House of Ballat for this winter’s experience.” He broke the line of their gaze and looked to the ground. “But I had a question when I arrived at Mistwell, and I found no answer there. I don’t know where that answer lies, but I do know that the Seer foresaw my return to her home, and so I will go there because I can’t think where else would be a better place.”

Softly, his mother said, “You could come back to Spinweb.”

He sighed heavily. “I don’t doubt that she will advise me so. But perhaps she will have some other thought as well. I can only hope so.” He lifted his gaze to hers, and there was pain in his face. “Mother, I must know. If there is any way in the world, I must know!”

Her features mirrored his. “And if there is no way, my son?”

He bit his lip very hard, tasted the blood, warm and metallic, on his tongue. “Then I will come home,” he said at last, and his voice broke on the final word. His eyes brimmed suddenly. “Oh, how could he have done this to us?” he blurted.

“I respect his reasons,” Delivev said. “Whatever they were.”

Cray shook his head violently.

“I only wish,” she went on, “that he could have known we had a son. You look very well, Cray. You look strong and hard.” She paused, watching the silent tears streak his face. “Now is not the time for us to talk, I think. Take care of yourself. I love you always. Farewell.”

As the web blanked itself, Cray covered his reddened eyes with both hands. “What shall I do, Feldar?” he whispered. “What shall I do if the Seer has nothing left to offer me?”

Sepwin looked out through the cave mouth, at the mountains which lay all about them. “It’s a hard road back to Mistwell, but we know it, and we know what lies at its end.”

Slowly, Cray held his palms out to the fire. He felt the warmth beat against his skin, but it did not seem to penetrate; his whole body felt cold and stiff. “My body may take that road,” he murmured at last. “But where will my heart go?”

Sepwin, watching him stare into the flames, had no reply.

Delivev sat by the tapestry of Cray’s travels. It made a strange map, his route picked out in crimson threads against the earthy colors representing mountain, meadow, forest, and swamp. As he retraced his steps northward, the fresh crimson squeezed among darker threads laid down when first he passed that way, paralleling his old path; if anything significant happened on that second passage, threads of the weft would unravel on the spot, pull behind the warp, and knot themselves, leaving room for some fresh symbol to take shape and hint at the event. Such symbols were scattered about the design: here was his father’s grave, here the swamp where he might have drowned, here the bandits he slew, here the terrible disappointment of Mistwell. Each even had its own aura, faded now, yet easy enough to recapture if she but placed her hand upon the threads there. Delivev never did so, for there was only grief to be gained from that. The tapestry carried no joy in its threads; Cray, who had been a joyful child, had shed that quality like a broken toy when he left Spinweb. Often, contemplating the tapestry as she did this day, Delivev wondered how he could bear to wander the world when he knew that nothing but misery awaited him.

You are braver than I, my son, she said to the tapestry.

But she was not sure that even joy would take her out of Spinweb. She, who could have the world in her web chamber, had always preferred that to meeting it in the flesh. She had ventured away from Spinweb only three or four times in her long life, and none of those recently. Save for her son, all she desired lay within easy reach of these castle walls—all she desired, at least, that could be gamed by mortal flesh. Often, she pitied the ordinary people she saw in the webs, who strove to gain that which was so far beyond their reach that they used a lifetime in pursuit, of gold, of glory, of power. Some of them wandered far in the chase, as Cray did. Thinking about such wanderings, she could not help but recall the greatest wanderers of all, the troubadours, and the one she had once singled out, Lorien.

She did not smile at that memory. She thought now that she had given him too much in exchange for his songs, not just of fine clothing but of herself. She had made the gifts of cloth to salve her conscience, to recompense him for the shabby treatment he had seen at her hands and for the false impression he had gained from her behavior—that she wanted more of him than music. The gifts of herself she had not given freely, her words, her demeanor, her solitude that be had woven already into the cloth of songs, with the magic of his voice. She had heard him in the webs, and she knew when he sang of her, though he embellished her mystery into a tale with beginning and end that bore no resemblance to reality. Now part of her would always be in the world beyond Spinweb, though her body stayed within these walls, and she would never look into a distant castle through the webs without wondering what was known of her there.

He knew she watched him sometimes; she could see that knowledge in his eyes. And spiderwebs drew his gaze, so that be occasionally appeared to be looking straight at her, and she had the haunting sensation that he could see her face. He had found her spiders riding in his clothing, but he had made no attempt to destroy them. They had an unspoken agreement, he and she, and both had paid for it with fragments of their privacy.

She went to the web chamber and conjured his image on one gossamer curtain. Far away, he sat on a fine-carved chair with velvet upholstery and gilded lions’ feet for legs. A rich house: he had been there some months already, and his hosts showed no sign of tiring of his company. At this moment, he sang in an upper room of the great keep, and half a dozen young women sat on cushions at his feet, enthralled by his music. His song was not of Delivev, however transmogrified, but of dragons and knights and brave deeds, and the listeners were flame-cheeked with the excitement of the tale. When the last note died away, they clapped their hands in delight, and when the delight wore off they sighed all around and complained of having to leave his music so early in the day. They shuffled out of his chamber with many a backward glance, many a maidenly blush at the smile he gave them all.

One stayed behind. She had wrapped herself in the arras as her sisters drifted out. So quiet she stood there that they never noticed she was not among them, or perhaps they did notice, but only after the door had shut firmly behind them. Their voices receded quickly beyond the heavy door, and Lorien turned away from it, laying his lute on the table as he often did. While his back was turned, she thrust the drapery aside and stepped toward him. The rustle of her skirts was loud in the new stillness of the room, and Lorien looked over his shoulder. She smiled at him then and held her arms out to him, and he moved toward her in a way that showed he had touched her before. They kissed and then he broke away from her, and his image loomed large in the web as he walked to it, bent close, and brushed it aside with a hand. The view of his room vanished as the silken latticework crumpled.