The Jack of Souls (Multi-award winner!)

Chapter 33 - Slavery & Freedom

Black fury rippled across his mother's features, but vanished as quick as it came, and she laughed. The sound was a wonderful, musical tinkle that made Harric smile. "When the toad speaks," she said, "he shows his black heart."

This was the mother he remembered from his youngest years, before the madness had consumed her — a lady, in complete control of herself, unaffected by lesser beings around her. Aches and desires long buried in Harric rose to meet this. But it didn't match his memory of her in Abellia's chair, when she'd been half-starved, as obsessed and mad as ever. That's how she translated to the Seen, he thought. How then could she be so whole in the Unseen?

"You must abandon this wretch," she said, with another flick of strands toward Fink. "I shall be your teacher, Harric. Free from my madness, I can be the mother and teacher I wanted to be for you. It will be as it was meant to be — as it was when you were small — I have seen it in the web! I have so much left to teach you. Come. Dig up my bones and take me everywhere with you."

The oldest of human needs ached in Harric's heart. If his mother were no longer mad, might she not reveal her true love for him, the love she'd always felt? Might she not explain the mysteries her madness had cloaked in riddles?

And it made him angry.

Every detail in the last ten years of his life clashed with that dream, and his heart rebelled against it. Anger blazed to fury, boiling up from his heart into his brain.

"You tried to kill me, mother," he seethed. "How is that not mad? If you aren't as mad as ever, why the doom on my nineteenth birthday?"

Her eyebrows raised in surprise. "Must I explain? It should be obvious. It was to drive you out of Gallows Ferry, else you would have stayed there to rot, and wasted all I gave you."

He stared, expecting more. "That's it?"

"Need I more reason than that? You would have wasted all our labors in an idle life of bitterness."

"You killed my friends, Mother! You tortured them with prophecies and killed them in that fog. That was all part of driving me out? They had nothing to do with it."

She shook her head sadly. "They would have died that day regardless what I did. It was woven in the web. I simply dressed it in fog to put the fear in you. I assure you I arranged for a much gentler death than what they would otherwise have experienced."

Harric's fury knotted in his throat as he remembered the misery of his friends. "Forget their deaths, you poisoned their last years with your predictions, Mother. You didn't have to tell them the day of their deaths, but you did. That was the worst of it."

She pursed her lips. "They vexed me. Silly boys."

"They were my friends!"

"But all of that was before my death, when I was mad. Surely you cannot hold such things against me. And my plan, after all, worked beautifully. Not only did it dislodge you from Gallows Ferry, but it did so in the company of your childhood hero, for which I should think I deserve some thanks."

"Horse shit, Mother. I chose Willard, and I made that happen. You meant to kill me, but you failed. I beat you, Mother, and now you're trying to cover it with a lie."

She laughed. The notes tinkled prettily. "Kill you! My dear boy, you make it sound so final. As if I would end your life in this world for all time."

"That's what kill means, Mother."

She sighed, gazing down at him patiently. "What a monster you must think me," she said. "But your thinking is limited to the present, Harric, to this version of you only. I see the future, my son — all your potential futures and all potential versions of you — like branches spreading outward from this point, I see them." She raised her eyes to the infinite web in the sky above them, where some of Harric's strands still rose to mingle and disappear among thousands of others. "Some of these futures are bright — some of these future Harrics are even glorious! — but others are foul and ignoble, ending badly." Her eyes snapped back to Harric's, eyes suddenly stern. "When I say I mean to kill you, dear Harric, I do not mean all your potential future selves, only those that do not lead to our best possible destiny. Right now, that means any future involving this vile, usurping creature and its soul-devouring stone."