With a tangled skein by Piers Anthony

Author:Piers Anthony
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780345318855
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Published: 2010-01-22T04:40:04+00:00

The instruments were wonderful, and both girls continued to prosper in their talents. By the time they completed school, each was as skilled as any Niobe knew. She was sure both would prosper in life, if Fate permitted. But there was the matter of the tangled skein that had not yet materialized.

After Blenda died, the Magician Kaftan moved to America with Luna, apparently unable to face the old country in her absence. Niobe was saddened more by Luna's departure than by her son's, for she had actually been closer to her granddaughter. But she could not protest. Luna was a fine, levelheaded young woman, and she would take good care of her father.

Then, after twenty-two years of their marriage, Pacian died. He was seventy-four, by no means young, but it came as a shock; somehow she had always thought of him as eleven years younger than herself, and she was only forty-six, physically. She had lived twenty-three years in her first mortality, and the same number in her second. It was as if she had finally completed the term set for her original love of Cedric. She still loved Pacian, but the intensity of it had eased over the years. Now she had raised her family, and was satisfied to meet the necessary severance of threads. She had seen Pace ailing, and had done what she could for him, never thinking he could actually die. Satan seemed to have no hand in this; the cause had been natural.

After the funeral, she tended to retreat from participation in worldly matters. Orb went away on tour as a singer; indeed, she had been traveling about the world from the time she turned eighteen. There just wasn't much left for Niobe in the mortal realm.

Then she received news that her son, the Magician, had also died. This was entirely unexpected; he was only sixty-three. Luna wrote to report that she now lived alone in the Magician's house, carrying on his business, and that she was dating the new Thanatos, exactly as the prophecy had foretold. Niobe had no stomach for that business. She kept her letters polite and left the girl alone. What, after all, had she expected of mortality—perpetual youth, bliss, and innocence? She was in as good a position as any woman to know better.

She was chronologically eighty-six years old; she had outlived her time. Her comfortable, placid world had been replaced by modern high-tech, high-magic world. She was prepared to depart it with a minimum of fuss.

But the following year, things changed.

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