Lin sighed. He knew what she was thinking, and it irritated him. He was my friend, he thought. She had simply appropriated Hassen for several days, and it made her think her grief could be equal to his.
She said, “I’m sorry, Darien. I know it must be much harder for you than it is for me.”
Thrown off-balance, Darien said, “That’s all right,” and finished lacing his boots.
He allowed her to pass before him as they left the room; it had been too long since he had had anything to do with a woman. Daylight was not kind to Lin, making her pale skin look sallow and her brown hair mousy rather than alluringly dark. But the bodice of her dress cinched in her waist attractively enough, and she did have hips, at least. Darien would take what he could get in this dismal, womanless castle. Such had been his philosophy during his days as a student, as well, though he had learned quickly enough that the prettier girls in the nearby village were as likely to be soft for him as the plain ones. Another reason, perhaps, that Piet had hated him.
It was without much of a strain on his memory that Darien led them to the great oak by the shore. It was a historic tree, and a popular haunt for lovelorn poets, dreaming away their sorrows under its boughs by the crystalline stillness of the bay. And of course, writing a song about it later.
“What do you expect to find here?” Lin asked.
Darien shook his head. “My lady, I have no idea.” Then an idea occurred to him. A rock nestled within the base of the tree, and Darien knew it was exactly the sort of place where he himself would have hidden something. “Help me move this rock,” he said.
Lin grasped one end of it as he took hold of the other, and together they wrenched it free. Lin inspected the tree as Darien rolled the rock away. He saw she was staring at the leaves and dirt that were clumped within the hole, stopping it up. “I suppose this wasn’t the best idea,” he said, looking from his own dirt-stained hands to Lin’s soiled white dress.
“Don’t be sure of that just yet,” she said, and began to rake away the leaves and dirt with her fingers. But the dirt was thickly caked, so that she was forced to get a sharp stone to shovel it away.
“Want me to help there?” Darien said.
“The dress is ruined anyway,” she said, and continued on. There was a feeling of rightness to all of it, Darien suddenly thought, as if he had dreamed this all before and knew the outcome. Her slight figure by the tree, kneeling in dirt, was something he seemed to remember. So Darien was not surprised when he heard a thump, just as Lin gasped and, in the next moment, lifted a small metal box from the base of the tree. A steel lock with the mark of the Academy clamped it shut.
“It’s almost too easy,” she said.
“Easier still,” Darien said, “if that key of yours fits the lock.”
Lin reached into her pouch and with dirtied fingers pulled out Valanir’s key.
CHAPTER
23
IT was like something in a dream when the key clicked easily in the lock and the box popped open without prompting. In later days, Darien could not have said what he had expected it to contain. But he could remember feeling no sense of surprise when what emerged was a collection of old scrolls. This was, after all, the Academy. The parchment crackled like flame as he unrolled it, and Darien could almost imagine that it whispered secrets.
He set them back into the box and tightened the lid. “We had better take these to our room before someone notices us here.”
Stumbling in their haste, they made their way back along the shore to the castle. Darien experienced a moment of anxiety when they entered the courtyard, the box clutched to his chest, but they did not meet anyone there, or on the stairs to their room.
They spread the sheets of parchment on his bed. The ink was faded, the lines curled in a rounded, elaborate hand. Darien began to read it aloud before he realized what it was, and stopped. They were verses.
“There’s a note here at the end,” Lin said. “These being the verses which I used to enter the Otherworld. All but the final verse, which I have kept to the grave, that no one will follow my path and pay a price that is far too high.”
“A price,” Darien read, “that I could not pay.” It ended there, signed with the initial E. Darien grimaced. “He left us all but the last verse. What good is that?”
“He didn’t mean for it to do us good,” Lin said patiently. “He did not want anyone else to discover the Path.”
“Yet he came up with—all these.” Darien indicated the verses spread before them. “He somehow knew how to summon that portal.”
Lin nodded. “We can’t know how they came to him,” she said. “But perhaps it was very like the way these scrolls have come to us.”
“There is much that we cannot know,” Darien quoted with a sigh. “I’m growing tired of hearing that. It seems as if we’re no better off now than when we started.”
“There’s more here,” said Lin, gesturing at the pages that remained. “These look newer than Edrien’s verses, and they’re in a different hand.” She began to read the headers of each. “Rite of Enchainment … Rite of Joining … Rite of—” She swallowed.
“Of Summoning the Dead,” Darien finished for her. “This seems very forbidden indeed.”
“Some of it,” said Lin. “Some may not be … just lost. I believe I know what these are. Valanir Ocune told me he and Nickon Gerrard worked to transcribe some of the old magics from encoded texts. Valanir must have hidden them here.”
“That must be why he didn’t tell you what the key was for,” Darien said, feeling grim. “He couldn’t risk such a secret coming out to the Court Poet under torture. I’m guessing he enchanted himself to silence.”
Lin ran a hand through her hair and grimaced. “And all this time, I was irritated with him. Of course.”
“Glad I could put an end to that lover’s quarrel,” said Darien.
“I think I’ll go for a walk,” said Lin, without changing expression. She rose and left before he could think of a reply. From the window, the air had turned chilly even though it was afternoon, the rough winds abated.
* * *
ALL that day, Darien felt the nagging sensation that he had done something wrong. It pursued him through his tedious exploration of the library, which, as usual, yielded crumbs of information that fell just short of being useful. Damn Lin, he thought. Damn the girl’s touchiness, her moods. He couldn’t help it if he was unable to be sensitive to her all the damn time.
More than ever, he missed Hassen, who would simply have punched him and gotten it over with.
He was in my dream, Darien mused. Maybe that’s a good sign.
Her granite eyes and flat tone had made him uncomfortable. Most women reproached, or cried; even that was better. Then again, those were usually women Darien had seduced, who felt that he had a duty toward them. Darien was proud that in his long career with women, he had made many more laugh than cry.
It occurred to him that he had promised Rianna he would write her, an idea that now seemed like bridging one world to another. What would he tell her? I have seen things you would not believe. Exhilaration warring with the knowledge that, regardless of the thrill of what he had glimpsed—the world outside his world that he had touched—the price had already been far too high.
Unsurprisingly, he found nothing on the last verse of the song Edrien Letrell had composed to enter the Otherworld. He leafed through works by Edrien that had been scrivened just before the poet’s death but found nothing that looked like a detached verse, let alone one the culmination of possibly the most powerful song ever written.
It will die with me, the Seer had said.
* * *
HE returned to the room that evening after an extended visit to the kitchen, full of a warm glow of well-being brought on by the combined powers of adoration and good food. The cook had fed him a kingly meal after he had sung some silly songs for her. At the end, he took some bread and meat for Lin, in case she had not yet had her supper. Perhaps his obv
ious thoughtfulness would be noted, and she would put aside her grievance. It had been such a harmless comment, after all.
Stars were kindled in the dimming sky by the time Darien arrived at the room. Lin was standing by the window, looking out into that sky and the mountains. In the gloaming her white dress seemed to beckon eerily, like the mast of a ship at sea.
Sucking in his breath, Darien resolved to swallow his pride. “Lin, I really am sorry,” he said. Resisting the urge to add: Be reasonable.
Without turning, she said, “What do you have against me, Darien?”
A good question, when it came to that. He had still thought to blame her for abandoning Hassen, but could not. In his heart he knew that had he gone after his friend, neither of them would be here. “Nothing,” Darien said. “I’m just a bastard. Not a good excuse, but I hope you’ll forgive me.” He cleared his throat. “Afraid I didn’t find anything that interesting today. How was your walk?”
She was silent, still not turning to look at him. Darien came up behind her and touched her shoulder, gingerly. She turned to face him then, and there were tears on her face.
“What is it?” he said, suppressing his first instinct, which was to draw back in alarm.
She shrugged and looked away.
“Is this about that poet you mentioned in our meeting with the masters?” Darien said, pressing. “What was the name? Alyndell?”
Lin dashed away the tears and refused to answer. Darien noticed for the first time, even in the fading light, that black dirt had stained the front of her bodice and skirt. But of course—she had practically waded through dirt to retrieve Valanir’s worthless box for them.
“You should change,” he said, indicating the bodice and skirt, where stains marred the white, the sweet feminine embroidery.
She laughed without merriment. “Indeed.”
“I’ll turn around,” said Darien. “I’ll look away, and you’ll change, and you’ll tell me what happened to you. Why you ran away.”
“Why should I tell you?”
“Why not tell someone?” True to his word, he sat on his bed with his back to her.
“You’ll mock me,” she said, sounding tired.
“No,” he said. “I won’t.”
He heard a rustling—the sound of her unlacing the bodice. She said, “He was my tutor. I was expected to be educated to some degree, you see. It’s required of a lady.”
“So I’ve heard,” Darien said equably. “And you fell in love with him.”
“We shared a bed for a season.” She had not spoken of this recently; he could hear it in her voice. Perhaps ever. “Rayen didn’t know. With our parents dead, Rayen was my guardian until I was to be wed. He had a number of suitors in mind and wanted time to judge the merits of them all. Or he liked having me around to torment—I’m not sure.”
“Torment?”
A brief silence, then, “I have a scar from one of those times.”
He had seen it, a white line slashed across her left palm.
“You must have known he would find out,” Darien said.
The tiredness had returned to her voice. “Alyn had promised we would run away together when … when the time was right. Instead…”
“Rayen found you together?”
“No … no, not that. Though that would have amused him.” She swallowed, said, “He found out, because I was soon with child. The moment he saw me taking sick one day, he knew. He knew right away.” A pause, then, “In a way, we know each other so well.” He heard a rustling again, the sharp report of the wardrobe swinging shut. “You can turn around.”
Darien did. She was clad now in the lace-edged shift she had worn to sleep the night before. Lowering herself onto her bed, hair tousled, pale legs and feet exposed to moonlight, she looked like a very young girl. He had never asked her age.
“So let me guess,” Darien said. “This Alyn was a coward and ran away, rather than face the consequences.”
“No,” she said. “I would have understood that, though. But, apparently, Rayen knew him better than I did. He gave Alyn a choice: my hand, with me disinherited from the Amaristoth holdings. Or gold.”
“And he took the gold,” Darien guessed.
She bowed her head.
“And the child?” he said. It almost pained him to ask.
Lin looked up to meet his eyes. “Beaten out of me.” In the silence, she spoke again. “I knew then what a fool I’d been, in any case. Believing that a beautiful man could love … someone like me.”
Darien was starting to regret he had urged her to talk about this. “Hush,” he said. “That’s nonsense.”
Lin shook her head. She held up a hand, as if to forestall him. “Please,” she said. Her arms were wrapped around her stomach. “It is such a sordid little tale. And it becomes so clear, when I tell it, what a fool I was.”
“The fool was this Alyndell character,” said Darien. “Because if I ever meet him, I promise you, I’ll kill him for you.”
A moment of silence. Lin laughed.
“You don’t think I could do it?”
She was grinning, a heartening sight to him now. It was very dark now, but for the moonlight. “I’m sure you could,” she said. “Alyn was common-born, didn’t know one end of a sword from another. But while it’s dear of you to offer to avenge me, I’m fairly sure he fled the country. He vanished the day he accepted his gold, probably fearing Rayen would come after him. Which he probably would have, for sport. Hunt-the-poet. It would have been his style.” In uttering the idiot man’s name, her smile had faded. Her voice seemed to go on with effort, as if stretching a skein of wool as far as it would go and then stretching it some more. It was a desire, he saw, to make light of this pain, to consign it to the past. He saw that she had not succeeded, not yet.
There are some things that a poet knows.
“Lie down,” he ordered.
“Why?” Lin said, instantly suspicious.
“Don’t be silly,” said Darien. “You’re safe with me.”
She quirked a half smile. “All right.”
“Get under the covers,” Darien instructed. He meanwhile released his harp from its wrappings. Cradling it in his arms, he sat on the floor beside Lin’s bed. “I’ll sing you a bedtime story,” he said, and strummed lightly. The familiar movements, the music in that stillness, filling him with peace. A tune from his childhood that he remembered and loved, albeit with a measure of sadness now.
Her face was soft in the moonlight. She closed her eyes.
* * *
SHE had thought of Alyn all that day, strolling along the shore and picking her way over the roots of trees young and old. He had told her so much of this place. She had begged him to teach her the ways of poets, everything he knew. There had not been time, of course, for everything, but there was much that she did know. They had had a year.
She had felt him with her the night of the Midsummer Ball. Alyn had schooled her for such occasions, in the formalities that a poet must know. All but the most secret ceremonies, such as how a poet must conduct himself while receiving the mark of a Seer. That, she realized, he probably had not known himself. After meeting so many poets, Lin now knew that handsome as Alyn had been, his voice liquid silver, he was by no means among the best the Academy had produced. It was likely that he would never become a Seer.
So he had sought to ease his future with a marriage vastly above his station, and when that failed, simply the gold. And who could blame him?
And it had been so easy. She had made it easy. Liquid silver. It had been summer; he had first taken her in the forest to the sounds of awakening birdsong in the pines.
“You should thank me,” Rayen had said, weeks after Alyn had gone, when she still lay recovering from the loss of the child. She had incurred three broken ribs and assorted bruises from Rayen’s concentrated pummeling.
Lin remembered: lying motionless in the bed, her thoughts, mercifully, still too much a blur of pain to focus on any one thing.
Even Rayen’s face, familiar to her as her own, a mirage that floated in and out of her field of vision. For so long she had lied to him, lived apart from him in a world of happiness of her own, that now he seemed almost a stranger.
“I saved you from an adventurer who wanted nothing but your gold,” Rayen had said. At the time, the words had not fully penetrated, but her mind had stored them away for later. Repeated them many times since. “And you, poor filly, thought he wanted what’s between your legs.”
She had screwed her eyes shut then, she remembered, as if by not seeing him she could will him into nonexistence.
He continued relentlessly, his voice like silk. The same voice she could imagine him using to seduce his yellow-haired paramours. “Don’t ever make that mistake, pet,” he said. “The next time you think such a thing possible, look in the mirror. I’ll have a new one made, full-length, of finest silver-backed glass, if that is what it takes to save our fortune. I don’t want to be throwing any more gold away on useless lovers. Or physicians.” He sucked in his breath and let it go, what he did when mildly exasperated. “I’ll have to bribe this one to keep silent, on top of his fee. No one would want used goods.”
Weeks later, when she had recovered the use of her limbs, Lin ran. Imagining, then, that death was not far off. But for the warmth of Leander’s cloak and his words, that might have turned out to be true: a debt she owed her former partner that she would probably never have a chance to repay. In any case, so much had been marred between them: their trust broken, and his body, because of her.
But the portal was real. Edrien had found it, had summoned it with his song. That was one thing that had not been marred. The Path was real.
That was the last clear thought that passed through her mind as she lay wrapped in the strands of Darien’s song. His sung words echoing from the stones, backed by the strains of ocean waves. You’re safe with me, he had said to her. She let herself drift, trusting that—trusting his music.
* * *
SHE was clad in a dark velvet dress, diamonds woven into her long hair. The bedroom she stood in was familiar—too familiar. From the window, a forest encased in ice that glimmered as if to echo the dead stones in her hair. Not here, Lin thought in a panic. Please not here.
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