Her little performance with a third encore where Casamir fought a vampire and then neutered a werewolf, went so well she found her pockets laden with sweets, a new dress tossed over her shoulder, and two fresh pies stuck under her arms. Rather than try and force a near bushel of apples into her waning stomach, she opted to share them with the rest of the historians who were beginning to treat her as a bit more than just a piece of self-moving furniture. Chase and Chance seemed to have melted the most by her ability to secure enough of a grant they need not worry about operation costs for two months. Or perhaps it was because she saved their hides from more than a few of the professor's rulers.
"Set it upon the table by the door, please," Medwin said, his face finally rising as he stared off into the distance. His red glasses were off, the ghostly eyes all the more evident in the waning sunlight filtering through the caravan's few murky windows. Ciara placed it down and, not really expecting anything more than a grunt, turned to leave.
"I heard about your little exercise in the town square," the tone was impenetrable. He was either about to congratulate her on a job well done or run her out of the country by wind surfing wagon. He rose slowly, and reached his hand out to check the edge of the desk, "How does it feel to make history?"
"I," Ciara blushed, and looked down, "I didn't do anything important."
"No? With a few words, you altered the history of every ear in that town square. Even a few members of the order talk about your yarns as if they could have actually happened. Perhaps we need to have another symposium on critical review skills."
He walked steadily towards her, his hands brushing across the buckling walls as his feet shuffled around piles of books. She dodged to the right as he made for the pie table, scooping it up in his hands. Even through his dressing down of her, he couldn't turn down fresh apple pie. The scars on his gummed cheek bounced and folded anew with each bite.
"I didn't mean to..." she started to say, feeling like she let her father down again getting caught between that stall door and...and something she shouldn't have turned her back on.
"We here, we ten men, devoted to a life of frugality, of piety, of academia, we can never truly succeed over the story tellers. Over the Bards who captivate not the mind but the soul all by changing everything that should be unchangeable with a few words."
Ciara shook her head. She had no idea what he was talking about or if she should be packing what little of her things she had. "I'm not sure what.."
"Even Jack the Great, who some claim was deaf and blind making his great task all that more miraculous, will still hold more sway over the common man than we ever could hope. And yet we still rely upon him to uncover the truth within the lies."
"What in the hell are you blathering on about?" her hand slapped to her mouth, but it was too late, the damage was done.
But Medwin didn't throw his plate down in anger, didn't grab her by the cuff and toss her out into the mud. He let his fork settle carefully down, picking up the rim of the crust with his fingers and smiled while chewing down the last of the pie.
As the Chancellor started to shuffle back to his chair, Ciara eyeballed the exit. She had one hand on the door and another on the dirty plate before he asked her, "Can you read?"
The door handle rattled a bit as she removed her hand.
"There's no need to be ashamed. Most of the population have never even seen a letter or two, never mind picked through an entire book."
"I'm not ashamed of being unable to read," she said cautiously, fearing this was a test.
A new smile graced Medwin's face, a shrewd one that hinted at a life not only spent keeping ten or so academic monks, who were about as deadly as a one-winged moth, in line. It was like a man who'd traveled the shifting currents of court and knew how to play the game.
"I find myself in the need of a new reader," he said. "My old one is occupied teaching the future ruler about agriculture and ship building, I believe."
Ciara's eyes narrowed, "Are you saying you can't read?"
Medwin's smile turned bittersweet, "No, not the small, fading text since I lost my eyesight."
"You're blind?!" she wasn't about to win any tact awards.
But he smiled, always slightly tickled whenever he could fool others, or at least pass enough to go unnoticed, "Yes, for over 15 years now, I believe."
A blind man leading a herd of traveling scholars, whose only purpose was to keep literacy alive. It was like some kind of bad joke someone told after having used the horse with the long face in a bar one ten times. He sat down in his chair, his fingers searching through the contents on the desk until a fresh strip of vellum and a quill settled in front of him. She inched closer, peeking down at the man's work, even as his eyes remained fixed upon her without seeing her. His other hand slipped into a drawer and pulled out a piece of metal, like a comb but flat as a ruler and with the teeth more evenly spread. He laid it upon the paper and, lining up the top and the bottom, began to ink out a line of prose in that claustrophobic calligraphy hand only a cleric would know.
"Many of these books are already in my head. I transfer them from their waterlogged and dying state to fresh pages, keeping the soul of the book alive. But on occasion, I need someone to read me the words as I give them a new form."
Ciara glanced around the caravan; this one stuffed with so many books there was only a small path from the door, to the desk, to the single sleeping pallet. He seemed cursed to spend his life rewriting every single book, only to begin anew.
"I, I can read, but only a little."
He smiled again, his hand still swooping through the loops and dots of language, "That is alright, we can read them together."
The Ciara Stories, as the random brain goo she crafted while trying to keep produce from being thrown at her came to be called, were proving to be real showstoppers. The Chancellor made certain they still maintained proper decorum and held speeches on important local and universal historical events as well as anything pertaining to recent discoveries in the scientific or meteorological fields. "It'll be wet tomorrow," was all the meteorologist ever needed to say before he could nip off to the pub. Assuming they weren't in a desert, he was guaranteed to be right, as they could always find something wet.
But the historians were gaining such traction, people from outlying towns were trekking in to hear them. A few traveling bards even threatened to break their legs, the best sign of the week. This was proving to be the windfall many had dreamed of while face deep in oatmeal. And while Ciara's stories, growing more elaborate and including ghosts because ghosts make everything better, entertained the crowds, she spent her days holed up in the Chancellor's caravan with a book or two pressed up to her nose.
Where the younger professors had a very nurturing approach to getting the world of letters into Aldrin's head, Medwin was used to dumping someone in a pit and letting them claw their own way out.
"'And the Duke of Linchester, the pater...patri....' I don't know this word."
"Look it up," Medwin grumbled, his quill pausing mid loop.
Ciara hefted up the book of words and thumbed through. It was written by a man who spent most of his young adult life trying to woo the fair maiden of the loom, but every time he tried to whisper sweet nothings in her ears, they came out as, "You smell nice. I like the way your boobies look." Believing that his problem was not in having the wrong words, but in not having enough, he set out to catalog every single word he could find, along with a definition so he didn't try to call a woman a 'sow in heat' again. By the time he finished a decade later, the love of his life took up with a pig farmer whose vocabulary was somewhere in the range of a stuttering parrot and he was forced to take to rooming with a man named Boswell. Such is the tragedy of literature.
"'Patriarch: the male head of the family or tribe. Note, not something to call a girl on a date.' Why couldn't they just say head of the house, or man?"
Medwin sighed; they'd had this discussion many times. The girl wasn't a fan o
f synonyms, especially useless ones that only made the author sound smarter than the patriarch really was. He did have to agree with her on "apropos" though.
"Read the next line," he said, not wanting to get into another discussion about how each word choice was itself a small token of the era, a peek into a long buried past they were trying to uncover.
"Duke of Linchester, the patriarch of the Aravingion line, founded the House of Roses in the year of Our Lard."
"Lord," Medwin said without pausing his quill.
"Are you sure? The Aravingion's were always giving the years queer names."
"While there was a Suet Era that lasted all of five years, they never documented a Lard one."
She settled back onto her cushions, her feet propped up on the next stack of books to get through, "That's too bad, I bet people'd far prefer to worship Lard. It goes down easier."
"If you could continue..." Medwin tried to lead her on when his door flew open and Professor Mitrione stumbled in, clanging against the ceiling the war axe he bought at a small stand on their way past "Dwarven City: the smallest place on Arda!"
Ciara raised the book to cover her face. The other professors were not as enthusiastic about the girl learning as they were the boy.
"A desecration of the moral fiber their order stood for."
"Dangerous to future generations."
"Like putting a pig in a dress and sending it to a debutante ball."
But Medwin merely pointed to the solid gold patch upon his black robes with the script "C" surrounded by cherubs firing quills at each other, and continued to do whatever he wanted because there wasn't another soul willing to make any harder decisions than "which sock should I put on first." Still, Ciara kept her face hidden and never took books out of the Chancellor's caravan unlike Aldrin who always seemed to have four or five tucked under his arms as he skittered about.
"Yes, Mitrione. What is it?" Medwin could easily spot the wheezing belabored breathing, the thunk of wood painted metallic, and the inevitable cry of a robe's hem catching in the door handle. He recognized most of his fellows by how they entered his caravan.
"It's the square... Things are happening... It's..." the man doubled over, trying to get oxygen through closed off lungs. He hadn't run this much since he was in the womb. His fear of women started very early.
Medwin rose, concern sliding his eyebrows, "What? What about the square? Have we been routed?" Practiced hands swept around the desks edge and he reached out for his walking stick. It was carved from dark mahogany, over six feet tall, and some say carried a curse. He hated the thing. Children would come up to him asking for fireworks and adults for him to dispose of their old jewelry.
"No," the wheezing professor gasped out, "not a problem. News. Good news."
The Chancellor paused, his hand against the wall, "Well that's a strange turn of pace. Take your time, Sir. I don't want to be carrying you out of here."
Ciara giggled at the idea of the waifish blind man trying to drag the five tons of lard and beard out of his own caravan. He'd either have to push him with his walking stick or go around back and pull on his beard.
The girlish giggle did not help to calm Mitrione's inflamed airways, instead he gasped more at visions of hordes of pigtails descending upon him threatening to make him look pretty. It was the man's curse to be born into a family of ten sisters.
"Kaltar was performing with Bartrone the Ballad of Ova's Light versus Dark."
"You mean that dribble I made up about macaroons?" Ciara asked. "I didn't think anyone would buy the idea of Casamir having to reforge the whisk of destiny."
Mitrione ignored her comment and continued in his message, "The Baron was so impressed he requested our presence at a large feast he's throwing for some dignitaries of the Empire."
The lard finally stood fully, his whole face beaming like a misogynistic bowl full of jelly. But Medwin frowned, ghostly eyes staring out at the problems set upon them by this turn of events.
"You seem to have forgotten that we have in our midst one of the sworn enemies of the Empire," the Chancellor said in even tones.
"What? The sandworm? They ain't been at war with anyone since the big one," Mitrione mumbled.
Ciara froze, feeling the glare of the man sizing her up, probably trying to determine if he could eat her. So many curses died a still birth on her tongue. Her mother taught her that cursing without breath was much safer than under it.
Also, she needn't have bothered. "Byddwch yn fab i asyn braster fornicated gyda llif rhydlyd!" Medwin swore in what the poets like to call ancient Elvish. Few knew it; even less could actually speak it. "The boy king you all seem certain you can mold into your own warrior? Do you wish to hand his young head to the Empire while Bartrone dances in bells?"
Mitrione shuffled his feet, his hips smacking into a pile of books and scattering them over the floor. "So we tell the Baron no, then?"
"Dylwn i werthu eich ceilliau i wrach! No, we do that and it will look even more suspicious." Medwin's fingers rubbed his temples, squishing the top of his scars together like rippling waves. "When is this prestigious event to take place?"
"A weeks time," the professor mumbled, confused by the turn of events.
"So we have one week to travel to Fortran, compose an epic tale, and figure out how to hide the prince of Ostero. Is there anything else? Perhaps a dragon is planning on swooping down and eating a few of us for an afternoon snack?"
Mitrione shook his head, hoping he'd no longer have to be on the other end of that blank disappointment. "Then leave me, I have much to prepare."
He broke free of the book cage as fast as his mass would allow, sending a few more towers scattering in his wake. Ciara stood; trying to organize the blind man's piles so he wouldn't place a shoe where clear space had been.
"Ar bob sydd yn bechadurus yn y byd hwn, I shall strangle my own hair!" Medwin shook his hands in rage, his robe's fallen hems sweeping the floor.
"I should go as well," Ciara mumbled, a few of the fallen books about the lineage of the Torpor Kings of a nation that was now the Emperor's pool still in her hands as she walked toward the door.
But Medwin didn't hear her, he was still muttering as much elvish under his breath as he could remember from school. Then he paused, and a strange grin took place of the curled lip, "If they wish a tale, a tale we shall give them. Ciara..."
She stopped, and watched as he sat purposefully behind the desk, his hands reaching beneath the middle. A book, hidden carefully in the folds of the indent of the long lost middle drawer, fell open on his desk. It was much smaller than the others cluttering the wagon were. Almost none of the original spine remained, having been stitched and restitched together by practicing hands. Some of the pages were darker than the man carefully flipping through them, counting each one.
"By the bed there's a small stack, about fifteen or so, grab the fifth book from the top. It'll have an image of a stave on it."
Ciara complied. This book, while old, was nowhere near as ancient as the one he was thumbing carefully through on his lap. In bold lettering it proclaimed itself to be "Casam and the Elves."
"What are we..." she started to ask, her eyes skipping past the piles of work still waiting for an audience.
Medwin smiled, his own version of which never actually reached his dead eyes, leaving almost no crows feet to compete against the deep scars. "We are reviving the lost tales of Casamir for the Baron."
He turned towards his book, now flipped to a section in ant-sized font that began half way down the page. It was called "TerraFae."
"Begin on page one of 'Casam,'" he said, pulling a fresh piece of vellum out and not bothering with his placement comb. Beside him, his left hand followed along on the ancient book as Ciara brought forth the island of the elves.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Marciano rattled his sword in its scabbard, ignoring the fascinating arch work, and marble floors, and the chandelier made from the bones of over thirty of the Baron's enem
ies. The last month of his life was spent trying to find passage for the vast army amassing in the East and not in feigning interest in chickpea tours.
Originally his men were to wait until the first thaw from winter securely in long loyal Empire territory, then amass and march through the Northern Passage after the Knights Eritaller secured the disputed mountain gap with the liberal use of kind words and less kind swords. But, while the King's head was being shipped to him, what remained of Ostero's close guards and that Lord Albrant, they amassed and caused a major avalanche, sealing off the passage for all.
The Emperor's informant accomplished what little job they needed to cut off the snake's head, but was of no use in finishing off the body. Most were uncertain where the traitor even went or if he survived. While the castle bathed in blood, servants and some disguised as such still managed to slip past the black blades. All reports pointed to them regrouping in the North, within the tower the Emperor had been eyeing his entire life. Marciano would call it destiny if he believed in such things.
"And here we have the crests of the five houses under the rule of Shar."
Weary eyes turned up to the banners wafting in the rising northern winds, five of them broken up and pushed aside to accommodate the large addition in green. A set of three rings interlocked each other, one pointing East, another West, and the last North. In the middle sat Aravi, and the seat of the Empire.
"You seem to be missing one," Marciano said, pointing towards an unfaded section of bricks on the wall that would have balanced the houses out.
The Baron, his eyes bulging out of his face, stared guiltily at the spot where a dragon once roared out of its frozen hell. He gasped and backtracked, blaming the house maidens for failing to do their job and that they needn't concern themselves with such empty space when all eyes are drawn to the magnificent crest of the Empire.
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