by Lynn Kurland
“Our new queen,” she said crisply, “is the granddaughter of Sìle of Tòrr Dòrainn and will have certain expectations. She will not sit down to table and find her linens crumpled!”
Aisling leaned close. “Who is Sìle of Tòrr Dòrainn?”
Sgoilear’s ears were apparently more refined than his negotiating skills. He came to a full stop and turned to look at her.
“Why, he is the king of the elves,” he said, dumbfounded. “The elves of Tòrr Dòrainn, of course. Queen Mhorghain is his granddaughter. Didn’t you know?”
Aisling, to her credit, didn’t snort, but Rùnach glanced her way and had a knowing nod in return. He supposed he would hear something about the deluded nature of the librarians at Chagailt at some point, but hopefully that point would be when there weren’t such eager ears listening. He only winked at Sgoilear, had a look of disbelief in return, and happily took up the march behind the keeper of the royal books again once the man had found it in himself to carry on.
It didn’t take long for them to reach the library. Rùnach supposed he should have been surprised that they were to be simply turned loose inside it, but he realized he could see the faintest shimmer of spell hanging over the door. He imagined someone would know if they tried to poach anything.
He knew, however, that he would not escape scrutiny so easily. He sent Aisling off into the chamber, noted that a fire was being hastily stoked for her pleasure, then turned to look at Sgoilear by means of the werelight the librarian had kindled for them both.
“Prince Rùnach,” he whispered in a garbled tone. “We are honored by your presence.”
“Honored enough, I hope,” Rùnach murmured, “to keep my visit a secret.”
Sgoilear’s eyes were very wide. “I hesitate to ask.”
“I would as well, actually,” Rùnach agreed. “I’m helping my companion with a quest. Very important to maintain absolute secrecy.”
“As you will, Your Highness.”
Rùnach smiled, shook the man’s hand, and pretended not to notice when Sgoilear winced slightly—in sympathy, no doubt—at his scars. He didn’t volunteer any information. He simply thanked Sgoilear for his discretion, then went inside the library to see what had become of Aisling.
She was standing with her back to the fire, looking around her as if she’d never seen books before. He came to stand beside her, sighed in pleasure, and steamed a bit thanks to the dampness of his cloak.
“We can begin our search whenever you’re ready,” he said easily. “I told the librarian we were on an important quest. I imagine we’ll have as much peace as we care to have.”
“I’m not sure how long I’ll manage to stay awake,” she admitted.
Rùnach smiled. “I believe there is a couch over there—a recent addition, I daresay—just right for the weary scholar who doesn’t want to leave his research too far out of reach.”
She looked horribly tempted. “Think you?”
“I do.” He set his pack on a table near the hearth. “I’m not weary,” he said easily, “so why don’t you take a turn first. I have things I’m curious about.”
She hid a yawn behind her hand. “I should say no, but I find I can’t. I didn’t sleep well last night.”
“You were busy dreaming,” he said with a smile.
“I think I was screaming,” she said wearily.
He laughed a little. “Well, that too, perhaps. A small nap might be just the thing for you.”
She stretched out on the sofa, then didn’t protest when he took off his cloak and spread it over her. “You’re very kind.”
“You’re very easy to be kind to.”
She only looked up at him with eyes that he still couldn’t decide the color of, though he had taken his share of looks at them on the shore in the sunlight and in the mist. They weren’t blue, nor were they green, nor a combination of both. He supposed it might take a bit more study to decide.
He smiled down at her, wished her a good rest, then wandered about the shelves, pretending to look for things until he was certain she was asleep. Then he went directly for what lexicons he could find.
It took him less than an hour to realize that whatever tongue she had been speaking was a tongue not described in any of the books he’d found. He found a handy wall to lean against and considered things he simply hadn’t had the heart to before.
He had brought his map with him, the one he’d made of the Nine Kingdoms and how they had changed over the years. The unfortunate truth was, the Nine Kingdoms was an enormous collection of lands and peoples. There were lands that remained as they always had—Neroche, for instance, Durial, Meith, Tòrr Dòrainn—and others that he’d mapped out easily at Lismòr.
The Council of Kings was made up of nine kings—or, rather, eight kings and a queen—but there were places that considered themselves outside the bounds of that council and wouldn’t have frequented it if forced. His grandmother’s homeland of An Céin was a good example. Her father had diplomatic relations enough with his elvish neighbors, the elves of Tòrr Dòrainn, and to a lesser extent the nobility of Ainneamh, but King Beusach never would have treated on any level with a dwarf or a mere man. But a king he was, and a powerful one.
There were also kingdoms that had been absorbed by other places. Diarmailt was proof enough of that. Rùnach wasn’t entirely sure that his cousin hadn’t gambled away the crown to Stefan of Wychweald in a game of chance. Wychweald was less of a kingdom than it was a tributary of Neroche, and Stefan currently wore a title that Miach no doubt considered just above a courtesy. Penrhyn had been in the early days of the world a rather small but very powerful place. Now all that came from it was a very tasty sour wine and a great deal of noise about how its seat on the council had always belonged to the kings of that land and so it should always be. Rùnach suspected there were quite a few who disagreed.
He glanced at Aisling, saw that she slept still, and decided perhaps it was time to be a bit more serious about narrowing things down. He fetched his map out of his pack, spread it out on the table, and decided he would start from the west and work his way east.
He immediately dismissed Melksham Island. They spoke sheep and irrigation there, which was understood readily enough when emphasized by the point of a sword. Meith had its own tongue, true, but his aunt was wed to the king of that land and he had learned well not only the common tongue, several variations of it, but their particular language of magic. Aisling had not come from Meith.
By the time he had cut the world in half and satisfied himself that there was nothing that fit what he’d heard come out of Aisling’s mouth, he had a pounding headache and knew he needed either sleep or food.
He walked over and found Aisling with her head on her pack, her hands tucked under her cheek, swathed in both her cloak and his. He fetched a chair to sit in so he might watch over her for a moment or two. Nothing more.
He supposed that if he was to judge her by worldly standards, he wouldn’t have said she would garner a second look on any busy street in any busy metropolis. She was not beautiful in the way his aunts and cousins were beautiful, painful to look at, with the magic shimmering in their veins seemingly rendering them unattainable. She was also not lovely in the same way his grandmother Eulasaid was, or any of her daughters, his aunts, or his cousins, half-elven, half-wizardess get, every last one of them worthy of the rapt attentions of the finest portraitist.
Aisling was not.
She was something else entirely, something that words seemed unequal to describing.
Her hair was a very pale blond, hanging around her face unevenly, as if whoever had cut it had done it not at all well. Perhaps she had done it herself in order to escape that terrible life of servitude she hadn’t asked for. He supposed there were souls enough in the world who suffered that fate. It gave him pause that he couldn’t bring another of them to mind.
He wondered how it was she could touch air or water or night sky and stir them all as if they were solid substances he coul
d have touched himself. And if the situation in her village had been so dire, why had she, an untrained, unskilled lass, been sent to find someone to rescue them? Why not send a seasoned swordsman to do the deed? And why all that haste to find a mercenary only to have that haste be abandoned?
And why was it when he looked in her eyes as he was doing now, he felt as if he had stepped out of time and space and was looking into dreams?
“Were you afraid I would run away?” she asked.
He realized he was likely sitting too close to her to be considered polite, but who could blame him? He felt a certain sense of protectiveness where she was concerned. Sitting nearby on the off chance she required aid was simply the chivalrous thing to do.
“Something like that,” he managed.
She sat up and dragged her hand through her hair. “I’m not sure if I feel better or worse.”
“I think food might help either way,” he said. “Let’s seek out the kitchens and see what’s available.”
“Did you find what you were looking for?”
“Not yet, but I will.”
“I imagine so,” she said through a yawn. She handed him his cloak, then hesitated suddenly. “I have no gold to buy food.”
“I have enough for the both of us.”
She looked at him, her expression very grave. “I’m not sure how to repay you.”
“Secrets?” he asked lightly.
“I wonder if they need a floor scrubbed instead?”
“I imagine they will feed us out of pity,” he said wryly. “We’ll discuss floors and secrets later when the need truly arises.” He rose wearily to his feet and held out his hand to help her up. “Let’s be off before we haven’t the energy to get there.”
She nodded and followed him out of the library. He had left their packs behind, but he imagined no one would walk off with them. The lesser librarian’s magic would see to that.
He walked with Aisling along passageways and outside through the gardens to reach the kitchens. He realized only as he’d left her behind for the third time that she seemed to find something rather interesting about the greenery. He stopped and walked back to where she was plucking something off a budding rosebush.
“What is it?” he asked.
She held up a single strand of silver, no thicker than a strand of hair, though obviously fashioned of an otherworldly substance. “I keep seeing these.”
He was almost speechless at finding that once she had the magic in her hand he could see it as well. “Interesting.”
She studied it, then looked at him. “Camanaë.”
He felt for somewhere to sit down and only succeeded in putting his hand into the middle of a very thorny rosebush. He cursed, sucked on his thumb, and tried to look casual.
“What?”
“That is what this…is,” she said, looking at him helplessly.
“Is it?”
She swallowed, hard. “Is it magic?”
“Ah—”
She waited for him to finish. He couldn’t. All he could do was stare at her and remind himself that he was far too old to be squirming under the piercing gaze of a woman who could draw strands of magic out of thin air.
Her eyes narrowed. “That is my question for the day and you must tell the truth.”
He might have believed she wanted the truth if she hadn’t sounded as if she would rather have heard anything but.
He took a careful breath, then nodded. “It is.”
“How do you know?”
He knew he either had to lie or say nothing. So he said nothing.
“But there is no such thing as magic,” she protested, looking as if she were very near to weeping.
He could only look at her, because there was nothing he could possibly say to make the truth any easier to bear. He just didn’t understand why the knowing of it grieved her so.
She looked away, down at what she held aloft on her finger. “It isn’t fashioned from anything,” she said, her voice barely audible. “It just is. As if it were a thread from a cloak snagged on this as someone walked by.” She looked at him, then. “What is Camanaë?”
Rùnach felt a little winded. “It is a type of magic,” he said, when he thought he could speak easily. “It is also a place, very small, tucked in amongst other places.”
She dangled the strand of magic from her pinched thumb and pointer finger. Even Rùnach could see how it sparkled in spite of the lack of sunshine. It was, he had to admit, a very beautiful magic. He was partial to Fadaire because it was his birthright and it was extremely powerful, but he was also heir to Camanaë through his father’s mother, who was the granddaughter of the wizardess Nimheil, who had woven her tears into a famous blade, the name of which he honestly couldn’t bring to mind at the moment. That might have been because Aisling was looking at him as if he had answers she might want to have. That look made him unaccountably nervous.
“It is very elegant,” she said with a frown.
“It is an elegant magic,” he agreed, trying to look about surreptitiously for a place to place his arse before he landed full into that damned rosebush. “Matriarchal, as it happens. I think it might have been Friona of Camanaë to first lay her hand on the spring of power in that land and claim it for her own. Her husband, if I remember aright, had just eaten most of a half bushel of overripe peaches and found himself indisposed for the afternoon, else he might have found the spring first and the destiny of that realm would have been forever changed.”
She shut her mouth, then smiled. “You can’t be serious.”
“I am,” he said, finding he had to smile in return. The woman was, he had to admit, so earnestly grave most of the time that when she smiled, she became…
Beautiful. She became beautiful.
“I think you need to eat,” she said suddenly. “You look unwell.”
He wasn’t sure he wanted to think about how he looked. Besotted was definitely not the word he was searching for. He nodded firmly. “I think I might be feverish. Perhaps we would both benefit from food and a place to sit.”
“All this talk of legends leaves one hungry for something substantial, does it not?”
He would have argued the point with her, but she looked at him so quickly and with such a haunted look in her eye, that he couldn’t.
“Absolutely,” he said. He offered her his arm. “Shall we?”
She looked at his arm as if she had no idea what to do with it, though he was certain he’d escorted her thus before. Then again, with that woman, he was honestly not quite sure what was dream and what wasn’t. He reached for her hand, tucked it into the crook of his elbow, then nodded up the path.
“Things will seem easier with a full belly.”
She nodded, though she didn’t look convinced. She looked at the thread of Camanaë she had laid back onto the rosebush, shook her head slowly, then didn’t protest when he led her away.
Two hours after having managed a meal for them without garnering undue notice and managing further to get himself back to the library before he couldn’t stay awake any longer, he woke and wished he’d had an entire night’s sleep and not just a nap. He sat up, rubbed his bleary eyes, and found Aisling sitting at the table with a rather large stack of books.
She was reading, though looking rather less than pleased with her efforts. He pushed himself to his feet with a groan, stumbled over to the table, and collapsed into a chair around the corner from her. He forced himself to sit up with his elbows on the table.
“What are you looking for?” he asked with a yawn.
She started as if he’d poked her with a hot fire tong. She shifted. “Nothing in particular.”
“Which is why you’re so irritated at not being able to find it.”
She looked terribly uncomfortable. Rùnach couldn’t say he was a particularly adept reader of faces—though Soilléir had certainly been a master at it—but he could spot a lie coming at him from fifty paces.
“I am looking for myths.”
> He leaned back in his chair and propped his ankle up on the other knee, trying to look as unassuming as possible. These were details he found himself rather more interested in than perhaps he should have been.
“Myths?” he asked casually. “What sort?”
She shrugged, though she looked very nervous and didn’t manage it as smoothly as she would have liked. “Things that don’t exist. You know what I’m talking about.”
“I’ve forgotten.”
She glared at him. “Wizards, bejeweled caverns under the mountains belonging to dwarves where they pluck already faceted diamonds from the ceiling to spend in creating even more lovely halls, perhaps dragons. Elves too, though I’m willing to allow that there might be the odd thing I’ve read about that might exist.” She looked at him seriously. “A pegasus, for example.”
“There is that,” he agreed.
“I still don’t believe in magic.”
“I know.”
She sat back and looked around her. “Have you ever seen so many books in one place at one time? Well, save Lismòr, of course.”
He almost didn’t know how to respond. The library at Lismòr was very well stocked, he had to admit, but it paled in comparison to the library at Buidseachd, a place he had haunted for a score of years. He had heard tales that the library in Diarmailt contained so many books it took a small army of librarians to simply reshelve them all.
The thought made him a little light-headed, truth be told.
“You’re overwhelmed as well,” she noted.
“Aye,” he agreed, for he was, and not just by the thought of all the things he could discover with the right amount of searching.
She looked around. “I have looked in the most obvious places here. I may have missed something, given that this library is so large.”
Rùnach had to bite his tongue to keep from telling her that these were only the books put out for public use, that the king of Neroche had a vast library on the second floor for his own personal use, for then she would wonder how he knew that and that would lead to questions he simply didn’t want to answer at present.