I realized Hal and Mr. Dart were both staring at me: and then the rest of the riddle fell into place.
THE SUN HAD LONG SINCE set when I left.
I was not really dressed for running—usually I wore the same clothing as for fencing lessons—but my half-boots were comfortable and snug, my breeches fine wool, my shirt and waistcoat cool cotton. My coat I had wrapped around the jade crock to cushion it inside its sack.
I set out at a brisk walk through the quiet evening streets of Ragnor Bella, passing a few men on their way to various houses, public or private, and two older women I didn’t know sitting on a front stoop to catechize the passersby. Arrived (without more than a suggestive few comments about the contents of the sack) at Ragglebridge—bridge, pub, and hamlet in their sequence—where tonight there were no mysterious armed strangers to spark thoughts of revolutions or romance. Once on the other side of the torchlight, I began to lope.
The moon was set to rise at ten-thirty or so, which gave me just about enough time to thoroughly enjoy the run.
Up the long slope out of the valley of the Raggle, the road still damp and a bit churned up from rain and the day’s traffic. Around the curve that encompassed the hill on which stood the Little church (walnut tree skeletal against the stars; no sign of Violet, nor anyone else). Past the Lady’s Cross, empty this evening of gentry or cultists; turned south onto the fine old imperial highway, and, muscles warm, ran.
Marcan had been keen on meditative practices and had tried on numerous occasions to teach me. Whether it was the fault of wireweed or enchantment or my own personality I didn’t now know, but I had never succeeded in calming my mind while sitting still.
Running, though, running I could do.
And running I found myself asking myself the hard questions.
What was I afraid of, Hal had asked me: why could I not rejoice in good news, trust in it?
I ran, the pale limestone road clear before me, smooth, firm, more steadfast than the Empire that had built it.
I was afraid of the good news being withdrawn.
The treed height to my left was the western edge of the Coombe hills, where Mr. Dart and I had discovered cultists and black magic and wireweed and organized crime.
I was afraid I was nothing without the wireweed and the magic.
To my right were the half-abandoned fields and pastures that had once been lovingly tended by farmers who had almost all perished during the Interim, by magic gone awry, by pestilence, by wild animals, by wilder men.
I was afraid of how much I wanted something to fill the void left by the loss of Lark and the wireweed.
I passed one lone farmhouse with a light burning inside, wondered who had braved the loss of all their neighbours, how they kept picking up the pieces of their lives when so few came down the highway now.
I was afraid that I would never again be whole.
Ahead of me the mountains rose against the stars. The peaks of the Crosslains had snow on them, sure sign of the turning season, though frosts had yet to touch us in the wide vale of the Rag.
I was afraid of becoming like the Honourable Rag: addicted to gambling, to drinking too much, to hunting too hard, to trying to drown the inner voices.
Below the white peaks the grey slopes of the Foothills, and below that dark dimness the darker mass of the Woods, silent now in the nighttime.
I was afraid the title—Hal’s good news—would mean I had to do none of the hard work. That again like the Honourable Rag people would smilingly watch me destroy myself, secure in the eccentricities of the gentry; that I would never live up to my father’s legacy; that everything I had learned of myself standing up against Lark would be lost not to my cowardice but to a far-too-easy adjustment to my mother’s heritage.
The tall white waystone marking the branch of the road that led off to the west and the Gorbelow Hills and the Leap cast a black shadow across the road, which I felt a superstitious urge to jump.
My father had taught me to play Poacher; to jump the Leap (throw my heart first and be sure my horse would follow); to stand up for what was right, to fight for what I believed in.
My mother had taught me to think through what I believed in; that life was a game of Poacher; that sometimes one had to make compromises to survive, but that one never compromised the heart of oneself, for what survived without the heart was nothing.
I was afraid that the good fortune would turn sour because so often already it had. My father’s return leading to suicide and disgrace; my love for Lark imploding into lies and criminal magic; my efforts to do the right thing, say the right thing, be the right thing, for Mr. Buchance ending ... well, ending with him deciding to give me the merest competence and me missing his funeral.
That was a hard thought to address. I gritted my teeth, concentrated on my form, and when I was in the smoothest stride forced my thoughts back to it.
I did truly believe, or I kept trying to convince myself I truly believed—my mind believed, though my heart struggled with it—that he owed me nothing more, indeed nothing so much. I was not actually his son; I had made it clear to him that I would not, could not, be his son, not with my father’s legacy (the good and the bad) hanging over me. How could I be his son, when I was the son of the man who had been given the Heart of the Glory by the Emperor, and was buried under five roads at the White Cross.
I had not in the least deliberately missed Mr. Buchance’s funeral, but missed it I had.
I crested a low rise, started down to the wide plain before the boundary stream, the first Sun Gate a dim circle in the starlight.
So I had: and (I could hear Mrs. Etaris’ voice in my ear) what was I going to do as a result?
I would do my best to see that Mrs. Buchance and my sisters had all they needed. They would not need any financial help from me, but there were presumably other things I could do.
It occurred to me for the first time that the heiresses of an upward-climbing Charese merchant would find adult life much easier if the Viscount St-Noire (presumably at some point the Marquis—or possibly March—of the Woods Noirell) acknowledged them as his kin and got his friend the Duke of Fillering Pool to help sponsor them into the world.
Most people, after all, did not go to Morrowlea because they wanted to know who they were without the trappings of name and family and wealth.
Another thing I had learned was people did care for me, even when it felt as though no one in the world did, and it was unkind to them to get out of all communication. How unhappy I would be never to hear from Mr. Dart or Hal again—or Marcan—or indeed Violet.
I mused about potential ways to communicate with Violet for a few hundred yards before I arrived at the Sun Gate and realized what I was doing.
No. I was not trying to work out my feelings for Violet at the moment. That was for another night run, another ... well, another night.
There was a light wind on this side, blowing out of the Woods, strongly redolent of the Tillarny limes.
Was I nothing without the wireweed and the magic?
I paused at the Sun Gate, the water rushing softly under the bridge below me.
No.
I was the Fiellanese scholar to Morrowlea before, and—I chuckled aloud, startling myself a little—I was Mrs. Etaris’ assistant clerk after. I was, it seemed, the Viscount St-Noire (albeit by accident of birth), and I was Mr. Dart’s friend and Hal’s, and a spite to all the smug conservatives who didn’t want anything to change simply by being who I was.
I took a breath and ran through the Gate and across the threshold of shadow and deeper shadow into the Woods.
And if I were afraid of addiction—if I knew that my grandfather had been addicted to gambling, and that my father had been concerned enough to warn me as best he could long before I was of the age to begin seeking out such things—if I knew that I had always to be careful to stop when I drank or played at cards long before I wanted to, because I could guess—because I knew—that the wanting would not stop until it
was disastrously too late—
—Well, I did know that, and I did do that, and I had the ruination of Roald Ragnor before me as a warning. He was blithe and merry and seemingly untroubled by any pricks of conscience or sense, but in two weeks I had yet to encounter him without a drink or a wager in hand, and sooner or later it would catch up with him.
At least if I had the Indrilline criminal family of Orio City after me it wasn’t for gambling debts.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Mr. White has an Idea
INSIDE THE WOODS THE road gleamed as if magical; and there were fireflies.
“Oh,” I said, and decided that every one of my critics could be right if only I could see this sort of beauty from time to time, and I swore then and there that for the bees and the fireflies and the Tillarny limes I would be the Viscount St-Noire, crazy grandmother, unpleasant castle, mysterious curses, dragons, riddles, high Gothic melodrama, and all.
Round and around the curves I ran, fireflies twinkling beside me, above me, before me, behind me, road white and trees dark and so fragrant I could almost identify each as an individual by scent alone.
And then in amongst the houses, to the village green and the white inn and between them the well with its wellhead in the shape of a hive full of bees missing something to make it whole.
THE FIREFLIES, AT FIRST a few faint specks twinkling in the depths of the Woods, at length brighter, more numerous, and nearer. Each footfall on the old highway seemed to attract them, almost to create them; I half-imagined I could look behind me and see sparks rising from my feet and whirling away into fireflies, until my way shone dimly gold and all I could see to either side of me was a thickly clustered ribbon of light punctuated by the dark boles of the trees like sentinels.
In Kissing the Moon Fitzroy Angursell writes of how the Red Company stole the boat of the Sun and rowed it down the River of Stars, out of the Moon’s country and all the way back into the mortal worlds.
The first time I read the poem I had stalled there wondering why the boat of the Sun had no sails and who rowed it ordinarily (‘the Hours’ was, I discovered, the scholarly consensus; for even the most notoriously banned poet in the Empire eventually gets studied by the Scholars), and I had nearly not noticed the beauty of the passage itself, until Violet read it out to me one summer’s evening when we were supposed to be weeding.
I could not quite bring the words to mind.
Down the River of Stars—something something the sky-road
The Sun’s road—something something
the Sea of Stars uncountable
Each of them named
And then something about
Our arms doing the work of the hours
Something about the movement of rowing, the wind from the places between the stars
And Jullanar of the Sea reaching her hand down
Dipping her hand down
Into the sky ...
I would have to borrow the Darts’ copy and read it again, without the wireweed or the magic this time.
But now when I read it I would have, along with that ghost of a memory of Violet reading the poem while I pretended to dig up dandelions, now there would be this vision of the fireflies surrounding me in a river of stars uncounted, though perhaps the Lady of Summer knew each one’s name.
We poured into the village, the river of fireflies and I, like a cataract of light, the heavy scent of the limes suffusing the air.
At the green I slowed to a walk, and then a slower walk as my feet touched the dew-sparkling grass. The fireflies, thick as festival lights, swirled around me, filled all the space of the green, the sky above us spangled brilliant as fireworks.
I halted at the well. The fireflies moved ceaselessly, flickering on and off, but so many of them they gave the impression of light reflecting off myriad glinting surfaces. At any moment I expected a Faerie ballroom to take shape out of light and shadow.
Figures did emerge.
My heart stopped a moment in shock, until I saw they had the barely-familiar faces of the villagers. They were confused and a little wary, coming out of houses and inn, some in their daytime clothes and some ready for bed.
They stopped in a loose circle around me, the fireflies illuminating them in strange patterns of shadow and speckled light. I nodded uncertainly at Mr. Horne and the innkeepers, who were closest to me. Mr. White smiled encouragingly; I wondered briefly why.
I opened the sack, withdrew my coat and put it on—now that I was no longer running I was a little chilled—then cleared my throat. Stuffed the sack in my pocket, so all I held was the crock, smooth and cool and heavy in my hands. Cleared my throat again.
“I have come to answer the riddle, O dragon.”
IF FOR A MOMENT THE fireflies had seemed reflections rather than illuminations, for a moment the dragon seemed to be made of the spaces between things, rather than a body-in-itself. I watched as sparkling shadows turned into sparkling scales, and then coiled around the well-head as it had been coiled around the Dragon Stone there it was.
“Well?” it said.
My heart was thumping rather more than it had from running. Be calm, I said sternly to myself. I wanted the clear air of mortal danger: instead I had audience and fireflies and heavy scent and a riddle, and was thrown into the position I had last occupied at the final viva voce examinations at Morrowlea.
I had been waiting for my turn, hands shaking, while others presented their final papers, defended their theses, answered the questions of their tutors and occasional fellow students. I knew my final paper was rubbish, though I held to my thesis as being sound, and hoped mostly to redeem the incoherent mess I feared I had written. Our tutor had smiled when Violet defended her paper, then frowned when he looked at me.
I had not read Lark’s paper, nor anyone’s, before the examinations. I had been ill (so I thought), unable to concentrate on much of anything besides the running. Running I could channel the feverish energy, did not have to think, could let my thoughts jump as they willed until at last they settled into a semblance of calm focus. So I ran longer and longer loops, trying to exhaust the fear of the mysterious illness out of me, hiding from the knowledge the rest of my life was collapsing along with my health.
Wrote something of barely acceptable length, only coherent because Violet had forced me to give it to her to edit, the brilliant insight into Ariadne nev Lingarel’s poem a mess of lines and allusions to other poets. It was still too bitter a thought to address my mind to how much I had failed the insight, the poem, my tutor.
But sitting there, waiting my turn, hands shaking, I had marshalled my thoughts as best I could to the arguments I knew were there, to the points I knew were sound, to the thesis I knew was correct, and new, and elevated what was considered only a minor masterpiece into one of the upper ranks of literature.
Or it could have, had I made the argument; and if I were right and the insight not merely a function of some strange deluded state of mind of someone in the later stages of wireweed addiction and magic loss.
I had not been put to the test of my knowledge of Classical Shaian poetry, nor to my ideas about Ariadne nev Lingarel, for before it was my turn it was Lark’s, and all thoughts of poetry disappeared in a deluge of disbelief and betrayal.
And at the end of her smug and spectacular piece of rhetoric, when the tumultuous applause was dying down under the Chancellor’s ironic eye, when Lark’s tutor Dominus Marbone asked the traditional question of whether any of the students had a response—
I had stood up, hands shaking, knees (the shame!) trembling, voice barely sounding, and taken her speech apart point by point by point, as I had been taught to do by my tutor.
For that I had been stoned.
But also for that the senate of the university had awarded me First in the year.
I stepped forward, hands kept from trembling by the weight of the jade crock, knees unable to tremble because I was forcing them to walk, voice sounding far too loud because I was using
my diaphragm to project it as clearly as I could.
“You gave me a riddle,” I said.
Between the green and the white is the door.
Between the race and the runner is the lock.
Between the sun and the shadow is the key.
In the bright heart of the dark house is the dark heart of the bright house.
And therewithin, if the sap of the tree runs true, is the golden treasure of the dark woods.
Bring that to me ere the Sun and the Moon are at their furthest remove.
The way of the woods has many turns and few branches.
The branch of the woods has many turns and few ways.
The turn of the woods is the way of the branch, for good, young sir, or for ill.
“Well?” said the dragon.
I glanced at the villagers, who must have seen many strange things on a regular basis, given their mildly interested expressions; though perhaps that was a trick of the flickering light.
“The riddle,” I began, and recited it.
I wish I knew more names of the villagers than simply Mr. Horne and the innkeepers Mr. and Mrs. White. At least I did know their names, and could see them, along with all their fellows who would soon—so I hoped—become familiar to me.
“Your answer?” said the dragon.
I took a breath, sneezed out of ancient habit, took another breath. “The answer is in two parts. First is the short one: a variation on the classic answer, which is ‘myself’—in this case, ‘myself with this honey crock’.”
I held out my mother’s jade crock for the dragon’s inspection, and even more the villagers’. Lady willing, they would be the ones I would see day in and day out, whom I would be responsible to and for. I might even hope that one or two of them would let me bridge our stations and become friends. My grandmother the Marchioness might stay immured in her castle, but my mother hadn’t, and neither would I.
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