Alphabet of Thorn

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “You must marry,” she told Axis. “You will need that army from Cribex to fight the regent.”

  He raised his head, stared at her. Later during his life he was known as the Lion, because of his broad, golden face, his wide-set eyes, his tawny hair. He never doubted her; he only wondered, “How do you know such things?”

  “I listen,” she said.

  “Do you become invisible?”

  “No. I’m there, if you know how to look. I stand between the place you look at and the place you see. Behind what you expect to see. If you expect to see me, you do. I listen in places where no one expects me to be.”

  He nodded, becoming calmer; he wiped at his face with his forearm and sat back on his haunches, his hands on her knees. He asked her what his mother told him to ask.

  “What do you want?”

  “What you want,” she said.

  “I want you. With me. Forever.”

  She put her hands on his, her own eyes dry now, seeing them both where no one would expect them to be, ever; always they would be the last thing anyone would expect to see.

  “So it will be,” she said, and made it so.

  FIVE

  The queen was in the wood.

  A week had passed since her coronation, and her guests showed no signs of going home. Elaborate feasts still came up from the kitchens, endless slabs of meat big enough to flag a floor, loaves of bread the size of cartwheels, tiered cakes she might have worn as skirts festooned with ribbons and scrolls and invariably topped with crowns shaped of beaten egg whites and gold leaf. Her guests had drunk small ponds of wine and roaring rivers of ale. They had drunk to the name of everyone who had ever ruled the Crowns of Raine, including a pair of twins who had killed each other in a brawl over which should be king in the middle of the coronation ceremony. Outside, the broad plain was littered with empty barrels and feathers and bones; it was turning into a midden. Late at night when the winds were still it smelled like one.

  “I’ll send them all away soon,” Vevay promised. “But not until you know your ruling nobles’ names, and their faces, and you can remember one striking opinion from each one of them. Dance with them. That’s the easiest way to begin a conversation.”

  Tessera could only gaze at her, amazed, wondering who the mage thought she was talking to. One of Tessera’s ladies-in-waiting, perhaps, those poised and smiling creatures who could drop an eyelid and unsettle a kingdom.

  Vevay was beginning to look cross-eyed back at her, something that happened when Tessera had seemed particularly obtuse.

  “Dance. You know. Movement of the feet in an orderly pattern in time to music—”

  “I know,” Tessera said hollowly. “I did it with my father.”

  By which she meant she knew how. But Vevay heard something else, apparently; she closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose a moment.

  “Your father. You are no longer a child, and your father is dead.”

  “Yes.” She had to stop and swallow what felt like a hard little turtle lodged in her throat. “I guessed as much when he got buried.”

  Vevay closed her eyes again. The lines of her face shifted subtly, turning her somehow very old and very beautiful at the same time.

  “I am sorry, Tessera. I only want—I want for you everything your father had.”

  Tessera looked past her, out the open window of the council-chamber where she met every hour with Vevay to be told whom she would speak to next, and of what, and what she had to gain or lose by it. A gull, hovering in the wind, looked back at her in her tower room, then caught a shifting angle of air and slid with dizzying grace to freedom.

  “I am not my father,” she said, while her heart swooped and fell and soared through that airy nothing above the sea.

  “Don’t judge yourself harshly,” Vevay answered, regaining her composure and misunderstanding Tessera entirely. “That’s what I’m here for. To help you, I mean.”

  “Yes,” Tessera said indifferently; dancing would help nothing. But there it was: she must move her feet and talk at the same time. And remember, as well, so that they could all be sent home and she could hear herself think again.

  She tried very hard to remember their words; after a while everything they said all sounded alike. What she remembered most was their eyes as they took her hand and turned her, drew her close and relinquished her, according to the instructions of the pipes and the viols after supper that evening. Alien as birds they were, watching her, waiting for her to shift her shape to something grublike, helpless and possibly edible. So she felt, as she tried to make civilized noises. Even those came out oddly, in whispers and squeaks. Vevay watched from a corner, her face a remote mask. Around Tessera, other young women laughed and chattered amiably as though there were no danger, as though they had all the power.

  The younger men, some would-be suitors, spoke of her beauty, which she knew was negligible, and of her charm, which was nonexistent. She peered at them anxiously, trying to see what they really meant. The older nobles and courtiers spoke to her of their worthy and eligible sons, or, lacking them, made reference to difficulties in their Crowns to which, they said, her father had been on the verge of attending just before his tragic accident. These she promised earnestly to keep in mind, while she tried to match the problem with the shape of a mustache or a sagging eyelid to remind her. Only one man, the uncle of the Prince of Chessery, the Ninth Crown of Raine, attached himself instantly to her memory.

  He was a compact, gray-haired man whose composure she found calming. He said to her simply, as she turned under his upraised arm, “I miss your father. I liked him better than my own sons. He could be very kind, when he thought about it.”

  She stared at him, until she had to turn again. When she faced him, she asked abruptly, “Are you allowed to say such things? Nobody else says what they think.”

  “If you have nothing to lose,” he answered, “you can say whatever you want.”

  She was silent a moment; when she tripped over his foot, they both ignored it. “I may not say what I think,” she told him, “and I am Queen of Raine.”

  “That’s because you have everything to lose.”

  She barely saw anyone else that evening; when Vevay questioned her later, his was the only face she could remember clearly.

  “His expressions were kind,” she said. “He made me remember why I loved my father. He told me the difference between everything and nothing.”

  “Which is?” Vevay prompted, looking baffled.

  “Words.”

  Vevay was still baffled. But she had taken a word as a suggestion; her voice seemed kinder than usual when she finally spoke. “It is enormously difficult to lose so much and gain so much at the same moment.”

  “Oh, yes,” Tessera whispered. She walked out of her dancing shoes with a sigh, went to the window, which framed black now, above the sea, starless and roiling like the beginning or the end of time.

  “Tomorrow,” Vevay said behind her. “The first thing after breakfast, you must meet the delegation from the King of Almorania. It is an ancient kingdom, along the southern borders of the Fourth Crown, mountainous and harsh. Each time rule changes hands in either of our lands, treaties are renewed to keep peace between us. They pay certain tributes; we leave them alone. The delegation missed the coronation, but that is not an issue: traveling through their mountain passes in early spring is difficult for them. They will offer coronation gifts of bowls lacquered with the crushed wings of butterflies, and necklaces of gold and amber for which they are renowned. In a day or two, you will sit with your council while the treaty is renewed. After meeting them tomorrow, you will…”

  “Yes,” Tessera said, and “yes” and “yes” whenever it seemed required.

  In the morning, before breakfast, she went to the wood.

  It was not a conscious decision. She found herself awake early, and restless. The dawn sun spilled gold across the stones around her bed. She dressed herself; no one was awake to stop her.
She wandered through side corridors, down narrow, winding stairways no one had used for a century or two, where every arrow-shaped window overflowed with light. That was not far enough. Light drew her farther, past stables, through gardens where she breathed the scents of brine and early roses. The plain, she knew, would be a great, gilded, shining thing where winds like wild stallions raced from the sea to the end of the world. But when she went through the last of many gates in the maze of walls around the palace, she saw the flapping pavilions, dogs chewing on last night’s bones, servants sleepily poking up their fires and trying to quiet children running half-naked and laughing through the light.

  Tessera passed around them, not noticing how wide a berth she had to give her well-wishers just to try to find some place where no one would want anything from her, not a smile, not a word, where the people ended and the empty plain began again.

  The wood suddenly filled her eyes, crouching like some dark feral thing on the horizon. She had forgotten that, too, along with the pavilions. It hid itself occasionally, she guessed, which must be why she always seemed to come across it unexpectedly. Lured by light, she had already walked a long way around the pavilions. Now dark, silence, secrecy tempted her, all the mysteries hidden within the wild wood.

  The mages’ school was somewhere in the trees, she knew; she looked for it as soon as she crossed from grass into bracken and shadow. She had only seen it once, on a summer afternoon when she went riding with her father. Then it had floated above the trees like something sunning itself: a strange stone puzzle of walls with too many angles, blind towers, and no gates anywhere in sight. It cast its own reflection in the air, a mirror image of itself. The reflection had windows and doors and gates everywhere. She remembered her father’s surprised, delighted laugh at the vision, and how one of the eyeless towers grew a window to flick a glance at him. Then it sank with a stately, lumbering grace to hide itself again within the trees.

  Now, the wood in early morning was utterly silent. She walked carefully through damp leaves, around tangles of bramble and vine, trying not to disturb the stillness. She could not see the sky, only green and shadow woven thickly above her, yielding not a scrap of blue. She breathed soundlessly. So did the wood around her, she felt; it seemed a live thing, alert and watching her, trees trailing wisps of morning mist, their faces hidden, their thoughts seeping into the air like scent. It was, she thought, like being surrounded by unspoken words.

  She stopped moving, stood as silently, listening to them, trying to understand their silent language. Their words lay all around her, she realized slowly; each fallen, moldering leaf, each twist of ivy along a branch, each outstretched twig in a thicket made a shape in the air, in the eye. What did they say? she wondered, entranced, and tried to breathe in the language of the wood, tried to take it in through her skin, as though she too were hidden within leaves, within bark.

  Leaves crackled suddenly; branches whipped. The wood spoke, describing something imminent and, from the sound of it, fairly big. Tessera tensed, then spun, searching. The wood looked the same from every direction: trees and thickets, bushes and brambles and great veils of ivy twining up to cover the heads of huge old trees. Nothing pointed out. She chose a direction at random and ran.

  Tessera? she heard from very far away, as though someone had thought her name. Vevay, most likely, she guessed, and remembered the morning’s work: breakfast with her guests, the delegation from Almorania, the bowls painted with crushed butterfly wings… She ran faster, through endless silent trees, wondering if she were heading deeper into the wood, so deep into its magic that not even Vevay could find her.

  And then she crossed the border between shadow and light. She was on the sunlit plain again, the wood only a tangled memory behind her. She could see the ragged smoke from the distant campfires; she could feel the exuberant wind again, which had not stirred a single leaf within the wood.

  She stopped, panting, turning to look back incredulously at the self-contained, secret world. For the second time in her life, she saw the Floating School, another secret world, hanging between sky and tree, its blind towers sunlit, even the reflection it cast of itself catching light, throwing glints of crystal and brass from windows and doors.

  There were shouts of wonder behind her. The giant who had stalked her in the wood parted branches at the edge of it to look at her. She glimpsed his great bald pate, his massive shoulders, before she turned and ran again. One of the guards keeping watch over the plain, sitting on his horse and gawking at the school, saw the girl running out of the wood and rode over to her. He recognized the flying, spider-web hair and the pale, unfinished face, with its white eyebrows and startled eyes.

  “I went for a walk,” she told him in response to his astonished questions. “I must get back quickly.”

  He gave her his horse; she reached the palace in time to dress for breakfast.

  SIX

  By sheer chance, Nepenthe was swimming with the fish when next she saw the visiting scholar’s hairy face.

  He put his head into her alcove, looking over her shoulder to read her translations. She started. His head was worse for wear, his eyes hollows of dark, his hair plastered to his scalp as though he had dunked himself into a barrel of ale. She wondered if he would survive the queen’s coronation.

  But he seemed cheerful enough, wrapped in smelly fur against the afternoon chill and paying close attention to her reasoning as her finger moved from fish to fish.

  “This one has two small lines here, like two mouths. Two little hooks, or smiles. I think it’s a method of counting. The counting fish have varying numbers of smiles, and they always come at the beginning of a line. So that kind of fish is both a number and the beginning letter of a word. Two wagons, maybe, or two oxen. Something to do with transporting all the fish lined up over here.”

  He made an appreciative noise or two through his nose, then extended an inky finger out of the fur. “What do you make of this grouping? It’s repeated often.”

  “There are several repeated groupings, positioned like that. They might turn out to be people’s names. The merchants, or drivers in the caravan, perhaps.”

  He grunted again, then remarked, “Lord Birnum seems in no hurry to leave. You might have time to solve this puzzle before I have to go.”

  “I hope so,” she replied absently, not willing to abandon the thorns for the scholar’s kettle of fish. He jingled something in the fur; a coin or two spoke.

  “I can’t pay much,” he said, “but you deserve something for all this work.”

  She shrugged, surprised. “I don’t expect much. I’m still an apprentice. We go for months without seeing money.”

  “It helps, in the world beyond this stone.” He dropped a coin among the fish. “There’s your newly-minted queen. I can give you a few more of those if you finish before I leave. If she’s still on her throne.”

  Nepenthe picked the coin up, studied it curiously. It was a round of copper, big, but what she had learned about money was that the bigger it was, the less it was worth. The young queen’s profile, stamped on the coin, was likely to be as close as a transcriptor ever got to seeing her. The impression made was of an abundance of hair, a rounded, determined jaw, and an enormous crown; other details seemed imprecise.

  “It’s more like,” Master Croysus said heavily, “what we wish than what we see. I don’t remember much of a jaw-line at all, and her hair is rather limp.”

  “Maybe she’ll turn into herself,” Nepenthe murmured, feeling some pity for the defenseless young woman who had the weight of twelve Crowns and all those centuries of history on her head. The possibility of war occurred to her; the scholar’s musings seemed to suggest it. In the epics she had read, war usually came to a bad end. “Will the Crowns fight her, Master Croysus?”

  His head ducked down into his fur, as though hiding from the listening stones. “Don’t talk so loudly—”

  “You always do.”

  “I speculate.” He lowered his own vo
ice nearly to a whisper. “I think many are. It’s why everyone is lingering.”

  “Why—”

  “Speculations, conspiracies, alliances—nobles testing her, testing one another before they make decisions.”

  “Really?” Nepenthe flicked her pen against the desk, gazing raptly upward at solid stone, trying to envision the complex, restless world beyond it. “What of the library? What do we do if they go to war?”

  Master Croysus shook his untidy head. “Who knows? Words do not always survive war.” He tapped the fish. “Entire languages disappear. Librarians?” He shrugged and said again, “Who knows? Epics are never written about libraries. They exist on whim; it depends if the conquering army likes to read.”

  Nepenthe mulled over that, sitting safely on her stool, surrounded by stone as old as the world. She came to no satisfactory conclusions about anything, except to realize that her head was filling with thorns now, instead of fish. The thorny alphabet, far from keeping her out, was proving oddly accessible. One thorn led to another; the very shapes of the flowing, graceful brambles suggested the words they formed. Warfare, battles, seemed a constant, underlying theme. War and poetry. War and love. Though neither battle nor passion had emerged yet from the brambles, both were hidden among them, she was certain. Stumbling among the strange letters like a child learning to read, she had come to recognize those words first.

  She rolled up the fish, since Master Croysus would not return that day, and took the thorns out of their hiding place behind a pyramid of scrolls on a shelf.

  She was surrounded by brambles, trying to unravel some twining canes arranged in brief lines that suggested poetry, when she became aware of a looming something breathing over her shoulder.

  She jumped, nearly spilling her ink, as she threw an arm across the books. It was Laidley behind her, his mouth open, his close-set eyes snagged on thorns.

  “What is that? I’ve never seen anything like it.”