Alphabet of Thorn

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  So it was that when Telmenon’s army appeared by moon-light along the southern bank of the Serpent, Axis’s army rode out of the cornfields to meet it. The battle was reminiscent of that long-ago massacre of his mud-soldiers and his father by the Serpent. Axis waited silently in the night, while Kane watched. When most of Telmenon’s army was in the river, she signaled the Lion to attack.

  The Serpent ran red in the moonlight,

  The red moon floated on the water,

  The Serpent’s eye, open and bloody,

  As it fed.

  The army of Telmenon

  Drank their own blood

  As the Serpent dragged them under its waters.

  The boy-king

  Who would be Emperor of Night

  Slew his father’s brother

  And fed to the Serpent the dying warriors of Telmenon.

  Kane helped the Serpent feed. It was late summer; Telmenon chose a time when the great river would be at its shallowest for his army to cross. As the poets described the scene later, the river would have had to be swollen with all the rains and melting snows in Eben to have drowned so many warriors. So Kane worked some illusions into the water, which drowned the wounded with their fears, and she coaxed a few streams and field channels that ran out of the river to flow back up their beds to swell the Serpent’s waters. The swirling floods confused the warriors in the dark. They saw the Serpent moving in waters they could have walked through; they panicked and ran into one another’s swords, or splashed blindly across into Axis’s army. The bloody eye the poets envisioned was a fair description of the full moon that night, as it was reflected in the reddened waters. Or as it appeared to the eyes of a warrior watching the burning arrows soar out of the sky across the river into the army still struggling on the south bank. At the battle’s end, many who fled still had no idea who had attacked them. Axis had dressed his warriors in black; their faces were hidden under hoods and veils not unlike Kane’s. They were the first faceless army of the night.

  The boy-king

  Brought his masked army

  Out of the dark,

  Out of stars and fire,

  Out of the Gates of Nowhere

  To conquer the enemies of Eben.

  The poets were wrong about one thing: Telmenon did not die that night. Axis’s warriors, capturing what fleeing men they could find in the night, recognized the regent among their prisoners. He was wounded, stunned by events, and so exasperated he could barely speak when he was dragged from the dungeons at dawn and confronted by the boy-king he had tried to depose. Kane was there, of course, but only as a stray shadow without a visible source, if anyone had noticed.

  The regent, pushed to his knees in front of Axis, dirty, sweating, and bleeding from a slash across one shoulder, looked so like Axis’s father that Kane expected the Lion’s heart to melt a little with pity. The king showed no anger; his voice remained even. As always, his broad, golden face revealed almost nothing of his thoughts.

  “So, uncle,” he said, still in battle-black, with the cloth he had worn over his face hanging around his neck, “what shall I do with you? You taught me how to rule. What would you advise?”

  His uncle, tasting the unbearable bitterness of his defeat, spat at Axis’s feet. Prudently, he missed. The Lion only waited, his tawny eyes unblinking.

  “How,” Telmenon asked finally, hoarsely, “did you know? Who betrayed me?”

  “You betrayed yourself. And you betrayed me.”

  “Who was it?” Telmenon demanded. “Tell me before you kill me.”

  “You will never know,” Axis said softly, and that was so. No one of Telmenon’s warriors ever knew which of them had betrayed them all; everyone suspected everyone. Telmenon’s power had broken itself against a fourteen-year-old girl whom he had dismissed long before as something Axis would grow out of. Telmenon had told Axis what to do with him. Axis had his headless body returned to his family in Lower Eben by a small army, who also brought documents that declared Telmenon’s lands confiscated and sent his family into exile. Axis let them take what they could, along with their heads. Nobody argued.

  Thus he bound Great Eben and Lower Eben, the twin kingdoms of the Serpent, securely under his fledgling rule. Inspired by the incident, he looked for something else to conquer. His mother protested; his wife pleaded. Peace, they craved, though it had been peaceful in Eben all through Telmenon’s regency. They wanted to sit in the courtyard among the peacocks, listening to the singing fountains and the cooing of doves while they played with Axis’s children, for the young queen was pregnant.

  During Axis’s long reign she would have many children, not all of them her husband’s. But not all of his were hers. They had married one another for reasons of state; they expected certain things of one another, but love and fidelity were not among them. Compromises were reached: he would not bring his battles into Eben, and she would not bring her lovers to his attention. She had to relinquish certain illusions. Kane had seen the soft lights of hope and expectancy in her eyes when she looked up at her young husband. But nothing answered in his eyes. She was an affair of state, his wife and the mother of his heirs; he treated her kindly and with respect. But he would never love her. Having a practical soul, she consoled herself with her status and her right to his company. She grew to become an affectionate mother and a discreet wife. So the poets mentioned her rarely and without interest. Her life was not the stuff of passion or tragedy, at least as far as they could see.

  Not even Kane saw much more, though she was very much aware of what could eat at the heart beyond anyone’s detection. For a while she could only watch, always masked, always silent, while Axis moved freely through his world. She longed for their childhood, when one was seldom seen without the other, when she could show him her naked face in public and smile, when they hid in the gardens and spoke their secret language. That Axis missed her as much, she could not have guessed. He married, became a father, ruled his kingdom, while Kane could only do her tricks to make the queen laugh, and trail as a shadow after her heart.

  The Lion

  Fearless, magnificent, unchanging through a thousand years,

  Casts a glance of desire

  And takes.

  Walk in shadows, fear that glance.

  The Lion sees through time,

  Through cloud and stars,

  Into a different day.

  Beware if that day is yours.

  Beware his watching eyes.

  Axis’s golden glance had fallen on the Serpent. The river bordered another kingdom to Eben’s west, and passed through yet another to the east before it ended its journey in the Baltrean Sea. Marrying Cribex, the land to the west, he had secured the headwaters of the Serpent for his own interest. The kingdom between Eben and the sea, containing the rich delta lands the river watered as it fanned into the Baltrean, caught the Lion’s interest. He felt a certain kinship with the Serpent; it had consumed any number of his relatives during his uncle Telmenon’s ill-fated battle. So, he decided, the world that the Serpent ruled should be his.

  He broached the matter in secret with his battle commanders; at his request, Kane listened in the shadow of a potted palm. He met with her at midnight, as was their habit when discussing such things. Invisible to his guards, she followed him into his private chamber, where no one else was permitted and where, it was assumed, he pondered the advice of his counselors, weighed it against history and experience. That he had a secret door to admit lovers and other whims, it was also assumed, though nobody ever found the door. There Kane allowed herself to be seen, only by Axis.

  She unwound the thin black veiling around her face with relief, as well as some trepidation. He had not looked at her for a long time, and she had lost sight of herself as well. Nearly sixteen by then, she had been the lonely, misshapen Kane for so long that she felt she must be turning into him. The Lion’s expressionless face, gazing silently at her, did not help matters.

  He spoke finally. “I am going to war with t
he sea-kingdom of Kaoldep. You must find a reason to come with me.”

  She blinked, not understanding. “Why would you bring the child’s toy from Ilicia with you to battle?”

  “I have no idea.” He still gazed at her, his wide-set cat’s eyes intent and unreadable. “I mean, I have no idea how to explain you. I want you there with me because I want you.”

  She closed her eyes, the breath running soundlessly out of her. “Yes.”

  “Before I married, I only had to turn my head to find you. I only had to say your name.”

  “Yes.”

  “And now, day after day, I must see you veiled, hidden, invisible even to me. I cannot see your face, you cannot speak. I can only watch the shadow of you, using your astonishing powers to amuse my wife.”

  “My lord, I could not think of any other way—”

  “Say my name.”

  “Axis.”

  “Again.”

  “Axis.”

  He gripped her hands, so close to her now that she could feel his heart beat against her fingers. She could not speak; tears spilled down her face. He put his mouth to her cheekbone, caught hot salt between his lips. He slid one hand behind her head, unbound her hair from its tight scarf. It swept down her back; strands caught in her tears. He shifted them away from her face, kissed her again, here, there, wherever he found tears.

  “You have grown so beautiful,” she heard him say, his voice trembling against her ear. “I am King of Eben and a father, and I have fought for my crown and won my first battle, and always, always, with your voice in my thoughts, your face in my heart. Make yourself part of my life again. I don’t care how you explain yourself. I want you with me again. Kane. My first and only love. Make it so.”

  “Yes,” she whispered, feeling herself for the first time all that he said: beautiful, wanted, loved. He spoke those words, and she became them; he had that power over her.

  That was the night Axis and Kane became lovers, and of that all poetry is silent.

  After that night, she began to make certain, subtle changes in the tricks she played to entertain the court. Kane seemed as astonished as anyone when he accidentally knocked a hole in a wall with power from his staff, or set a tablecloth on fire. He made instant reparations, sending stones flying back into the wall to mend it, directing a stream of water out of a fish pond to put out the fire. Then he curled himself into a ball, in terror of the courtiers’ wrath, and tried to beat himself with his own staff. The queen spoke of those mishaps to Axis, worrying that Kane might set her children on fire. The king, intrigued, sent for Kane and tested his powers in front of his counselors and commanders.

  Kane, trembling with fear, destroyed three huge flower pots and shot fire out of the window over the courtyard. The peacocks fled, screaming. In the war room, the advisors consulted one another silently.

  “My lord, that is no longer a toy,” one said finally. “That is a weapon.”

  Kane’s knees hit the floor promptly; he flung the staff away and bowed until his forehead touched the floor.

  “He does not know his own powers,” someone observed softly.

  “What shall I do with him?” Axis wondered. “It would be a pity to kill him. He is innocent of all malice, and his powers are hardly his fault. Yet he would be a danger to my children.”

  “He would be a danger to more than children,” one of his commanders murmured, seeing the future as he stared at Kane.

  “I cannot send him back to Ilicia.”

  “No, my lord, you cannot. That would be foolish, and killing him, as you say, a pity. I suggest you take him with you to Kaoldep and see what he can do on a battlefield.”

  Axis stood up, stepped to the veiled figure crouching on the carpet. “You have pledged your loyalty to me,” he said to Kane. “Will you make your staff into a weapon for the armies of Eben?”

  Kane straightened just enough to seize the king’s hand and bestow fervent kisses on it. Then he held out one hand; the staff, lying in a corner, flew unerringly back to his hand. He rose, feeling the tension in the sudden silence. He put the staff into Axis’s hands, then held both hands over his heart and bowed his head.

  And so, for the first time, Axis and Kane rode together into battle.

  THIRTEEN

  Bourne stood in a chamber within the mages’ school, trying to turn himself invisible. He was alone; the chamber was empty. If he had opened its door a moment earlier than he did, or a moment later, a dragon as pale as snow might have spat blue fire at him. A mage older than the school, sitting alone and patiently waiting to die, might have looked at him and died. A woman so beautiful that his knees melted might have said something in a language he did not recognize. He had found all of these behind doors he had opened in the school at one time or another. They were like random tests that he passed or failed; he was never quite certain. Shutting the door again had seemed the simplest answer to the dragon. He had almost closed the door on the dead mage and gone to find help. But in time he remembered that the door would slide away into some other part of the school, or into some other moment, if he turned his back on it. Instead, he entered the room, stood beside the dead mage, and learned, in that moment, how to send a silent cry for help. He would quite willingly have joined the beautiful woman in her sunlit chamber, except that as he put one foot across the threshold he suddenly understood her incomprehensible words, as though his heart had grown an ear. Shut the door, she had said; he withdrew his foot and went away.

  The chamber he stood in now held only a few cobwebs and a couple of tarnished mirrors leaning against a wall. Light and the sweet breath of the wood wandered in from an open casement. He glanced out, hoping to glimpse the palace, for the room seemed high, at a level with the treetops. But the wood beyond the window went on forever; he could not even see the plain, just the upper boughs of endless trees. He had been roaming the school with nothing to do that day, and Nepenthe in every thought. But she had made it clear, the night before, that no delight he could suggest would tempt her from her work that day; she would see him at supper time in the refectory, not before.

  So he whiled away the time exploring, recklessly opening doors, wanting monsters, warrior-mages, riddles, and tasks. He found little but old furniture and dust. Not even a magical tome to look for trouble in. Finally, seeing his reflection in the mirrors, he had posed himself a task: How could he make himself and his reflection disappear?

  All the students wanted to know. But Felan only told them, “You are not ready yet.” He would give them no clues. Books that might have answered the question stubbornly refused to open, or revealed blank pages when the subject came up. The students protested; Felan only said, “Be patient.” Bourne said nothing at all, not wanting to draw attention to his own keen interest in the matter. Invisible, he could drift at will through the palace, listen to secret meetings, find out what hidden strengths and vulnerabilities the Crowns and the queen might have, and so impress the Lord of Seale with his powers that his uncle would want Bourne to stay in the school forever, which was exactly how long, that day, Bourne wanted to keep seeing Nepenthe.

  Invisibility eluded him; he kept seeing his baffled face in the mirror no matter what he tried. He closed his eyes and concentrated on nothing until he felt he must have turned into it. He opened one eye, saw his one-eyed self peering back at him. There must be a potion, he thought, bemused. Words he must say. A cloak made out of threads of thought. Perhaps he should look for the dragon again, put himself in such peril that only invisibility would save him, and in his desperation he would find the way to disappear. Desire, he reminded himself, had precipitated him across the plain in a step. Perhaps terror could inspire a different magic.

  He opened both eyes, stood idly scratching his brow with a thumbnail, wondering if scaring himself witless with a dragon would be the best time to find out if he had the power to save himself from it. A breeze trembled under his nose, loosing scents of opening leaves, moist earth, wildflowers scattering their fragrances pr
ofligately through the warm spring light. Nepenthe’s eyes would turn from brown to green in such light. He saw her turn her head in memory, look at him, her eyes the tender green of young leaves, and he closed his own eyes, felt the hot sweet light on his lips. He gave a stifled groan of longing and exasperation, took a restless step…

  And there he was, smelling leather and parchment and wax instead of trees, feeling the implacable stone all around him. I should go back, he told himself before he opened his eyes. Shut the door. Before she sees me. Unless she has already and I am already in trouble. Unless I can very quickly turn myself invisible…

  He opened an eye again, cautiously, saw her desk and her ink jars, her parchments full of fish. He raised his eyes, saw the face looking at him above the fish.

  He stared. So did Laidley, who was sitting on Nepenthe’s stool and gawking gracelessly. He closed his mouth and cleared his throat; still nothing came out.

  “What are you doing here?” Bourne asked. “Where’s Nepenthe?”

  “What are you doing here?” Laidley managed finally. “She told you not to come until this evening.”

  “Does she tell you everything?” Bourne marveled, hearing an edge in his voice that nothing about Laidley could explain.

  Laidley only shook his head. “No.” He hesitated. “That’s why I’m here.”

  “I see.” Bourne stepped to the desk, illumined. “And looking as guilty as I am.”

  “I thought she—she told me she was going to finish the scholar’s manuscript today. I found out more about Axis and Kane, so I came to tell her. But she isn’t here, and neither—”

  “And neither are the thorns,” Bourne finished softly.