Alphabet of Thorn

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “Yes. Neither are the thorns. I searched for them. She’s working somewhere else, hiding them from us.”

  Bourne sighed. “With some reason. That’s my fault—I threatened to take them away from her. It didn’t occur to me that she could make herself invisible. Where might she be?”

  Laidley shrugged. “The library is immense. Entire rooms go forgotten for decades. She could be anywhere.”

  “It sounds like the Floating School.” He brushed aside some fish, sat on the desk, and looked blankly down one end of the silent corridor, then down the other. “Well. I could probably find her if I wished, but she did ask me not to disturb her.”

  “She’ll be waiting for you later,” Laidley said. “Not even the thorns will make her forget.”

  Bourne glanced at him, surprised. “I didn’t intend to come here,” he explained after a moment. “It was an accident. I was just thinking about her—”

  “Yes,” Laidley said, studying one of Nepenthe’s jars with cross-eyed intensity.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “For what?” Laidley queried the ink. The words came out with unexpected harshness. Laidley swallowed, his eyes finally relinquishing the ink jar. He looked at Bourne. “I’ll still be here,” he said simply, “when you’ve forgotten her.”

  “Fair enough,” Bourne breathed. “In that case, we may all grow very old together…” He slid off the desk. “I should go before she finds me.”

  “How?”

  “What?”

  “She brings you here,” Laidley said. “You think of her and work your magic. What magic in that school is strong enough to draw you back to it?”

  Surprised again, Bourne made an effort and thought. “I suppose the magic draws me back. The possibility of doing the impossible. It’s harder without Nepenthe. But even the difficulty becomes interesting. A puzzle. A challenge. Also—” He hesitated, added with a laugh, “My uncle would be furious with me if the mages threw me out of the school for my disorderly ways.”

  “Why does your uncle care that much whether or not you become a mage? You’re a noble of the ruling court of Seale. You don’t have to be anything.”

  Bourne gazed down at the alphabet of fish, eluding Laidley’s too-clear eyes and trying to be careless and careful at the same time. “My uncle thinks I have some gifts. What I think is that he is the one who wants a mage’s power… This is the scholar’s manuscript, isn’t it? Nepenthe told me about the fish. What does she make of them?”

  “Merchants’ inventories from a caravan.”

  “So that’s the riveting topic that keeps her buried down here, along with her thorns.” He realized then that he was lingering, hoping she would hear her name in whatever cranny she had concealed herself and be tempted out. It might work, he thought, so he said it again. “You said you had something to tell Nepenthe about Axis and Kane. What is it?”

  “Oh.” Laidley straightened, a scholar’s eagerness to impart knowledge to the ignorant driving all else from his mind. He picked up a scroll. “It’s about the question of Dirxia.”

  “What?”

  “Nepenthe was having a problem naming one of the kingdoms that Axis conquered. Actually, conquered is too precise a word for what he did. You might as accurately talk about a tidal wave conquering a city. The word assumes that someone had time to fight back. Overwhelmed is more like it. Engulfed.”

  “Yes,” Bourne said hazily, feeling overwhelmed by whatever Laidley was babbling about.

  “We thought it might be Dirxia, except that Dirxia did not exist when Axis did—”

  “Which was when?” Bourne asked, trying for a spar to hold on to in the flood of history.

  “When—”

  “When did Axis live?”

  “Oh. Roughly three thousand years ago, when Eben ruled the world. I haven’t narrowed down exactly when he died. With all the poetry written about him through the centuries you’d think he might have lived forever. Anyway, I found another kingdom which did exist about the same time as his kingdom Eben did, and which Axis did conquer. It was called Kirixia; it was west of Eben, across the Baltrean Sea. It was full of goats and olive trees. A trade route ran through it. It was fairly big but not at all wealthy.”

  “Maybe Axis was practicing.”

  “Maybe,” Laidley said, looking at his frivolous suggestion seriously. “Or maybe it was a kind of poetic device to give status to an otherwise undistinguished land. Axis conquered it, therefore—”

  “Therefore it could not be boring,” Bourne suggested, stifling a yawn. He added soberly, after a moment, “But it does make you wonder, doesn’t it?”

  “Does it?”

  “Why Nepenthe is so obsessed about all this. It’s ancient history. Dust. Tombs. Headless statues that you find sketched in the margins of worm-eaten manuscripts. Where’s the magic in it?”

  “What magic?”

  “What are the thorns really telling her? It’s why she won’t let us see them, why she clings to them—or they cling to her—as though she got herself buried in a bramble thicket and she can’t get out and we can’t get in to free her.”

  “Buried in what?” Laidley asked, struggling.

  “That’s just it. We don’t know. If every thorn is some form of sorcery apart from the word it makes, then who knows what it might be telling Nepenthe to think or do?”

  Laidley was looking fish-eyed again. “Is such a thing possible? That the letters themselves—the shapes might be magic in themselves? The words and tale are innocent; the power is in the different alphabet?”

  “Look at her,” Bourne said helplessly, wishing he could. “She’s entranced. Enchanted by ghosts. By a bit of history that would put anyone else to sleep. Something else is speaking to her when she reads, telling her things that we can’t see or hear, saying one thing to her eyes and mind, and another to her heart—”

  Laidley shivered suddenly. “You’re making my skin crawl,” he said reproachfully. “I think you’re letting your imagination run away with you.”

  “That’s the beginning of magic. Let your imagination run and follow it.”

  “You’re liable to follow it over the cliff and into the sea.”

  Bourne was silent, contemplating his vision of Nepenthe and her thorns. An odd hollowness touched his heart, as though he had looked down and found the vast nothingness between earth and sea beneath his next step. Fear, the reeling was, he realized suddenly; he had rarely encountered it.

  “I’m going to find her,” he said restively. “I think those thorns are dangerous and the mages should know about them.”

  “The mages already saw them,” Laidley pointed out, troubled but clinging stubbornly to what he knew. “They sent them to the librarians to translate.”

  “Then let the librarians translate them. Not Nepenthe.”

  “She won’t thank you if you force her to give them up.”

  “I don’t suppose she will.”

  “Scholars get obsessed every day over the strangest things. The contents of a caravan, for example. Or the ancient language in which the contents are written.”

  “Or a conqueror who has been dead for three thousand years? You want her to keep the book. Don’t you.”

  “It’s a puzzle,” Laidley admitted. “A challenge. And it gives me reasons to find things for her, bring them, speak to her. It seems harmless to me. Well—perhaps not entirely harmless. I’ll concede that. But nothing we can’t deal with.” He raised his head, meeting Bourne’s eyes pleadingly. “The three of us. The mage, the scholar, the woman who reveals the magic.”

  Bourne stared at him, mute again, and oddly touched. “All right,” he said tautly, “all right,” and saw Laidley’s shoulders, hunched under his ears, slide back down into place. “But I want to talk to her. I want her to tell me plainly why she thinks she must hide those thorns from us. Where can she possibly be?”

  Laidley stood up. “I’ll search, too. I know where many of the ancient epics are kept; she might be there. You look in
her chamber. It could be that easy.”

  “Which way?” Bourne asked, bewildered as ever in the labyrinth. Laidley pointed, moving down the hallway the opposite direction.

  “We’ll meet here,” he suggested, and Bourne nodded.

  “Wherever here is,” he muttered, winding through the books toward what he thought might be a main corridor. Then he stopped, charmed by an idea. All he had to do was think of her and step…

  Something flowed between him and his heart’s desire. He felt off balance suddenly, uncertain, as though he had stepped into another world entirely. But it was the same, he saw, blinking books and stone into place around him. And there was the woman in front of him.

  It was not Nepenthe. He blinked again and recognized that tall figure with long hair like spun silver and eyes like the sky in winter above the sea. He felt his face blanch before he even knew he had to be afraid.

  “Vevay.”

  She nodded, those eyes holding him rooted to stone. “Bourne of Seale,” she said. Her voice sounded as though it could have splintered flint. “I made a journey to the Floating School to find you, but you were here, instead, under the queen’s roof without anyone’s knowledge.”

  “Is there something—” he managed.

  “Oh, yes. There is something. Your uncle Ermin is plotting to attack the First Crown, and you are under arrest for treason.”

  FOURTEEN

  Vevay took the young man back to the Floating School. She was too furious to speak again in those brief moments; Bourne of Seale looked too stunned. Once he tried. Vevay saw a face flicker through his thoughts; his eyes grew wide and full of words. But he said nothing until they were in the school, facing Felan in one of the rich, cluttered, comfortable rooms that students rarely saw, full of old books and shy animals. By then Bourne seemed resigned as he gazed helplessly back at Felan.

  He said, “That day we spent in the wood.”

  Felan’s shining pate lowered an inch; his own eyes were very calm. “Of course we watched to see what shapes the wood took for you. It shapes your heart; you can hide nothing from it.”

  “Then why—” Bourne began abruptly, then as abruptly closed his mouth again.

  Vevay, who saw the lovely face again in his thoughts, answered grimly, “You have no privacy now. If you did not see that young woman in the wood perhaps it was simply because in that matter your feelings are entirely unambiguous.”

  “Who is she?” Felan asked.

  “Just a transcriptor,” Bourne told him. “One of the orphans the librarians raised and trained. She doesn’t pay attention to the world beyond the library. Her head is full of ancient languages. She knew nothing about—about—” He shook his head, his mouth tight; his eyes slid away from Felan’s. “Whatever,” he finished, “my uncle might be doing.”

  “Do you know?” Vevay demanded.

  “I can guess,” Bourne answered after a moment. “From comments my uncle made, and from what he wanted me to learn.”

  “And you never questioned those things.”

  A dull flush seeped into his face. “It’s a family tradition, rebelling against rulers. My great-grandfather was beheaded for it.”

  “You don’t take this seriously!” Vevay exclaimed, exasperated. “You could lose your own head.”

  “No.” He met her eyes, trying hard, she saw, to explain himself to himself as well as to her. “I do take this seriously. It was my uncle Ermin that I never took very seriously. I thought he was mostly talk. He wanted me to come here and study to gain powers to help Seale rebel against Raine. I couldn’t imagine actually learning anything that might be useful to anyone. But I found I liked what I was studying. So if he wanted me here, I didn’t mind learning.”

  “And you would have taken all that you learned back to the Second Crown and used your powers to fight against the queen.”

  “My powers,” he repeated incredulously. His eyes moved from her to Felan. “You saw the extent of my powers in the wood. I summoned fire and managed to char some bark on a tree.”

  “You lifted the Floating School,” Felan said.

  The blood drained out of Bourne’s face again. He stared at Felan; Vevay saw his eyes grow cloudy a moment, almost tranquil, as he remembered his own spell. “I tried,” he whispered. “It was just something to do. I thought—I didn’t think—It seemed only a dream. A wish. I thought I had only raised it in my head.”

  “You raised it in your heart.”

  He blinked, asked with sudden anxiety, “Did I really drop it?”

  “Students usually drop it, the first time. I caught it.” Vevay saw the golden, dreaming afternoon sky above the dark wood in Felan’s own eyes, then. “I made the noise to let you know something had happened.”

  “My uncle Ermin happened.”

  “He does get in your way. You should have made your own choices.”

  “Maybe.” He ran fingers through his hair, his face drawn, rueful. “It seems I never took either one of us very seriously. Is that why the wood sent the queen to me later? To show me that I had another choice?”

  Felan didn’t answer immediately. Vevay, glancing at him, saw the bemusement behind his imperturbable expression. He turned to her for enlightenment. “Was the queen in the wood that day?”

  “Of course not. Tessera has never been in the wood. She’s afraid of everything.”

  “Yes,” Bourne said, remembering. “She did seem afraid. Whoever I saw. I thought at first she was a student; she talked about things the wood had shown her.”

  “What things?” Vevay asked tightly.

  “An old man she said was a tree; it spoke to her. Deer carrying fire in their antlers. There was something else…an armed rider. When I realized that she wasn’t a student, I thought the wood had conjured her. After she left, I remembered where I had seen her face before: at her coronation. I understand now, of course too late, why the wood sent her.”

  “If the queen was in the wood that day,” Felan answered, “I did not see her.”

  “Then I must be mistaken,” Bourne said.

  But he did not believe that, Vevay saw. “Tell me,” she said harshly, “what she looked like. What she wore.”

  “She had long, very pale hair and a small, pale face. She seemed very shy. And very careful, as though at any moment she might encounter trouble. I remember very clearly what she wore because it seemed odd. Pink satin, under an old dark cloak too big for her, and—”

  Vevay made a sound, and he stopped. “Was it real?” she demanded of Felan. “Or a vision of the wood’s?”

  “I don’t know,” Felan answered gently. “I didn’t see this. But I was watching for magic that affected the students, If the queen was in the wood, then she entered and left so quietly that I was unaware of it. Judging from what Bourne has said, the wood was aware of her and spoke to her. I suggest you ask her.”

  “I intend to.” She was silent a moment, struggling with several inexplicable notions at once: that Tessera might wander off by herself into the wood, that somehow she had eluded Felan’s attention but not the wood’s; that Bourne, supposedly conspiring with his uncle against the queen, had described her with such kindly perception. “Did she tell you what she was doing in the wood?”

  Bourne answered carefully, trying to recall. “No. As I said, at first I thought she was a student, so I thought I knew. When I told her that, she laughed and told me—”

  “She laughed? Tessera doesn’t laugh.”

  He hesitated. “Yes. I guessed that she didn’t, that she wasn’t used to it.”

  “Go on,” Vevay said dourly. “What was she laughing about?”

  “That I had thought she was a student, while she had thought I was another apparition of the wood’s.” He paused again, then closed his eyes a moment, opened them again. He continued wearily, “There was something else she said. Birds that spoke to her told her to beware what she might meet in the wood. She seemed relieved to find that it was only me.”

  Vevay closed her own eyes,
touched them with cold fingers. “You are the most convoluted young man I have ever met. Find a room for him,” she said to Felan. “I will bind him here myself with spells appropriate for someone who does not know his own powers, who might conceivably be capable of anything.”

  Felan nodded. Bourne stared at the floor. “I’m sorry,” he told them, but for what he seemed unsure. “I can’t imagine that my uncle would prove much more than a brief annoyance to the queen. The other Crowns would never let him rule.”

  “He could provide the spark that ignites the whole of Raine,” Vevay snapped. “And even that might be only the beginning of trouble.”

  Bourne lifted his head sharply; even Felan lost some of his composure. But he asked nothing then, just folded the school around them into another of its endless shapes to provide a suitable room for the prisoner. It had little furniture, no windows, and one massive door. While Bourne surveyed it, appalled, Vevay busied herself with some changes. If Bourne managed to astound himself by melting through a wall, he would be impeded by a succession of walls, each a different illusion he would have to understand and unravel. If he managed to open the door, it would lead into whatever fire was burning at the time, or to the terrifying nothingness beyond the edge of the cliff. To escape, he would have to outwit Vevay herself. It was possible, she thought grimly. Anything was, apparently, those days, with Tessera running off alone to talk to trees, and the king who was a queen awakening to warn of the destruction of Raine by brambles.

  She left Bourne there, sitting on the hard little bed and contemplating his predicament.

  He asked, before she and Felan vanished, “What happens now? To my uncle? To my family still in the queen’s palace?”

  “I haven’t decided yet,” Vevay told him. “Troops have been sent to the Second Crown to arrest your uncle. Your family is under guard in the palace.”

  He sighed soundlessly, already looking harrowed by his vacuous surroundings. “May I have paper at least?” he pleaded. “A pen? A book?”

  “No,” she said mercilessly. “Sit there and consider what brought you to this place and why. Your great-grandfather lost his head over such things. I suggest you find yours before you become the next headless ghost in your family.”