“Then,” Axis said very softly, while the counselor’s face grew suddenly waxen beneath his graying beard, “we will make sure that you are never behind him, because only you know what weapon might defeat him.” He paused; the room was so quiet that Kane could hear the sobbing coo of mourning doves in the gardens. “Since you seem so reluctant to go to battle,” Axis continued, “you give me no choice but to believe that you would be much happier within the peaceful walls of your own home. A pity. We will miss your counsel.”
“But, my lord—”
“You will leave tomorrow,” Axis said inflexibly. “I’m sure your family will greet your return with great relief.”
How his family would have felt no one ever knew, for the counselor never reached his home. He and his entourage were set upon by bandits in the rocky hills north of the palace, and his body returned home without him. Upon receiving the news, Axis proclaimed a day of mourning for the man who had counseled two kings and a regent. He spent most of the day in private with Kane.
Shortly afterward, with Kane at his side, Axis began his great campaign against the Baltrean kingdoms.
Seven kingdoms fell
To the Emperor of the Sea.
Seven crowns he took,
Seven pearls of the waters of the Baltrean.
He ringed the sea with the dead
Until the living cried out for mercy.
With the Faceless One beside him
The Emperor walked on water across the Baltrean
Where armies threw down their arms
And his name echoed among the mountains of Kirixia.
SIXTEEN
Nepenthe sat hunched over her desk, staring at fish. They were trying to speak, standing on mouths and tails and back-fins to say baskets of grain, slabs of salt, jars of olives and wine. Her eyes saw them, but they could not swim into language through her head. Something blocked their way, a stubborn vision that refused either to make itself real or to go away. It just stayed there, maddeningly silent, refusing to answer questions and refusing to let the fish speak.
Go away, Nepenthe told it coldly, even while she could hear her own heart pleading, Come. Come.
It did neither. She grasped great swaths of her hair in her hands and tugged, rocking her head this way and that. Even that would not dislodge Bourne’s face. It was stuck there in her brain like an elusive pebble in a stocking, constantly annoying, impossible to ignore.
Where are you? she pleaded; it did not answer. Bourne. Where have you gone?
“What are you doing?”
She opened her eyes, met the amazed gaze of the scholar, who had wandered down to see how she fared with his fish. “Oh,” she said shortly, uninterested in his face. She let go of her hair and picked up her pen. “I’m almost finished.”
“Have the fish suddenly become that frustrating?”
“No.” She tried to write a perfunctory word; the nib was bone dry.
“Then it must be a two-legged frustration,” he suggested shrewdly.
“An earth-dweller,” she agreed moodily. Master Croysus straddled a hefty pile of tomes on the floor, looking open to diversion. His face, she saw, had regained a healthier complexion; his eyes looked nearly human again. The coronation celebrations in the world above must be waning.
“Any surprises?” he asked.
“Among the fish? I’m having difficulty with this one with its body full of bubbles. It doesn’t appear on any of the other lists.”
He leaned forward to study it. “Pearls?” he suggested tentatively. “Coins?”
For a brief moment, she forgot Bourne’s face. “Scales?”
They regarded one another with conjecture. “No,” the scholar said heavily. “Not scales.”
“No,” Nepenthe echoed, sighing; they were after all not really fish, and a measuring scale in any language would most likely not resemble a fish scale. She nibbled on the end of her pen, while Bourne’s face surfaced again in her head, predictably as sunrise. “I thought,” she added, “you would have gone home by now.”
“So did I,” Master Croysus said. He shifted a tome under one buttock and lowered his voice. “There are rumors of trouble. But no one is talking.”
Nepenthe took her pen out of her mouth and wove it into her hair, struggling to understand. “Rumors. How can you hear rumors if nobody—”
“Nobody knows what is going on. Yesterday nobody would go home; today, suddenly, everyone wants to. But it’s never convenient; the queen summons the nobles for meetings, then puts them off; they cannot leave. The rulers have been summoned to yet another assembly, but it must wait for the return to the court of Lord Ermin of Seale; the reason for the assembly is vague and keeps changing. The court is uneasy; no one explains. Even the folk on the plain are packing their wagons and drifting away, but the rest of us cannot seem to find an open door.”
Nepenthe grunted, her thoughts straying. Perhaps Bourne—But he didn’t need a door, open or shut, she reminded herself. All he had to do was—
“Think of me,” she whispered. Something pinched the back of her throat; she swallowed.
“What?”
She tossed the pen down. “Nothing.”
Master Croysus was still brooding over court matters. “So you see, you do have more time to attend to my fish. You should be able to finish before we leave. Whenever that might be. But don’t move them from this place, whatever you do.”
“I won’t.”
“If we must leave quickly for some reason, in the middle of the night for instance, I want to know where to find them.”
She looked at him silently; again Bourne melted out of her head, like light in the path of a cloud. “What is happening up there?” she asked softly, suddenly uneasy herself, wondering how an entire library might flee in the dark, and to where. But Master Croysus did not hear her; he was gazing at her again, fixedly, but without seeing her. “I know!” he exclaimed abruptly, and she jumped. “I know where I have seen your face!”
“My face,” she repeated blankly.
“I’ve been trying to remember, since I first saw you.”
“You’ve seen me before?”
“In the margin of a very old book.”
“It’s not my face, if it’s in some old book.”
“Yes, it is,” he said intractably, and stood up. “I’ll find the book and prove it to you.”
Bemused, she watched him retreat down the hallway, leaving her to the dead silence of books and stones. She studied the fish full of bubbles again. Bourne’s face came between them, filling her eyes, filling her mind with memories, longings, unanswerable questions.
Where are you? she wanted to shout, but only the stones would answer.
She gave up on the fish finally, forgot the scholar, and carried her pens and ink to the secret place where she had hidden the thorns.
They wouldn’t stay hidden long, she knew, if Bourne stepped out of nowhere to find her. But after three days without a glimpse of him, she did not care where he found her. The students sometimes had tests, he had told her; entire days when they could not leave the school or the wood until some mysterious thing happened to give them deeper insight into magic. But he had not come that evening when he promised he would. She had waited for him in the refectory until the fire had died and only a taper or two remained alight. Laidley, aware of her unhappiness, had told her that Bourne had appeared earlier that day in the library and had gone to look for her. He had not found her. He had not returned at supper time. Nor the following day, nor the day after that. Nor had he sent any explanation or excuse, in any alphabet. Laidley’s silence about the matter grew so pointed that by the third day Nepenthe wanted to throw the meal-gong at him.
“Just say it,” she had flared at him finally as they ate their porridge that morning. “Say I told you so.”
He could not even be honest. His brows rose owlishly as he swallowed a bite. “I’m surprised,” he managed finally.
“He is a hummingbird, quick wings, no thou
ghts, flitting lightly from heart to heart—I knew that. I knew it before we ever kissed.”
“He was worried about you, when you hid the thorns from us. We both went searching for you; we were supposed to meet again, but he vanished. For all I know he might still be wandering around the library, completely lost—”
“He could find me.” She stared down at her porridge; his face was even there, between her and breakfast. She flung her spoon into the bowl and stood up. “He could find me in a step,” she whispered. “He could find me with a thought. If he wanted.”
She left Laidley making incoherent comments about troublesome times, and went to work on the fish manuscript, where Bourne could find her easily if he wished. He didn’t. The scholar did.
And now she consoled herself among her thorns, bewildered and hurt, hiding from Bourne and hoping against hope that he would find her there.
The thorns themselves were becoming pricklier, as though Axis’s acquisition of most of the known world around Eben demanded a more complex language. Kingdoms Nepenthe had never heard of fell to his armies. He seemed equally insatiable and invulnerable, collecting more crowns in half a decade than the kings of Raine had in a thousand years. And every ruler, every realm had a name like a bramble bush. She might, Nepenthe decided reluctantly, have to tell Laidley where she had concealed herself, so that he could continue to help her with the historical names. At the same time, while Axis blazed his way across the map of his world and poets celebrated his victories with endless superlatives, Kane’s thoughts began to require a larger vocabulary. Puzzling concepts, that might or might not make sense, grew under Nepenthe’s pen. Tangled thorns hinted at ideas that connected in some skewed fashion, or possibilities requiring obscure tenses, maybe past or maybe future. Nepenthe, scratching her head over them, forgot about Bourne for entire minutes as she tried to untangle the canes. She worked all afternoon after the scholar had left her, and into the evening, mesmerized by the new difficulties, and comforted, every time she realized that for a sentence or even half a page, she had not thought about Bourne. She did not think about supper either; the gong rang only distantly beyond the thorns.
She put down her pen finally, yawning, and realized then how dark the library had grown around her. A single candle glowed in the distance, as someone walked down the corridor. She watched it, surprised. She had taken the thorns into a chamber full of antiquities, texts chiseled into slabs of broken sandstone and wax and marble, painted on tanned hides, carved into bone and horn. Only visiting scholars ever came that far down. Perhaps, she thought with a twinge of alarm, Master Croysus was truly fleeing in the middle of the night and had come looking for her.
But it was Laidley.
He sat down among the ruins, letting an armload of books slide to the floor beside him.
“I was worried,” he said simply, “when you didn’t come to supper. I’ve been looking for you everywhere.”
“Well, you found me,” she answered brusquely, for he was not Bourne, and he had invaded her hiding place. Then she relented, for she needed him. “Did I miss supper?”
“By several hours.”
“Laidley, was there a kingdom called Auravia?”
He gazed at her a moment expressionlessly before he answered. “Yes. There was. It existed nine hundred years after Axis was born.”
“Nine hundred.”
“Yes. I told you so. I told you that whoever wrote that was jumbling everything together, regardless of historical order.”
But she only nibbled a thumbnail, intrigued. “Maybe. But Kane knows she is doing it. I think she does. That would explain some of the passages.”
Laidley ground a fist against one eye, looking aggrieved. “That makes no sense.”
“No. But it means my translation does.”
Laidley banged his head against the shard of marble behind him. “Now you’re making no sense.”
“I know.”
“Read it to me.”
She mulled that over, eyeing him. She had grown into the strange alphabet, she knew; she could recognize more than words. But she did not know what names belonged where in Kane’s world, and Laidley would. If he didn’t, he would know where to find out. Unlike Bourne, he had no fear of an ancient, harmless language. He would not threaten to take it away from her; he was capable of getting as ensnared as she.
The thought of Bourne blew a dreary mist into the region of her heart. She slumped over her work, lonely for him, wondering where in the night he was, what he was doing, whether he was thinking about her at all. The thorns, she remembered, kept her mind off him. Another long night of wondering waited for her inside her chamber. Better to read to Laidley and keep him awake than be kept awake by the utter silence out of the mages’ school.
So she began to read what she had translated since she had disappeared with the thorns.
They both fell asleep, among the dusty, forgotten oddments of language, before she finished.
Nepenthe dreamed that Bourne was calling her over and over. But he could not say her name right because he did not know the language. Every time he called, another word in the form of a bramble came out of him. A wall of thorns began to coil up around him, hiding him from Nepenthe. She could not answer because he could not say her name correctly in thorns; he would not stop calling until she answered. Suddenly terrified, she began to shout her name to him, trying to tell him how to say it. He could not seem to hear her in his prison of thorns; words that did not mean her kept growing until she could only see the top of his golden head.
And then his hair turned into the top of a black hood, just visible above the thorns, and a strange voice said her name.
She woke herself trying to repeat it. Something with a shell in it? Or was it a moth?
“Nepenthe,” said the gong, shivering through the silence, and again, in Laidley’s voice: “Nepenthe.”
“No,” she protested, for the name was fading and fading like the sound of the gong. “That wasn’t it.”
She opened her eyes finally and found it was morning.
She had fallen asleep on the floor with her translation in her lap and her cheek imprinted with a raised wax word of uncertain origin. Laidley, using his armload of books for a pillow, blinked at her sleepily.
“I don’t remember,” he said hazily, “how much you read and how much I dreamed. In my dreams, Axis went back and forth.”
She straightened stiffly, pushing hair out of her eyes. “He was pacing?”
“No. He went back and forth. He didn’t care.”
“Laidley, what are you talking about?”
“Back and forth,” Laidley repeated stubbornly and pulled himself up among the shards. “You’ll have to read it to me again. It all seems like a dream.”
“Laidley. Say my name.”
“Nepenthe,” he said, yawning.
She shook her head. “That doesn’t sound anything like my name.”
“You’re an orphan,” he reminded her. “You don’t know your own name.”
“Yes, I do. When I hear it, I know it. I wasn’t always an orphan. Someone said my real name in my dream.”
“Who?”
About to answer, she stopped, for that answer made no more sense than Laidley’s dream. She said it anyway, puzzling over it. “Kane.” Laidley only grunted. She sucked a breath then, and whispered, “And Bourne. He was calling me. Again and again.”
“Did you answer?”
“No. How could I? He didn’t know my name.”
Laidley blinked at her. She gathered the pages in her lap and stood up, forgetting why, looking aimlessly around the chamber as though for the wall of thorns.
“Dreams,” Laidley murmured. “Wishes.”
“Maybe. But someone was calling me, and I heard my name.” She felt close to tears, of longing and frustration, for it was another matter entirely, the secret language of dreams. It refused to answer questions except in its own language, and that changed nightly. “I don’t know either what is real
and what is past,” she cried suddenly to Laidley.
He swallowed, said only, gravely, “What can I do to help?”
“If I give you a list of kings and kingdoms, can you find them for me?”
“Yes.”
“Then at least we’ll know that much.”
“What?”
“What was real for Axis and Kane,” she said, and in that moment she understood the language of Laidley’s dream. “Back and forth,” she whispered. “Back and forth.” Her fingers went to her mouth, icy with shock. “Oh, Laidley.”
“Try not to worry,” he said groggily, gathering up his stack of books. “I think he loves you. I wouldn’t say that unless I did.”
He wandered out to follow the smell of breakfast. Nepenthe, still transfixed, watched him go. She came to life again finally, sank back down among the thorns, and picked up her pen.
SEVENTEEN
The queen was in the wood, looking for thorns.
If, she reasoned, thorns threatened the Twelve Crowns, then they must be something more than a bramble bush. They would be thorns of great power and magic, like the wood, which was the only source of power Tessera knew. Besides Vevay, that is. But even Vevay seemed uncertain of the origins and capabilities of the mysterious wood. The armed ghost of the first ruler of Raine had appeared there to warn Tessera: even the dead were drawn to it.
The queen was supposed to be somewhere that morning, meeting with someone, while keeping someone else uneasily waiting, and sending a summons throughout the palace for yet another noble, or half a dozen of them; she had lost track. Vevay kept everyone on edge, ruthlessly demanding the guests’ constant attendance to the whims of the queen, while refusing to answer any questions. Rumors like mythical beasts stalked the hallways, colorful, dangerous, and improbable. Only the family of the Lord of Seale had been allowed to leave, without fanfare and at some inconvenient hour. At least that was Vevay’s explanation of their invisibility. They were actually under guard in the lower chambers of Vevay’s tower, where they had stunning views of the plain and the sea, and no comforts whatsoever beyond that. Tessera doubted that Vevay would notice her absence that morning; not even the mage could always remember whom she had told to do what.
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