Alphabet of Thorn

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “Thorns,” Tessera whispered to the wood. “Thorns. Tell me what they mean. Tell me where they are.”

  She wandered among the silent trees; nothing spoke. Beyond the wood, spring winds roared over the plain; brilliant, tattered clouds raced their shadows across the grass. The folk still on the plain huddled around their fires, or in their wagons. Tessera wondered why they stayed, what they expected. Perhaps a feeling in their bones kept them lingering close to what they thought might protect them best. Perhaps they had tossed their carved pigs’ knuckles and read the warnings in them. On their brightly painted cards the sun fell out of the sky, or a storm of stars like flaming arrows burned away the night. Nowhere to go to escape such disasters, so why go anywhere? The new queen, protecting herself, would protect them all.

  The new queen, questing patiently for thorns, could not find so much as a raspberry cane. She roamed, hoping for a talking bird, a wise word dropping from a tree. But everything seemed half asleep that morning, under patches of shadow and mist, exuding dreams like the faint breath of warmth out of a dying ember. Moving like a swimmer underwater through their dreams, Tessera felt herself fill with scents, obscure memories, words without sound. Peace, layered in rings of wood rippling out from the word, was one of the dreams; she breathed it in, or swallowed it. Now she lumbered like a tree, heavy with time, her thoughts too slow for words, her outward body a small, unwieldy thing crusted with bark, her hair doing inexplicable things on top of her head.

  In this guise, barely remembering herself, she came upon the giant in the wood.

  She remembered him well enough: his immense, thewed shoulders, his bald head and broad, expressionless face. The last time she saw him, he had chased her out of the wood. This time, she would not run. Like the folk on the plain, she had nowhere else to go, and he knew the wood better than she.

  He did not recognize her, with her thoughts disguised in tree bark and her hair full of leafing twigs. Around her, she felt the wood stir out of its dreaming, quicken with interest to listen.

  “Giant,” she said; how her voice came out of her, she wasn’t sure. “You must help me. You may roar at me and threaten until your teeth fly out of your head, but I will not leave this wood. You must show me where the thorns are hidden.”

  A strange expression slid from within the giant’s bones, seeped across his face. He said, “Tessera?”

  She felt herself dwindle back into Tessera-shape at the word. Still she didn’t run. The wood was watching; it hid things from her that she wanted. The armed warrior with her beautiful, courageous face and her great sword still rode in the queen’s heart, ready to battle for her.

  She said coldly, “Yes. I am the Queen of Raine, and I need every giant and every bird and every listening leaf in this land to help me before we are all destroyed.”

  The giant said gravely, “I will help you. Come with me.”

  He turned; she followed him to his lair.

  He led her through a doorway in a great stone wall so high and so wide that its true dimensions were lost within the trees. Once inside, he vanished. Tessera lingered at the threshold, expecting mischief in some startling form. Nothing happened. A long hallway stretched away from her on both sides, lined with many closed doors. All of them were different: dark and square, rounded and painted, carved and oblong, latched with iron, or wood, or gilded metal; one had a window of colored glass; another was fashioned of three rough-hewn planks and wooden nails with heads as wide as the giant’s thumbnail. She waited for him to leap out of one door or another. He didn’t. He had promised to help her, and had led her to this place with many closed doors. Behind which might be anything, including, she realized suddenly, what she had asked for.

  “Thorns,” she breathed, and opened the nearest door.

  There they were: an enormous, leafless tangled hillock of brambles with wicked spikes of thorns covering the floor. As she stared at them, they began snaking up the walls of the room they had overrun. She felt the door pull out of her hand and turned to see it slam shut, then melt into the stones. Such was the nature of the giant’s mischief, she thought grimly: she was trapped in a room full of what she had asked for, and no way out. She could hear them sliding over the stones, scratching like claws. For an instant, she wanted to melt into tears and wail for help like a baby.

  But this was nothing, she reminded herself, compared to the imminent disaster that had caused the ancient, sleeping ruler of Raine to sit bolt upright in her tomb. A room full of thorns. Nothing.

  They were magic, living things, like the trees in the wood, so she spoke to them.

  “I am here,” she told them as they began to coil toward her feet. “The Queen of Raine. If you mean to destroy the Twelve Crowns of Raine, then begin the battle with me.”

  They spoke in her mind then, as they whispered across the stones. The great pile that appeared in her thoughts grew leaves, opened blooms of white and pink and scarlet until the hillock they showed her was green as the grass on the plain, and she couldn’t see the thorns for the leaves, nor the leaves for the flowers. She gazed bewilderedly at the bleak, naked canes twining over her boots, and was suddenly illumined.

  “Oh!” she cried. “You want light.” She looked around her hastily: four walls and a ceiling of solid stone, and not even a door left that they could crawl out of. How could she give them light so that the hungry canes could bud? They were growing importunate, snagging on the hem of her skirt, a great spiky animal wanting to be fed the sun.

  “Giant!” she called nervously as a bramble touched her wrist. “Open the door! We can’t get out.”

  The giant, a creature of impulse, had tricked her, it seemed; he did not answer. She gazed desperately at the walls, searching for a chink, a crack in the mortar, a glimpse of day through the ceiling. The canes had wrapped themselves around her ankles now. She couldn’t feel the thorns through her boots but she would fall among them if she tried to walk. A memory glanced through her head: the armed, faceless warrior in the wood, pointing her gauntlet hand in warning at the brambles.

  “If only I had your sword,” she said breathlessly as a thorn tugged on her skirt, “I could knock out a few of these stones—”

  She felt the dead weight of it in her hand, and nearly dropped it. She could scarcely see it; it was a silver streak of air and a glimmer of jewel. But it dragged at her hold like all the Twelve Crowns at once, and she dared not drop it lest it vanish again. Her mouth pinched; she felt a crown of sweat bead her brow as she gripped it with both hands, and with more effort than she had put into anything in her life, she found muscles she rarely used and forced the blade of the sword up, then over her shoulder. Shaking, her arms and back aching with the strain, she heaved, spun the blade forward and let it fly at the far wall.

  Stones rained down. She shrieked, covering her head, then peered under one elbow at the light pouring from the jagged hole in the wall. Beyond it the wood watched, trees whispering; a bird chuckled. A tide of brambles flowed out of the wall into spring. When they loosed Tessera finally, she followed them, relieved to be leaving the giant’s house.

  The wall closed behind the last bramble, left her trapped again within stones. She beat at them; they refused to budge. After a moment, a door formed noiselessly under her fists. It was a simple affair of wood and whitewash, with a brass latch. She glanced behind her; the door through which she had entered the room was still nowhere to be seen.

  She sighed and opened the second door.

  The giant stood waiting for her.

  He said nothing, just blew a great breath at her that slammed the door and pushed her backward into it. She nearly fell over when he ran out of breath. Indignant, she filled her lungs and blew back at him, a feeble breath that stirred a few dust motes in the air between them. He laughed a booming laugh that shook the floorboards. Furious with him for toying with her, she drew breath and blew again, noisily and gracelessly, like a bellows. She thought she saw one eye flutter; his laughter grew a little hollow. The ne
xt breath she loosed at him lifted him off his feet.

  Obstinately, he was grinning as he got up off the floor. Still he didn’t speak. He threw something at her that looked like a little ball of fire. She ducked. It smacked the door and set it on fire.

  Gasping, she flung herself away. He had already tossed another ball. She ran; it struck the floor where she had been and set that on fire. She fled across the room, watching him, breathless and astonished, as he pulled another burning ball out of his sleeve, or out of the air. Magic, she thought as she dodged this one. But the fires burning the floorboards and the door were real enough: she felt the painful heat, heard wood sizzle and snap.

  The giant formed another ball. This time she did not run; she narrowed her eyes and stood ground grimly, tired of being batted around by this mindless hulk in his confusing house. When he threw, she blew. The ball of fire stopped in midair and bounced back at him.

  He caught it, laughing again, and dropped it down his sleeve. “Good,” he grunted. “You fought beyond your fear and began to think.”

  The fires around them vanished at the sound of his voice. She stood panting, staring at him incredulously. An odd feeling spilled through her, filling her like steam fills a pot; when she finally found her voice, it sounded a little like steam blasting the lid off the pot.

  “How dare you?” she demanded. Angrier than she had ever been in her life, she did not even know the word for what she felt. “Who are you?”

  But he was gone suddenly, and so was the door.

  A third door formed in the wall ahead of her.

  The strange tempest in her had blown itself out. She gazed wearily at the door, tired of being tormented and teased, and frightened. She was uncomfortably aware that she had misjudged something; she was looking at something askew, not seeing what was in front of her nose. The giant, perhaps, was not a giant? The magical house, perhaps, was not a house?

  Perhaps she was not even herself?

  She had wielded the sword of the first queen of Raine; she had blown a giant off his feet and outwitted him; she had brought light to a place with no light; she had understood the magic of the thorns.

  “I don’t know anymore what I am,” she whispered to the door, and put her hand on the latch. It seemed that, opening it, she would understand something she was not sure she wanted to know. There was no other way out. She drew close to the door, still holding its simple wooden latch, and bowed her head against the unseasoned planks.

  “I wish,” she told it, “that you would just let me back into the wood.”

  It opened to yet another room; in this one she found Vevay.

  Tessera looked at the mage silently, not recognizing the expression on her face at all. She said tentatively, wondering if it were just another teasing bit of magic, “Vevay?”

  “Yes,” Vevay said simply. She did not move; Tessera took a step toward her.

  “You look unfamiliar. What have you been thinking?”

  “I was remembering,” the mage said. “Things that I had forgotten long ago… You reminded me that they are still there, buried away underneath the years.” She moved finally, turning, and Tessera saw the door appear in the wall in front of the mage, as though she, too, had been trapped in the giant’s house.

  But it had not been a giant, and it was not a house… Vevay opened the door; Tessera saw the green wood just outside. Vevay stood aside, waiting for the queen to pass.

  She took a step then stopped before she crossed the threshold, said without looking at Vevay, “This is the mages’ school.”

  “Yes.”

  “And the giant. He is a mage.”

  “Felan. You met him once before, when your father took you with him to visit the school. You were very young; you might have remembered him as a giant.”

  Tessera nodded. She shifted to take another step but didn’t. “And what am I?”

  “You tell me,” Vevay said.

  Tessera looked at her finally. The ancient, beautiful face held many complex things that she had not seen before she began to see herself.

  She answered softly, “I will.”

  “I was searching for you. Felan sent word that you were here. The Lord of Seale did not wait for your messengers to summon him back to court; he is already on his way here.” She paused, her smoky eyes hooded, watching something in the distance. “He is bringing his army with him.”

  Tessera turned her head, gazed blindly at the trees. She moved finally, stepped into the unpredictable world that, like all the rooms in the giant’s house, had no way out but through.

  EIGHTEEN

  The Emperor of the Sea was not content.

  Neither were his armies, which had grown substantially as he made his way around the Baltrean, swollen with warriors from other lands whose heads were stuffed with dreams of glory and plunder. Axis seemed invincible. After Kirixia fell to him, almost without a fight since its ruler had fled before the armies of Eben had even gotten there, he lingered to rest on the sunny Baltrean shores. As always, he left as much unchanged as he could in the lands he conquered. For most, daily life continued much as it had before; only the faces of authority were different. He chose a careful combination of alien conqueror and pragmatic locals to restore peace and preserve order. Aware that an empire begins to crumble the moment the emperor turns his back, he did what he could that was shrewd and prudent to maintain it. Then he turned his back, for his first love was war.

  After every campaign, no matter how distant, he returned to Eben. He was most careful with it, since he had almost lost it once. There, while he attended to its affairs, his thoughts would inevitably stray beyond the boundaries of Eben, of his empire, to find his next battlefield. His army, well paid and sheltered between wars, waited patiently tor him to decide. It was becoming a fearsome thing, that army of Eben; it was as complicated to handle as an empire. The queen hated it when it took Axis away from Eben, and feared it when he brought it home. It had become a great killing machine, a monster that ate entire kingdoms. If Axis failed to provide for it, it would consume Eben. So she complained to the king, who listened gravely to his wife, and answered simply, “Then I will find it new worlds to conquer, and it will never turn on me.”

  It was full of strangers, the emperor’s army, foreign faces and languages, customs, experiences, warriors who were newly part of the empire and inspired by the young emperor’s astonishing victories. Kane, who fought its battles with it, who drifted at night from campfire to campfire, a stray shadow listening to comments, complaints, tales, recognized it as a source for Axis’s new worlds. Thus, from a warrior born in Kirixia, whose father had been a trader, she heard of an immense, fabulous kingdom east of the Baltrean, full of exotic beasts, untold wealth, and poetry as old as the world.

  When, in Eben, she recognized the signs of restlessness in the Emperor of the Sea, she told him what she had heard.

  They lay together, as usual during their most important councils of war, in the placid palace beside the Serpent.

  “Does this land have a name?” Axis asked. Around them, the palace was hushed and dark; a single stand of candles showed them one another’s face.

  “It’s called Gilyriad.”

  “Gilyriad. I’ve never heard of it.” He dropped kisses like warm rain in the crooks of her elbows, in the hollow of her throat. “Does it really exist?”

  “I will find out,” Kane promised.

  She had her ways, which she only explained to Axis if he asked. He rode the twin dragons of empire and war; he had little time to wonder about her sorcery. It existed; she used it for his purposes; it was too complex for him to comprehend, and so he rarely asked. When he did, her answers were frustratingly vague. How could she travel across a battlefield in a breath, so that if he said her name or thought it, there she was beside him?

  “I feel you call me,” she said. “I take a step.” But how? “I make the shortest path to you.” How did she find the shortest path? “I eliminate everything that isn’t you.” How, he
asked incredulously, can you eliminate a battlefield? She tried to explain. “It goes elsewhere. Like a pattern on a cloth when you fold it. One end is you, the other end is me. When you lay the cloth flat, we are far apart across the pattern. When you bring one end of the cloth to meet the other, there is no longer any distance between them. The pattern is still there, but no longer between us. It is elsewhere. We are together.”

  In this fashion she traveled to other places: the docks on the delta where the Serpent flowed into the sea, for instance. There she listened and questioned until she found a trader who claimed to have traveled to Gilyriad. He showed her seed pods that, crushed, became richly scented spices. He showed her cloth of a strange airy weave dyed unusual colors, and pottery glazed with unfamiliar patterns. He held fine-grained aromatic wood to her nose and opened elegantly wrought chests full of uncut jewels and disks of gold stamped with the faces of rulers she did not recognize.

  She brought one of the disks back to Axis.

  “A coin,” she told him, “from your next conquest.”

  He studied the face on the disk: a proud, hawk-nosed, disdainful profile. “I will need a map,” he murmured, “to show to my generals.” He laid the coin in her hand, closed her fingers over it. “When I am Emperor of Gilyriad, spend this in the marketplace on a piece of cloth with a pattern on it that goes elsewhere when we are together.”

  She smiled. “I will spend it on a map of the world. Not even that can separate us.”

  If, she reasoned, the maps of the world she knew showed only the world she knew, then the maps in the world of Gilyriad would show the world as it was known there, which might indeed encompass lands unknown in Eben for the emperor to conquer. She continued her search among traders and sailors, for they roamed farther than the merchants’ ships could go in the sheltered Baltrean Sea. She learned of long, arduous trade routes over mountains and plains east of the Baltrean, where tribes of nomads and vast herds of peculiar animals roamed on paths formed over countless centuries by their ancestors. Thus the world changed its shape in Kane’s mind, stunningly and irrevocably. In the mind of the young girl on the bank of the Serpent, the world had been exactly the size and shape of Eben. Now it was shifting rapidly into something unimaginably huge and complex. Axis wanted to lead his army across that complexity and conquer whatever kingdoms he had missed. He depended upon Kane to show him the way.