Alphabet of Thorn

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  She bought maps where she could get them, from sailors along the shores of the Baltrean. A couple she stole, for the trade routes leading to rich, exotic cities were the well-kept secrets of wealthy merchants. She laid them side by side in Axis’s secret chamber, where he walked barefoot among them, studied them silently for a long time. Then he looked at her. She felt her throat swell at the expression in his eyes. In that moment they both knew that the world at his feet belonged to him.

  Out of the mountains of Kol

  The Emperor’s army poured like water

  Onto the plains of Gilyriad.

  Like the stars,

  Nameless, countless,

  Like the endless drops of rain

  Were the masked faces of the warriors of Eben.

  The trumpets of Gilyriad sounded,

  Bone and brass shouted across the land

  Like the battle-cries of fierce beasts

  Rushing to meet their doom.

  And doom it was for Gilyriad, after three days, or thirty days, or ninety days and ninety nights of constant battle, depending upon which poet wrote of it. On his march from Eben to Gilyriad, Axis’s army had indeed grown like a river, as nomadic warriors and mercenaries streamed into it. Kane fought always at Axis’s side through the long battle. Even she lost track of time, for they scarcely slept, and her powers could light up a battlefield even at night. The victory was never in question. But the proud ruler of Gilyriad did not easily give up the land his ancestors had held since the beginnings of language to this masked raider who came out of Nowhere.

  The Lion of Eben

  Raised the severed head

  Of the King of Gilyriad by his hair

  To let him look

  One last time at his land.

  A great cry echoed across the plain

  From the mouth of the dead king to his people:

  “Bow low, touch your mouths to the dust,

  For this is the Emperor of the World.”

  Actually, the King of Gilyriad was on his feet with his head on his shoulders when he surrendered his army and his kingdom to Axis. He killed himself not long afterward, unable to endure his humiliation. Axis sent his sons to govern remote areas conquered by Gilyriad during its long history. They became minor princelings themselves; Axis had them carefully watched through their lives, for any signs of rebellion and revenge. He himself did not return to Eben for nearly a year. He explored his new acquisition and dealt with its governing bodies. On Kane’s advice, when he did return to Eben, he left a great part of the immense swarm that was his army in Gilyriad.

  While Axis was putting the realm in order, Kane gave deep and careful thought to their situation. Gilyriad was a sprawling, fertile land, well able to contain the emperor’s army. Camped near a wealthy city, it was well fed and kept in order. By then, contrary to the fears of the Queen of Eben, it was fiercely and passionately devoted to the emperor, for he had made it, in a few short years, the matter of legend and epic. Axis’s army would have followed him anywhere.

  He expected Kane to tell him where.

  She traveled through Gilyriad with Axis, staying in the great palaces and cities. While he set his governing bodies in place, she spoke to scholars and explored libraries. For this she used interpreters who had once been sailors or caravan leaders, wanderers who had come to the end of their roads in Gilyriad. Very few people had ever heard of Eben before they suddenly found themselves under its rule. The scholars showed her ancient texts, tried to find ways of explaining them. She demonstrated her powers; illumined, they produced even older words, and took her to meet local witches, sorcerers, and healers. She learned odd, stray things from them. Mostly she offered them gold in return, for they were a wild, scruffy lot underappreciated by those who consulted them.

  Sometimes she spent entire days in the sumptuous gardens, listening while scholars and interpreters read to her. The histories and epics they read were of long-dead heroes, kingdoms with little left of them but their names. They showed her maps of the world according to Gilyriad. A great ocean lay to the east; it had no beginning and no end. No one who ventured forth to find the other side of it had ever returned. Therefore there was no end. Kane nodded solemnly. The ocean went on forever, gradually flowing into the stars, which also went on forever. All that existed lay flat, like a great cloth. All intelligent people had believed, until the emperor had come out of the Gates of Nowhere, that the pattern of the earth on the fabric of existence was roughly the size and shape of Gilyriad.

  Now that they realized their error, the scholars asked Kane to change the shape of the world for them. She drew them the world as she knew it, though she made Eben about ten times bigger than it was so that Axis’s victory would be more credibly explained. Thoughts washed back and forth in her head, images that their language summoned. The endless sea that flowed into stars. The world lying flat like a cloth. The explorers looking for the end of the world who went out and never returned, presumably still sailing around the stars… In her mind she reached out to the flat cloth of existence. She touched it, ruffled it, so that pieces of the pattern that had been an inch apart were now touching. She folded one end against the other; places that had not known of one another’s existence were now face-to-face. Stars rained out of the sky, touched the earth. The sea that had no end suddenly found itself a shore.

  How? she wondered. How?

  And all her explanations to Axis about how she moved across distances resolved themselves into one word: Time.

  There, in the tranquil gardens of Gilyriad, as Axis made his peace with his conquered people, she glimpsed the true beginnings of his empire.

  The Lord of Time

  Who opens the Gates of Nowhere

  Everywhere at his whim

  Knows no boundaries.

  No kingdom is safe.

  Lock your gates.

  Guard your walls.

  Bury your gold.

  Never sleep.

  He will unlock your gates.

  He will shatter your towers.

  He will take your gold

  And give you sleep in return.

  That sleep that has no language,

  No dream,

  No time,

  No end.

  NINETEEN

  Bourne sat on the hard, narrow pallet in his prison chamber, flipping a coin. Sometimes the crowned head of the young woman in the wood landed upright, sometimes the twelve linked Crowns of Raine. He would pause to gaze intently at either, as though trying to comprehend the message they were giving him in the alphabet of coins. He had no pen or knife to tally which fell when, so he had decided from the beginning that it didn’t matter: he would regard every toss as the first, and every image as a message. The message, which one fall or another of the coin would eventually give him, was how to get himself out of his chamber and into Nepenthe’s, so that he could tell her why he had not come to tell her why he had not come.

  He had tried. Each time he filled his heart with her, so that longing fashioned the shortest path through time, he would be brought up against a wall. He tried more than once; the second wall looked different. He tried many times, thinking that Vevay could not be shoring up that many spells at once, and somewhere there must be an end to walls. There wasn’t. He sank down on the floor and began pitching coins into his shoe, trying to devise a way to outwit the door. It was visible; it functioned; it opened and closed whenever someone from the kitchens brought him food. There seemed no lock on it. He offered money to the servant to show him how to open the door. The servant, who might have been Felan himself for all he knew, only snorted at the idea and went off snickering unpleasantly. Bourne kept his mind on the problem, doggedly throwing the seventeen coins he had in his pocket over and over. An idea grew the way mushrooms seemed to grow, unexpectedly, out of nothing, when no one was watching. There it was: the door in his head and a way to open it. He barely remembered to empty his shoe and put it back on before he went to the door.

  He opened it a
nd nearly fell over the cliff.

  He closed it again, leaned against it, his heart pounding sickly, still feeling the sudden blast of wind leaping up over the cliff, smelling of sun and salt, pushing against him even as the shock of the long emptiness almost unbalanced him into it. Illusion, he guessed, but was not entirely convinced that, stepping into it, he would not be instantly stripped of every illusion in his young life as he plunged to his death. Nor did he believe that Vevay might bestir herself to rescue him. He—or something—seemed to have tested her patience severely; she didn’t look in the mood for mercy.

  So he went back to his coins, tossing this time instead of pitching, with the one coin he had that bore the queen’s face. It didn’t resemble the girl in the wood. The face on the coin belonged to someone older, stronger, tempered. A warrior queen, not the shy woodland creature he had met. That one was magical, talking to trees and birds, and seeing portents in—what had it been?—a bramble bush. Perhaps some of her magic would spark within him at a coin’s toss, if her face came up often enough. Queen or Crowns, he threw, again and again. Queen or Crowns. It seemed a question to which he must give his entire attention. If he chose correctly he would find the magic, work the spell, set himself free…

  This time the spell that stole into his empty mind was not one he had thought to look for. He had no idea how long he had been in the windowless place except by counting meals; already there seemed to have been more than possible. No one came to tell him anything. Even the servant who brought his food and wash-water rarely glanced at him, and refused to acknowledge any remarks. I might as well be invisible, Bourne had thought a hundred times. I might as well be a stone in the wall, without eyes or ears or thoughts. Much longer in this timeless, soundless place, and I will turn into one…

  Queen or Crowns.

  Queen or Crowns.

  Queen or Crowns.

  “I might as well be,” he whispered, flicking the coin with his thumb. “I might as well…”

  Be invisible.

  He heard his breath stop.

  Queen.

  He picked the coin up as tenderly as if it were a love token, gazing at her face.

  Invisible. I might as well be…

  “Why not?” he asked her. “Why not? No one sees me, anyway. I might as well.”

  Be invisible.

  He sat there tor a very long time, holding the face of the young queen, not trying anything, even not to think, just letting himself be what he was, something no one wanted to see, hear, speak to, a stone in the wall, an unlit candle. Something that was nothing. Nowhere. Unnoticed. Invisible.

  He placed the coin gently into his pocket and waited.

  When the servant brought his next meal, he saw the scattering of coins on the floor where the prisoner had been sitting.

  While he straightened, staring incredulously around the room, Bourne walked out of the door into the mages’ comfortable library and kept walking as the servant shouted, into the library in his heart.

  He appeared in Nepenthe’s chamber. Not daring to show his face anywhere in the halls he waited for her there. Sitting on her bed, tossing the coin again to empty his head, he tried to remain invisible. The sky in her tiny window took forever to darken. But it did eventually, and no Vevay came searching for him. He wondered why. He loved an orphan transcriptor in the library; she must know he would go there first. Perhaps because she had caught him there before, that was the last place she expected to find him now. His mouth crooked ruefully. Or she simply thought he would run, since he took so little seriously; she would expect to find him somewhere between the mages’ wood and the safety of his uncle’s court.

  He flipped the coin upward; the door opened.

  Nepenthe, staring at the coin falling over her bed, brought both hands over her mouth to stifle a scream.

  She tried to scream again when Bourne stumbled off her bed and caught her shoulders. “Nepenthe,” he whispered. “It’s only me.”

  She pushed past him into the room, shoved the door closed with her foot. She was trembling; her hands shook badly as she tried to light one taper from another. Bourne took them from her; she gasped sharply, “Don’t do that!”

  “Do what?”

  “Make things float in the air like that.”

  “Do I?” he asked bewilderedly.

  “Bad enough that I couldn’t see you when you weren’t there—”

  “But I’m here, now.”

  “Where?” she demanded tightly. “Why are you hiding from me? Leave me alone if you can’t think of anything better to do than torment me.”

  He put the taper very carefully in a holder. “Nepenthe.” For some reason he was whispering again. “Can’t you see me?”

  “No!” She was trying, he could tell. Now that he no longer held anything her eyes searched for him desperately everywhere in the chamber. “I can hear you; I can see things you hold. But I can’t see you at all.”

  He closed his eyes, slumped against the wall. “Oh,” he breathed, “this is cruel.”

  “Yes.”

  “Please.” He caught her hand; she tried to pull away, but he brought her palm to his rough cheek. “Feel that. That’s what grew in however many days I was locked away. How many days has it been since I should have met you that evening in the refectory?”

  Her wide eyes searched the air her hand cupped. “Five days.”

  “Five. It felt like half a year.”

  “Why are you still invisible?”

  “Because I don’t know how to undo my own spell,” he answered raggedly. “I don’t know how I managed to turn myself invisible, but as soon as I knew I was unseen I crept out the door and came here.”

  “Where have you been?”

  “Somewhere in the mages’ school, boxed in by Vevay. She found me wandering around the library when I was last here looking for you, and she arrested me for treason.”

  “Trea—” She tried to stuff the word back into her mouth, as though saying it would bring down disaster. “Bourne. What have you been doing?”

  He sighed. “Sit with me. You don’t have to see me, just feel my hand in yours, my body beside you. I’ll try to explain.”

  He tried, and watched her trying to understand. What had seemed a lighthearted venture into the mystery of magic sounded foolish now, fraught with the dangerous ambiguities of history. Her hand grew slack in his hold. Once or twice she tried to interrupt, but he continued doggedly, insisting that he had meant no real harm, that truly he thought himself incapable of—He had actually met the queen in the wood one day and liked her. He had gotten her to smile—

  “Bourne.” Nepenthe was not smiling. Her eyes were enormous and very dark. His babbling died away; he waited uneasily. “There was a rumor at supper tonight about your uncle. They say he’s leading the entire forces of the Second Crown here to attack the queen.”

  He felt his skin go cold with shock, as though someone had doused him with a bucket of water. At the same time, something was unleashed, a sudden flash of wild magic that he had been holding in place without realizing it. As it dispersed, and the expression in Nepenthe’s eyes changed, he knew that he had broken his own spell.

  “Bourne!” she cried to his visible face. “Not now!”

  “I couldn’t help it—” He gripped her hand again; they were both silent, motionless, listening. No irate mages appeared out of nowhere to haul him back into his cage. He loosed her slowly, whispering again, “I didn’t know about my uncle. No one has spoken to me for days.”

  “Can’t you turn yourself invisible again? You’re in terrible danger.”

  He looked at her, brushed a strand of hair from her eyes. “You believe me?” he asked wistfully.

  “Yes, of course I do; I always knew you had a careless heart,” she answered dolefully. “But a transcriptor in the royal library believing in your—well, your foolishness if not your innocence—is not going to matter to anyone else if they find you. What are you going to do? You can’t show your face, even
down here.”

  “I don’t know.” He shifted closer to her, pushed his lips against her hair. “I only came here because I knew I had hurt you. I wanted you to know that I didn’t mean to—I’ve wanted nothing but to come to you for days, explain that maybe I have taken the world too lightly, but never you. For you I work magic. I do things I never knew I could do. Like—” He paused, holding words back, then continued reluctantly. “Like leaving you, now, before I get you into trouble, too.”

  “No.” Her fingers closed on his shoulder, his wrist. “No.”

  “I can’t stay.”

  “Yes. You can make yourself invisible again. Stay with me. I’ll hide you, and feed you—”

  “She’ll find us both here. You’ll be as culpable as I am.”

  “Then I’ll put you where I hide my thorns. No one ever goes there except me. You can practice your invisibility there.” She put her arms around him, held him tightly. “Where else can you go? Back to the wood, where the mages will be looking for you? To your uncle’s army, to help him fight?” She loosed him as abruptly, to meet his eyes. “Would you do that? Use your mage’s powers to fight for the Second Crown?”

  “I could,” he answered softly. “But what is my uncle going to do when the warriors of eleven other Crowns converge on this plain around him to rescue their own rulers and protect their powers? The Second Crown is doomed. I’d do better to flee with the gypsies on the plain, go off to a strange city, change my name and do tricks for a living. I don’t suppose you would come with me?”

  To his surprise, she considered it, her eyes wide, oddly desperate. “Have you got any money?”