Alphabet of Thorn

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “Yes,” he said. Then he sighed. “No. I left it all, except for this coin, in the school.”

  She dropped her face against him, hiding her eyes. “Then we must stay. Anyway, what about your family? You can’t run away from them.”

  “What about them?” he said bitterly. “My uncle is not thinking of them. There won’t be much left of it if he continues his march toward the plain.”

  “Can you stop him?”

  “Not with words. The queen and her mages and the other Crowns will put a stop to him soon enough. I won’t have a home to go home to.”

  “Then this must be home for now. Wait with me until it gets late. Then I’ll take you to my secret place. I know where the librarians keep spare bedding, and I can bring you food from the refectory kitchens. You’ll turn yourself invisible again, and no one will find you.”

  He saw Vevay’s eyes, gray, clear, and winter-cold, knew she could see through any spell he conjured. “For now,” he said, and kissed Nepenthe. “I’ll stay tonight at least. I won’t put you in danger longer than I can help it. But I can’t seem to think clearly now.”

  “Don’t think. She’ll only find you.”

  He tried not to, as Nepenthe led him, hours later, through the soundless, shadowy corridors, down every worn stone stair, it seemed, she could find until they must be in the center of the cliff somewhere near the Dreaming King. Was he dreaming now? Bourne wondered. Was Ermin of Seale a nightmare or merely an irritating twitch in the Dreamer’s sleep?

  Nepenthe deposited him among the broken shards of history, left him with a candle while she went for food and blankets. He studied the old slabs with their incomprehensible letters, shifting the light to see tablets of wax and stiffened hide, all filled with writings that once were urgent and necessary for an orderly world and now were buried away, gathering dust and of no use to anyone.

  The little book of thorns caught his eye. It lay closed among Nepenthe’s pens and ink jars and papers covered with her careful, miniscule writing. Her translations. He picked one up, scanned it. Kane and Axis, nothing else, nothing but, both names as ancient and dusty as the tablets around him. What, he wondered, not for the first time as he picked up the odd, thorny book, was her obsession?

  Thorns.

  He blinked, remembering. Something. The queen in the wood. The warrior that had appeared to her, armed, faceless, pointing, warning silently of—what?

  A pile of brambles.

  Thorns.

  The eerie magic flashed out of him again, sudden fear colliding with sudden power.

  “Only the beginning,” he heard Vevay say again in memory, talking about his uncle. “Only the beginning of trouble.”

  TWENTY

  Vevay sat with Felan in the mages’ library much later that night, explaining to him where their prisoner had gone.

  “Something there is in all this that doesn’t meet the eye,” she said grimly. “Which is why I left him in the library instead of bringing him back here.”

  “I don’t understand how he freed himself. You put terrible spells on that door.”

  “Only if he figured out how to open it with magic. Which he shouldn’t have done. What have you been teaching the students these days?”

  “Nothing very complicated.”

  “Well, what he actually did wasn’t complicated at all. What he actually did was walk out the door after Halvor opened it. Halvor said no one had told him that the prisoner might turn himself invisible.”

  “No one told me, either,” Felan said ruefully. “I had no idea he could do that.”

  “Neither did he. That’s what he told the transcriptor in the library. I could see what drew him back there. She has astonishing eyes, and a face that—well, it reminded me of something; I can’t remember what. She took him to a room deep in the cliff, full of old stone tablets and such. She left him there while she went for food and blankets. It didn’t look as though he were going anywhere else, so I left him, too, to come here.”

  “Will he stay there?”

  She shrugged slightly. “At least until morning.”

  “What will he do then?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What will you do?”

  “I’ll decide then.” She paused, her eyes hooded, expressionless, as she tried to piece together events that would not fit. Ermin of Seale’s army marching out of the Second Crown to attack the queen; the Dreamer awake and uttering dire warnings not about Ermin but about thorns…

  “There isn’t a bramble bush anywhere on the entire plain,” she said impatiently. “There is no danger that I can see beyond Ermin. That’s what is so frightening: I can’t see!”

  “No danger even in Bourne?”

  She shook her head helplessly. “I heard everything he said to the young transcriptor he loves. They discussed running off together in a gypsy wagon. The last thing he wanted to do, it seemed, was fight for Ermin of Seale. He said that the Lord of Seale had doomed the Second Crown, and he worried about his family. As well he should. I will have his uncle’s head on a platter and his family in a tower on the Outermost Islands for the next five hundred years if the Twelve Crowns gather their forces to fight Ermin and then decide to rebel against the queen while they’re at it. Gavin has summoned the queen’s warriors. They’ll be coming from the north and the south, he said, and they should be able to cut Ermin off before he comes near the plain. And of course the nobles are clamoring to return home and gather their own forces to protect their interests. And to fight for the queen. So they say. You’d think that alone would be reason enough to galvanize a dead warrior’s bones. But no. It must be something totally incomprehensible.”

  “Thorns,” Felan murmured.

  “Thorns.”

  “And you think that by leaving Bourne to his own devices, you might learn something about them?”

  “His magic is unpredictable, governed by impulse and desire. Pent up here, it may do more harm than good. Let loose, it may unearth something useful.” She brooded silently again, then added slowly, “His is not the only wild magic on this plain.”

  “Tessera.”

  “Yes.” The ominous stillness left her eyes; she looked suddenly bewildered, vulnerable. “I didn’t remember.”

  “What?”

  “What power is like when you’re that young. If no one names it for you, how can you possibly know what it is? She had no way of telling me. Why she could hear the language of trees. That it might be important. Why should she have told me? Nothing else she could do seemed to please me; why would that? I may be older than I can count, but how could I have not recognized what was under my nose?”

  “You were trying to see something else in her,” he suggested gently. “You were trying to find her father in her, his strengths and powers. You didn’t think of looking for your own.”

  “No.”

  “Do you have any idea—”

  “No. I don’t know how powerful she could be. Or even what branch of her family tree such power came from. That tree is more tangled than the entire wood, and if we couldn’t even keep the sex of the first ruler straight, then there’s no telling what else has been changed or misplaced or forgotten along the way. There is no time to teach Tessera anything now. She can be trained as a mage later, if she survives her first month as queen. Until then, she will have to rely on us. An aging counselor whose vision is failing, and a handful of schoolmasters who haven’t been near a battlefield in decades.”

  “I could,” Felan suggested tranquilly, “drop the Floating School on Ermin’s head.”

  Vevay smiled thinly. “I might ask you to. But the most important thing you can do now is look for—”

  “Thorns.”

  “Thorns.” She stirred restively. “I’m trying to find them in the most unlikely places. The transcriptor who is hiding Bourne put him in a secret place where, she said, she kept her thorns. So of course I followed them there, and looked for anything remotely resembling brambles in the library.”

/>   “Was there—”

  “I didn’t see anything. Just broken stone tablets and a few books and her papers.”

  “Books.” Something quickened in his face; a line disturbed his brow, faint as a dragonfly’s wake across water. Vevay gazed at him with wonder. “There was a book that passed among the mages earlier this spring. It was written in a kind of thorny alphabet.”

  “Was it magic?” Vevay asked quickly.

  “It didn’t seem so. It seemed just an ancient language that none of us could decipher. A trader gave the book to us; he said he couldn’t interest anyone in buying it, and he was tired of carrying it around the Twelve Crowns.”

  “Is it still here?”

  “No. We sent it over to the librarians to see what they would make of it.”

  Her silvery brows rose. “But you sensed no power in it?”

  “Nothing. Nothing beyond the power of a forgotten language to inspire curiosity.” He paused. Vevay watched his eyelids descend slowly, tortoise-like, over some thought. He said softly, “Bourne.”

  “Bourne.”

  His eyelids lilted again. “I believe that it was Bourne who took the book out of the wood to give to the librarians’ messenger. The older students were practicing an exchange of power in the wood that day, and Bourne was the only one of the beginning students not afraid to walk through it.”

  “Why am I not surprised?” she inquired of the air. “Have the librarians translated it yet?”

  “They’ve said nothing about it.”

  “Perhaps they gave it to Bourne’s friend to translate. That’s what she meant by thorns. She kept paper and ink there; she was translating something. I’ll go back now and look.”

  Felan nodded. “Though it’s hard to imagine a language powerful enough to rouse the dead of Raine without attracting your attention.”

  “Well,” Vevay said tersely as she rose, “now I’m listening.”

  But while she heard Bourne’s weary snoring in the library chamber as she turned page after page of thorns, nothing spoke behind the letters, within the words, between the lines. She read some of Nepenthe’s translation. Axis and Kane, she saw with surprise. She remembered speaking their names not so long ago, telling a story to Gavin to send him to sleep. This was sending her to sleep. She yawned in the middle of Axis’s conquest of the ancient kingdom of Gilyriad. Where had that been? she wondered. Far east of the easternmost Crown, the Sixth Crown, she thought, and yawned again.

  “Nothing,” she told Felan on her return to the mages’ library. “Just ancient history.”

  She slept then, for a few scant hours, until she heard the first bird sing on the tower roof where they nested, and in the darkness before dawn she returned to keep watch over Bourne.

  They were together by then, he and the transcriptor Nepenthe, huddled under patched quilts and talking.

  “I should leave,” he insisted. “Vevay and Felan must be searching for me, and they will find me. That’s only a matter of time. I don’t want them to find me with you.”

  “I don’t want you to go. You have nowhere to go. Stay with me. The mages will imprison you, if you go back to the school; the queen will arrest you. If you go back to the Second Crown, you’ll have to choose which side of a war you’ll fight in, and either side might kill you. Stay here.”

  “And do what? Haunt the library for the rest of my life, never appearing except after dark? I should leave now while I can. Now. Before the sun rises. Come with me. There are books in the world beyond the royal library. I’ll find work as an apprentice mage, and you can write and translate.”

  She hesitated; Vevay heard her draw breath once or twice. Then she whispered something that Vevay heard, but Bourne didn’t, for she was turning away from him as she spoke.

  “What?”

  “I want to. I will go with you. But I have to finish the thorns first.”

  He pulled her back, catching her shoulders and holding her down, pulling the hair away from her face so she could not hide from him. “I’ll finish those thorns for you,” he promised grimly. “I’ll throw them over the cliff and into the sea.”

  “And I will go after them,” she told him with such chilling calm that Vevay blinked, and Bourne buried his own face in Nepenthe’s hair.

  “All right,” he whispered. “We won’t fight over them. I won’t take them away from you. I will leave now—”

  “No—”

  “Listen. I’ll ride out of here on one of the traders’ wagons; I can do enough magic to convince somebody to hire me as protection against trouble on the road. I’ll make my way to a city where I’ll be safe, and then I’ll write and tell you where I am. You can come to me when you’re ready.”

  “Don’t leave,” she pleaded. “Isn’t there someone you could talk to? One of the mages, or someone in the palace who could tell you what to do? Vevay hasn’t found you yet. She would have by now, if she could. Wouldn’t she? If you turn yourself invisible again, she wouldn’t find you, would she?”

  Bourne hesitated. Vevay nodded, encouraging the idea. Bourne, she was convinced, meant no harm to Tessera, but it would not be safe for him to roam freely with all his relatives imprisoned for treason and his uncle leading an army against the palace. Losing Bourne would be a waste of an interesting power that might likely be useful to the queen if they all survived her coronation. Vevay considered making herself visible, then and there, and commanding Bourne to stay. But there were decisions he had to make for himself, if he were to wield a power that could be trusted. All she could do, for the moment, was watch.

  “All right,” he breathed, dropping his face against Nepenthe’s. “I will wait until you’re ready. But you must hurry. If war comes to the plain before we leave, we may never get out of here. And if Vevay finds me—”

  “Don’t say her name.”

  “She will have no mercy.”

  “Then you had better remember how you turned yourself invisible in the first place. Can you?”

  “I had a coin,” he answered, surprising Vevay again. “The queen’s face was on it. I think the magic in her inspired me…”

  “She’s magical?”

  “You wouldn’t notice it, looking at her. I think that’s what I used—her ability to hide all that magic, to be unnoticed in the midst of all her power… Trees talk to her. She sees birds in the wood. Nobody ever sees birds in the wood.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know.” He was talking into her hair now, his face nuzzled into her neck; her eyes were closed. “Maybe they’re the wood’s thoughts, birds are. The trees hide them from the students, or from other humans…the way you would hide something precious from clumsy strangers… The way you hide the thorns…”

  Vevay waited until they were both asleep again and took another look at the thorns.

  Utterly mystified, she went to attend to the waking queen.

  TWENTY-ONE

  “Dirxia,” Laidley said. “Auravia. Niscena. Toren. How can you concentrate on this when we are about to be attacked?”

  “Go on,” Nepenthe said tersely.

  “Mordicea. All of these existed centuries after Axis did. Cranoth.” He raised his eyes again from the list Nepenthe had given him. “The kingdom of Cranoth still existed when the first king of Raine ruled. How can you possibly believe that Kane wrote this book?”

  Nepenthe slid her fingers over her eyes. They were cold and trembled slightly. She couldn’t get them warm enough lately; it made writing difficult. “What about Cenele?”

  “It’s old,” Laidley said. “But still at least five centuries later than Eben. Axis could never have conquered it.”

  “Kane says he did.”

  “Kane is not Kane.”

  “What if she is? What if he did?”

  Laidley tossed the list down, peered at her. “How?” he asked succinctly, and she sighed.

  “It doesn’t seem likely, does it?”

  “No.”

  “Nor possible.”

  �
��Nepenthe.” He hesitated. They were sitting on the bed she had made for Bourne, which Laidley took for hers because he had no idea that Bourne was in the library. Bourne, practicing invisibility, was presumably somewhere in the room; Nepenthe had last seen him sitting on a stack of stone tablets. “Nepenthe,” Laidley said again, and stuck.

  “What?” she said dolefully.

  “Are you—You’re not taking all this seriously, are you? I mean: Bourne disappearing isn’t causing your mind to—well, to—not to mention Ermin of Seale, which is sufficient reason in itself for Bourne to have vanished out of your life. He’s either gone to fight with his uncle, or he’s trying to protect you. I know you’re extremely disturbed and frightened by all this, but you seem to be wandering off into your imagination.”

  She nodded, twisting her long hair into a rope and gazing fretfully at the list of kingdoms. “I know. It seems.”

  “Can’t you leave the thorns alone for a while?”

  “No.”

  “What about the fish?”

  “What about them?”

  “Master Croysus has been looking for you. He has waited for you for the last three mornings beside his fish manuscript, hoping you’ll appear. The librarians are beginning to wonder about you. Daimon asked me where you work during the day. Leave the thorns and finish his fish for him. Let the librarians know you’re still alive and working.”

  She nodded again, absently. “All right. Laidley, is there any way that you can imagine, just for a moment, looking at life and time and history from a different angle—”

  “No,” Laidley said, his face crumpled like a wad of paper with concern. “Not without more evidence than that book.”

  She looked at him then, wrapped her chilly fingers around his wrist. “Evidence. Yes. That would help, wouldn’t it. Laidley, find out when they died.”

  “Axis and Kane?”

  “Yes.”

  “That should be easy enough. And that would convince you?”

  Her fingers eased. “It would help.”

  “If I do this, will you work on the fish and talk to Master Croysus? And to Daimon?”