Alphabet of Thorn

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “Yes,” he agreed. “Always. Every time I ask, you have already answered. You give me what I want before even my heart has named it.”

  “I do,” she said, watching his bowed head as he crouched in front of her, the Lion of Eben, kissing her knees now, sliding the sandals from her feet.

  “Kings reward their servants for a few moments of work,” he said, his mouth against one instep. “How can I begin to reward you for every moment you have given me?”

  She lifted his face between her hands to find his eyes again. She told him.

  Some time after that, she found her way back through time to the northern kingdom of Cranoth.

  This time, she did not pursue a mage to get there; she went alone to see for herself. She had learned the most carefully guarded secret of the mages of the Serpent: the pattern of the Labyrinth of Time, which she must follow to find her way out of her own time. She had wrested the pattern from the sorcerer’s mind. It burned now like a brand in her own: the path out of the Hub of Time to the infinite spokes in the Wheel. In Axis’s private chamber, she walked the pattern and opened the Gates of Nowhere to Cranoth.

  She found herself in a prosperous city surrounded on three sides by rich farmland and on the fourth by a river thick with a flock of gaudy boats and barges. She wandered through the lively city streets, hearing a language that made no sense to her ears, but which she could understand well enough if she listened to its images and feelings with her mind and heart. It was there that she first heard of the land west of Cranoth, the little realm between sea and sky on the edge of the world, hardly worth thinking about then, but the name lingered in her mind. Its queen, Mermion, she heard in passing at a bookstall, liked to collect books. She went on, through the crowded cobbled streets until she found at last the palace of the rulers of Cranoth. She paused among a crowd of idlers at its gates and saw the guards in their elegant armor, the nobles riding fine horses adorned with jeweled bridles and cunningly wrought stirrups. As she stood there, she envisioned the cheerful sky above them rent as by a silent lightning bolt, torn apart to reveal a swarm of faceless riders pouring endlessly into the fields around the city, while those within the walls, busy buying books, selling fruit, riding their haughty steeds, stopped what they were doing, looking puzzled at first, and then incredulous and finally aghast at what had come out of Nowhere into their peaceful afternoon.

  Kane walked the Labyrinth back to Eben and told Axis what she had seen.

  The Emperor of Night

  Stopped the sun, held the moon in the sky

  Over the King’s City in Cranoth.

  Between the sun and the moon

  His dark army flowed like water

  Flooding the fields, climbing the walls,

  Spilling everywhere into the streets

  Those within found nowhere to run.

  There is nowhere to run from night,

  Nowhere to hide from time,

  And the Twins who rule them both.

  Axis returned his army to Gilyriad after overwhelming the King of Cranoth and razing the walls of his city. His army, dazed with the sorcery, with the possibilities of fame and wealth, shouted his name across the plains of Gilyriad from dusk to dawn until their voices were gone. When he returned once again to Eben, he brought gifts of jewels and wondrously embroidered cloth for his wife, and golden spurs for his children. Thus the queen was appeased by his absence. She had little knowledge of the shape of the world. He told her that he had conquered Cranoth, and she assumed that it was where he said it was: west and far north of Eben, a chilly place unsuitable to raise children in.

  The queen spent her days in the courtyard with the fountains and peacocks, her many children, attendants, courtiers, and a lover or two among them. Masked, darkly dressed as always, Kane watched them from a distance and remembered the days when she conjured doves out of goblets to make the children laugh. Sometimes, in Axis’s private chamber, even in the circle of his arms, she woke at night and wondered if she could have led a different life. If she had not wrapped herself up and given herself, body and heart, to Axis on his wedding day. Perhaps by now she might have reclined at ease among her own peacocks, nibbling dates stuffed with almonds and crying to her children not to step on the peacocks’ tails. She had spoken to no one but Axis for years. Her own family had grown resigned to her disappearance. Outside of that chamber, she was the mute, faceless, awkward, and formidably powerful sorcerer Kane, who, everyone knew, loved Axis with a helpless, childlike love, and who would have followed him into his tomb.

  The second kingdom Axis rode the Labyrinth of the Serpent to conquer was called Gedron. Its nomad king was a fierce marauder himself, like Axis, appearing where he was least expected along the borders of his realm of steppes and plains to slay, plunder, and disappear again, along with herds and flocks, children to be used for slaves, and whatever other wealth his army could carry. Kane was careful to keep herself invisible in his city. It was a city of colorful tents thrown up across a plain; all around it animals pastured on the rich summer grasses. Guards ringed it, watching for trouble and checking the contents of the occasional merchant’s caravan that wandered through. Passing one of the caravans, Kane heard again a name she remembered from Cranoth: that of the little northern kingdom whose queen collected books.

  It wasn’t so small anymore. Now its king ruled five other kingdoms, five Crowns, they were called; the palace perched on the edge of the world had grown huge, and there was a school of magic or sorcery nearby that attracted students from many lands. The merchant from whom Kane overheard all this was haggling for some books that had gotten mixed in with plunder from the latest raid along the Gedron border. Apparently the nobles of Gedron had no use for them. A bargain was struck; books passed from hand to hand, bound for the royal library in the north.

  Kane did not mention the kingdom of Five Crowns when she returned to Eben and to Axis. But again, she remembered.

  The battle between the Lion of Eben and the Wolf-King of Gedron was swift and bloody. The King of Gedron, furious at being surprised, was equally curious. He wanted such power for himself and made every effort to capture Axis and Kane alive. Of course he had no hope of victory, for the army out of Gilyriad was truly numberless as the stars by then. His tents were flattened, his flocks scattered, his rich plunder taken, before Axis vanished back into Nowhere, leaving the king surrounded by his dead on the plain and wondering what had hit him.

  In Gilyriad, as Axis’s army shouted and drank and sang the emperor’s praises, and the Lion of Eben paced his sumptuous chambers dreaming of more worlds to conquer, Kane looked out a window at the silent, enigmatic moon. She thought of the distant northerly kingdom with its library and its mages’ school, its palace overlooking the edge of the world.

  Raine.

  She knew that night that Axis had given her all that she asked in return for her gifts to him of worlds and time and her life: She was carrying his child.

  TWENTY-THREE

  The Queen of Raine sat on the last of the cliff steps, listening. Far beneath her, the gray sea roiled and frothed against the cliffs. Gulls wheeled and cried in winds strong enough to hammer the long zigzag line of steps carved out of the face of the rock a little deeper into the stone. Tessera didn’t feel the winds, nor did she hear the breaking waves or birds. Deaf as a barnacle burrowed into its shell, she had made herself. Something enclosed, clinging to the cliff, untroubled by cold or wind; she might have drawn the cliff around her like a cloak. As though testing here, there, for the heartbeat in a stone, she let her mind wander in a timeless, wordless moment, throughout the living thing built into stone that was her palace.

  She had stopped searching for thorns some time ago. She had relinquished the word. It got in the way; it did not mean what it said. She listened now for something that did not belong to Raine. Something that did not breathe Raine, whose heart was not steeped, like these ancient stones, in the history of Raine. Occasionally, deep within her solitude, her whole body so intent
on Raine that it was scarcely visible except as stone, she sensed the flickering images within the Dreamer’s heart, and knew that she had touched even the dead in her search.

  When she heard Vevay’s summons, she had to remember that she had eyes. She opened them and found she had bones again, and hair, and skin beneath a cloak that had been drenched by a passing squall some time ago. The mage’s summons was wordless; it was as though she had opened a window into Tessera’s thoughts and peered inside for a moment, looking for her. Tessera stood up, a small living thing now, not part of the immense, stolid pile that grew out of the cliff above her. Some part of her still searched, wandered down chimney stones, drifted through closed doors like air, feeling for something unfamiliar, something amiss. The rest of her, shivering in the damp air, trudged back up the steps to the palace.

  She found Vevay in her tower, gazing into a silver bowl of water. Tessera went to her side. Rank after rank of warriors, silent and grim in the rain, marched across the surface of the water. Their tunics bore the linked double circlets of the Second Crown. She couldn’t see their faces clearly in the bowl, and what she did see was apt to disappear too soon, leaving headless soldiers moving into the silver.

  She raised her eyes after a time to the casement above the bowl. Vevay’s spell, permeating the water, translated itself easily to the glass; the window was broader, and she could see more.

  “You have called for an assembly before supper today,” Vevay told her, still intent on the images in the bowl. “You will speak to your nobles, tell them that you will permit them to leave as soon as the threat from the Second Crown has been eliminated. You will tell them where Ermin of Seale is now: marching through the Sevine Valley, following the river toward the plain. And you will tell them that the army of the First Crown will come out of the hills west of the valley to stop him before he reaches Dreamer’s Plain.”

  Tessera nodded absently. The mage found Ermin a threat. To Tessera he was insignificant, a problem to occupy the mind when the enormity of the question of thorns became overwhelming. Vevay, not hearing an answer, glanced at her. What, a week earlier, might have caused the mage’s voice to tighten with frustration, only elicited a curious question.

  “What are you looking at?”

  “The army,” Tessera said. “You can see more faces in the glass.”

  “Really?” Vevay watched the movement across the casement. “So you can,” she murmured. “Though I find the light distracting. Who taught you to do that?”

  “You did.”

  “I did?”

  “I took your spell from the water.”

  “Oh.” She looked back into the bowl, as though expecting to find the spell floating like a paper boat on the water. “What was I saying?”

  “My army will stop the army of the Second Crown before it reaches the plain,” Tessera said perfunctorily.

  “Good. Gavin and Ermin of Seale’s uncle and half a dozen nobles rode across the plain to try to negotiate peace with Ermin before he does something irrevocably stupid. You sent them early this morning; I couldn’t find you to tell you that.”

  “Do I tell the assembly that?”

  “Yes. It might calm a few nerves. Where have you been all morning?”

  “Searching for thorns.”

  Vevay touched her eyes delicately, as though she felt a sudden twinge. “They do make Ermin moot,” she breathed.

  “Yes.”

  “But at least Ermin is a threat everyone can understand. If you told your court to beware of thorns, they would be more likely to beware of you.” She brooded at the water, her brows puckered deeply. “You’d think the dead, if they are going to bother to wake after centuries to warn you about something, would be more explicit.”

  “She dreamed them,” Tessera guessed. “Dreams don’t speak in words. Maybe the thorns aren’t thorns.”

  “Maybe,” Vevay answered grimly, “but it’s the only word we’ve got. There’s Ermin of Seale among his generals.”

  Tessera watched a small group of riders cross the glass: generals, guards, standard-bearers. In the midst of them rode the impetuous leader, a big man with graying yellow hair, his face furrowed and dripping. Following him was a boy who looked scarcely older than Tessera. He carried a trumpet slung on a strap over his shoulder. His calm, secret face, under milky-gold hair, was lowered against the rain. He reminded Tessera of someone.

  “Who is that?” she asked curiously.

  “Which?”

  “The trumpeter. Look, he’s carrying something in his pouch.”

  The leather pouch beneath the boy’s trumpet shifted and bulged oddly. He spoke a word, still gazing ahead, and slid a finger into the pouch to stroke whatever was stirring.

  “Do you know who he is?” Tessera asked again.

  “I believe he is one of Ermin’s grandsons. His father is locked up in my tower, below us. I can’t believe Ermin would risk him on the battlefield. But then he is risking everything else he has, why not his grandchildren, too?”

  “He reminds me of someone…” She watched him, wondering what pet he kept in his pouch. He had two fingers burrowed into it now, his light eyes narrowed a little against the rain, watchful but not afraid of what he was riding toward. An unfamiliar feeling grew in Tessera as she stood there. Words ripened in her mind like strange fruit, crowded into her mouth. She wanted, more than anything else, to speak to that boy with the calm, gentle face and the pale eyelashes, ask him what he kept in his pouch that comforted him as he rode toward death. She wanted his eyes to see her; she wanted to hear his voice.

  “I remember.” Her own voice sounded strange to her ears, but Vevay did not seem to notice anything. “He reminds me of the young man I met in the wood.”

  “Bourne,” Vevay murmured dourly. “Yes. They would be cousins.”

  “Do you know his name?”

  She felt Vevay look at her then, sharply. But the mage only answered equably, “I can’t remember it. If Gavin and your nobles manage to negotiate peace, perhaps you can ask him yourself.”

  Tessera watched the boy cross the window. Peace seemed a meaningless concept, what with the invisible monster roused and turning its eyes toward Raine while Ermin rode obliviously across its battlefield, insisting on his little war. The boy with the pet in his pouch might die like the hare in the wood for his uncle’s folly, or he might survive one battle only to face the enormity of the powers that had wakened the warrior-queen of Raine. He rode beyond the window frame toward his fate. Tessera turned restively, thinking, I will never know his name or hear his voice if he dies.

  “Where are you going?” Vevay asked as she opened the door.

  “To search.”

  Vevay studied her bowl; the scene in the window shifted. She was watching for Gavin, Tessera guessed. “Don’t forget the assembly,” the mage murmured. “It may seem unimportant compared to the greater threat, but we can only deal with what we can see. We don’t want an insurrection within the palace as well. Your nobles are very powerful, and if you abdicate your own power over them, they will remove your crown one way or another. How you deal with Ermin now will show them how you would deal with them if they attack. It is vital for you to make these things clear.”

  “Yes, Vevay,” Tessera said absently. The mage sighed.

  “Call me if you need me.”

  Tessera did not go far, only to the tower roof, where she stood among the snapping pennants and explored the complex, busy world beneath her feet. Her thoughts flowed downward into the stones; she rooted herself there, impervious as a pennant-pole to the weather. Like the thorns in the giant’s house, she crept everywhere, looking for illumination. In the wood, the mages searched their accumulated knowledge of both magic and Raine. The queen roamed as far as she could within her own boundaries, within the world she knew.

  It seemed a small thing when she finally found it. As small as a thorn. It had hidden itself in the center of the massive cliff: a bramble growing in the heart of solid stone. A mind like a
dark night-flower bloomed where there was no one to see it. A poisoned flower in a garden full of flowers. A single deadly word in the midst of an uncountable number of harmless words. She did not know what shape it took inside her palace; she only knew the shape and feel of the dreamlike image in her heart: a dark star in the center of her world, its power contained now, quiet and secret. It was an unspoken word, an unopened flower, a dream of itself. But it had wakened the dead, and the living queen sensed if she did not stop it now, it would explode and blaze in an incandescent fire across the whole of Raine.

  She stirred on the rooftop, felt the wind again, her tangled hair. She still sensed the strange power, a seething smudge of dark in her heart. Somewhere in the palace it was, a small unnoticed thing in that immense place, eluding even the mages’ acute attention. Tessera, who understood small, unnoticed, powerful things, climbed down the tower steps and went looking for it.

  She moved through most of her palace without attracting attention. Only partly visible, preoccupied, and wearing her blandest expression, she persuaded everyone that, if they saw her, she must be there on the most unimportant business and should be ignored. In Vevay’s tower room, the mage was busy talking to Gavin’s face in the bowl and did not notice the queen at all. There, Tessera felt the troubling power as little more than a slumbering ember. She left without disturbing Vevay, went down again, and down, making her way ever more deeply into stone. As she moved, she sensed the unfamiliar power quickening, burning now, taking its dark fires from the source.

  The queen found herself in the library.

  She had never been there. If she wanted a book, like everything else it was brought to her. She passed librarians and scholars and scribes, working among what seemed every book or scroll or tablet ever written since the beginning of the world. Language itself might have begun there, she thought; it grew everywhere in those stony burrows, crusting the walls like some kind of ancient life. The dark fire in her heart, the unspoken word, burned unwaveringly down there. She wandered erratically, looking into every book-lined hollow. Are you there? her heart asked. There? No one noticed the queen in their midst; she might have been just another word.