Alphabet of Thorn

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  In Gilyriad, Kane hid her condition well. She played the shy and monstrously ugly sorcerer at every moment, so that the wind breathed never a hint to Axis’s army that its Masked Sorcerer, who led them over the battlements of time itself, was a young woman and pregnant with their emperor’s child. When the time grew close and she wanted help, Kane left the palace. A dark-haired, barefoot woman dressed in patched linens sought aid from the ancient wood-witches. Her accent was peculiar, but the witches were nearly deaf, and anyway didn’t need to be told much. They took her into a shadowy hovel, laid her beside a fire scented with herbs and lavender. There her child was born, amid the delighted laughter of snag-toothed witches. The child of a noblewoman of Eben and the Emperor of the World and Time.

  Their daughter.

  Before the birth, as Kane wandered through the royal gardens, she gave a great deal of thought to the immediate future. The child must remain a secret. There was no room either in Axis’s public or private life, or on any battlefield for a child. It could not even be allowed to cry within the royal palace in Gilyriad. Kane could not nurse it there. No one could know about it, for she could trust no one not to gossip. That Kane was not a man but a woman, and had been Axis’s lover for years, and now carried his child, was a tale that would lose no time crossing the trade routes out of Gilyriad and finding its way to the emperor’s lands around the Baltrean. And from there to the queen’s ear in Eben. What she would do, Kane had no idea. The queen assumed that Axis had his lovers. But she had never been faced with the fact that he actually loved anyone. The discovery of such passion and devotion that had taken root long before her marriage and had flourished under her own nose for years after it might inspire such bitterness in the queen as would tear apart Eben, the land Axis loved most. Eben was the foundation stone of his empire. He had already battled to meld Great Eben and Lower Eben into one inseparable state. If the queen inspired her lovers with ambitions and promises to aid them, the foundation stone would crumble. And the emperor would be forced to turn his attention from all the worlds he had not conquered to battle to keep the one he had together.

  In the gardens, before the child was born, Kane realized clearly what scant months she and the child would have together before she must leave it and take her customary place at Axis’s side. Sitting in the soft green shade, hawks crying in the pellucid blue above her head, she let her thoughts take her here, there, roaming all the kingdoms she had found for Axis, trying to think what would be best for the three of them. She examined every option, including taking the child and disappearing out of Axis’s life. But she could not leave him. Nor could she unmask herself and live openly with Axis as his battle-sorcerer and consort, and the mother of his child. The emperor’s wife would never allow such an interloper to come between Axis and her own heirs to his magnificent empire. It would shatter the peace between them and break their tacit contract: that the queen would be first at his side in the eyes of the world. For that, she had yielded him his heart, never suspecting that he had given it away long before he even knew he had it.

  What to do, what to do…

  The glimmerings of an idea came to her, not whole and clear, but piece by piece as the slow, tranquil days passed. If she could not raise the child, then someone must…in some secret place where the Queen of Eben could never find it, where no one would have the slightest inkling of the circumstances of its birth… But under such circumstances that it would find no valuable place in the world while it was raised and educated. It must feel the lack of its proper heritage until Kane returned for it… It must be well-educated, exposed even to the magical arts, for it would be the child of a sorceress and an emperor, and in such a mingling of enormous powers, who knew what abilities it might inherit… Above all, it must be safe…

  Alone with her unborn child, these anxious thoughts filling her mind, she faced the uncertainty of their future. She began to write then, both to herself and to the child. Missing Axis, she wrote of him to soothe her longing, and to explain both herself and him to their child. She wrote in the language of their childhood so that no one chancing upon it would be able to read it and expose her. She set her own magic into the letters, so that they would come alive only for her child. Only her child, sensing Kane in every letter, would respond, for the magic would be in its own blood as well. Anyone else would see only a puzzling alphabet and feel no more than curiosity. Her child’s heart would recognize the language of Kane.

  She carried the little book with her into the woods when her time came, for that language was all she had of Axis to comfort her.

  The court at Gilyriad was accustomed to the sorcerer’s unpredictable wanderings; no one there questioned his absence. Axis was too far away to know how far she went when she left his world. She took only their daughter, the book, and a few practical gifts from the witches. She wandered through time, staying here for a week, there for a month, her face unmasked, her hair unbound, a passing stranger in every land. She worked small magics, did some healing, performed a few tricks to earn money for food and a bed. At no time did she attract more than a temporary interest in her powers. She had left the Masked Sorcerer in another world. No poets would have noticed the gypsy walking in their midst, the curly-haired child watching the world over her shoulder with great eyes that were sometimes one color, sometimes another, depending on the light. Kane herself did her best to forget her own name. Remembering who she was in her own world meant remembering that she must leave her child.

  In her alphabet she could not find a thorn sharp enough to say that. Language would have to turn to thorn in her throat, come out in bloody words for her to say that. So she wandered, trying not to think, until at last she remembered Raine.

  There on a cliff, she found the immense palace of the rulers of Raine. What had encompassed five Crowns the last time she looked had now become Twelve Crowns, ruled by a shrewd and vigorous king. With her secret ways, she explored the mages’ school in the wood, the palace, and the great royal library within the cliff. There, she learned, the librarians took in orphans and raised them as scribes. They grew up among all the wealth of the accumulated knowledge of the world. They were well treated, valued for their skills, and encouraged to stay there; if they left the library they must make their own way in the world, for no one else claimed them.

  Kane felt the thorns begin to grow in her throat, for it was there, on that plain so high above the sea that she could not hear the waves, that she must do the unthinkable thing. The one tattered, threadbare comfort she took in the deed she contemplated was the powerful and magical kingdom that she had found. This one, she would ask Axis to take for her and for their daughter. In this place, Kane could go unmasked at last, and their daughter would be openly acknowledged; she could freely love both Axis and their child for the rest of her life.

  Only that thought gave her the courage to do what she must. She waited until she saw a kindly-looking librarian, dressed in their somber garb and with his packs full of books, riding along the cliff road on his way to the palace. Then she set the child on the high grass at the cliff edge and stood up. The sudden, inexplicable emptiness between them caused them both to cry out: she said her daughter’s name, and her daughter wailed the only word she knew. Kane’s tears blurred sky and grass and the bright, dancing winds into painful swirls of color. When she threw herself over the cliff under the startled gaze of the librarian, it was because if she had not put such abrupt distance between them, she would have snatched up her child and wandered the worlds with her, nameless and impoverished except in memory, rather than part with her again.

  She lingered in Raine just long enough to be sure that her daughter had indeed found a home among the royal librarians. Then she returned, empty-handed, to Gilyriad, where Axis, sick with dread at her absence, had shut himself in the palace to wait for her.

  He stepped into the terrible emptiness she had felt since she had left their daughter on the edge of the plain above the sea. He filled her arms, but not the aching h
ollow in her heart. She could not cry; she could not speak. She could only cling to him and tremble while he kissed her and murmured incoherent questions. Finally, he drew back a little to see her face.

  “Where is our child?”

  She wept then, enough to fill the Baltrean Sea and back the Serpent up until it flooded the fields of Eben with saltwater. She told him in their secret language, each thorn tearing her throat as she spoke it.

  “There was nothing else I could do,” she said again and again. “I did not know what else to do.”

  He held her, not understanding anything at first, and then finally beginning to see the impossibilities he had not noticed before: the deformed sorcerer nursing a child, or Axis’s lover fighting openly beside him on the battlefield, becoming the subject of romance and epic, while his wife smoldered in Eben; the child Kane would not dare leave behind her dragged from battle to battle, dodging arrows as she learned to walk.

  “I did not know what else to do.”

  Finally, when they had both wept all the tears in Gilyriad, their grief blunted with weariness and the comfort of their love, she told him about her plans for Raine.

  “I want that land,” she said, “for all of us. When the time comes, you will take it. But you will not conquer and vanish. This kingdom that values its scholars and mages you will make part of your empire. Do this for me.”

  “I will,” he answered simply, for he trusted her vision, even if he did not always understand it. “How will we know when the time is right?”

  “I have written something for her to read when she is older. I will see that it gets to her. It is her history, her background, her birthright. And our private history, yours and mine. When she understands it, she will tell us. When that time comes, she herself will open the Gates of Time and summon the Emperor of Night. When you take the Twelve Crowns, you will crown her Queen of Raine and she will rule in your name.”

  The Lion of Eben bent his head to Kane’s wishes and raised her hand to his lips.

  “And when will the time come?”

  “The time is now,” I told him.

  For so it will be now in the future when you read this, my daughter, our daughter, child of Eben and the greatest empire the world will ever know. You are born of the timeless love between the Lion of Eben and the Masked Sorceress, and you are heir to all the open Gates of Time.

  Open the Gates.

  Summon us.

  Remember your name.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Nepenthe remembered.

  Her name sounded in her head with all the force of the refectory gong, implacable and riveting, reverberating through her. It was the name she had heard in her dreams, the name she must have heard on the cliff’s edge before her mother disappeared, and many times before that, in many different places.

  “Of course,” she breathed, slumping on weakened knees to the stone floor, dragging the open book with her onto her lap. It had always been there, her name, haunting the borderlands of memory, and as familiar, now that she heard it clearly, as morning. “Of course.”

  Then she froze like a mouse caught in a sudden spill of light in the larder. She did not dare blink. Something enormous had her trapped in its vision, its golden, watching eyes.

  Thorns in her head twisted into poetry. The Lion sees through time, they reminded her. Into a different day. Beware if that day is yours…

  It can’t be true, she thought numbly. It can’t be. “Bourne,” she called, unable even to tremble. Her voice was no more than a trickle of sound. She felt as exposed as if someone had lifted the palace like a rock to see what lay beneath. “Bourne,” she pleaded again in a cricket’s chirr, a bat’s squeal, unable to wrest any more sound than that out of her petrified self. Caught in a waking nightmare and with no help anywhere, she could not even scream. Bourne must have either been found by Vevay, or run away without Nepenthe. As though that would keep her safe. Or him. Or Laidley, or Master Croysus, or the Queen of Raine herself and her Twelve Crowns, all about to be overrun by an army pouring out of slashed veils of sky whose warriors were numberless as the fish in the sea.

  “Bourne,” she whispered. “Help me. Laidley. Where are you? I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do.”

  She became aware then of someone with her in the room, who was sitting on the stack of tablets Nepenthe used for a desk, and staring upward with equal intensity, as though she, too, were waiting for the roof to fall. Nepenthe jumped wildly, her voice freeing itself finally in a scream. The pale-haired stranger slid off the tablets and came to crouch next to Nepenthe, who was trying in vain to place her among the library scribes. She seemed oddly windblown; the pearl pins in her tangled hair had slid askew. By the look of her elegant dress, she must be some highborn young woman who had been amusing herself pretending to be a scholar, and who had gotten herself lost among the antiquities.

  “Who are you?” Nepenthe demanded bewilderedly.

  The girl gazed at her out of blue-washed eyes that seemed too wary and secretive to belong to a noble’s spoiled daughter. She said, “I am the Queen of Raine.”

  Nepenthe swallowed a lump like a knot of words. The queen, she realized, had been sitting beside Nepenthe’s translation of the thorns. If she had found her way this far into the ancient depths of the palace, they must be why.

  “Did you—” she managed finally. “Did you read—”

  “Yes. All of it. You remembered your name.”

  “I did.” Her voice wobbled badly. “And there is nothing I can do about it. No way I can get us back to the time before I remembered it.” She drew breath abruptly, looking askance at the queen. “You were watching me. You were invisible. Like a mage.” The queen nodded. Her small, pale face didn’t much resemble the face on her coins; it seemed blurred yet, somewhere between child and woman. “Are you a mage?” Nepenthe asked incredulously.

  “You aren’t what I expected either,” the queen answered, responding more to Nepenthe’s thoughts, she realized, than to her question. “I received warning of the thorns threatening the Twelve Crowns from the Dreamer.” Nepenthe, her lips pinched tightly, gave a muffled squeak of despair. If the Dreamer saw the danger in them, then there could not be a single shard of hope that the tale they told might be only a tale, and the Emperor of Night only the hoary fragment to which poetry clung. “I went searching for the thorns and found them here. I had no idea who, in my own house, held such malice toward my entire realm. So I hid myself while I waited for the terrible sorcerer. It was you.”

  “I’m an orphaned transcriptor,” Nepenthe whispered. “I’ve been in the library all of my life. There’s not a breath of magic in me except for changing fish and thorns into words.”

  “Not,” the queen reminded her, “an orphan. Not now.”

  Nepenthe closed her eyes, trying to hide again. “I’m sorry,” she said through icy fingers. “I’m so sorry. I don’t know—I don’t know if there is any way to stop them—Axis and Kane—”

  “Is that what you would choose? You could see your mother again and know your father. You could be rich and loved and protected. You could go anywhere in time, know anything you want. You could be Queen of Raine.”

  Nepenthe opened her eyes, stared at the young queen wordlessly. She was trembling now, chilled to her marrow as though all the boisterous winds of plain and sea had seeped through stone into that small chamber. She said finally, haltingly, “I never knew my father. My mother died when I was barely old enough to crawl. The librarians are the only family I have ever had. This library is my home, and the books in it the only places I’ve ever wanted to go. I’ve never dreamed of having anything else. Except maybe Bourne. And now a three-thousand-year-old marauding emperor and a sorceress who can travel through time say I am their daughter and they want to put your crown on my head. They’re nothing to me! I’d rather keep my familiar world—books and ink pots and languages and Laidley and Bourne—That’s what I would choose. If I had a choice. But I don’t think we do.”

/>   The queen glanced up at the ceiling again, which so far remained unmoved. “I’ve been here all afternoon waiting for you. I’ve had some time to think.”

  “There’s nothing anyone can do against Kane.” Her throat ached with unshed tears. “You’ve read her book. You can see that.”

  A step at the door made her jump again. It evidently startled the queen, who promptly vanished. Laidley, his expression curdled, his mouth taut, came to Nepenthe’s side to stare bleakly down at her.

  “Laidley,” she said without hope. “Did you find—”

  “Nothing. I think we’re in trouble.”

  “We are in trouble. The ending of the book of thorns summoned Axis and Kane to Raine.”

  “No,” Laidley breathed, his face turning the color of boiled almonds.

  “Yes.”

  “What does it say? Tell me exactly.”

  She read it to him, still crouched in the middle of the floor; he sagged down next to her, listening mutely.

  He said softly, when she finished the brief passage, “She loved you very much.”

  “She left me. This is my world.”

  “She gets what she wants. She wants you back.”

  “Laidley,” she wailed.

  “Don’t you want to be Queen of Raine?”

  “Don’t even think that!” she said fiercely, and saw the sudden, dreamy look in his eyes. “Stop seeing me like that! I’m not a desert princess. I am a transcriptor in the royal library of the rulers of Raine.”