Alphabet of Thorn

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “Raine is on the verge of war anyway. Does it matter who starts it?”

  “Stop,” she said sharply, aware of the queen somewhere within the dust motes, but Laidley went off anyway, pursuing his thought.

  “Think about it. You’d have your mother beside you to help you rule. You’d see the world instead of dwelling down here like a cave-bat. You could travel to any known kingdom. You could be there at the birth of epic; the point where the stark language of an event becomes colored with imagination.”

  “Laidley—” she said between her teeth. “Why are you saying these things to me? You can’t really want them for me. I might ascend to an unimaginably brilliant life, but where would you be?”

  “Still here, from the sound of it. I can’t see Kane permitting the destruction of a library, and she does value translators.”

  Nepenthe’s eyes stung drily. “How can you think I would choose such a thing if I had a choice at all?”

  “Who would blame you?” Laidley asked simply. “History moves in great, messy shifts of power, in choices made as though by too many people building a house, where one misplaced stone in the foundation slips under the weight of another stone near the roof. Even if the thorns have lost their power and nothing happens to you, Ermin’s war may cause enough chaos in the Twelve Crowns to shift power from the First Crown to the Ninth. Or it may pull us all into many squabbling kingdoms, and ten years from now, when we prepare for yet another siege, you may well wish that you had made a different choice today.”

  “I don’t have a choice,” she said grimly. She took his hand then, and he turned a rich, winey color she had never seen before. “But I do know this one thing: you have known me and loved me day after day for years. That is more valuable to me than a mother who left me at the edge of the cliff for the librarians to find before I had a tooth in my head.”

  “Well,” he said gruffly, with a trace of his sweet smile, “that’s something for me to remember when you’re dressed in silk and surrounded by peacocks.”

  “Don’t—”

  “I don’t understand why you wouldn’t want this, if it’s remotely possible—”

  “Because she only exists in a different language!” she cried. “She’s nothing more to me now than thorns. On a page. In a book. Even if she becomes real to me, how could we even talk to each other? And it sounds so lonely. I’ll be surrounded by people from all kinds of worlds, and I won’t know any of them, and none of them will know me. They won’t know my history, since it doesn’t exist yet, and theirs is so old it barely exists except in poetry. It will be like living with dreams and ghosts. I’d rather take my chances with the only life I know, and—”

  “Who is that?” Laidley interrupted bemusedly.

  “Our history in the making, and Ermin of Seale at our door instead of—” She became aware of the queen beside her again, listening intently. “Oh. This is the Queen of Raine. She was warned of the thorns and came down here searching for them.”

  Laidley gawked. “You don’t look like the coins.”

  “I know,” said the queen.

  He flushed again. “I’m sorry. I don’t—I don’t know how I should talk to you—and I guess I’ve said a great deal too much already.”

  “It seems moot,” she answered evenly, “at this point. I may not be queen for long.”

  “Oh.” His hands slid up his arms then, gripped hard. “Oh,” he said again, the word wavering as though he had begun to lose his balance. “It’s true, then? We really are about to be attacked.”

  “So it seems.”

  “Well, should we—what should we—what,” he suggested, “about Vevay? Can she stop them?”

  “I thought you preferred a different outcome,” the queen reminded him.

  “That was speculation,” he said dazedly. “Scholarly babble. I really prefer a simple world in which I can see Nepenthe every day.”

  “I see.” Her young voice sounded a bit less remote. “I would not like to suspect sedition in my library.”

  “No. It was more resignation to the inevitable. Is it?” he inquired, his eyes widening nervously. “Inevitable?”

  “So it seems,” Nepenthe said tightly.

  “What about the mages at the school? Can’t they do something?”

  “I believe so,” said the queen.

  “And Vevay—She must be as old as Kane—she might think of something.”

  “We’ll ask her,” the queen answered, “since she has been here listening for some time.”

  Laidley closed his eyes, put a hand over them. Nepenthe rose finally from her mouse’s crouch on the floor, as a line or two that seemed not Vevay at all sketched themselves in the air. She closed her own eyes, stepping toward what her heart had recognized before it had finished shaping itself.

  “Bourne.”

  She felt his arms around her, melting her ice-locked thoughts, her hoar-frosted bones. “I went to Vevay,” she heard him say. “I was so afraid that the thorns might have us all trapped in their tale.”

  “I think they do. At least you’re here with me now. Stay with me,” she pleaded. “No matter what happens. Promise—”

  His hold tightened around her. “For as long as you want me,” he promised blindly into her hair. “I will stay.”

  “Well,” Vevay said, her voice so tart that it drew all their attention as she stood among the dusty remnants of forgotten kingdoms. Her long, silvery hair seemed to spark with anger and frustrated power in the gloom. “Never in my very long life—though not quite so long as you, Laidley, seem to think—have I had to deal with war against Raine from the depths of the royal library. And no, I have not got a single inkling of what to do next.”

  “I do,” said the Queen of Raine. “I know how to hide.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  The queen was in the wood, watching warriors without number pour out of a gash in the sky onto the plain like ink out of a cracked jar, staining the limpid water of the pool that reflected them, the green plain, the sky itself black. They kept coming. Hidden deep within the wood’s heart, in the shape of an old crumbling stump or a mossy bank, something half-enchanted, the queen was aware of a terror that did not seem to belong to her. It was distant, detached: a hare trembling under a log, a vole under a leaf. The wide, unblinking eye of the pool was her eye, gazing at the alien magic amassing in her realm. A fine, hidden root work of thought linked her with the familiar powers around her. It was as though she glimpsed others’ dreams as they slept: the mages and Vevay and even Bourne weaving illusions of airy nothing around the school, the palace, the folk on the plain, and the nobles and servants within the walls. Even as they watched, their stunned minds trying to comprehend the impossible, they were hidden within the minds of the mages: dreams that did not know they were dreams.

  The Emperor of Night appeared clearly in the pool. The crowned figure had ridden into the middle of the plain and waited there while his army flowed on currents of wind, it seemed, down to the grass around him. The tall, slender figure beside him drew Tessera’s attention. All the warriors wore cloths over their faces. But the rider wearing black from hair to heel stayed close as a shadow at the emperor’s side. Kane, Tessera guessed, and felt the hare’s thumping heart as the veiled face turned at the thought of her name. Tessera could not guess what any of them were seeing or thinking. She would not know until Axis finally spoke if the spell she and the mages had cast would hold beyond Kane’s first glance at it.

  She could see the spell clearly, the magic imposed over the real. Axis’s army, still coming, surrounded the little wood like floodwaters. But the spell over the wood made it seem, at first glance, only the lifeless remains of itself, as though Kane had led them all into some far future that not even she had foreseen. All the magic had seeped away and the trees had died. Only stumps and the silvery bones of broken trunks remained of it. In the middle of the dead wood, a crumbling section of wall stood, still guarding the place where the Floating School had once been. It might have t
aken itself elsewhere sometime in the past centuries; not a hint of it remained.

  The tiny pool, Tessera’s eye, could see it clearly, cocooned above the wood within an illusion of cloud and sky. Coaxed by Felan, it had found the center of its own complex labyrinth and hidden itself there, turning its inner empty spaces outward to surround and conceal it. She could not tell if Kane saw it. The dark, silky head of the sorcerer, eyeless as a beetle, turned this way and that, scenting, it seemed, rather than seeing.

  The palace of the rulers of Raine still rose from the cliff edge. Once it might have been an intricate, magnificent structure towering above the plain like a small mountain. Now yawning gates hung by their hinges and slowly splintered. Sagging walls revealed inner rooms choked with grasses and weeds and ceiling stones that had fallen through many floors above. Broken towers had shrugged small hillocks of stone into courtyards and roofless outbuildings. Stairs climbed above cracked walls and ended in space. The palace looked as though it had been decaying for more centuries than Raine had existed; it was being swallowed back into the plain. Along one broad wall gilded with late afternoon sun, a flowering vine grew to what seemed an impossible height, opening great golden trumpet-shaped blossoms to the briny air like a memory within a bitter past of something that had once been good.

  The warriors had finally finished coming out of the sky. They covered the entire plain, from the cliff edge to the distant hills beyond which Ermin of Seale so obliviously marched. The pure black that had loosed them was now a gaping, empty seam across the blue. On the plain nothing moved but a horse’s flicking tail, a windblown scarf. No one spoke.

  Finally the crowned warrior turned his eyes away from the ruined palace to his companion. Tessera could not tell if he spoke. Kane did not look at him. All her attention seemed to be snagged on something in the heart of the ancient stones. She dismounted suddenly. Tessera would have blinked if she could. The pool stayed still, watching. A thought surfaced, the first coherent word in the queen’s head for some time.

  Thorns.

  They were snaking up a shadowy corner between two walls, leafing as they grew, flowering. Tessera watched the spell blooming out of illusion, too mesmerized to be afraid yet. Were they the thorns from the book in the library? she wondered. That magic, Kane’s own spell, no one could hide from her. Or were they the thorns that had taken root in Kane’s daughter’s heart?

  As though hearing the wonder from the wood, the Masked Sorceress turned her invisible face toward the trees.

  Briefly, Tessera remembered the body that she was hiding. It wanted, in that moment, to spring in panic out of hiding and to run wildly in any direction. But her magic covered it with a crust of moldering wood, moss, bracken. Her hair had rooted itself; her mind seemed to drift like a fish near the bottom of the water. The placid pool, reflecting the two most dangerous faces in the world, remained unruffled when the Emperor of Night pulled apart the black swaths of silk that masked him.

  Tessera gazed into the Lion’s face.

  It seemed hammered out of eons of desert and sun: broad, golden, implacable, and merciless as the harsh sands of Eben. His eyes were wide, tawny gold. Thwarted by the baffling landscape, they remained unreadable. He was looking at his battle-consort, whose invisible face still contemplated the wood. She turned her head, feeling those eyes, and said something to him in a language that Tessera guessed was spoken that day nowhere else in the world.

  Then she vanished.

  She reappeared so quickly to stand over the pool that she might have seen herself disappear in it. Tessera saw her veiled head again, this time terrifyingly close, peering into the water. The wide, motionless eye of the pool stared unblinkingly back at her.

  Again she spoke, very softly. This time Tessera heard, but the word meant nothing to her. The queen, so deeply hidden within the wood, could not even tremble. Whatever word Kane had said did not reveal Tessera; if the sorceress knew the queen was there, she paid no attention. Tessera waited. So did Kane. She sat down on a stump beside the pool. Her hands moved to her veils; for a moment it seemed she would push them aside within the privacy of the trees. But habit stopped her. Tessera could not guess which wood she saw: the dead, gray shards of trees, or the living wood with the queen dispersed through it, eyelashes like blades of grass, fingers like mushrooms, just beneath the surface. She wondered what the sorceress was waiting for.

  After what seemed an endless moment, during which even the emperor and his army did nothing, Tessera saw the flowering thorns along the wall across the plain vanish.

  They reappeared, too quickly for anyone to have noticed their passage across the plain. And as quickly, they revealed the secret word within the canes: Nepenthe.

  She had a few brambles caught in her hair; her fingernails finished shaping themselves out of thorns. She looked half-entranced, half-appalled at the sight of the veiled, featureless head; a sound like a mouse’s squeal came out of her. The sorceress lifted her hands quickly, tugged at the silk. Nothing came away easily; she had protected herself too well for too many years. But little by little like a butterfly out of its cocoon, veils loosening and parting, her face appeared.

  Nepenthe stared. So did the pool. They looked much alike, the young transcriptor and her three-thousand-year-old mother, with their wide-set eyes and graceful, sculpted bones, their thick, dark hair. Kane’s eyes were smoky, opaque; Nepenthe’s reflected green within the wood. Her mother’s rippling hair was severely braided, while Nepenthe’s ran wildly to her waist, with a thorny twig caught here and there, still bound by the frayed spell.

  The sorceress said something incomprehensible to her daughter. Nepenthe only looked bewildered, panicked. In that moment Kane seemed to see the vast distance she had put between them when she fell off the cliff into the mists of time. She reached out, gently untangled a stray twig of bramble from her daughter’s hair, and held it up. In her fingers it became malleable, twisting to form familiar letters of thorn.

  “‘I,’” Nepenthe translated, her voice wavering badly. “‘Came. For. You.’” She backed a step, shaking her head frantically, hair whipping across her eyes. “No. No. You came to conquer. You came to destroy. You and my father think you can take whatever worlds you want. How could you possibly think I would welcome you here? That I would be grateful to you for coming back after all these years to take away the world I know?”

  Kane, interpreting without benefit of language, seemed to hear with her heart her daughter’s expressions, the torment and passion in her voice. Her own face suddenly anguished, she held up the little twisting shoot of thorns again.

  “‘We. Will. Give. You. Every—’” Nepenthe’s voice broke on the word; she backed again, her eyes wide, like a cornered animal’s. “Nothing here belongs to you! You have nothing here to give! Go away! Leave us alone! You want to give me a kingdom, but you don’t know me. You are ancient. Ghosts. Nothing that belongs here. I don’t know you—” The thorns spoke again, so quickly they caught at the sorceress’s fingers, drawing blood. “‘I. Am. Your. Mother. You. Are—’ You left me! I learned to live without you. I learned to love without you. You came back too late. Please.” She clasped her hands, still stumbling backward. “Please. Just go. It’s Axis you love. Stay with him. Forget me and go.”

  Kane spoke. Nepenthe shook her head fiercely at the word. “No. That’s not my name. Nepenthe is my name.”

  “Nepenthe,” the sorceress said. Her own voice trembled. Nepenthe stopped moving and stared at her wordlessly, her hands twisting together. Again the thorns spoke; Nepenthe translated.

  “‘Do. Not. Leave. Me.’

  “You have Axis,” Nepenthe whispered. “You have all of time and everything you want—” She paused as the thorns shaped their letters again.

  “‘Kane. Speaks,’” they said. “‘I. Have. No. Name. I. Cannot. Speak.’”

  Nepenthe was silent again. The sorceress’s face turned briefly away from her as at another summons from the plain. Her eyes glittered oddly as though
, Tessera saw, she were about to cry. She said something in her ancient language; the thorns in her hand remained silent.

  Nepenthe spoke, her voice nearly soundless in the dead wood. “What is your real name?”

  The emperor called again; the sorceress’s face twisted as she glanced between wood and plain with desperate indecision.

  Then she dropped the thorns without a word, wound the veils again around her head, and vanished.

  Nepenthe grew thorns where she stood, out of Kane’s spell or out of her own frightened heart, great tangled brambles heavy with leaf and flower, a living anomaly in the dead wood, until no one noticing them with an unmagical eye would see the young woman hiding within the thorns.

  Tessera waited for the pulse of numberless hooves pounding across the plain as the sorceress revealed the living realm to the emperor.

  She waited. A breeze rippled across the pool. Brambles stirred, shaped new letters in the air. The great army began to move finally, a vast, unwieldy maelstrom across the entire plain. The eye of the pool grew dark with it, stayed dark for a very long time. Tessera could no longer see the sky, only the endless march of warriors across her realm. She could not tell what direction they were going until the sky began to show a ragged edge of blue. Then she saw the river running backward, the army of the night flowing back into the boundless realm of time above the plain.

  She did not move for a long time after they vanished. No one did. The old ruins still slumped into themselves on the cliff; the Floating School refused to come down. The green brambles remained brambles, where it was safe. The wood stayed dead. Only the sun moved, dipping slowly behind one of the broken towers above the sea.

  Then a bird cried on the plain. So it sounded at first to Tessera, until its strange cry grew more insistent, stronger, and the voice turned suddenly human as the sound it made took shape.

  “Nepenthe,” it pleaded, the name borne on the sudden wings of wind across the plain. “Nepenthe! Nepenthe!”