Alphabet of Thorn Read online

  Ace Books by Patricia A. McKillip

  THE FORGOTTEN BEASTS OF ELD

  THE SORCERESS AND THE CYGNET

  THE CYGNET AND THE FIREBIRD

  THE BOOK OF ATRIX WOLFE

  WINTER ROSE

  SONG FOR THE BASILISK

  RIDDLE-MASTER: THE COMPLETE TRILOGY

  THE TOWER AT STONY WOOD

  OMBRIA IN SHADOW

  IN THE FORESTS OF SERRE

  ALPHABET OF THORN

  An Ace Book

  Published by The Berkley Publishing Group

  A division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  This book is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2004 by Patricia A. McKillip.

  All rights reserved.

  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. ACE and the “A” design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First edition: February 2004

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  McKillip, Patricia A.

  Alphabet of thorn / Patricia A. McKillip.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-441-01130-6

  1. Teenage girls—Fiction. 2. Translators—Fiction.

  3. Orphans—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3563.C38A78 2004

  813'.54—dc22

  2003062912

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3

  CONTENTS

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  ONE

  On Dreamer’s Plain, the gathering of delegations from the Twelve Crowns of Raine for the coronation of the Queen of Raine looked like an invading army. So the young transcriptor thought, gazing out a window as she awaited a visiting scholar. She had never been so high in the palace library, and rarely so warm. Usually at this time of the morning she was buried in the stones below, blowing on her fingers to warm them so they could write. Outside, wind gusted across the vast plain, pulling banners taut, shaking the pavilions thrown up for the various delegations’ entourages of troops and servants. A spring squall had blown in from the sea and crossed the plain. The drying pavilions, huffing like bellows in the wind, were brilliant with color. The transcriptor, who had only seen invading armies in the epics she translated, narrowed her eyes at this gathering and imagined possibilities. She was counting the horses penned near each pavilion, pelts lustrous even at a distance after the rain, and as clear, silhouetted against one another’s whites and grays and chestnuts, as figures pricked on a tapestry, when the scholar finally arrived.

  A beary man, he shed a fur cloak that smelled of damp and an unusual scent of tobacco. He carried a manuscript wrapped in leather that he laid upon the librarian’s desk as gently as a newborn. As he unswaddled the manuscript, the transcriptor standing silently at the window caught his eye. His hands stilled. He stared at her. Then his head, big, dark, and very hairy, jerked toward the librarian who had shown him in.

  “Who is this?”

  “We called her Nepenthe,” the librarian said in his austere voice. His name was Daimon; Nepenthe had known him all her life, for he had found her and named her. Of the child she had been before she became Nepenthe, neither of them knew a thing. In sixteen years since then, she had changed beyond recognition, and he had not changed by a moment, being the same dispassionate, thin-haired wraith who had picked her up with his bony hands and tucked her into a book bag to add to the acquisitions of the royal library. “She is one of our most skilled and creative translators. She has a gift for unusual alphabets. Such as you say you have, Master Croysus?”

  “I’ve never seen anything like it in my life,” Master Croysus said. He continued unwrapping the manuscript, still tossing glances at Nepenthe. She stood quietly, her long fingers tucked into her broad black sleeves, trying to look skilled and creative, while wondering what the scholar found wrong with her face. “It looks like an alphabet of fish. Where did you come from?”

  “Don’t let her youth deceive you,” Daimon murmured. The scholar shook his head absently, squinting at Nepenthe until she opened her mouth and answered.

  “Nowhere, Master Croysus. I was abandoned on the cliff edge outside the palace and found by librarians. The last foundling they took in was named Merle. N was the next available letter.”

  Master Croysus made an incredulous trumpet sound through his nostrils. “I’ve seen that face,” he said abruptly, “on a parchment older than Raine. I don’t remember what it was, except that the ancient kingdom it came from lay far beyond the Twelve Crowns and it no longer exists except on paper.”

  The librarian looked curiously at Nepenthe; she wished she could take off her head and look at herself.

  “A clan of wanderers,” he suggested, “remnants of the forgotten kingdom. Perhaps they were passing through Raine when Nepenthe was born.”

  “There was no one—?”

  “No one,” Daimon said simply, “came looking for her.” He paused, added to clarify and end the subject, “It was assumed that whoever left her in that precarious spot—her mother, most likely—flung herself for her own reasons into the sea. The child was left in hope, we also assumed, of a less difficult life, since she was left alive and wailing with great energy when we found her.”

  The scholar grunted, which seemed his last word on the subject. He laid the manuscript bare and gestured to Nepenthe.

  She stepped to the desk. They all gazed at the strange, elongated ovals neatly imprinted on something that Nepenthe did not recognize.

  She brushed it with her fingertips. It was supple and tough at once. Some kind of pelt, it seemed, though it was white as birch and strangely unwrinkled.

  “What is this?” she asked puzzledly.

  The scholar regarded her with more than fantastic interest. “Good question. No one knows. I’m hoping that the contents may indicate the tools.” He was silent a moment, his bushy brows raised inquiringly at her, and then at the librarian. “I can stay only as long as the delegation from the Ninth Crown stays after the coronation. I’m traveling in the company of Lord Birnum, who will pay his respects and go home to civilization as soon as he can. It is a powerful gesture and a stirring custom for rulers to be crowned in the palace of the first King of Raine, but not even he, with all his ambitions, imagined the rulers of Twelve Crowns under his ancient roof at the same time.”

  “Are you with Lord Birnum in the palace?” Daimon asked delicately.

>   “No,” Master Croysus sighed. “In a leaky pavilion.”

  “We can offer a bed of sorts among the books.”

  The scholar sighed again, this time with relief. “I would be immensely grateful.”

  “I’ll see to that, while Nepenthe takes you down to show you where she will be working on your manuscript. Transcriptors dwell in the depths. As well, I must warn you, as do visiting scholars.”

  “I trust the depths don’t leak.”

  “No.”

  “Then I’ll sleep happily buried in stone.” He wrapped his manuscript again in leather and himself in fur, and followed Nepenthe.

  She led him down and down until mortared stone became solid stone, until they left even the green plain above them and the only light came from windows staring across the sea. Until then, he questioned her; she answered absently, wondering about the fish wrapped in his arms.

  “You don’t remember anything of your life before the librarians found you?”

  “How could I? I had no teeth; I didn’t know words for anything. I don’t even remember—” She stopped to light a taper, for the stairways had begun to plunge into hand-hewn burrowings. “I do remember one thing. But I don’t know what it is.”

  “What is it?”

  She shrugged. “Just a face, I think.”

  “Whose?” he demanded.

  “I don’t know. I’m an orphan, Master Croysus,” she reminded him patiently. “A foundling. The librarians have always taken us in; they train us to become scribes and translators. We get accustomed early to living and working in stone suspended between sky and sea.”

  “So you’re content here?”

  She flung him an uncertain glance, wondering what he meant. “I don’t think about it,” she answered. “I have nothing of my own, nothing that’s not on loan from the librarians. Not even my name. I don’t know what else I could choose.”

  “Do you like the work?”

  She smiled, smelling books now, leather bindings, musty parchments, flaking scrolls that lived with her underground. “Here,” she told him, “there is no time. No past, no future; no place I can’t go, no lost realm I can’t travel to, as long as I can decipher its fish.”

  She showed him where she worked. It was a doorless cell lined with books, a cell in a hive that was itself a cell in the huge hive that clung by walls and pillars and towers of stone to the immense, steep cliff rising straight out of the sea. The palace of the rulers of Raine had grown from a seedling through the centuries. Long ago, it had been little more than a fortress on the edge of the world, guarding its portion of thick wood and plain against other princelings. Through the centuries, the palace had become a small country itself, existing between sea and air, burrowed deep into the cliffs, piled above the earth so high that on a clear day, from the highest tower, the new Queen of Raine could see all but three of the Twelve Crowns she ruled. The first king had taken the first Crown: lands as far as he could see from his single tower. Before he died, he had added two linked Crowns to his own. Now there were twelve, and they flew on a tower higher than the king could ever imagine, even in his wildest dreams, as he guarded Raine in his sleep in the secret cave within the cliff below the palace.

  So many lands had produced so many words. During the centuries they found their way, in one collection or another, to the royal library. The library was a city carved into the cliffs beneath the palace. Parts of it were so old that scrolls and manuscripts got lost for entire reigns and were discovered again in the next. Languages transmuted constantly as they wandered in and out of the Twelve Crowns. Such mysteries required flexible minds. A librarian had found the baby sitting abandoned on the sheer edge of the world; the librarians kept her. That proved shrewd. Nepenthe had drooled on words, talked at them, and tried to eat them until she learned to take them into her eyes instead of her mouth. Surrounded by that rich hoard into which chance and death had brought her, she had not yet imagined any other kingdom.

  Within those stones she had grown her weedy way into a young woman, long-boned and strong, able to reach high shelves without a stool. Her hair, which was waist-long and crow-feather dark, she kept bundled at her neck with leather ties; during the course of the day she would inevitably pull them out to use as book marks. In that sunless place, her skin stayed brown as hazelnut. The eyes that gazed absently back at her in the mornings from her wash-basin were sometimes green and sometimes brown. What Master Croysus had seen in her face, she had no idea. She was curious about it, as she was about nearly everything, but that would have to wait.

  He examined her tiny space, a shallow cave so full of shelves that her table barely fit among the books, and she had to sit with her stool in the hallway. He looked at work she had done, the fat jars of ink colored variously and stamped with her initial, her carefully sharpened nibs. Finally, reassured, he unrolled his manuscript again. They discussed the oval, finny letters with an eye here, a gill there at random. He told her his ideas; she pulled down previous alphabets she had deciphered, one seemingly of twigs, another of bird-claw impressions in wax. By the time Daimon came to show him his bed-chamber, Master Croysus seemed content to leave his treasure with her.

  She dreamed that night about fish, bright flashing schools of them whose whirls and darts and turnings this way and that meant something vital in a language of fish. But what? She struggled with it, trying to persuade her unwieldy human body to move gracefully among the little butterfly flittings, until finally in her dream she swam with them, wheeling and shining, at ease in the water, speaking the invisible language of fish.

  Deep in the stones, playing among the fish, she was scarcely aware of the coronation above her head. Master Croysus vanished for most of a day or two, then came to her late in the morning, reeking of smoke, his hair standing on end, to see how far she had gotten into the mystery. He seemed pleased with her work, and less pleased with what was going on in the complex and incomprehensible palace above ground.

  “She’s very young,” he muttered of the new queen. “Younger than you, and with far less—far less—”

  Less what he could not find a word for. Nepenthe, oblivious of most of what went on beyond the library, assumed that the world would take care of itself, and got on with her fish.

  That night she woke with a start to the sound of her name.

  She answered instantly, pulling herself upright out of a stupor of dreams: “Yes.”

  Then she opened her eyes, puzzled. The world was so still that it might have vanished, swallowed by its own past or future. The name was already fading; she could only hear the backwashed eddies and echoes of it in her head. Outside her door, the stone corridors were silent; no one had called Nepenthe. Neither the drowsing embers in her brazier nor the single star hanging in the high narrow window shed any light upon the matter. Yet someone had dropped a word like a weight on a plumb line straight into her heart and she had recognized her name.

  She dropped back down, still listening, hearing only her slowing heartbeat. Nothing spoke again out of the dark. A visiting mage from the Floating School, she decided finally, celebrating the coronation too heartily, had flung a word carelessly into the night, heedless of where it landed. She closed her eyes, burrowed toward sleep, and reached the memory on the borders of dream, the one thing that she could claim as her own, that she had in her possession before the librarians found her.

  The memory was of a face, misty, ill-defined. It seemed to shape itself out of the sky, displacing the blue, flowing endlessly above green, racing far into the distance to meet it. She didn’t know the names for colors then, nor could she name the force that blew across the green so that it roared and glittered and seemed to stream wildly away from her. The face came close, as close to her as her own face, tried to meld itself with her bones, her eyes. Then she was falling slowly, the face growing farther and farther away from her. She felt the distance between them like something physical, a coldness that refused to end. A word came wailing out of her then, but what it meant
had vanished into the blue.

  And after that, everything was gone.

  She woke to another reverberating sound: the enormous gong in the refectory. Confused, remembering the strange word in the middle of the night, she moved too abruptly and fell out of bed. She untangled herself, muttering, pulled on a patched linen shift, and stumbled down the hall to the baths. There, in that steamy warmth, she closed her eyes again and let herself fall into a chorus of laughter and protest, flat and stiff as a tome into a tank, causing a wave at both ends that submerged more than one floating head.

  Someone spread a hand on her head and dunked her again as she surfaced. “Nepenthe!” she heard as she sputtered soap bubbles. “Must you fling yourself into the water like a whale falling out of the sky?”

  “It’s the only way I could wake up this morning,” she answered. Her eyes were finally open. She floated a little, trying to remember when she had begun to comprehend that her mother must have done just that: flung herself like a strange fish off the edge of the world into a sea so far below that until she was halfway there, she would not have heard the waves break against the cliff.

  But why? she wondered, as always when she had fallen asleep in the realm of memory.

  She felt water weltering around her. A head appeared, slick and white as a shell. It was Oriel, whom the librarians had acquired shortly after Nepenthe. She had been discovered by a scholar on the track of some obscure detail, surrounded by books in a forgotten chamber and bawling furiously. Fine-boned and comely, she could well have been the embarrassing afterthought of a highborn lady-in-waiting in the court above. Her pale hair, which she kept short with a nib sharpener, floated around her face like a peony’s petals. Her fingers, pale as well, and impossibly delicate, closed with unexpected strength on Nepenthe’s wrist.

  “You have to come with me.”

  “It’s amazing,” Nepenthe marveled, “how your hands can feel like they’re sweating even in bath water.”

  “They always sweat when I’m frightened.”

  Nepenthe peered at her, wondering if it was important. Everything agitated Oriel. “What’s the matter?” A coming storm, she guessed; the phase of the moon; a translation about to be reviewed by the head of librarians. But she was thrice wrong.