Alphabet of Thorn Read online

  “I have to get a book from the Floating School. I don’t want to go alone; that place terrifies me. Come with me.”

  Nepenthe ran soap through her hair, tempted by the prospect: a ride across the plain through the brilliant pavilions, into the mysterious wood in which anything was said to happen. Then she wondered: what book?

  “Why can’t they bring it here?”

  “Everyone is here,” Oriel said vaguely, “and the students are involved in some magic or another. A trader brought a book to the mages that they can’t read. The trader told them he thought it might be magic since no one he had ever met could read it. A mage told the librarians last night, and now they can’t wait to see it and I must go and fetch it because everyone else is working or celebrating—”

  “I am, too,” Nepenthe remembered. “Working, for a visiting scholar.”

  Oriel gazed at her despairingly. “Is it important?”

  “Well, he thinks it is.”

  “What is it?”

  “It seems to be turning into a supply list.”

  “A supply list!”

  “For a caravan of traders about to cross—”

  “Not an epic,” Oriel interrupted pointedly. “You can finish that with your eyes closed.”

  “It’s thousands of years old! And written upon the hide of an animal unknown anywhere in the Twelve Crowns.”

  “Maybe it was a fish,” Oriel suggested grumpily.

  “Maybe it was,” Nepenthe said, intrigued. “Or maybe some kind of a seal—”

  “Nepenthe! Please come with me. Your scholar can wait half a day. He’s probably sleeping off yesterday’s celebration anyway. He’ll never know you’re gone. Please.” She added cunningly as Nepenthe hesitated, “I’ll let you see the book before I give it to the librarians.”

  Nepenthe submerged herself to get the soap out of her hair. She shook her head, sending her dark hair swirling around her while she thought. Books sent to the librarians from the Floating School were extremely rare; the mages had their own ways of recognizing words. And Oriel was right about Master Croysus: he might not appear until late afternoon if he found his way down at all from the heady business of celebration.

  She straightened abruptly, sent her long hair whirling back with a toss of her head, nearly smacking someone behind her. “All right.” She stopped, snorting water as Oriel splashed extravagantly with relief. “Meet me,” she added stuffily, “at the library stables after breakfast.”

  In her tiny, shadowy chamber, she dressed quickly and simply for the ride in a long woolen tunic and boots. It was still early spring, and bound to be brisk on the plain. Then she went to breakfast. The refectory was so high and broad that swallows sometimes nested along the walls. There she could step beyond the arches into light; she could pace above the sea. Dawn mists were shredding above the water, tatters and plumes of purple and gray. The hilly island that was the Third Crown lay clearly visible in the distance, its white cliffs gleaming like bone in the morning sun. She filled a bowl from the huge cauldron full of inevitable boiled oats, and added nuts and dried fruit to it. She took it with her through the arched outer doors to the balcony beyond. It was made of marble from one of the southern Crowns; its fat, pillared walls and railings were high and very thick. There, if she listened hard on a fine, still day, sometimes she thought she could hear the breaking waves.

  Not that morning: she only heard the voice of Master Croysus, oddly energetic at that hour. He was standing at one corner of the balcony, talking to a couple of librarians. One glance at his face told Nepenthe he had not been to bed yet. His eyes were red-rimmed and shadowed at the same time; his face was so pale it might have been km to the glacial, ravaged face of the moon.

  “They say she can’t keep a thought in her head. She’s scarcely there, behind her eyes. Yet she is her father’s daughter. She has his eyes, his hair, everything. Everything but his ability to understand what will hold twelve restless Crowns under her rule.” He shook his wild head and scooped another spoonful of oats. “It’s disturbing.”

  “She has Vevay to counsel her,” a librarian reminded him.

  “She has the entire Floating School, but she does not seem to realize that she might need all the help she can get.”

  Nepenthe, hovering in the doorway, took a discreet step back out of eyesight and stepped on someone’s foot. She turned. It was only Laidley, who seemed to have been following her.

  His head bobbed diffidently as she apologized. His lank, straw-pale hair hung in his eyes, which were too close together and a pallid gray. Intent on Nepenthe’s face, they seemed slightly crossed. He was a stoop-shouldered young man whose hair had already begun to thin, revealing the bulge of the well-filled skull beneath. He knew more languages than most of the transcriptors. Around Nepenthe he could barely find words in any of them.

  But he spoke that morning as she began eating her porridge. “Oriel says you are riding with her to the Floating School to bring back a manuscript the mages can’t translate.”

  She nodded, feeling guilty about the scholar, awake and oblivious, just on the other side of the wall. “Why? Do you want to go instead of me?”

  He shifted, disconcerted. “I was thinking: with.”

  “But then I wouldn’t have to go.”

  “But then—” He paused. She read the rest in his eyes, in the slant of his mouth: then I wouldn’t go with you.

  She swallowed oats wordlessly, then made an effort to change his expression, which seemed to be bleak, lately, whenever he looked at her. “Do you want to see the book before we give it to the librarians? They might keep it to themselves for months while they decipher it.”

  His eyes looked crossed again, this time with avidity. “Yes. Very much.”

  “Then work near the south stairs in the library and watch for us to come back.”

  His head bobbed again; he swallowed a word. Then he smiled, a generous and surprisingly sweet smile that made her stare. “Thank you, Nepenthe.”

  It took half the morning, it seemed, for the two transcriptors to find their way up and out of stone onto earth. They took horses from the library stables, a pair of gentle nags that could not frighten even Oriel. Once outside the palace walls, as they made their way along the cliff road to skirt the pavilions and paddocks, servants, wagons, the assorted paraphernalia of travel, Nepenthe turned to look back. The immense and complex maze of stone with its spiraling walls and towers built upon towers clung like a small mountain to the cliff, spilled halfway down it, a crust of angles, burrows, parapets between more towers, balconies and bridges thrust out of the face of the cliff, windows in the stone like a thousand watching eyes. The east gate in the outermost palace wall opened as she paused. A troop of guards or warriors in sky blue and silver rode out. Against the massive sprawl they seemed as tiny as insects. Riding away from it among the pavilions, they regained human stature. Nepenthe sent windblown hair out of her eyes and caught up with Oriel, who had turned away from the sea toward the wood.

  It seemed a dark, impenetrable tangle, a smudge along one edge of Dreamer’s Plain. The school, which occasionally and inexplicably floated above the trees, was nowhere to be seen that morning. Its history was as nebulous as the wood. The school was either younger or older than the royal library, or it had once been the Library, during the rule of the first King of Raine. Legend said that as the palace grew more complex through the centuries, the school broke free of it and floated away, searching for some peace and quiet in the wood. Another tale had it hidden within the wood for safekeeping during a war. Yet another said that the wood was not a wood at all, but the cumulative magic of centuries spun around the school, and that the magic itself could take any shape it chose. As far as Nepenthe knew, it generally looked like trees. But they were thick, shadowy, strange. No one hunted there. The animals, tales said, had a human turn of thought and talked too much.

  As they rode toward it, the dark wood began to leak color like paint spilling between stones. Oriel pulled her
horse to a halt and reached out to Nepenthe at the sight. Light shimmered from between the trees, great swaths of dazzling hues that Nepenthe only glimpsed from a distance when a parade of courtiers rode to hunt beyond the plain. Such silks they wore then, such rich golds and reds, purples and summer blues that they looked like flowers blown across the plain. As the transcriptors stared, bolts of flame and sun unrolled like rippling satin into the air above the trees, shook across the grass, and seeped away.

  “I’m not going in there,” Oriel said flatly. Her damp fingers were icy around Nepenthe’s wrist.

  “It’s nothing,” Nepenthe murmured, entranced. “Magic. Illusion. They made it out of nothing.”

  “They can kill each other with it!”

  “They’re students,” Nepenthe argued unconvincingly. “They don’t practice that on each other.”

  “If it doesn’t kill you, it can transform you into something loathsome.”

  “They can probably see us coming. They wouldn’t turn a pair of transcriptors into maggots.”

  Oriel balked. “No. Anyway, how do you know what it is or who is making it? They could be having a war in there for all we know, and we’d ride into the middle of something deadly just looking for a book.”

  “All right,” Nepenthe said. “All right. I’ll go.”

  “No.”

  Nepenthe coaxed her placid mount forward a step or two. “My horse doesn’t even see it,” she said, but Oriel sat obstinately still.

  “I’ll wait,” she said tersely. “Just hurry.”

  The mages must have seen them coming some time ago, Nepenthe realized when she saw the robed figure come out of the trees to meet her. The young man was carrying something in one hand. His hair, Nepenthe noted idly, was the same gold-leaf hue that had splashed so profligately out of the mysterious wood. As she rode up to him, he gave her a smile somewhere between amusement and rue.

  He nodded at the figure in the distance, then said to Nepenthe as she turned her mount to rein beside him, “We frightened her, then.”

  “She’s easily frightened.”

  “There was no need.” He looked up at Nepenthe, mouth open to continue, then did not, for a moment; only the wind spoke, racing exuberantly between them. He finished his thought finally. “You aren’t. Easily frightened.”

  “No.” The word snagged oddly. She cleared her throat, then for once in her life could find nothing coherent to say.

  “What color are they?” she heard.

  “What?”

  “Your eyes. They were brown. Then when you turned your horse to face the sea they became as green as water.”

  “They do,” she answered. “They do that.” His own eyes seemed the color of his hair, full of morning light. Rich, she thought dazedly, rich, though he wore the plain brown wool of a student, and that was none too clean.

  “What is your name?”

  “Nepenthe. I am a ward of the royal library.” From mute to babbling, she had suddenly gone. “They were up to N when they found me on the cliff edge.”

  “Nepenthe.” His eyes had narrowed slightly; they seemed to pull at her, doing a mage’s work. In some magical world, she dismounted; she stood on the grass in front of him; his hands, graceful and strong, something crusted and glittering beneath the nails, moved to touch her…

  But no: they still held the book. She blinked, still mounted. He remembered it, too, in that moment.

  “Oh. Here.” He held the book up to her; she took it. It was very plain, worn, undistinguished by gold ink or jewels; the binding smelled of wax and old leather. “It came to us in a trader’s wagon. He said it had been passing from hand to hand across the Twelve Crowns and more than likely beyond them. Nobody can read it, so he gave it to the mages for nothing. If the librarians find it deals with magic, the mages want it back. Otherwise, they’ll settle for some explanation of it.”

  “I’ll tell them.” Idly, because she had been surrounded by books since she had been found, she opened it, glanced at the odd letters.

  “My name is Bourne,” she heard him say, “of Seale. If I come to the library, will they let me see you?”

  They looked like thorns, the strange letters: brambles curling and twisting around one another, linked by their sharp spurs. “Yes,” she said to him. And then a word spoke out of the book, a deep, sudden sound she recognized, swift as an adder biting into her heart and clinging.

  She looked at the young man, Bourne, dazed by the unexpected wealth: his gold eyes, his name, the book coming to life in her hands. “Yes,” she said again, holding those eyes while she slipped the book into a deep pocket in her tunic, beneath her cloak. “Come to me.”

  She had forgotten Oriel, the isolated rider stopped in the middle of the plain while it ran hither and yon beneath her. Riding back, she hardly saw the grass. Speaking, Oriel startled her, as though one of them had appeared out of nowhere.

  “Well?” she asked. “Did you get it?”

  Nepenthe scarcely thought; the answer came out of her as easily as truth. “Oh. The mages didn’t send it after all. The student said that they had finally learned its secret language.”

  Oriel turned her horse, matched Nepenthe’s distracted pace. “Then we came for nothing. Oh, well, we had a ride on the plain in the sun. Was it magic? The book?”

  Nepenthe lilted her face to all the gold flowing down from the sky. “Someone’s secret recipes,” she answered vaguely.

  “We came all the way out here for a cookbook?”

  “So it seems.”

  She urged her horse forward, racing for the cliff road, wanting to run herself all the way back to the labyrinth of the library, where she could hide and find a way through the brambles. She heard Oriel shouting behind her, but it was nothing, only fear, only beware of falling off the edge of the world, and Nepenthe had been balanced there before she had a name.

  TWO

  Bourne lay on earth, in silence, somewhere within the Floating School. On those days, which were as timeless and dark as nights, the Floating School seemed to bury itself underground. The place was silent as a grave. It smelled like one, Bourne supposed, if the dead could smell earth and stone and roots and tell about it. The students could and did. They woke on what felt like pebbles instead of pallets. Forewarned and given challenges the day before, Bourne was still surprised. Straw turned to stone, light to night, the daily genial pulse of life within the school with its scholarly murmurings and colorful mishaps was suddenly, utterly stilled. Illusion, he knew, all illusion. If he cried out, someone would answer instantly. If he battered at the blinding dark, tried to run from it, then what seemed a tiny cell of unmortared stone and earth would suddenly expand around him; a hand would draw him into light. So he had heard. So far he had been patient in the dark, more curious than afraid. So far, he had been able to concentrate on the challenge, the test they must pass through to find the day.

  So far. He lay on his back, feeling a mass quite close to his face, as though he were in a box. If he sat up, nothing would stop him. But the illusion hung there, persistent and subtle: nothing there, but something. There. They had been instructed, that day to listen for the sound of the sea and to interpret what it said. Buried in earth and stone and dark halfway across the plain, he could not imagine such a thing was possible. Even standing on the edge of the cliff, staring down at the foaming, churning waters, Bourne had never heard the sea.

  But the mages expected the impossible, and Bourne had learned that he could occasionally surprise himself.

  He had surprised himself simply by staying at the school since autumn, after his brothers and cousins had made bets that he wouldn’t last the season. He would send the Floating School tumbling into the sea, they warned. He would turn himself into a donkey and forget how to change himself back. The mages would lock him out sooner or later. Sooner became later; autumn became winter. In early spring, the Lord of Seale rode to the door of the school and demanded to speak to his youngest nephew about a neighbor’s daughter who was wani
ng and weeping and writing poetry about Bourne’s golden hair. Find him, the mages had suggested. If he chooses. If you can. Bourne, buried in dark on that silent day, could not be found. He had been given a word he had never encountered before to interpret. Hearing, from very far away, his uncle’s voice, he mingled the sound of it into his interpretation of the word and produced a very apt description of the fiery, puissant, bellowing beast the word named.

  This time, he heard nothing but his own breathing, his heartbeat, his blood. Hard enough to concentrate on the sea, which he could neither see nor hear, let alone imagine the sound that might come from it. What he kept seeing was a face. For the first time, he grew impatient in the charged and magical silence. He wanted to get up, walk until he found a door, then walk out of the wood toward the cliff road until he saw again the rider coming toward him, her long hair shining and crisp as a blackbird’s feathers, her shoulders as straight as any hunter’s, her skin like sun-drenched earth.

  His breath broke explosively out of him. He held it a moment, then lay quietly, drawing and loosing air, drawing and loosing slowly in long, measured cadences, until the dark was filled with the soft rhythm of it and he recognized, his eyes widening suddenly and his breath heaving and breaking again, the ceaseless patterns of the tide.

  He smiled in the dark, charmed. So the sea breathed like some great, restless, dreaming animal. So it spoke. But what did it say? An ancient and untranslatable language, like the voices of trees, the voice of wind. It was enough that he had heard it; the mages could expect no more.

  But it was still dark; he had nothing else to do but listen. Blood in his ears sang like water; his breath weltered like spume. He heard her voice again: Nepenthe. The orphan N, reared by librarians. Her voice, low and slightly husky, dredging words out of the strange silence that had encircled them both like a spell. A little world. The air that they both breathed. He heard his breath again at the memory of her eyes, that moment when they changed. Chestnut, then leaf. Opaque, and then luminous as she turned toward the sea.