Alphabet of Thorn Read online

  Come to the library.

  He had been to the palace with his uncle, Ermin of Seale, Lord in the realm of Raine and ruler of the Second Crown. Lord over three sons of his own, as well as three of his dead brother’s, all of whom were either safely and appropriately married, or wealthily betrothed. He had different plans for Bourne, whom he sent to the Floating School. Not, Bourne knew, for any great gifts he possessed; his uncle had no illusions about that. What he had were ambitions, which the young and inexperienced queen, ascending to her perilous place in the world, had sharpened immeasurably. A mage’s powers, he made Bourne see clearly, would be a great asset to the family. The more power Bourne acquired from the Floating School, the better. His uncle would hardly approve of an orphaned transcriptor distracting him from his studies. The librarians’ foundlings came from everywhere, like blown leaves, and no telling from what tree she might have fallen. Let alone what far-flung language she had been born to speak.

  Where had she come from? he wondered, shifting a little to rearrange a pebble under his shoulder blade. She with those long bones, those eyes?

  What does the sea say?

  He breathed an answer; the word washed over him, through him, fanning out, separating into pale, delicate fingers of spume. He stared back at the changeless dark, trying to see through illusion into light.

  “Nepenthe,” the mage Felan repeated curiously when Bourne explained what the sea had said to him. There was a muffled snicker amid the unwashed, hungry students clustered together at the end of the silent day. Some had heard poetry; one or two had heard spells, which they attempted then and there, but which came to nothing in the light of day. They lacked an element, Felan suggested. Perhaps the true sea, cold, dangerous, and indifferent, might have fed the magic, rather than their imaginary seas. Others had heard nothing, not even their own breathing.

  “You told us to listen for the sea,” one said bewilderedly. “Why should I listen to myself?”

  “Everything connects,” Felan said mildly. He smiled at the fretting student. “Don’t worry. There will be other days.” He was a huge, gentle man, bald as a stone, with astonishing power. He could hold the Floating School in the air by himself, if the students lost faith in their powers and threatened to drop it. “You hold it with your heart,” he would tell them, “not with your hands. It has nothing to do with strength.”

  Felan taught the beginning students and ran the school. He was responsible only to the ruler of the Twelve Crowns and to the aging mage Vevay, who had headed the school for a century or so, by some accounts. Others said she had founded it, she was that old. She lived in the palace now and rarely visited the school. Bourne had never seen her, only the imaginary Vevay, made timeless and immortal by legend, whose beauty and powers would never change.

  “A transcriptor,” he told Felan when questioned further. “She gave me permission to visit her.”

  “Then you had better do so,” Felan said, without a smile hidden anywhere on his broad, calm face. “If that is what the sea said.”

  So Bourne did that on his next free day, walking through the wood to the plain. The trees were quiet that day, and not quite so thickly tangled as they had been the day he had passed through them on his way to the queen’s coronation ceremony. Then he kept tripping; he heard rustlings in the brush; things dropped on his head, including some yellowish slime from an invisible bird. It seemed the wood’s opinion of his intentions toward the new queen. He ignored it. Brilliant he was not, but anyone with half a brain could learn how to blow apart a wall with a thought. And like his uncle, Bourne did not see why the young queen should possess so many Crowns. By all accounts she was hardly capable of ruling one.

  The wood seemed to approve his intention to see Nepenthe. The thought of her in his head seemed to open a path through the trees, as though the wood guided him. The palace was more complex: he spent an hour or two passed from guard to guard through a system of gates and stairs and hallways that challenged his memory. When he finally passed through the palace to the library, he wandered a long time through the maze of stones and manuscripts, listening within its silence, its thick ancient shadows and sudden spills of torch fire, for the word from the sea.

  He picked up the thread of her finally. Someone had glimpsed her this way. She might have gone that way. She was usually to be found here. Or if not here, then probably there. So he was passed from librarian to scribe, deeper and deeper into stone. When he came upon her finally, it was not where he had been told to expect her. He had simply gotten lost. He turned a corner into a quiet corridor and saw a transcriptor alone at a desk in an alcove of books, poring over another, open on the desk.

  “Please,” he said, and there they were, those eyes, vague with words still clinging to them from the page, and so dark now they seemed to have shifted from brown to black. Then she recognized him. She smiled, and the breath he hadn’t realized he was holding ran out of him swiftly. A flow of color like firelight ran beneath her burnished skin. She started to close the book she studied, then didn’t.

  She said instead, a little breathlessly, “You see, the librarians gave it to me to translate. I’m good with odd alphabets. Notches on twigs, such things…”

  He said, “Oh,” without comprehending. Then he glanced at the book beneath her hand, saw the tangles of thorn like winter-stripped canes winding across the page. He said, “Oh,” again indifferently, then remembered that it might be magic.

  “How did you find me?”

  “Only by accident,” he answered wryly. “I have no idea where I am, or how I will ever get out of here.” He paused. “I wanted—I had to—”

  “Yes,” she said softly and studied him, her eyes filling with him now, instead of thorns. “Bourne. Bourne who? What? From where?”

  “Odd questions,” he commented, “coming from an orphan.”

  “You might have fallen out of the sky, for all I know.” She gestured. “There will be a stool at the next desk down the hall. Sit with me. No one comes down this far during the day, except the occasional visiting scholar searching for something obscure. So we can talk.”

  “Am I interrupting work?”

  She looked down at it. “No. I am. I should be translating something else entirely. But I was too curious about this.”

  He stepped down the hall, brought a stool back, and sat beside the desk, half of himself still in the hallway, for the alcove was tiny. The vast stone ceiling, high above the books and barely illuminated by the torches, had been formed by some unimaginable burrowing, centuries before, into the solid heart of the cliff. He was under the earth again, he thought, and still listening for magic.

  “Bourne of Seale,” he answered her. “My father is the younger brother of the Lord of Seale, in the Second Crown. He died several years ago. My uncle Ermin sent me to the mages’ school.”

  She raised a brow, tapping lightly and idly on the pages with a quill. Her eyes grew opaque for a moment; he waited, while she laid his name on her scales and weighed it against all kinds of things. Trouble, for one, he guessed. Heartache, he hoped, for that was on his scale as well. Then she stopped weighing, yielded to whatever it was that outweighed everything.

  “You are right,” she said abruptly. “I don’t want to know. My heart saw you before you had a name. That never happened to me before.”

  “No,” he breathed. “Yes.”

  “Especially not twice in one moment.”

  “Twice?”

  She touched the book again with the pen. “Twice,” she said, and he saw the wonder in her eyes. “There was you—all that richness in your hair and eyes, all that gold—and there was the book you gave me. It seemed in that moment that my heart recognized the language. And until that moment, I hardly knew I had one.”

  “One what?” he asked dazedly, thinking of all that glowing dark she carried with her, all that mystery.

  “A heart.”

  “Nepenthe,” he said, the word out of the sea. “Can you—Is there a place—Must
we sit here with all these books listening?”

  “For a while. If we go up, we will be seen, and I should be working. Can you stay?”

  “How can I possibly find my way back through this labyrinth?” he asked her. “I am at your mercy.”

  She smiled at that. “I don’t know if I possess such a thing. Nobody ever asked me for it before. Except maybe Laidley.”

  “What is Laidley?”

  “Just someone. No one.” The pen flicked again between her fingers; her attention strayed, was caught on thorn. “This book—”

  “Never mind the book,” he said huskily. “You saw me first.”

  “Let me talk,” she pleaded. “I have no one else to tell.”

  “The librarians.”

  She shook her head, the swift blood running into her face again, so that he wanted to open his hand to that fiery warmth. “I lied,” she said, her voice catching; she cleared her throat. “I lied to you.”

  “We hardly know each other,” he said, astonished. “What could you have found to lie about so soon?”

  “The book. The librarians don’t know I have it. I told the transcriptor who rode with me that the mages had puzzled it out for themselves; they didn’t need to send it after all.”

  He stared at it with sudden interest. “Why? Is it magic? It must be, for it to have possessed you like that.”

  “Is that it? Is that what magic does?”

  “It charms; it transfixes; it binds. Have you understood any of it?”

  “I think so. The letters are like thorns: they cling to each other to make words, but like thorn branches they can be separated—look.” She drew the book toward him, her voice eager now, unafraid. He moved close to her, so close he could feel the scented dark of her long hair against his lips. “The thorns make a circle around a center.”

  “Like a hub. Or an axle.”

  “Axis,” she suggested. “It is repeated, on nearly every page. I think it might be a name. And here—this must be the writer’s name, this branching of thorns on the first page. No other word but that, and not centered like a title, but—”

  “Sprawled all over the page,” Bourne murmured, “like a warning. You should tell the librarians.”

  “I will,” she said absently. “I will. But not yet. The book spoke to me. I want to keep it just a little longer.”

  “Promise,” he insisted, his eyes on the thick, spiky canes of thorn rising between his eyes and the book’s inner secrets.

  “I promise.”

  He looked at her, not knowing her at all, he realized, even as he recognized the perfunctory tone in her voice. If she would not tell them, then he must, he realized. Soon. After she showed him what kind of magic compelled the book, for he might learn something from it, beyond what the mages thought he should know.

  But not that day. She closed it and showed him something else, a kind of alphabet of fish on an ancient pelt, whiling away the time until she could put the fish away and draw him deeper into the labyrinth.

  THREE

  “And so,” Vevay said to Gavin as the candles guttered around them and the embers murmured dreamily, “there they were, then: Axis and Kane. King and mage. Rulers of the entire known world. No one born who didn’t learn their names. And where are they now? Vanished like rain.”

  “Raine?” Gavin asked through a yawn.

  “Rain. Underground. A pair of names chiseled into a broken sandstone tablet in a language so old no one remembers it anymore.”

  “You remember.”

  “Well,” she said lightly, “I’m so old I’m sure I was alive back then.”

  She heard him yawn again, and looked down at him affectionately. She sat up in their bed among linens and furs, clothed for the night in pearl-gray silk, her hair, a paler shade of pearl, falling around her like a cloak. Her blue-gray eyes, hooded with age, had once inspired poetry; her hands had inspired epics. Her deeds had inspired a great many different passions; she had managed to survive them all. Now, at home, at rest within the mighty palace of the rulers of Raine, she occasionally wondered, with amazement and rue, how she had survived her younger self.

  She dropped a slender, age-rumpled hand on Gavin’s bare chest, stroked the white fur there. Once it had been black; once her own hair had been the color of polished bronze. Once he had commanded armies; once she had counseled the mages of warrior-kings.

  Now, she thought, it was enough to try to keep a step ahead of one young and inexperienced queen who had inherited the Twelve Crowns of Raine.

  “Is that the end of the story?” Gavin asked. His eyes were closed.

  “How could it be anything but the end? They lived, they died, they were forgotten.”

  “How did they die? Honored and beloved, with funerals that lasted days and tombs overflowing with treasure? Or in a final, ignominious battle with some bastard son or another upstart?”

  She folded her arms, rested them on her upraised knees, and dropped her chin upon them, watching the embers, lying open like broken hearts, pulsing and dying at once. “I don’t remember,” she said absently, losing interest in her own tale. She felt his fingers drifting down her backbone.

  “Heroes die a hero’s death. Always. In tales if not in truth.”

  “Do they?”

  “Make up something.”

  “All right. Axis, the ruler of the world, had so many children he couldn’t keep their names straight, and he died contented in his nightcap, so old and shrunken that he was buried in a child’s coffin, which is why no one ever found his tomb. No one believed that such a magnificent and indomitable emperor would rattle like a seed in a pod in his own coffin.”

  “Unconvincing,” he murmured, his eyes flickering behind the closed lids, seeing himself, she guessed, his own unfinished story. “And the mage? Can you do better for him?”

  “Kane lived so long that he forgot who he was. He died in some ruler’s palace, where for decades he had been useful, so that in his decline he was well treated even when nobody else could remember who he was, either.”

  “You are not kind to heroes.”

  “No,” she said, her eyes mirroring a cold reflection of the burning hearts. “Nor were they, Axis and Kane, the brothers who ruled the world. Nor were they kind.”

  His hand opened on her back, warm against silk and skin. “You’ve laid them to rest. And me as well. Now come to sleep. Meet me in my dreams.”

  “Where?” she asked him, settling into his arms, and he told her a briefer, gentler tale that lured her into sleep before he finished it.

  They lived, as befitted a great mage and a great warrior, in a high central tower from which they had the wind’s view of everything: the waves, the broad island across the channel that was the Third Crown, the archipelago beyond it that was the Fifth Crown, the misty northern forests and slopes, the southern fields, and the great green plain that flowed like a second sea over the cliffs above the sea. From there, Gavin watched for trouble; Vevay kept an eye on the Floating School and other anomalies. When he wasn’t summoned to the king’s company, so weighted with mail and leather and jewel-crusted weapons that he could barely mount his horse, Gavin wrote poetry and studied the accounts of early battles in the long history of Raine. Vevay toyed with an account of her own very long life, ignoring those events that might be embarrassing to the living, including herself.

  Now the shrewd and vigorous king was dead from falling off his horse during a hunt, leaving his rabbity daughter Tessera to rule the Twelve Crowns of Raine. Vevay, not certain that the girl could even name them all, had tutored her ruthlessly before her coronation. She had learned everything obediently, but with a distinct lack of interest, her mind occupied by other matters. What matters these were eluded Vevay completely. In desperation, Vevay consulted the queen’s mother, who was no help whatsoever.

  The lady Xantia, who had loved the dead king dearly, was in deep mourning and had no patience for anything but her grief.

  “You must help her,” she said brokenly to
Vevay. She wore dark purple and black, even to her daughter’s coronation. Since then she had appeared in court only rarely, blinking bewilderedly like something seldom exposed to light. “Of course she is lacking in experience; what do you expect? No one expected her to rule so soon, and under such circumstances.”

  “She’s fourteen,” Vevay said grimly. “Your husband the king was crowned not two years older than that. And he faced the first challenge to his reign from the Fifth Crown three months later. And won.”

  Xantia closed her eyes and applied black linen to them. “You teach her,” she said faintly. She leaned back in her chair, summoned her ladies-in-waiting with a gesture. “Teach her, Vevay. As you taught the king to rule. I place all our hope in you.”

  “Thank you,” Vevay said dourly. The queen’s mother shifted a corner of the silk over one eye to glance at her.

  “You’re a mage, Vevay. Do some magic.”

  Baffled, Vevay went in search of the queen. The days after the coronation were scarcely less hectic than the preparations had been. The palace had never held so many noble guests, all with their families and entourages; the people camped on the plain, celebrating night and day, showed no signs of going home. A few days of rain might dampen their spirits, Vevay thought. Perhaps the students at the Floating School could practice conjuring with the weather. The queen, who should have been holding audiences with various rulers that morning, meeting with ambassadors, accepting gifts and giving them, becoming acquainted with possible suitors, was doing none of those things. She was, Vevay realized after coming across any number of bewildered courtiers, nowhere to be found.

  She roused Gavin from his poetry with a silent call; he knew how to search without causing alarm. Then she took the shortest way to the top of her tower and began her own silent search through the palace, among the throng on the plain, even in the depths of that most unlikely place, the library. Trawling the busy palace and plain with a single line of thought baited with the queen’s name, she felt no response to it anywhere. In desperation she searched wildly improbable places, like the kitchens and the stables. Finally she flung a question into the Floating School, catching Felan’s attention.