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 waning 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.

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.