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.

Is the queen in the wood?

Forever passed, it seemed, before he answered. She paced the tower roof, waiting, while banners from the Twelve Crowns whipped around her like snakes. What would Tessera be doing in the wood? she asked herself impatiently. She had never shown any interest in it. But if not there, then where?

The answer from the Floating School came finally in the form of Felan, who fashioned himself out of cloud and light to stand with Vevay on the tower.

“No,” he said, his habitual calm shaken, though his face did not show it. Vevay could feel the perturbed air between them. “The queen is not in the wood. You don’t know where she is.”

“I don’t,” Vevay agreed grimly. Then she saw the tiny figure, far down on the face of the cliff, as far as the ancient outermost stairs led, which was, to all but the most knowledgeable eye, nowhere. She sighed. “Yes. I do. Thank you, Felan.”

He rubbed a hairless eyebrow, gazing down. She saw his expression before he vanished, and she thought darkly: you can laugh.

She met the queen halfway down the steps, as Tessera made her painstaking way back up. The queen reeled at the unexpected sight of a body on her next step, but Vevay had expected that. A solid, invisible wall of magic protected the young queen from any danger, including an errant wind or her own clumsy steps. Vevay sat down on the weathered, crumbled stairs; Tessera stood still, gazing at her perplexedly.

She was slight, with lank hair, pale gold like her lather’s but lacking its exuberant curls. She had his almond eyes, too, though hers were a more watery blue, especially now after her trek in the raw wind. A quiet, seemingly unimaginative child, she was growing into a pallid young woman, with powdery skin and uncertain expressions. She looked apprehensive now, thin lines appearing and fraying above her colorless brows.

“What,” Vevay asked, trying for calm on the deadly face of the cliff, with the wind roaring around them and the sea wrinkling and snarling below, “are you doing here?”

“Just — I was just — ” She shrugged slightly, shivering at the same time, for she had come without a cloak. “It was something I always wanted to do.”

“What?”

“Go down far enough to hear the sea.”

She is utterly exasperating,” Vevay told Gavin that night while he laughed. “And what’s so funny? She has no direct heir. If she had fallen into the sea, the Twelve Crowns of Raine would be spending the next century bickering over who should inherit the realm.”

“She didn’t fall.”

“She’s not a child anymore; she can’t just go off looking for seashells whenever — ”

“She is grieving, too,” he reminded her gently. “She’ll learn. I have faith in you.”

“I don’t,” Vevay said bleakly. “I don’t understand her at all.”

“What were you like at that age?”

“How should I know? I barely remember the last century.” She stiffened then, pulled away from him. “I shouldn’t say such things to you. You’re still a child.”

He dropped an arm over her shoulders, pulled her back. “Don’t be absurd. You enchant me.”

“Still?”

“Always.”

Content in his hold, she didn’t pursue the matter, though she knew she would never be entirely secure. “You could help,” she suggested. “You were her father’s greatest general; he always looked to you for advice.”

“I’m an old man,” he reminded her. “I could fight and die for her sake, but I can’t protect her from whatever Crowns might conspire against her.”

“She doesn’t even understand such threats yet. The kingdom of Raine is very old, but she hasn’t learned that it is not immortal. She has no idea what brute forces and subtleties hold a realm together. Maybe you could explain more clearly than I can.”

Gavin was silent a moment, savoring some memory of the dead king; Vevay felt him sigh noiselessly. “Her father spent his life eluding rebellion and war precisely because he constantly anticipated them. He understood how precariously this palace sits on the edge of the world. How do I begin to explain that?”

“I don’t know,” Vevay said tautly. “Someone must.”

“She needs to study the history of her realm.”

“She needs — ” She shook her head helplessly. “So much. I don’t even know where to begin.”

He drank wine, set his cup down. “Tomorrow,” he suggested. “You’re tired now. Begin again tomorrow.”

He eased his long body beside her, one arm loosely across her, the other crooked beneath his head. He had held her lightly through the years, she knew, because he had never been entirely secure either, during the long, busy, unpredictable life they had made together. She seemed, he had complained more than once, always at the point of vanishing.

But I am here, she thought. Now. This is what we have now, this moment of peace. Humans die, mages vanish…

“You’ve gone somewhere,” she heard. “I am holding you in my arms, but you have disappeared.”

She came back, glanced up at his strong, craggy face, with its grizzled brows and slackened skin, the faded scar on one cheekbone from when he had turned his head during battle and an arrow had skimmed across his skin instead of striking him. He met her eyes. His own were light blue. She had seen that blue blaze like sun-struck ice; they were mild now, quizzical.

“Where were you?”

“I wandered off into a tale,” she answered. “The tale I told you last night. Human and mage…”

“Axis and Kane.”

“I was putting a different ending on it. Only slightly different,” she amended. “In the end, all endings are the same. Even for those two.”

“Are they?” he murmured, as though there could be some question about the matter. He settled himself to listen. “Then tell me the different story.”