NINE

Vevay sat high in the tower overlooking the plain, trying to remember her life. It was late at night. Fire murmured in the great hearth beside her, whispering things she had long forgotten. If only I could remember the language of fire before I understood it, she thought absently. The perpetual winds rattled at the thick windows, trying, like memory, to reach her. Once, long ago, she had stood in them for the first time, let her mind and body flow into them, become the dark, singing force beneath the moon. Now she was draped in white fur, listening to them from within stone and glass. If she opened an inner ear she could hear the sea, churning restlessly with some incoming squall, tearing at the cliffs with silver-white fingers, trying to reach the palace, trying to catch the wind. If she opened an inner eye, she could see into the wild spring night that once, long ago, she would have tried to breathe into her marrow; she would have changed the shape of her bones to enter into its realm.

Easier to understand the wind, she thought. Easier to walk on the surface of the frothing sea, than to remember the hunger to do it. Easier to remember knowledge than ignorance, experience than innocence. Easier to know what you are than remember what you were, so long ago that what you were then lived in an entirely different world…

Gavin’s reflection, entering the room through a pane of glass, startled her; her thoughts had strayed that deeply into past. She turned, noted his expression, or lack of it.

“Writing?” he asked, making an effort. She shook her head.

“Trying to remember what it was like to be young,” she said dourly. His set face eased a little, but not enough, she thought. He poured wine, sat down on the bed to pull off his boots. She smelled smoke on him, and wind, horses, and beer; he had been roaming, she guessed, speaking to guards on the plain, on the walls, picking up threads of rumor, incidents, gossip that might lead somewhere, mean something. Thus he kept watch on the Raine he understood, while she kept watch — or tried to — on the Raine she didn’t.

“I wish they would all go home,” he sighed.

“Maybe the queen should travel,” Vevay mused. “Visit her Crowns. They would have to return to their own lands to prepare for her. And she might learn a few things.”

“The size of her realm,” Gavin suggested.

“The size of her problems.” She crossed the room, sat down on the bed beside him. “Perhaps I’ll suggest it.”

“You’ll have to go with her.”

She contemplated that with horror. “No. Would I?”

“Who else? Her mother?”

“A younger and more energetic mage, surely. The thought makes my bones ache.”

“You were her father’s trusted counselor,” he reminded her. “The rulers of the Crowns know you; they wouldn’t want to deal with a new queen and an unfamiliar mage at the same time.”

She rose again, restively, to pace a little among the tall candle stands and tapestries. “Maybe it’s not a good idea. I used to be a mage,” she added impatiently. “Once I used my powers. Now I feel like a dancing instructor, reminding the queen whom she is dancing with at this hour and with which foot she should begin.”

“Be thankful,” Gavin advised with a laugh, “that so far the music is still being played and everyone is trying to dance in harmony.

“It won’t last.”

The words came out unexpectedly and far too bleakly; she stopped, met Gavin’s eyes. He gave a little nod after a moment, acknowledging her deepest fears.

“I feel it, too,” he said softly. “Trouble on the wind. But from which direction, I can’t guess, and I can’t place incidents together to put a pattern to them. Everything troubling seems isolated, random. And if everyone is still here, who would attack?”

“Ermin of Seale went home.”

“But it’s the Lord of Seale whom I would suspect of insurrection first,” Gavin said simply. “Even he is being predictable. That nephew of his in the mages’ school — ”

“Felan is keeping an eye on him.”

“That’s so transparent it’s ridiculous. Does Bourne have any talent?”

“Felan says yes. He might be disturbing except that he doesn’t take anything very seriously, not even his uncle, and he seems to have no ambitions of his own.”

“If he did?”

“Felan can’t guess. So far he can only watch.”

“And all we can do,” Gavin said, standing up to loosen his belt. Vevay went to the window again, stared back at the enormity of night pushing an eye against their tiny, bright window, spying on their comfort, their fragile peace.

“I can see into you, too,” she whispered.

“What?”

“I think it’s time to do what the queen’s mother suggested the queen’s mage do.”

“That being?”

“Some magic.”

So she did, the next day, while the queen rode off reluctantly with her guests to go hunting in the great forests east of the plain. Gavin, sighing over his stiff joints, rode among her guards, to ease Vevay’s mind. Vevay made herself invisible, wandered hither and yon through walls and narrow passageways so old that not even the servants knew they existed. Words drew her here, there, like a feather blown on a breeze; stray voices, scraps of conversation, soft murmurings from ladies and maids took her from high airy chambers down to stony cellars and moldering dungeons, and even deeper than that, to the weird labyrinth burrowed into stone that was the royal library. She gave that only cursory attention: even in the long, tumultuous history of Raine, the rulers had never had to go to war with their librarians.

She moved unseen through nobles and courtiers who had chosen not to hunt. Most of the younger ones had gone with the queen, leaving their elders beside the hearth fires in private rooms and council chambers. She learned a few startling things about affairs among the rulers of the Crowns, but nothing troublesome to the new queen that Vevay had not already guessed. Everyone suspected everyone else of plotting; she caught no one actually doing it.

When twilight fell, she roamed with the wind on the plain, listened to the soldiers and servants, the poor relations, peddlers, gypsies, the merchants and village folk of the Crowns who had traveled untold distances for a glimpse of their new queen. Seeing Tessera meant good luck, she learned. Her youth meant strength and beauty, her inexperience had been transformed into a kind of wisdom unsullied by reality that would lead Raine into a perpetual spring of prosperity and hope. She had been seen in improbable places: riding alone among her people on a white horse, flying out of the Floating School as it hung suspended among the trees. Along with beauty, strength, and wisdom, she had acquired magical powers.

She would be the last to recognize herself, Vevay thought ruefully. She stopped to talk to a flea-bitten witch who was telling fortunes. The witch cast the fortune of Raine with little carved bones and pieces of crystal onto a gold silk cloth with a black line painted across it.

“Above the line is good fortune,” she told Vevay. “Below the line is not.”

She closed her eyes and threw her motley tokens. They landed in an arc above the line. The witch clasped her hands in wonder, proclaiming the best of all possible fortunes for the Twelve Crowns of Raine. It was evident in the perfect rainbow’s arc above the black, and in the unbroken pattern of crystal alternating with bone. Clearly a great ruler had been crowned; a reign of unprecedented peace and affluence had begun.

“Clearly,” Vevay said, and left her a coin stamped with the new queen’s profile.

Clearly if that were so, then Vevay would not be wandering around in the dark feeling something amiss and trying to find out what from a handful of knuckle bones.

She caught the wind’s current again and flowed with it, half-visible to a mage’s eye as a swirl of cloth, a strand of ivory hair, and invisible to anyone else. It took her where she wanted, to the thick, clotted dark that crouched like an animal on the plain, never sleeping and never awake. She felt the wood’s awareness as she blew into it. She caught her balance among the trees, amazed as always at their utter stillness, even in the howling winds from the sea.

“Tell me what you see for Raine,” she asked the wood. But nothing spoke, not a leaf, not a breaking twig. It only revealed the school after a moment, a denser dark within the leaves. A gate opened; light beckoned. She went into it.

It was not the school that the students saw. That school was an eccentric, drafty puzzle-box of stone that changed shape according to their needs. Sometimes the stone walls would shift to let in the wood, sometimes the sky; any kind of weather was apt to appear. Stairs and corridors were rarely predictable, except for finding meals and beds. Monsters might roam the halls; doors might open to reveal riches, or strange beasts, or nothing at all as far as the eye could see. Through the centuries different mages had worked their spells into the rooms as tests and teaching devices; not even Felan knew anymore what waited behind every door, or how many magically charmed rooms lay unopened, forgotten until chanced upon by some hapless student. The school itself became a student’s first test: the inflexible mind that balked at its erratic behavior never stayed long.

The school that opened itself to Vevay was a comfortable, cluttered place, with thick carpets and musty tapestries and many fat candles. Owls queried her passing; in the windows, ravens and kingfishers muttered sleepily. A milk-white snake in a dark corner uncoiled its head and opened a sapphire eye at her. Books lined the walls, lay open on stands; some of them whispered constantly, reading themselves aloud. The hallway she walked opened into a room with an elaborately patterned floor of wood and ivory, and walls of oak and stained glass. In it, she found Felan, who would have been expecting her the moment she set foot in the wood.

He was sitting in moonlight and candlelight, scratching the head of some beast that looked to Vevay a cross between a lion and a bear. It had a black pelt, a flat, broad, fanged face, a powerful, bulky body. It seemed to be purring. It cast a smoldering red glance at Vevay then closed its eyes again, leaned heavily against Felan’s knee.

“What on earth is that?” Vevay asked.

“I have no idea,” Felan said. “It came out of an old book I was reading once and it never went back in. It seems harmless and it’s very obliging: it lets the students practice transformation spells on it. It eats strawberries when it can get them.” He stroked the pointed ears a moment, studying Vevay. “What’s wrong?”

“I’m afraid,” Vevay said tightly.

“Of what?”

“Of what, I don’t know. I’m afraid for Raine.”

“Sit down,” Felan suggested, and she did so on a broad stone bench strewn with cushions and furs and littered for some reason with dried flower petals. The wood, she noted, not for the first time and always with wonder, had made its own moon. It was quite full that night, spilling light into the open casements. Over the rest of Raine, no moon was visible. The odd animal collapsed, sighing, across Felan’s feet. He leaned back in his chair, his calm eyes on Vevay. “Are you afraid of the Crowns working against the queen?”

“Well, that, yes. That’s always on my mind. But every ruler I have ever counseled in my long life has always had to contend with — contention. The possibility of war if they weren’t making it themselves, trying to add another Crown to the kingdom. If that’s all I’m alraid of, I should be able to recognize it by now.”

Felan was silent again. A single line appeared and frayed across his brow; she had shattered his tranquillity.

“If that’s all,” he repeated slowly. “There might be something worse than twelve Crowns at war with one another?” He was on his feet so quickly she barely saw him move. The animal gave a guttural whine of protest as he stepped out from under it. “Something at war with the Twelve Crowns?”

She gazed blankly at the possibility. “There have been no rumors. No indications.”

“But you’re not afraid of nothing.”

“Maybe I am. I’m very old and trying to remember my past. Perhaps I’m simply unburying ancient fears. That’s why I came to you. You’ve known me longest; you can tell me if I’ve roused one of the fretful squalls of old age.”

His face had grown still again, watchful now rather than serene. “You’ve known yourself longest,” he reminded her. “Are you afraid of death?”

“I don’t have time to think about dying. I’m too worried about Tessera.”

“Then perhaps together we can see what it is that’s troubling you. Come.”

He stepped to the center of the patterned floor; she followed him. A circle of aged ivory lay there like an ancient moon, with many intricate paths raying out from it. Felan stood at the rim of it, facing the wood’s moon, so that the light illumined the ivory; his shadow fell behind him. He gestured. Vevay moved to stand opposite him, so that the moonlight fell on her back; her shadow lay across the face of the moon at their feet.

“The wood’s moon suggested this to me,” he explained. “Perhaps the wood is speaking to us. Or perhaps I am making an entirely random connection between two white circles. We’ll see. You must show it what you fear.”

“How can I, when I don’t know myself?”

He smiled. “Just tell it silently what you told me.”

So she told the moon her fears, word by word, until words became unnecessary; it became easier to feel fear than to speak. The ivory at their feet rippled like water, became insubstantial, cloud. It glowed through her shadow like the true moon through night, seeing, revealing. Something began to take shape on its face, a shadowy form, human it seemed, yet faceless and gleaming strangely. Vevay frowned, trying to make sense of it. It seemed to be sitting on a roughly carved stone chair, in a hollow of stone. It held a long streak of white light across its knees and carried a circle of gold on its head.

She gave a sudden hiccup of astonishment.

“What is it?” Felan asked.

“I think — ” The figure became clearer, faceless because its helm was down; the long streak of light was a sheathed sword, the circle of gold a crown. “I think it’s Mermion.

“Who?”

“The first king of Raine. The Dreamer. Asleep in his cave within the cliff until he is roused to defend his realm. But why in the world — ” She stopped abruptly, without knowing why, only that suddenly she did not want to know why, she wanted to close the moon like an eye and creep back into ignorance.

The Dreamer’s mailed hand tightened on the sword; light melted down it. The helmed head turned slightly, as though disturbed by some sound from the world above. Vevay stared, frozen, her white brows lifted as high as they could go. She heard Felan’s uneven breathing.

Within the moon, the Dreamer woke and rose.