TWENTY-THREE

The Queen of Raine sat on the last of the cliff steps, listening. Far beneath her, the gray sea roiled and frothed against the cliffs. Gulls wheeled and cried in winds strong enough to hammer the long zigzag line of steps carved out of the face of the rock a little deeper into the stone. Tessera didn’t feel the winds, nor did she hear the breaking waves or birds. Deaf as a barnacle burrowed into its shell, she had made herself. Something enclosed, clinging to the cliff, untroubled by cold or wind; she might have drawn the cliff around her like a cloak. As though testing here, there, for the heartbeat in a stone, she let her mind wander in a timeless, wordless moment, throughout the living thing built into stone that was her palace.

She had stopped searching for thorns some time ago. She had relinquished the word. It got in the way; it did not mean what it said. She listened now for something that did not belong to Raine. Something that did not breathe Raine, whose heart was not steeped, like these ancient stones, in the history of Raine. Occasionally, deep within her solitude, her whole body so intent on Raine that it was scarcely visible except as stone, she sensed the flickering images within the Dreamer’s heart, and knew that she had touched even the dead in her search.

When she heard Vevay’s summons, she had to remember that she had eyes. She opened them and found she had bones again, and hair, and skin beneath a cloak that had been drenched by a passing squall some time ago. The mage’s summons was wordless; it was as though she had opened a window into Tessera’s thoughts and peered inside for a moment, looking for her. Tessera stood up, a small living thing now, not part of the immense, stolid pile that grew out of the cliff above her. Some part of her still searched, wandered down chimney stones, drifted through closed doors like air, feeling for something unfamiliar, something amiss. The rest of her, shivering in the damp air, trudged back up the steps to the palace.

She found Vevay in her tower, gazing into a silver bowl of water. Tessera went to her side. Rank after rank of warriors, silent and grim in the rain, marched across the surface of the water. Their tunics bore the linked double circlets of the Second Crown. She couldn’t see their faces clearly in the bowl, and what she did see was apt to disappear too soon, leaving headless soldiers moving into the silver.

She raised her eyes after a time to the casement above the bowl. Vevay’s spell, permeating the water, translated itself easily to the glass; the window was broader, and she could see more.

“You have called for an assembly before supper today,” Vevay told her, still intent on the images in the bowl. “You will speak to your nobles, tell them that you will permit them to leave as soon as the threat from the Second Crown has been eliminated. You will tell them where Ermin of Seale is now: marching through the Sevine Valley, following the river toward the plain. And you will tell them that the army of the First Crown will come out of the hills west of the valley to stop him before he reaches Dreamer’s Plain.”

Tessera nodded absently. The mage found Ermin a threat. To Tessera he was insignificant, a problem to occupy the mind when the enormity of the question of thorns became overwhelming. Vevay, not hearing an answer, glanced at her. What, a week earlier, might have caused the mage’s voice to tighten with frustration, only elicited a curious question.

“What are you looking at?”

“The army,” Tessera said. “You can see more faces in the glass.”

“Really?” Vevay watched the movement across the casement. “So you can,” she murmured. “Though I find the light distracting. Who taught you to do that?”

“You did.”

“I did?”

“I took your spell from the water.”

“Oh.” She looked back into the bowl, as though expecting to find the spell floating like a paper boat on the water. “What was I saying?”

“My army will stop the army of the Second Crown before it reaches the plain,” Tessera said perfunctorily.

“Good. Gavin and Ermin of Seale’s uncle and half a dozen nobles rode across the plain to try to negotiate peace with Ermin before he does something irrevocably stupid. You sent them early this morning; I couldn’t find you to tell you that.”

“Do I tell the assembly that?”

“Yes. It might calm a few nerves. Where have you been all morning?”

“Searching for thorns.”

Vevay touched her eyes delicately, as though she felt a sudden twinge. “They do make Ermin moot,” she breathed.

“Yes.”

“But at least Ermin is a threat everyone can understand. If you told your court to beware of thorns, they would be more likely to beware of you.” She brooded at the water, her brows puckered deeply. “You’d think the dead, if they are going to bother to wake after centuries to warn you about something, would be more explicit.”

“She dreamed them,” Tessera guessed. “Dreams don’t speak in words. Maybe the thorns aren’t thorns.”

“Maybe,” Vevay answered grimly, “but it’s the only word we’ve got. There’s Ermin of Seale among his generals.”

Tessera watched a small group of riders cross the glass: generals, guards, standard-bearers. In the midst of them rode the impetuous leader, a big man with graying yellow hair, his face furrowed and dripping. Following him was a boy who looked scarcely older than Tessera. He carried a trumpet slung on a strap over his shoulder. His calm, secret face, under milky-gold hair, was lowered against the rain. He reminded Tessera of someone.

“Who is that?” she asked curiously.

“Which?”

“The trumpeter. Look, he’s carrying something in his pouch.”

The leather pouch beneath the boy’s trumpet shifted and bulged oddly. He spoke a word, still gazing ahead, and slid a finger into the pouch to stroke whatever was stirring.

“Do you know who he is?” Tessera asked again.

“I believe he is one of Ermin’s grandsons. His father is locked up in my tower, below us. I can’t believe Ermin would risk him on the battlefield. But then he is risking everything else he has, why not his grandchildren, too?”

“He reminds me of someone…” She watched him, wondering what pet he kept in his pouch. He had two fingers burrowed into it now, his light eyes narrowed a little against the rain, watchful but not afraid of what he was riding toward. An unfamiliar feeling grew in Tessera as she stood there. Words ripened in her mind like strange fruit, crowded into her mouth. She wanted, more than anything else, to speak to that boy with the calm, gentle face and the pale eyelashes, ask him what he kept in his pouch that comforted him as he rode toward death. She wanted his eyes to see her; she wanted to hear his voice.

“I remember.” Her own voice sounded strange to her ears, but Vevay did not seem to notice anything. “He reminds me of the young man I met in the wood.”

“Bourne,” Vevay murmured dourly. “Yes. They would be cousins.”

“Do you know his name?”

She felt Vevay look at her then, sharply. But the mage only answered equably, “I can’t remember it. If Gavin and your nobles manage to negotiate peace, perhaps you can ask him yourself.”

Tessera watched the boy cross the window. Peace seemed a meaningless concept, what with the invisible monster roused and turning its eyes toward Raine while Ermin rode obliviously across its battlefield, insisting on his little war. The boy with the pet in his pouch might die like the hare in the wood for his uncle’s folly, or he might survive one battle only to face the enormity of the powers that had wakened the warrior-queen of Raine. He rode beyond the window frame toward his fate. Tessera turned restively, thinking, I will never know his name or hear his voice if he dies.

“Where are you going?” Vevay asked as she opened the door.

“To search.”

Vevay studied her bowl; the scene in the window shifted. She was watching for Gavin, Tessera guessed. “Don’t forget the assembly,” the mage murmured. “It may seem unimportant compared to the greater threat, but we can only deal with what we can see. We don’t want an insurrection within the palace as well. Your nobles are very powerful, and if you abdicate your own power over them, they will remove your crown one way or another. How you deal with Ermin now will show them how you would deal with them if they attack. It is vital for you to make these things clear.”

“Yes, Vevay,” Tessera said absently. The mage sighed.

“Call me if you need me.”

Tessera did not go far, only to the tower roof, where she stood among the snapping pennants and explored the complex, busy world beneath her feet. Her thoughts flowed downward into the stones; she rooted herself there, impervious as a pennant-pole to the weather. Like the thorns in the giant’s house, she crept everywhere, looking for illumination. In the wood, the mages searched their accumulated knowledge of both magic and Raine. The queen roamed as far as she could within her own boundaries, within the world she knew.

It seemed a small thing when she finally found it. As small as a thorn. It had hidden itself in the center of the massive cliff: a bramble growing in the heart of solid stone. A mind like a dark night-flower bloomed where there was no one to see it. A poisoned flower in a garden full of flowers. A single deadly word in the midst of an uncountable number of harmless words. She did not know what shape it took inside her palace; she only knew the shape and feel of the dreamlike image in her heart: a dark star in the center of her world, its power contained now, quiet and secret. It was an unspoken word, an unopened flower, a dream of itself. But it had wakened the dead, and the living queen sensed if she did not stop it now, it would explode and blaze in an incandescent fire across the whole of Raine.

She stirred on the rooftop, felt the wind again, her tangled hair. She still sensed the strange power, a seething smudge of dark in her heart. Somewhere in the palace it was, a small unnoticed thing in that immense place, eluding even the mages’ acute attention. Tessera, who understood small, unnoticed, powerful things, climbed down the tower steps and went looking for it.

She moved through most of her palace without attracting attention. Only partly visible, preoccupied, and wearing her blandest expression, she persuaded everyone that, if they saw her, she must be there on the most unimportant business and should be ignored. In Vevay’s tower room, the mage was busy talking to Gavin’s face in the bowl and did not notice the queen at all. There, Tessera felt the troubling power as little more than a slumbering ember. She left without disturbing Vevay, went down again, and down, making her way ever more deeply into stone. As she moved, she sensed the unfamiliar power quickening, burning now, taking its dark fires from the source.

The queen found herself in the library.

She had never been there. If she wanted a book, like everything else it was brought to her. She passed librarians and scholars and scribes, working among what seemed every book or scroll or tablet ever written since the beginning of the world. Language itself might have begun there, she thought; it grew everywhere in those stony burrows, crusting the walls like some kind of ancient life. The dark fire in her heart, the unspoken word, burned unwaveringly down there. She wandered erratically, looking into every book-lined hollow. Are you there? her heart asked. There? No one noticed the queen in their midst; she might have been just another word.

In a chamber far beneath the earth, a stone room full of stone words, she found the thorns.

Her heart recognized them before her eyes realized what they saw: an open book with thorns on every page. She touched them, felt her heart grow confused, desperate, distressed. Beware, they said to her, in the voice of the dreaming warrior. Beware. The room was empty. There was a pallet along one wall, with disheveled blankets. The book lay on a stack of tablets used, apparently, as a desk. Beside the book were pens, jars of ink, a stack of papers. Someone, Tessera guessed, was in the midst of translating the language of thorns. Who? she wondered. Who living in that world within the stones bore so much malice to Raine? Who could work so quietly with such dangerous powers without being harmed by them, and unnoticed by librarians or mages? What formidable enemy did she have living down here in the library, plotting to destroy her realm?

The queen sat down on the stone tablets, picked up the nameless scribe’s papers, and read them while she waited.

Hours later she still waited, as silent as one of the old slabs around her and invisible to everyone except the living, luminous eye of history open and watching for the slightest movement from her.

Axis and Kane, she thought numbly. Axis and Kane.

The names were among those that had littered her mind like fallen leaves, learned early in her life and discarded when she achieved enough perspective to realize that they could no longer trouble the world. They were dead, forgotten, harmless as words chiseled on a broken tombstone.

“Axis and Kane,” she whispered, and felt the dark wind of their power blowing through her heart.

The tale had ended abruptly at a disturbing shift of pronoun. The pen, lying across the unfinished sentence, had leaked a pool of black instead of the next word. The jar of ink stood open. The transcriptor, startled by something, perhaps her own writing, had gone and not returned. Nothing, not even the assembly she was probably missing, not even Ermin of Seale at her door, could have made Tessera move, not until she saw for herself how the tale would end for Raine.

She recognized the dangerous transcriptor easily, of the two that finally entered with their arms piled with scrolls. “N,” the ink jars said, and “Nepenthe” was what the lanky, thin-haired young man called her. His eyes were anxious, but Nepenthe’s looked stunned and desperate, in an elegant, unusual face that might have been molded in forgotten eons of history. Tessera, watching her narrowly, saw not the formidable, malicious mage she had expected, but a young woman who, in troubling Raine, had managed to trouble herself beyond all expectation.

“Don’t despair, Nepenthe,” the young man said softly, even as his own voice shook a little.

“That’s not my name,” she said tautly, dropping scrolls on the floor. She sank down to unroll them; the parchment trembled in her fingers.

“It’s the only name you know. You should finish it.”

“No. They’re dead. They must be dead. Laidley, don’t stop looking.”

“Nep —” He stopped himself, then continued doggedly, “How will you know exactly what you have to fear until you finish the translation? It may reveal something completely unpredictable. It might even explain itself away somehow, tell us that it was not Kane at all who wrote the story, that someone else imagined the whole thing.”

Nepenthe, opening one scroll after another, did not seem to be listening. “Laidley, none of these are about Axis at all. They must have been put on the wrong shelves. They’re old legal documents dealing with property.”

She began to gather them up again with wild haste; Laidley coaxed them out of her hands.

“I’ll take them back. I think I know where the ones we want must be. You finish the tale.”

“No.”

“Nepenthe, we’ve been searching for hours to find out how they died, and it seems they never did. Maybe the book can tell us what truly happened to them.”

“No,” she said again, fiercely. “Don’t argue with me. I’m right about this.”

“What if you’re not?” he asked on his way out. His voice floated back down the hall behind him. “And how can you bear not to know how it ends?”

Nepenthe paced as she waited for him. Her path between turns grew shorter and shorter until, Tessera saw with sympathy, she seemed to be turning circles in the middle of the floor.

Finish it, the queen told her silently. Laidley is right. We will not know all there is to fear until you do.

As though Nepenthe heard, she stopped her futile circling to face the open book.

She moved toward it slowly, one soundless step at a time, as though she were trying not to awaken some terrifying monster. She reached out, touched the pen lightly with her fingertips. Just as noiselessly, Tessera moved off the stack of slabs she sat on and went to watch over the transcriptor’s shoulder as she finally picked up the pen.