TWENTY-FIVE

The child of Axis and Kane was conceived in the king’s secret chamber in Eben, and born in Gilyriad. For several months before the birth, Kane, who refused to risk her unborn child on the battlefield, walked the private, scented royal gardens in Gilyriad alone. Axis had left his consort and his army to return to Eben and attend to affairs of state. If Kane had asked him, he would have stayed with her. But she did not ask: it was far more prudent for him to go home for a while, placate the queen and see to his land. He would soon grow restless, she knew. But even great lions must wait for their prey with calm and patience; so he must wait in Eben, until Kane could give her attention once again to his battles.

In Gilyriad, Kane hid her condition well. She played the shy and monstrously ugly sorcerer at every moment, so that the wind breathed never a hint to Axis’s army that its Masked Sorcerer, who led them over the battlements of time itself, was a young woman and pregnant with their emperor’s child. When the time grew close and she wanted help, Kane left the palace. A dark-haired, barefoot woman dressed in patched linens sought aid from the ancient wood-witches. Her accent was peculiar, but the witches were nearly deaf, and anyway didn’t need to be told much. They took her into a shadowy hovel, laid her beside a fire scented with herbs and lavender. There her child was born, amid the delighted laughter of snag-toothed witches. The child of a noblewoman of Eben and the Emperor of the World and Time.

Their daughter.

Before the birth, as Kane wandered through the royal gardens, she gave a great deal of thought to the immediate future. The child must remain a secret. There was no room either in Axis’s public or private life, or on any battlefield for a child. It could not even be allowed to cry within the royal palace in Gilyriad. Kane could not nurse it there. No one could know about it, for she could trust no one not to gossip. That Kane was not a man but a woman, and had been Axis’s lover for years, and now carried his child, was a tale that would lose no time crossing the trade routes out of Gilyriad and finding its way to the emperor’s lands around the Baltrean. And from there to the queen’s ear in Eben. What she would do, Kane had no idea. The queen assumed that Axis had his lovers. But she had never been faced with the fact that he actually loved anyone. The discovery of such passion and devotion that had taken root long before her marriage and had flourished under her own nose for years after it might inspire such bitterness in the queen as would tear apart Eben, the land Axis loved most. Eben was the foundation stone of his empire. He had already battled to meld Great Eben and Lower Eben into one inseparable state. If the queen inspired her lovers with ambitions and promises to aid them, the foundation stone would crumble. And the emperor would be forced to turn his attention from all the worlds he had not conquered to battle to keep the one he had together.

In the gardens, before the child was born, Kane realized clearly what scant months she and the child would have together before she must leave it and take her customary place at Axis’s side. Sitting in the soft green shade, hawks crying in the pellucid blue above her head, she let her thoughts take her here, there, roaming all the kingdoms she had found for Axis, trying to think what would be best for the three of them. She examined every option, including taking the child and disappearing out of Axis’s life. But she could not leave him. Nor could she unmask herself and live openly with Axis as his battle-sorcerer and consort, and the mother of his child. The emperor’s wife would never allow such an interloper to come between Axis and her own heirs to his magnificent empire. It would shatter the peace between them and break their tacit contract: that the queen would be first at his side in the eyes of the world. For that, she had yielded him his heart, never suspecting that he had given it away long before he even knew he had it.

What to do, what to do…

The glimmerings of an idea came to her, not whole and clear, but piece by piece as the slow, tranquil days passed. If she could not raise the child, then someone must… in some secret place where the Queen of Eben could never find it, where no one would have the slightest inkling of the circumstances of its birth… But under such circumstances that it would find no valuable place in the world while it was raised and educated. It must feel the lack of its proper heritage until Kane returned for it… It must be well-educated, exposed even to the magical arts, for it would be the child of a sorceress and an emperor, and in such a mingling of enormous powers, who knew what abilities it might inherit… Above all, it must be safe…

Alone with her unborn child, these anxious thoughts filling her mind, she faced the uncertainty of their future. She began to write then, both to herself and to the child. Missing Axis, she wrote of him to soothe her longing, and to explain both herself and him to their child. She wrote in the language of their childhood so that no one chancing upon it would be able to read it and expose her. She set her own magic into the letters, so that they would come alive only for her child. Only her child, sensing Kane in every letter, would respond, for the magic would be in its own blood as well. Anyone else would see only a puzzling alphabet and feel no more than curiosity. Her child’s heart would recognize the language of Kane.

She carried the little book with her into the woods when her time came, for that language was all she had of Axis to comfort her.

The court at Gilyriad was accustomed to the sorcerer’s unpredictable wanderings; no one there questioned his absence. Axis was too far away to know how far she went when she left his world. She took only their daughter, the book, and a few practical gifts from the witches. She wandered through time, staying here for a week, there for a month, her face unmasked, her hair unbound, a passing stranger in every land. She worked small magics, did some healing, performed a few tricks to earn money for food and a bed. At no time did she attract more than a temporary interest in her powers. She had left the Masked Sorcerer in another world. No poets would have noticed the gypsy walking in their midst, the curly-haired child watching the world over her shoulder with great eyes that were sometimes one color, sometimes another, depending on the light. Kane herself did her best to forget her own name. Remembering who she was in her own world meant remembering that she must leave her child.

In her alphabet she could not find a thorn sharp enough to say that. Language would have to turn to thorn in her throat, come out in bloody words for her to say that. So she wandered, trying not to think, until at last she remembered Raine.

There on a cliff, she found the immense palace of the rulers of Raine. What had encompassed five Crowns the last time she looked had now become Twelve Crowns, ruled by a shrewd and vigorous king. With her secret ways, she explored the mages’ school in the wood, the palace, and the great royal library within the cliff. There, she learned, the librarians took in orphans and raised them as scribes. They grew up among all the wealth of the accumulated knowledge of the world.

They were well treated, valued for their skills, and encouraged to stay there; if they left the library they must make their own way in the world, for no one else claimed them.

Kane felt the thorns begin to grow in her throat, for it was there, on that plain so high above the sea that she could not hear the waves, that she must do the unthinkable thing. The one tattered, threadbare comfort she took in the deed she contemplated was the powerful and magical kingdom that she had found. This one, she would ask Axis to take for her and for their daughter. In this place, Kane could go unmasked at last, and their daughter would be openly acknowledged; she could freely love both Axis and their child for the rest of her life.

Only that thought gave her the courage to do what she must. She waited until she saw a kindly-looking librarian, dressed in their somber garb and with his packs full of books, riding along the cliff road on his way to the palace. Then she set the child on the high grass at the cliff edge and stood up. The sudden, inexplicable emptiness between them caused them both to cry out: she said her daughter’s name, and her daughter wailed the only word she knew. Kane’s tears blurred sky and grass and the bright, dancing winds into painful swirls of color. When she threw herself over the cliff under the startled gaze of the librarian, it was because if she had not put such abrupt distance between them, she would have snatched up her child and wandered the worlds with her, nameless and impoverished except in memory, rather than part with her again.

She lingered in Raine just long enough to be sure that her daughter had indeed found a home among the royal librarians. Then she returned, empty-handed, to Gilyriad, where Axis, sick with dread at her absence, had shut himself in the palace to wait for her.

He stepped into the terrible emptiness she had felt since she had left their daughter on the edge of the plain above the sea. He filled her arms, but not the aching hollow in her heart. She could not cry; she could not speak. She could only cling to him and tremble while he kissed her and murmured incoherent questions. Finally, he drew back a little to see her face.

“Where is our child?”

She wept then, enough to fill the Baltrean Sea and back the Serpent up until it flooded the fields of Eben with saltwater. She told him in their secret language, each thorn tearing her throat as she spoke it.

“There was nothing else I could do,” she said again and again. “I did not know what else to do.”

He held her, not understanding anything at first, and then finally beginning to see the impossibilities he had not noticed before: the deformed sorcerer nursing a child, or Axis’s lover fighting openly beside him on the battlefield, becoming the subject of romance and epic, while his wife smoldered in Eben; the child Kane would not dare leave behind her dragged from battle to battle, dodging arrows as she learned to walk.

“I did not know what else to do.”

Finally, when they had both wept all the tears in Gilyriad, their grief blunted with weariness and the comfort of their love, she told him about her plans for Raine.

“I want that land,” she said, “for all of us. When the time comes, you will take it. But you will not conquer and vanish. This kingdom that values its scholars and mages you will make part of your empire. Do this for me.”

“I will,” he answered simply, for he trusted her vision, even if he did not always understand it. “How will we know when the time is right?”

“I have written something for her to read when she is older. I will see that it gets to her. It is her history, her background, her birthright. And our private history, yours and mine. When she understands it, she will tell us. When that time comes, she herself will open the Gates of Time and summon the Emperor of Night. When you take the Twelve Crowns, you will crown her Queen of Raine and she will rule in your name.”

The Lion of Eben bent his head to Kane’s wishes and raised her hand to his lips.

“And when will the time come?”

“The time is now,” I told him.

For so it will be now in the future when you read this, my daughter, our daughter, child of Eben and the greatest empire the world will ever know. You are born of the timeless love between the Lion of Eben and the Masked Sorceress, and you are heir to all the open Gates of Time.

Open the Gates.

Summon us.

Remember your name.