TWENTY-SIX

Nepenthe remembered. Her name sounded in her head with all the force of the refectory gong, implacable and riveting, reverberating through her. It was the name she had heard in her dreams, the name she must have heard on the cliff’s edge before her mother disappeared, and many times before that, in many different places.

“Of course,” she breathed, slumping on weakened knees to the stone floor, dragging the open book with her onto her lap. It had always been there, her name, haunting the borderlands of memory, and as familiar, now that she heard it clearly, as morning. “Of course.”

Then she froze like a mouse caught in a sudden spill of light in the larder. She did not dare blink. Something enormous had her trapped in its vision, its golden, watching eyes.

Thorns in her head twisted into poetry. The Lion sees through time, they reminded her. Into a different day. Beware if that day is yours…

It can’t be true, she thought numbly. It can’t be. “Bourne,” she called, unable even to tremble. Her voice was no more than a trickle of sound. She felt as exposed as if someone had lifted the palace like a rock to see what lay beneath. “Bourne,” she pleaded again in a cricket’s chirr, a bat’s squeal, unable to wrest any more sound than that out of her petrified self. Caught in a waking nightmare and with no help anywhere, she could not even scream. Bourne must have either been found by Vevay, or run away without Nepenthe. As though that would keep her safe. Or him. Or Laidley, or Master Croysus, or the Queen of Raine herself and her Twelve Crowns, all about to be overrun by an army pouring out of slashed veils of sky whose warriors were numberless as the fish in the sea.

“Bourne,” she whispered. “Help me. Laidley. Where are you? I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do.”

She became aware then of someone with her in the room, who was sitting on the stack of tablets Nepenthe used for a desk, and staring upward with equal intensity, as though she, too, were waiting for the roof to fall. Nepenthe jumped wildly, her voice freeing itself finally in a scream. The pale-haired stranger slid off the tablets and came to crouch next to Nepenthe, who was trying in vain to place her among the library scribes. She seemed oddly windblown; the pearl pins in her tangled hair had slid askew. By the look of her elegant dress, she must be some highborn young woman who had been amusing herself pretending to be a scholar, and who had gotten herself lost among the antiquities.

“Who are you?” Nepenthe demanded bewilderedly.

The girl gazed at her out of blue-washed eyes that seemed too wary and secretive to belong to a noble’s spoiled daughter. She said, “I am the Queen of Raine.”

Nepenthe swallowed a lump like a knot of words. The queen, she realized, had been sitting beside Nepenthe’s translation of the thorns. If she had found her way this far into the ancient depths of the palace, they must be why.

“Did you — ” she managed finally. “Did you read — ”

“Yes. All of it. You remembered your name.”

“I did.” Her voice wobbled badly. “And there is nothing I can do about it. No way I can get us back to the time before I remembered it.” She drew breath abruptly, looking askance at the queen. “You were watching me. You were invisible. Like a mage.” The queen nodded. Her small, pale face didn’t much resemble the face on her coins; it seemed blurred yet, somewhere between child and woman. “Are you a mage?” Nepenthe asked incredulously.

“You aren’t what I expected either,” the queen answered, responding more to Nepenthe’s thoughts, she realized, than to her question. “I received warning of the thorns threatening the Twelve Crowns from the Dreamer.” Nepenthe, her lips pinched tightly, gave a muffled squeak of despair. If the Dreamer saw the danger in them, then there could not be a single shard of hope that the tale they told might be only a tale, and the Emperor of Night only the hoary fragment to which poetry clung. “I went searching for the thorns and found them here. I had no idea who, in my own house, held such malice toward my entire realm. So I hid myself while I waited for the terrible sorcerer. It was you.”

“I’m an orphaned transcriptor,” Nepenthe whispered. “I’ve been in the library all of my life. There’s not a breath of magic in me except for changing fish and thorns into words.”

“Not,” the queen reminded her, “an orphan. Not now.”

Nepenthe closed her eyes, trying to hide again. “I’m sorry,” she said through icy fingers. “I’m so sorry. I don’t know — I don’t know if there is any way to stop them —Axis and Kane—”

“Is that what you would choose? You could see your mother again and know your father. You could be rich and loved and protected. You could go anywhere in time, know anything you want. You could be Queen of Raine.”

Nepenthe opened her eyes, stared at the young queen wordlessly. She was trembling now, chilled to her marrow as though all the boisterous winds of plain and sea had seeped through stone into that small chamber. She said finally, haltingly, “I never knew my father. My mother died when I was barely old enough to crawl. The librarians are the only family I have ever had. This library is my home, and the books in it the only places I’ve ever wanted to go. I’ve never dreamed of having anything else. Except maybe Bourne. And now a three-thousand-year-old marauding emperor and a sorceress who can travel through time say I am their daughter and they want to put your crown on my head. They’re nothing to me! I’d rather keep my familiar world — books and ink pots and languages and Laidley and Bourne — That’s what I would choose. If I had a choice. But I don’t think we do.”

The queen glanced up at the ceiling again, which so far remained unmoved. “I’ve been here all afternoon waiting for you. I’ve had some time to think.”

“There’s nothing anyone can do against Kane.” Her throat ached with unshed tears. “You’ve read her book. You can see that.”

A step at the door made her jump again. It evidently startled the queen, who promptly vanished. Laidley, his expression curdled, his mouth taut, came to Nepenthe’s side to stare bleakly down at her.

“Laidley,” she said without hope. “Did you find — ”

“Nothing. I think we’re in trouble.”

“We are in trouble. The ending of the book of thorns summoned Axis and Kane to Raine.”

“No,” Laidley breathed, his face turning the color of boiled almonds.

“Yes.”

“What does it say? Tell me exactly.”

She read it to him, still crouched in the middle of the floor; he sagged down next to her, listening mutely.

He said softly, when she finished the brief passage, “She loved you very much.”

“She left me. This is my world.”

“She gets what she wants. She wants you back.”

“Laidley,” she wailed.

“Don’t you want to be Queen of Raine?”

“Don’t even think that!” she said fiercely, and saw the sudden, dreamy look in his eyes. “Stop seeing me like that! I’m not a desert princess. I am a transcriptor in the royal library of the rulers of Raine.”

“Raine is on the verge of war anyway. Does it matter who starts it?”

“Stop,” she said sharply, aware of the queen somewhere within the dust motes, but Laidley went off anyway, pursuing his thought.

“Think about it. You’d have your mother beside you to help you rule. You’d see the world instead of dwelling down here like a cave-bat. You could travel to any known kingdom. You could be there at the birth of epic; the point where the stark language of an event becomes colored with imagination.”

“Laidley— ” she said between her teeth. “Why are you saying these things to me? You can’t really want them for me. I might ascend to an unimaginably brilliant life, but where would you be?”

“Still here, from the sound of it. I can’t see Kane permitting the destruction of a library, and she does value translators.”

Nepenthe’s eyes stung drily. “How can you think I would choose such a thing if I had a choice at all?”

“Who would blame you?” Laidley asked simply. “History moves in great, messy shifts of power, in choices made as though by too many people building a house, where one misplaced stone in the foundation slips under the weight of another stone near the roof. Even if the thorns have lost their power and nothing happens to you, Ermin’s war may cause enough chaos in the Twelve Crowns to shift power from the First Crown to the Ninth. Or it may pull us all into many squabbling kingdoms, and ten years from now, when we prepare for yet another siege, you may well wish that you had made a different choice today.”

“I don’t have a choice,” she said grimly. She took his hand then, and he turned a rich, winey color she had never seen before. “But I do know this one thing: you have known me and loved me day after day for years. That is more valuable to me than a mother who left me at the edge of the cliff for the librarians to find before I had a tooth in my head.”

“Well,” he said gruffly, with a trace of his sweet smile, “that’s something for me to remember when you’re dressed in silk and surrounded by peacocks.”

“Don’t — ”

“I don’t understand why you wouldn’t want this, if it’s remotely possible — ”

“Because she only exists in a different language!” she cried. “She’s nothing more to me now than thorns. On a page. In a book. Even if she becomes real to me, how could we even talk to each other? And it sounds so lonely. I’ll be surrounded by people from all kinds of worlds, and I won’t know any of them, and none of them will know me. They won’t know my history, since it doesn’t exist yet, and theirs is so old it barely exists except in poetry. It will be like living with dreams and ghosts. I’d rather take my chances with the only life I know, and —

“Who is that?” Laidley interrupted bemusedly.

“Our history in the making, and Ermin of Seale at our door instead of —” She became aware of the queen beside her again, listening intently. “Oh. This is the Queen of Raine. She was warned of the thorns and came down here searching for them.”

Laidley gawked. “You don’t look like the coins.”

“I know,” said the queen.

He flushed again. “I’m sorry. I don’t — I don’t know how I should talk to you — and I guess I’ve said a great deal too much already.”

“It seems moot,” she answered evenly, “at this point. I may not be queen for long.”

“Oh.” His hands slid up his arms then, gripped hard. “Oh,” he said again, the word wavering as though he had begun to lose his balance. “It’s true, then? We really are about to be attacked.”

“So it seems.”

“Well, should we—what should we—what,” he suggested, “about Vevay? Can she stop them?”

“I thought you preferred a different outcome,” the queen reminded him.

“That was speculation,” he said dazedly. “Scholarly babble. I really prefer a simple world in which I can see Nepenthe every day.”

“I see.” Her young voice sounded a bit less remote. “I would not like to suspect sedition in my library.”

“No. It was more resignation to the inevitable. Is it?” he inquired, his eyes widening nervously. “Inevitable?”

“So it seems,” Nepenthe said tightly.

“What about the mages at the school? Can’t they do something?”

“I believe so,” said the queen.

“And Vevay — She must be as old as Kane — she might think of something.”

“We’ll ask her,” the queen answered, “since she has been here listening for some time.”

Laidley closed his eyes, put a hand over them. Nepenthe rose finally from her mouse’s crouch on the floor, as a line or two that seemed not Vevay at all sketched themselves in the air. She closed her own eyes, stepping toward what her heart had recognized before it had finished shaping itself.

“Bourne.”

She felt his arms around her, melting her ice-locked thoughts, her hoar-frosted bones. “I went to Vevay,” she heard him say. “I was so afraid that the thorns might have us all trapped in their tale.”

“I think they do. At least you’re here with me now. Stay with me,” she pleaded. “No matter what happens. Promise — ”

His hold tightened around her. “For as long as you want me,” he promised blindly into her hair. “I will stay.”

“Well,” Vevay said, her voice so tart that it drew all their attention as she stood among the dusty remnants of forgotten kingdoms. Her long, silvery hair seemed to spark with anger and frustrated power in the gloom. “Never in my very long life — though not quite so long as you, Laidley, seem to think — have I had to deal with war against Raine from the depths of the royal library. And no, I have not got a single inkling of what to do next.”

“I do,” said the Queen of Raine. “I know how to hide.”