The View From Castle Always

by Melissa McShane

  The unvarnished honesty of his words left Ailanthe with nothing to say. “Coren,” she began, hoping his name might spark a train of thought that would let her answer him with some honesty of her own.

  He turned toward her, an unfamiliar expression on his face, and opened his mouth and said, “Ailanthe, I—”

  “My lady, good sir,” Tristram said from the doorway. “I have discovered something I believe you must see.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  “It was a chance discovery,” Tristram said. They stood in one of the book rooms on the fourth floor, an interior room with no windows and all four of its walls covered by bookshelves. “There is a gap here where there is none elsewhere. Then I saw the marks on the carpet.”

  He pointed. There was a half-inch gap between two bookshelves, and barely visible on the carpet was a quarter circle arc with one of its endpoints lining up with the gap. “I guessed at the room’s existence, and sought out the mechanism that would open it.”

  He’d wrecked the room in doing so. Most of the books had been removed from the shelves and piled haphazardly on the floor and on the round table at the center of the room and on the three leather-upholstered chairs surrounding it. Tristram had also moved the bookends, which were horseheads made of scratched and chipped ebony, and scuff marks showed that he’d climbed some of the shelves to feel along their tops.

  “This is the device,” he said, indicating one lone horsehead remaining on the shelf. He tipped it forward as if it were bowing to them, and there was a click and one of the shelves swung open a fraction of an inch. Tristram took hold of its edge and pulled it open the rest of the way. “I have yet to enter,” he said. “I thought the honor should be yours, my lady.” Ailanthe nodded at him, too distracted to register his bow, and slipped through the gap.

  The hidden room was far too big to fit between the book room and the chamber with the mounted animal heads Ailanthe knew was next door to it. A dull golden haze of magic hung in the air, and she held her breath until she couldn’t bear it, but nothing happened when she inhaled the particles except a series of sneezes.

  Like the book room, it was windowless and filled with furniture. Shelves lined two adjacent walls, packed full of books with fraying leather bindings and embossed print worn away into illegibility. A glass-topped cabinet next to the door held an odd display of curios, with no theme Ailanthe could detect. There was a chair deeply upholstered in old gold velvet in the corner where the bookshelves met and another behind an oak desk stained dark walnut. The surface of the desk was bare except for a lamp and a sheet of some smooth green material nearly the size of the desk’s top.

  She moved around behind the desk and looked at the dozens of drawers of all sizes. “Don’t touch anything,” she told Coren and Tristram, who’d entered behind her. “This room is full of magic. Whoever it belonged to might have left traps for people like us.”

  “What magic do you see?” Coren asked.

  Ailanthe looked around the room more carefully. “Most of the items in that collection,” she said. “Some of the books. There’s a haze around the lock on the bottom of the cabinet, and another on these locked drawers here.”

  “I see no haze, my lady,” Tristram said.

  “I…have some magic,” Ailanthe said. “I can see which things are magical, and make things—” She raised her left hand and called another lamp into being. Tristan’s eyes went wide, and he jerked as if he wanted to take a step away from her.

  “Yet you are no kerthor,” he said. “How can this be?”

  “I don’t know, Tristram. I think this key may give me some of the power of the Castle. You really shouldn’t touch that.”

  “Most miraculous,” Tristram said, despite Ailanthe’s warning reaching out to touch the binding of one of the books. Nothing happened. He removed the book and opened it. “There is a book plate,” he said. “This book is the property of one Gweron. Have either of you heard aught of the name?”

  “No,” Ailanthe said. She gingerly opened a drawer with the tips of the fingers of her left hand; her right hand had begun to ache more severely, probably because of how roughly Coren had handled it in checking for broken bones. Inside lay pens, a penknife, and brass inkwells. None of them were magical. She shut the drawer and exclaimed, “Not that one, Coren.”

  Coren removed his hand from the book he’d been about to take. “Magic?”

  “Yes. I really don’t think we should touch the books.”

  “I agree. This entire room makes me nervous.”

  Ailanthe opened another drawer. It was full of blank white paper, crisp and neat like the pages of the books in the Library. “It might be important. We’re looking for a better understanding of magic, and this room is saturated with it.”

  “I didn’t say we shouldn’t investigate it. I said it makes me nervous.”

  “Me too.” A third drawer yielded several devices Ailanthe didn’t recognize, none of which were magical. She lifted one out and set it on the desk; it was a series of circles mounted on a base, each bearing a marble-sized orb, the circles centered on a much larger orb. The circles and orbs were made of brass, and its base was made of oak. Ailanthe prodded one of the circles, which wobbled.

  “An orrery,” Tristram said. “A model of the world and the other three planets. And of very fine workmanship.”

  “And yet it was stuck in a drawer,” Ailanthe said. She opened a few more drawers, but found nothing interesting and nothing magical. Coren slid the glass top of the cabinet open and examined the curios without touching them.

  “You said most of these were magical?” he asked.

  “Everything except the disgusting shriveled mouse corpse. I wonder if that was really part of the display, or if it just got trapped in there. Don’t touch anything.”

  “I’m not stupid, Ailanthe. I’m trying to work out whether there’s a pattern to this collection.”

  Ailanthe went to stand next to Coren. The shallow top of the cabinet was lined with white silk, upon which were arranged a metal butterfly made of colored wire, a red rose that looked as if it had been plucked that morning, a model house made of tiny bricks and slate roofing tiles, a square of roughly woven fabric with a bluebird and a rose painted on it, a handful of padlocks ranging in size from the size of Ailanthe’s palm to one no bigger than her thumbnail, and, strangest of all, a motionless sprite in its contracted ball-shaped phase. She pointed at it. “Do you see that?”

  “It looks like a dandelion clock. What is it, my lady?”

  “That’s what a sprite looks like to me. I don’t know how it’s visible to you.”

  “It looks dead,” Coren said. “If the sprites are even alive in the first place.”

  “Maybe they are,” Ailanthe said. She slid the cover closed. “I have no idea what it is, except that each of these objects has magic on it.”

  “Or was made by magic,” Coren said.

  “Or that.”

  “Dare you open that, my lady?” Tristram said. He pointed at the locked doors beneath the curio collection.

  “I think it’s a bad idea, Ailanthe.”

  “Anything locked in there might be what we’re looking for, Coren.”

  She fumbled with the key, her injured hand throbbing, and Coren carefully removed it from her wrist and handed it to her. She crouched and, left-handed, inserted the key into the lock and felt the familiar resistance as it reshaped itself to fit. A tingle ran up her arm, a pleasant feeling and not at all what she’d expected.

  She turned the key and the lock clicked open. She glanced up at the men; Tristram had taken two steps back, and Coren hovered over her left shoulder as if he were prepared to haul her bodily away from danger. She grinned at him and opened the door.

  A hot wind that smelled strongly of roses blew through the room, making Ailanthe rock on her heels. Coren took an involuntary step back, then his hand closed on her shoulder. Tristram said, “That is a lovely smell.” Ailanthe thought it was rather cloying and waved her
hand in front of her nose to dispel it. Coren sneezed. “We’re all going to stink of roses now,” he said.

  “There are worse things to stink of, good sir.”

  “True,” Coren said, surprising Ailanthe. She’d thought he would disagree with Tristram if he said water was wet. She leaned forward, pulling away from Coren’s hand, and peered into the cupboard. There were two shelves inside, and lined up on those shelves were sixteen glass spheres, each resting on a cradle of ash carved with symbols Ailanthe couldn’t read. All of them shone faintly with magic.

  Ailanthe reached in and removed one with its base. The sphere was bigger than her cupped hands could surround and seemed to be filled with water. “This is amazing,” she said, holding it out for Coren to see. Tristram stepped closer.

  Within the globe was a perfect replica of a grandfather tree, set in a base of green grass rumpled by its roots rising out of the ground. Ailanthe peered closely at it, but it quickly became blurry. She discovered the farther she was from the globe, the clearer the image became, and set the globe on the desk and took several steps back. At that distance, she could make out individual leaves on the branches. Another step, and she could see the veins on those leaves. She stepped forward and picked the globe up out of its base, and shook it. The leaves moved as if wind had ruffled them.

  “Is that a good idea?” Coren asked.

  “It hasn’t hurt me yet.”

  Coren snorted. “You have just summed up your entire approach to life.”

  “I never learn anything if I don’t take chances.” She placed the globe in his hands; he juggled it in surprise, but didn’t drop it. She turned her attention to the base. “How strange. We can read everything else in the Castle, so why not this?”

  It was a row of symbols Ailanthe was certain was a name, or a title, but was pure gibberish. She set it down and held out her hand for the globe, but it was intercepted by Tristram, who turned it upside down and exclaimed when a tiny smudge that was probably a leaf detached from the grandfather and floated down to rest on what was now the bottom of the globe.

  “These are all models,” Coren said, his head halfway inside the cupboard. He brought out one containing a miniature farmhouse and held it at arm’s length. “There are even tiny hens in the yard.”

  “Here’s a snow-covered mountain. I wonder that the snow doesn’t dissolve in the water,” Ailanthe said. “And—oh, it’s the Castle!” She put that one on the desk and all three of them stepped as far back as they could. It looked crisper and more finished than the real Castle. The tower looked unstable, as if it might blow over in a brisk wind, and Ailanthe felt uncomfortable looking at it. In fact, the whole model made her uncomfortable. It was so perfect she felt if she could step back far enough, she would be able to look through the windows and see herself looking out.

  She went back to the cupboard and continued pulling globes out, handing them to the men to line them up on the green surface of the desk. All were models either of buildings or some distinctive natural feature. None of the buildings were duplicated, but there were several mountains and cliffs and trees, and all were executed in the finest, most accurate detail Ailanthe could imagine. One contained a beautiful red rose, half-open and perfect, identical to the one in the cabinet, and Ailanthe gazed at that for some time before giving it to Coren.

  “Every base has something different carved into it,” she said. “I really think those are descriptions of what’s in the globe, or names possibly.”

  “I think you are correct,” Tristram said. “So what magic is upon them, my lady?”

  Ailanthe looked inside the empty cupboard, then at the lock. “The magic that was on the cupboard is gone,” she said, “but the globes are still glowing a little. I don’t know what it does. I don’t know what any of it does. It could be what makes the image become so clear at a distance instead of close up. It could mean they’re made of magic. I just don’t know.”

  “I am confident you will figure it out, my lady,” Tristram said with a bow. Ailanthe acknowledged his compliment with a smile, but inside she was burning with frustration. She’d learned so much and now she had a new mystery to solve. She was tired of mysteries. It felt as if the day had already gone on forever.

  “Maybe you ought to open these other locks,” Coren said. He’d gone around behind the desk and was sitting in the chair.

  “Did you just suggest I do something potentially dangerous?”

  “You made a good point, about finding something we might need in here,” he said, tilting back so the chair rocked on two legs. “And I think that key—” he pointed for emphasis— “may be absorbing the magic on the locks, or dispersing it, or something. I doubt the original purpose of the magic was to shower people with rose attar.”

  Ailanthe looked at the key. It was small now, with a single notched tooth, a simple key for a simple lock. “All right, but you need to move out of the way and stop playing with the furniture.” She waited for Coren to sidle out from behind the desk, then leaned over and, after a moment’s hesitation, slid the key into the first lock.

  The lock gave almost no resistance to the key, and again she felt the pleasant tingle run up her arm and into her shoulder. The lock clicked; she slid the drawer open, and said, “It’s empty.”

  The men crowded around to look inside. Tristram reached past her and put his hand into the deep drawer and felt around. “Possibly a false bottom?” he said, but his search turned up nothing else. Ailanthe shut the drawer and locked it again, superstitiously thinking the owner of the desk would want her to leave everything as she’d found it. Maybe she should have paid more attention to the order of the globes before they removed them. Then, impatient with her cowardice, she unlocked it.

  “One more,” she said, then, on a whim, took the key in her right hand, grasped it as firmly as her sore fingers would let her, and inserted it into the lock of the other drawer and turned it. The tingle that ran up her arm was stronger this time, and her hand immediately felt better. Even the bruising seemed diminished.

  She pulled the drawer open, reached inside, and withdrew a book. It was bound in yellow cloth over stiff boards and the tip of a feather poked out of the pages, like a bookmark. She opened it there and touched the feather, which came from a red eagle. “It looks like a diary,” she said. “It’s written in the same symbols as the globe bases. And it’s positively dripping with magic. Here’s the name Gweron again, inside the front cover. I wonder why we can read that when we can’t read anything else.”

  Tristram took it from her hands a little abruptly and flipped through the pages. “Indeed, my lady,” he said, with a hint of condescension that made Ailanthe bristle. “You are perceptive. I wonder that we cannot read it.”

  “We said that already,” Coren said, taking the book out of Tristram’s hands and giving it back to Ailanthe. “I don’t suppose you have any ideas on how we might read it?”

  “Not really.” She stared at the page, willing the symbols to make sense. She looked up at Coren, and something flickered at the edge of her vision. She gasped and slammed the book shut. “Did you see that?”

  “Danger?” Coren said, stepping closer to her.

  “I stand ready to protect you, my lady,” Tristram said, closing in on her other side.

  Ailanthe scanned the room, peering closely at the shadows, but nothing moved. “I…don’t know what I saw. Just movement.” She opened the book again. Still meaningless symbols.

  “I regret that I did not bring my sword,” Tristram said, pacing the room. “I allowed myself to be drawn into, no, lulled into complacency. This Castle has too many hidden dangers. I do not believe you are safe.”

  Ailanthe glanced at him, her mouth open to remind him she already had a protector, not that she needed one, and saw the flicker of movement again, right under her chin. She snapped her gaze downward and realized the flickering happened every time she passed her eyes quickly over the diary’s pages. “I found it,” she said. “But I don’t know wha
t I’m seeing.” She handed the diary to Coren. “Face the pages and turn your head quickly.”

  He complied, but said, “I don’t see anything but blurry lines.”

  “May I?” Tristram asked, and took the diary from Coren without waiting for permission. He repeated the experiment several times, muttering to himself, before finally saying, “Alas, I fear I see nothing as well. It seems this magic must be left to your divination.” He handed her the book with a flourish.

  “But I’m not seeing anything,” Ailanthe complained. “It’s as if the letters, the symbols, become clearer for a moment. That’s all.”

  “But it suggests there’s something more to be seen. What if the symbols cover up the real writing?” Coren said. “I think it’s worth your studying further.”

  “I agree.” Ailanthe closed the book with a snap and tucked it under her right arm. “Whatever it is, I’m taking it with me.”

  They left the hidden door to the study open and filed out into the hall, Tristram leading the way. Ailanthe saw Coren bristle at the Galendishman’s presumption, and couldn’t quite blame him for his reaction; Tristram did tend to behave as if he were in charge. “Shall we explore further, my lady?” he said, bowing to her.

  “I don’t think so. Right now I’m hungry and tired and I don’t care that it’s not quite time for dinner.”

  “Then I shall fetch food for us, my lady,” Tristram said.

  “That’s my job,” Coren growled.

  Tristram stepped back and made one of his sweeping bows at Coren. “Then I shall leave you to it, and escort the lady back to her chamber,” he said. Coren looked startled, then annoyed. By the gleam in his eye, Tristram had clearly planned to outmaneuver him. Ailanthe wanted to laugh at Coren’s consternation at leaving her alone with Tristram, but that would embarrass him, so she only said, “There’s a salmon filet in the cold room, if you wouldn’t mind bringing that?”

  Tristram offered Ailanthe his arm when they reached the stairs, which she wanted to refuse, but he had found the secret study, and he took such pleasure in his courtly game that she accepted it. He insisted on keeping the pace slow, exclaimed over her injured hand, and paid her so many extravagant compliments she wished she’d gone to the kitchen with Coren.