by Chris Howard
Gregor's eyes widened, and he covered his shock by returning a short bow. Holy Ocean, these Alkimides are insufferably haughty. Even their maids and bodyguards think they rule the world—not just the seaborn.
"I have wonderful news as well, Gregor." Ampharete kicked into a sitting position. "One of my past Wreath-wearers, Eupheron, has examined her from the inside, and tells me she is strong. Not that I needed to hear this from him. She kicks me constantly."
Gregor stared at her, a smile sharpening his mouth at the corners even as it sagged open. "A girl?"
"I'm going to name her Kassandra after Rexenor's greatest lord."
"I am...so happy, Ampharete."
"Don't just float there." Ampharete waved him over, wincing. "Help me with these." She grabbed her breasts. "They're so heavy, I'm going to burst. I need you to loosen the bands." She paddled, turning her back to him, letting the folds of a brocaded coverlet fall to her waist.
He swam up, jaw tightening as his eyes roamed up her bare neck into her rich brown hair. He sucked in water, stuck the book boards under one arm, and slid his hands along her shoulders, his fingers working one of the knots in the bands of cloth.
"Let me hold those. You will need two hands." She showed him a hint of a smile through her braids, hidden from Zypheria's view.
He nodded distractedly, said, "Yes, milady," and handed the decorated boards over her shoulder.
She recognized them as the covers for the book he was assembling from the scraps of original spell scrolls of the Telkhines. There was nothing but roaming smears of ink on the pages now, but he promised that when all of the scraps came together, they would form into the letters intended by their scribes. He'd disregarded his teacher's advice to give up the search—and even his teacher's teacher—Old Strates Unwinder, a hundred years ago, had thought it foolish to pursue.
A more than accomplished sorcerer, Gregor had known nothing about bookbindery, but learned to sew and had special thread made. He traveled to far off places, ocean corners, to the floors of abysses, unlocking the caves and chambers containing the pages. He fought the guards and two-thousand-year traps placed on the vaults by the Alkimides. He untied complex knots that bound the pages in chambers of ice. The task consumed nearly every hour of his life—the life he poured into the book. They were dead pages, broken leaves rotting in their own magic, waiting for Gregor Rexenor to bind them into something whole and new.
Ampharete wanted to hear his voice, excited about the Telkhines scrolls, the wonder contained in their words, the recipes for power, the processes for creating things no man had seen since the Telkhines reigned over two-thousand years ago.
She glanced at Zypheria and assumed a feigned snobbish ignorance. "What are these?"
"Later." He leaned close as if one of the knots was giving him trouble, and breathed, "My love." He straightened, with a worried glance at Zypheria. "Tell me more about our daughter."
He let the bands of silk slide loose a finger's width at a time. "How does that feel?"
"Fine. A little more."
Zypheria kicked in circles like shark, watching every bend of his fingers on Ampharete's skin. He rewrapped the bands and tied them, wishing he had had the forethought to work up a magic knot that only he could untie. Then they would have to invite him back.
Ampharete lifted a hand, gestured to the ancients in her head. "Anaxareta tells me I ought to name her something else, that Kassandra is an inauspicious name."
He had heard Ampharete speak of this Wreath-wearer before. "Anaxareta, the music teacher?"
Her face tightened, and with a look at Zypheria, she said, "Queen Anaxareta of Alkimides, and a Wreath-wearer. Yes, she taught the lyre and kithara and song, and she ruled the Great City and all the seaborn for eighty years."
"Do not listen to her." He shrugged off her rudeness. He knew she was acting this part for Zypheria. "I love the name Kassandra."
"It pleases me that you approve," she said, making it sound as if the decision was his. "Eupheron tells me that by the position of my uterus and the growth of the child, it will be at most a month and Kassandra will be ready to come into the sea."
"Kassandra," he breathed. "That is a beautiful name, and she will be as beautiful as her mother."
Zypheria frowned and Ampharete handed him back the end boards to the book with a small smile, thinking that her lover had the most brilliant bluish-green eyes she had ever seen, the color of island shallows in the south, which led her to wonder if her daughter would have the same eyes.
Gregor showed her the binding he had made, end boards of thick woody gorgonia woven, pressed and covered. He traced the reverse crescent shape in the cover's center, symbol of the Telkhines royal house in gold with the points down.
At the first pause in his demonstration of the book's binding and the power he had embedded to hold the different lengths of the original scrolls, Zypheria interrupted and ushered him out of the room.
Gregor summoned enough courage at the door to say, "My love, I will return before Kassandra's birth with the means to protect you forever from your father's murdering hands. The throne is yours, Lady Ampharete."
"No. Please, Lord Gregor. You cannot leave until Kassandra is born. Then pursue the book."
He looked hurt, torn between two forces that would tear him apart. He bowed his head. "Very well, milady. I will wait for Kassandra's birth to pursue the book—your book." He paused, and had to push against the door to keep Zypheria from closing it. "I long to see what the pages will contain—as do my mother and father, but you know I am building the Telkhines book for you." Gregor bowed low to her. He gave her one more smile before he slipped away, and Ampharete cupped it in her memories like a delicate coral bloom.
She whispered bitterly, "I know you are, my love."
A month later, hours after Kassandra's birth, Gregor Lord Rexenor left his home with the end boards and all of the pages he had accumulated, heading south on Barenis, soaring in the deep welling off the western slopes of the Atlantic range.
Elizabeth Shoaler brushed the hair from her eyes and smiled down into her baby boy's face, saying in a soothing voice, "There's a whole big exciting world under the waves, Alexander."
She bent lower, their noses touching, her voice going childish and musical.
"Yes there is."
He giggled, squinting against the feeling's intensity, her hair tickling his throat and ears. He twirled away from his mother.
She let go of his waist and Alexander, two years old, baggy blue swimming shorts whipping in the wind off the ocean, stumbled forward. He jabbed his hands into the sky and eagerly grabbed her fingers. He didn't need to look up. He knew she would always be there. He pressed his feet into shifting lumps of sand, uncertainly at first, lifting them one by one, nearly dancing, and then he settled into a wider, solid stance that shaped his little body into an X, feet apart, arms over his head, his fists clenched, his left one around his mother's thumb, right circling two of her fingers.
Alexander made a happy cooing noise, ending in a squeaky edge of a laugh that he swallowed along with a gust of cold salt air off the Atlantic Ocean. His whole body shivered, delighted at the wind's pressure against his face, stunned by the thump of cold breath in his lungs. He heard the rhythmic crashing of the waves, watched bits of dried seaweed skipping along the sand and then lifted his eyes to the hard dark line at the edge of the world.
Elizabeth Shoaler looked up at the ocean. While her son faced away, toward the Atlantic, she let the tears flow from her eyes, dam up against the inside of her glasses, and run down her cheeks. Her long hair shuddered over her face, but she kept any noises of her pain inside.
Alexander had his father's hazel eyes, and they caught the sun with shifting hints of other colors. The thick red hair and freckles were from his mother's side of the family.
Elizabeth cried and watched the waves folding over the sand, whispering words while Alexander, face into the sea wind, with his mother's fingers tight in his own, felt
a two-year-old's invincibility.
By a dim light he dared to conjure, Gregor Rexenor sewed the final page into the book. His fingers trembled as they released the unmarked, papery skin. The page jumped forward on its own and snapped into the binding like iron to a magnet.
The book, now complete, returned to life.
The dull glowing point over Gregor's head, an inch from the cave's rough ceiling, flared and went out, leaving him alone with the book in the lightless depths of the ocean. His seadragon, Barenis, liked open water. He had soared to the massif's height on her back, and she had gone off for prey as soon as Gregor was comfortable with the safety of the cave.
The book of unevenly cut pages, about as thick, knuckle to knuckle, as the edge of his fist, was alive, bound in the end-boards he had created.
The pages seemed to know what he had been attempting. They had guided him for months, in dreams and hints of whispers, telling him where it thought the other pages were hidden. There was life—at least one—bound into the book with the pages. He didn't know it was part of the book, part of a single page he happened to have gathered, or if it lived in all of the pages at once, pieces of it scattered over the world.
The dark of the cave made the open ocean slightly less dark. Gregor's gaze darted to a shadow that crossed the edge of his vision, and drew him warily from the book.
He kicked beyond the cave's mouth, trying to focus on anything moving. There was little. He felt the ocean's current on his skin. A blacker smudge of motion far enough to be blocked out by a finger's width, drifted down in the fluid space that was not quite as black, and could have been anything, Barenis returning, a whale diving, a sinking bundle of debris from a ship's passing, the giant many-fingered fist of a kelp holdfast wrenched free by a storm's surge. He stared at it, noting the direction, south toward the Nine-cities. He also noted that the great city was far enough south that the glow of its cycling lights did not add the slightest edge of contrast to the horizon.
He still didn't feel safe here.
Gregor had just come from the Nine-cities on Barenis' back, clutching her shoulders between her two massive wing-like fins. Dragons were fast, and very few among the seaborn even knew how to treat them. The chances of someone following him weren't high.
He returned to the book.
It had been ripped apart two thousand years ago by the Alkimides and scattered secretly in various prisons and chambers and grottos, and at various depths and temperatures throughout the world's oceans. The final page had been guarded in the king's archives, but Gregor had managed to steal it from under Tharsaleos' murdering nose.
Where he floated at the cave's mouth, the ocean was only a thousand fathoms. The Nauson Massif towered over the seismically unsteady sea floor. From his distance and with the sea's darkness, the bottom looked like fertile fields deeply ploughed at odd angles surrounded by hundreds of giant slumping dark-cloaked hunchbacks.
Suspicious and only slightly comforted by distance, Gregor turned back to his book. Before he passed into the blacker wedge of the tunnel in the side of the Nauson Massif, he looked back at the small dark shape one more time.
Gregor drifted a foot off the floor, pulling the book upright against the rock wall, nestling it in the corrugations of a deepsea sponge cluster. He curled one hand into a claw, held over his head almost to the cave's ceiling, and then poked and bent his fingers in small whirling motions. Where his fingers drew patterns, a green light flared, brighter and more daring than the last, coiling and combining into a pulsing ball of light, enough to read by.
The spot of motion against the ocean's steady background worried him again, enough to draw his gaze back twice, but not quite enough for a full sweep of apprehension. "Focus," he said to himself. He forced himself to look at the book.
Gregor's fingertips glided over the cover, curled around the top edge and pulled it open. It swung freely and the pages fanned out, pale and dead under the green glow, but he could feel life in them. The edges seemed to swell with the surrounding water, expectantly, urging him to flip through them. He pulled the first page over, looking for any sign of letters or pictures. Nothing appeared. He flipped more pages, one at a time, and then picked through ten or twenty in a clump. Nothing. Every one was blank, even though writing had appeared on them, still and bold, when he had found some of them.
What is your name? The voice came from the binding, slow and bubbling, with the demanding tone of the tides.
Gregor's hands shot away from the book. He kicked away, backing into the cave's opposite wall, scraping his head. He hadn't expected the book to speak to him directly. All he'd heard from it so far were whispers that died when he tried to listen for more, and dreams, long wearying dreams of faraway places and strange depths.
He did not answer at once and the book continued asking questions and making assertions, like a man emerging from a long sleep into a strange world.
What is this place? The book answered its own question before Gregor could. We are in the sea. You are seaborn. I can feel the curse on you from here. Move closer. Place your hand on the open page.
Gregor cleared his throat, straightened his spine, and moved toward the book. "I am Lord Gregor of House—"
A Rexenor. I might have known. House Rexenor, disreputable, unworthy, but powerful and clever in your own right. The tone of its voice turned milder. Only one of House Telkhines may discover everything on these pages. But you are the re-maker. I will give you a chance to learn something.
With that, the pages flipped to the center of the book and letters spiraled over the flat surface, flowing into adjoining pages like patterned black shapes on the surface of floodwaters. Letters he recognized, Hellene, in an ancient hand with a few unusual abbreviations and elisions. He bent closer to read it.
Patience, said the book. I must find a Telkhinos, the nearest, and most pure.
It had been more than two thousand years since the book had been whole and it had trouble remembering exactly how the correct forms went. There had always been a Telkhinos present and nearby, very close. This was new. The reader wasn't from the proper bloodline. It sensed no close member of House Telkhines, the masters who had created the book in the first place. The re-maker was a Rexenor. At least he wasn't an Alkimedes, the usurpers. Nothing for them. The book snorted in contempt and got down to business.
It sent out its thought, first like the octopus, in eight directions, then dividing each segment in two, then again, the sensing tendrils reached far and deep, seeking the nearest man or woman with Telkhines blood.
Elizabeth Shoaler stood and walked Alexander toward the waves. He bounced over the cold shiny flats, his freckly skin coated with wet sand.
"Let's go feel the water." Said Elizabeth excitedly. "Do you want to get your feet wet?"
His hands in hers, Alexander stepped into the cold folds at the ocean's edge. He went in further, up to his knees, and stopped.
He shivered, not yet understanding the source of the sensation of cold. He looked down at the foam rushing around his legs, his toes and heels sinking deeper into the sand as the ocean sucked the wave back and elliptic motes formed around his feet. The water felt cold and reassuring. Like his mother's hands, Alexander could reach out for the sea and it would always be there to accept him.
The book sent more of its power down sixteen of the sense paths toward the northwest. It felt something, faint and unusual. The tendrils lengthening into the east had met land, a few small spikes rising from the floor, the Azores, then they were past, but soon slammed up against the coast of Portugal, north Africa, parts of Spain, just fingering their way through the straits between the two continents. Directly south the book touched the pentagonal walls of the Great City, but found only traces of the bloodline it sought, so diluted that it would rather trust the Rexenor lord—and there were too many from the dreaded House Alkimedes.
West and south the tendrils struck more land, Brazil, islands in the Caribbean Sea, and further up, the American coast. It was
through the sixteen in the American northeast that the book directed most of its power, pulling all the others back in, except for the few that still tried to reach home, the isle of Rhodes.
The book found a child first, along the coast of the western continent, a direct descendent of the Telkhines royal house. The forms had been met, even if the process had been lengthy and unusual. As long as there was a Telkhinos lord in the ocean, it could proceed.
Until I learn more about you and your motives, Lord Gregor, I will only allow you to see two pages, this one and its face. Nothing more.
"That is well." Gregor scanned the first page with a title that puzzled him, oikouria, a long list of what looked like attacks using a novel combining of light and sound, a form he had never before seen. He slid his finger down the page, picking one at random, read and memorized the song that fused the two forces and the gesture that triggered it. He sang the words aloud and felt a shiver in the water around him. Then he turned the book off—pulled a cord that loosened the binding enough to separate the sheets. He didn't know what it was capable of, and certainly wasn't going to leave it alone while he tested the attack.
He had never felt more fragile, never before carried around this much force. It frightened him. A thin squeak like escaping pressure burned in his ears. He paused, hoping that the power of the spell had been contained, and then he concentrated on holding the trigger gesture in the front of his mind.
Afraid to release it in the cave, he turned and nearly impaled himself on the tip of a spear.
"Do not move or make a noise, Rexenor. I'll cut your throat in one motion, and the rest of your head in another."
Gregor held his hands out, fingers spread. He clamped his mouth shut, and the soldier motioned him to swim forward from the cave. Seven other soldiers kicked up, three with swords, the rest with short black spears with curved blades for heads.
