The Book of Forbidden Wisdom

by Gillian Murray Kendall

  I thought it was going to be over then, but I heard a scream from behind. One of the road scum was pulling Niamh from her horse. When he had her on the ground, he yanked back her hair and bared her throat and then lifted his knife.

  Niamh would be dead in a moment. There was no one close enough to help her.

  I was wrong.

  Charmian, who took half an hour each morning to put on face paint—­who was lazy about mounting and dismounting—­flew off her horse and knocked the man down, tearing his weapon out of his hand. She threw the grooved knife down and went for his throat.

  With her teeth.

  It was Trey who finally got around to pulling her off the road scum. What she was doing was barbaric.

  But Niamh was unhurt.

  It helped that road scum weren’t used to resistance. Three were dead, including Charmian’s conquest, and the rest ran away.

  And I realized something that I hadn’t before: Charmian loved Niamh. Maybe Niamh was the only person in the world Charmian loved, but in my eyes, that love redeemed the coarse, lazy, shallow woman that Charmian had become.

  We took turns mopping the blood off Charmian’s face. None of it was her own. Silky suggested Charmian might want to use a twig to clean between her teeth. We were all very proud of her, and we listened to her new litany of complaints with something akin to pleasure.

  “Who would have thought Charmian had it in her,” said Trey.

  Niamh, supported by Jesse, came up to us.

  “Sorry,” she said. “Jelly legs.”

  “I could have taken his throat out,” said Charmian.

  “You did,” said Silky, and she looked at Charmian with new respect.

  “We’d better bury them,” said Niamh.

  “Do I have to help?” asked Charmian. “I’m exhausted from saving Niamh’s life.” And we all agreed that she didn’t have to help.

  We moved on until we came to the Long Straight Road. To the left, it ran north to the Spiral City and The Book of Forbidden Wisdom. To the right, it went south, until it came to the place where Shibbeth territory bulged into Arcadia, the place where Niamh and Charmian would turn east. And then, after some days of travel, they would finally reach the location where Niamh took the women she rescued. There Niamh’s charges stayed in safety until she could integrate them fully into the Arcadian world.

  It had been determined that Jesse would escort Niamh and Charmian.

  We all stood at the crossroads. The wind was coming from the east, and it was very cold.

  Jesse was looking steadily at Silky.

  “I’ll see you in Arcadia,” he said. “I’ll see you wherever you go.”

  “Will you two please stop?” I said.

  Trey reached over and grabbed Jasmine’s reins. “Come with me,” he said, and, as I protested, he led me away from the rest. “Give your sister a chance to say good-­bye.”

  “I need to be there,” I said. “I don’t want any touching. No. Touching. At. All.”

  But by the time he let me go back to the rest, it was too late. Jesse had Silky’s hand in his. And then he leaned over and kissed it.

  Trey bumped me with Bran. “If you say a word,” he said, “I’ll knock you off your horse.”

  “But—­“

  He moved to push me out of the saddle, and I could see in Trey’s eyes that he was serious. And perhaps, in this case, for this one time, he was right—­perhaps I should let Jesse kiss Silky’s hand. Silky was glowing with happiness—­and I wasn’t sorry that she could feel so deeply.

  Now that it was time to say good-­bye to Niamh, I found I had no words.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll be at your wedding.”

  “What wedding?”

  She smiled.

  Charmian was more effusive. She kissed Silky. She kissed me. Renn managed to avoid her, but she came perilously close to kissing Trey.

  “No wonder you liked roading with Garth,” she said to me. “It’s a lot more interesting than the restricted women’s quarters.”

  Then Niamh and Charmian and Jesse moved their horses onto the Long Straight Road, but in the direction south. We watched them for a long time.

  Only Jesse turned and looked at us again. I couldn’t read his expression at that distance, and he didn’t wave or gesture. He just turned. And then he turned away.

  And that’s how we said good-­bye to Charmian. And Jesse. And Niamh. I didn’t know if we would see them in this world again.

  Chapter Twenty-­eight

  The Spiral City

  In the northern Arcadian territory, we came to a rolling green land—­a land that looked as if it would be a good place to raise horses, cows or sheep, although we saw none. We had moved off the known map of the world into the place of bardsong.

  Beyond this land, in the remains of the Spiral City, was The Book of Forbidden Wisdom. When my mother gave The Book into the care of the Keeper, she could not possibly have imagined that I would one day need it to stay alive. And at first I couldn’t think why she would hide a document that would have opened all Arcadia to her children.

  And then I understood.

  Her children. All her children.

  Perhaps she had not trusted Kalo.

  We began to pass cottages, and, at each dwelling, the inhabitants tumbled out to greet us. They stared at Trey’s face, but they showed neither fear nor surprise. The children didn’t point or make fun. I realized why when we passed a knot of faceless children. The disease of the flesh had been here too.

  When I saw an older woman—­maybe in her thirties—­hanging out wash, I pulled up Jasmine.

  “Is this the road to the Spiral City?” I asked.

  “Where be you from?” she asked. Her accent was so strong that I had trouble understanding her.

  “Southern Arcadia,” I said.

  “You be a very long way from home,” she said. Or so I thought she said. She said “home” to rhyme with “lamb.”

  “But are we going the right way to the Spiral City?” asked Silky.

  “Yes,” she said. She showed no curiosity but bobbed her head and went into her dwelling.

  So. We were close enough to the Spiral City that ­people knew of its existence.

  As it grew darker, we passed a cottage with warm light coming from its windows. A moment later, three children and a grown woman stood before us. The woman’s face was friendly.

  “You be strange and strangers both,” she said, but she didn’t speak with any anxiety.

  “We’re from the south,” I said. “Your land here is beautiful.”

  She beamed.

  “I be Treena,” she said. “You’re welcome here if you’d like to stop and eat—­and I’d be happy for company, should you need a place to shelter for the night.” Through the doorway I could see a fire dancing in the grate, and something savory wafted from the dwelling. “It be vegetables tonight,” said Treena, “but fresh from the garden. Selt”—­she spoke to the tallest girl without waiting for our answer—­“go set places.”

  The meal was a simple stew. Honest potatoes and other vegetables.

  She, too, we learned, had heard of the Spiral City.

  After dinner, Renn sang. The news seemed irrelevant this far north. Instead Renn sang one of the great epics—­the lay of the young lovers who, rather than betray each other, were turned to trees.

  We had heard it before, but it was clear our hosts hadn’t. Treena and her children wept at the end.

  After Treena tucked her two youngest children away in their beds, she and Selt rejoined us.

  “It’s good to have you here,” she said. “It be lonesome sometimes, with my goodman dead these last four years. I have washing water that Selt can heat if you’d be liking that.”

  Washing. Being clean. It occurred to me that Treena had offer
ed because we smelled. And then I didn’t care.

  Silky and I scrubbed ourselves in the cottage from a bucket of deliciously hot water, provided by Selt. Trey and Renn washed out back. When we had finished, and they returned, we looked at each other—­in wonder.

  All that shiny, clean hair. Silky’s fell around her like silk, and her heart-­shaped face was radiant. I noticed again Renn’s classically handsome face—­I could spend a long time looking at that face—­but somehow now my eye lingered mostly on Trey. His face hadn’t changed—­indeed, I put linseed oil on it earlier, to take away its dry look—­but his hair looked shiny and soft, and I wondered what it would be like to put my hands in such hair. I gazed at him, and, for just a second, I looked past his disfigurement and into his eyes, and I saw there again the boy that I had always known to trust.

  And Trey gazed back at me steadily. There was so much in his eyes that I had to turn away.

  How was I supposed to guide Silky when I couldn’t even guard against moments like these?

  But it had been a long day.

  Silky and I began to bed down—­the others would sleep in a lean-­to by the side of the cottage. But Treena lingered. I could tell she was curious about us.

  “At dinner you said you be going to the Spiral City,” she said finally. “They say it’s nothing more than a ruin.”

  “We have business there,” I said.

  “Ah,” she said, in a tone that betokened a complete lack of understanding, “business.”

  In the morning, Treena and her family saw us off. She pressed food on us, and although I tried to give her money, she refused absolutely, and I saw that to persist would be to offend.

  We rode all day. The grass was lush, and there was plenty of food for the horses. The cottages soon spread farther and farther apart until we rode without seeing a single one. All day the wind was brisk; it whipped against my skin. I hoped the linseed oil was protecting Trey’s face—­I had given the final poultice, so he had little to shield him from the elements. I wondered how much Trey could feel through the disease-­mask, and if he were in constant pain.

  That afternoon, when the shadows were long, we reached a set of gates that might have been built for giants—­but that were now no more than twisted ruins. Flecks of gold leaf suggested that they had been gilded, but now the wood was dark and stained by water and weather. One of the gates had fallen in, and the regular-­sized door set in the other was jammed so that it was forever open.

  We had reached our destination.

  Once upon a time these gates had sealed the Spiral City from the world outside—­it had been a forbidden city.

  Now we easily rode through them.

  On the inside, the buildings around us had crumbled, and some had collapsed completely. We picked our way through streets littered with stone and brick and timbers. The city curled to the center, where, so my mother had told me, The Book of Forbidden Wisdom was guarded by the Keeper, her Steward. She had told me of him when I was a child. Or perhaps now the son of her Steward was guardian. The Keeper had taken his family, as well as The Book, north.

  Squab began limping, and our progress slowed. Silky dismounted and checked his feet.

  “Stone,” she called out. “Bruise but no real damage.”

  “You’ll have to walk him for a while,” I said.

  “We can all walk,” she said.

  But I did not have the patience.

  “I’m riding ahead,” I said. “You two stay with Silky.”

  “Are you sure, Angel?” asked Renn.

  “That’s a stupid idea,” said Trey.

  “No,” said Silky.

  I ignored them. It was as if I were being pulled; delay would have been almost physically painful. “I’ll see you at the center,” I said, and I rode on. Soon enough the walls of the city curved, and the others were out of sight. There were advantages to outranking them all: in the end there had been nothing they could do, in courtesy, to stop me from going ahead.

  And it was a relief to be alone. At home, in Arcadia, I was never alone. There was always an attendant, a maid, a chaperone, a tutor with me. Here, too, we were always at close quarters. To be alone, one had to take the little digging stick and go into the bushes; then the others would politely pretend one didn’t exist.

  The air became close as the buildings of the Spiral City drew nearer to one another, as the spiral closed, as the roofs seemed almost to meet overhead. I was in shadow all the time now. I moved slowly, and the others were beginning to catch up to me. I could hear Silky’s voice raised above the other two; a moment later, I could see them again.

  Then Jasmine seemed to become unsettled, and she pawed at the ground. I thought perhaps she wanted to be with the other horses.

  I don’t know where the riders came from, except that they must have been somewhere ahead of me, deeper in the spiral. They were dressed in the dark clothes and hoods of freemen, but some of them rode their horses in the style of Great Lords. At first they galloped directly toward me; I screamed a warning to the others and expected to be overwhelmed and taken in a matter of seconds. There was nowhere to go. I braced. But a moment later they galloped past me, all but one. I reined right and left, but he mirrored my movements, and I halted. He came right up to me until our horses were almost nose to nose. The man, I saw, was enormous, and he rode an enormous horse. This was no Lord in disguise but, by the mark I saw on his hand, an indentured servant. There would be no pity in this behemoth of a man.

  “You’re not the fair-­haired one,” the man said.

  He made me impatient. “Obviously,” I said.

  “You’re the dark one. The Lady Angel Montrose.”

  “Yes.” At my back I could hear outcries and straining horses and the noise of struggle.

  “Get off your horse.”

  There was nowhere to go. I got off my horse. The behemoth dismounted as well.

  As the giant approached, I looked beyond him, frantically. I saw that one building in front of me was quite unlike the rest. It had not fallen into disrepair. The façade was covered in what looked like beaten gold, and there were curious devices—­serpents, strange land animals, fish—­carved on the pillars in front. Its windows were unbroken. If one could get in, it looked like a good place to keep ­people out.

  The door to this building was painted a vivid cobalt blue flecked with gold. It was ajar. Behemoth was close to me now. I measured the distance to the door.

  And I ran.

  I must have surprised Behemoth, because I got pretty far. My hand was actually on the door when he reached me. He didn’t pull me back but pushed me inside, and then, with no regard for the proprieties, he dragged me through a room and then into another. We stopped in front of a window onto the street, and he jerked my arm up behind my back.

  I tried hard not to make a sound, but it hurt, and I’m afraid I did.

  I stared out the window, pinioned by Behemoth, in time to see Renn and Trey taken by the men of the dark riders. Silky was on foot, running, and she almost made it to the door of one of the tilted houses, but as I watched, one of the dark riders bore down on her. I was afraid they would shoot her down in the street with their crossbows.

  The man still had my arm held high up behind my back until I thought it would break; with his other hand, he covered my mouth tightly. I couldn’t scream to the others. All I could do was make small and feeble noises that had no chance of penetrating the glass of the window in front of me.

  Silky never had a chance. The dark rider galloped to her so hard and fast that for a moment I thought she would be trampled.

  But at the last second the horse spooked and swerved to the side.

  As the dark rider’s horse swerved, he did not so much fall as swing himself to the ground, and then he was on top of Silky. One of her arms was pinned, but she pushed at him with the other and tried to c
law his face. A sharp pain ran from my arm up into my shoulder, and I realized Behemoth had lifted my own arm some more. I must have been trying to struggle. I watched the street, helpless. Up until now all sound had been muffled by glass and stone. But now I heard a voice, high-­pitched and desperate.

  “Angel!” cried Silky.

  But there was nothing I could do.

  The dark rider hauled her to her feet, and when he did, Silky reached up and yanked back his tightly fitting cowl.

  I recognized the corn-­colored hair before I saw the dark rider’s face.

  It was Leth.

  Of course it was.

  With one hand Leth held the reins of his horse; with the other he dragged Silky over to where Renn and Trey were being held in check by the freemen and the other dark rider. She suddenly twisted to the side, and I knew, because I knew Silky very well, that she was going to bite him, as she had bitten Garth what seemed like so long ago. But Leth, feeling her struggle, first shook her as if she were a kitten—­and then hit her in the face.

  I could do nothing.

  But at that, the other dark rider left Renn and Trey with the freemen and rode up to Leth. He cuffed Leth on the cheek, and then he pulled back his own cowl.

  It was my father.

  As I watched Leth drag Silky back to the others, my father at his side, my shoulder and arm were cramping, and I was in agony. But then I felt it. I felt it first as a kind of relief, a very small letup in the pain that was beginning to spread from my shoulder across my chest, and it took me only a second to realize where the relief was coming from—­the man holding me was getting tired.

  His muscles must be aching, too.

  I made a move to get my arm down from behind my back, but he yanked it so far up that I thought he was going to pull it out by the root. I felt sick. But his other arm relaxed just a little bit.

  I could bend my arm at the elbow, and I immediately drove that elbow, with all the force I could muster, back into his side.

  Reflexively, he released his hold for a moment, but a moment was all I needed. And for that moment, it didn’t matter how big he was or how strong or how much someone was paying him for capturing Lady Angel Montrose.