The Book of Forbidden Wisdom

by Gillian Murray Kendall

  “Well,” I said, “no.”

  “But it’s not fair to you, is it?” he asked. “If it ever was.”

  With that, Trey got up and walked off into the twilight.

  “Why did you just let him go?” asked Silky.

  “Trey makes me so unhappy that it’s confusing,” I said. “And then there’s Renn.”

  “You just like him because he’s all murky,” said Silky.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Yes, you do,” said Silky. “But I know how it’ll end.”

  “I wish you’d tell me.”

  “No,” said Silky. “It’s going to be a surprise.”

  We sat and listened to Renn for a while longer, and then I stood up and followed Trey into the growing darkness.

  Chapter Thirty-­three

  Every Wise Man’s Son Doth Know

  I followed him to a dried-­up riverbed. The moon wasn’t up yet, but I could still make out his pale face and his light shirt.

  He didn’t turn toward me.

  “I was proud of being your rescuer,” he said.

  “We should take turns doing the rescuing. My turn.”

  “Better go away, Angel,” he said. “You’re all right. You can take care of yourself, and I really do know that’s a good thing.”

  “Then what is this about?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Trey.”

  Silky, I knew, was in anguish over the rift between Trey and me.

  So, it turned out, was I.

  We walked down from the clearing and onto the dry riverbed. The dusk was moving into night.

  “Wait for me, Trey,” I said. He stood still. When I had caught up to him, we walked together, and we were silent, although it wasn’t like the old days. It wasn’t a comfortable silence.

  “I always wanted to marry you, you know,” he said.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t say anything,” I said.

  “No,” he said. “I might as well tell it now. All those long years of friendship—­each day I knew I wanted you, and each day I knew we could never marry. I had no land to please your father. And I couldn’t make you love me—­not that way.”

  “Trey—­”

  “Not enough to throw away everything and live on a sliver of land,” he said. “And then after your wedding was broken, and you came with me, I had hope.”

  “Trey,” I said again, but I could hear the difference in my tone.

  We had missed so much.

  “I would have married you,” he said. “Even if you did it solely to save your honor. Even if you meant it about living together as brother and sister.”

  “And there was a time,” I said, “not long ago, when I would have married you entirely for my honor’s sake. I understood nothing. I wouldn’t do that to you now.”

  “I imagine not.”

  “It has nothing to do with your face, Trey. My whole life I never really loved anyone. Not that way.”

  “Leth? At the beginning?”

  “No,” I said. “Even my father saw my indifference. But it seemed the thing I was supposed to do, and I thought it was good that I would become very powerful. I understand more about power now.”

  “We all do.”

  We walked on. I thought of all the time I’d spent with chaperones and attendants and those paid to protect my virtue. I took his hand.

  “That feels nice,” he said.

  “To me too.”

  “I’ll never marry now, of course. Even if before I could have brought myself to marry someone other than you, it wouldn’t have been fair to her. And no woman would have me now.”

  “Of course you’ll marry.” His hand was warm in mine.

  “With this face?”

  “Have you seen the lumpish, dough-­faced man-­boys that girls trip over each other to marry?”

  “Landed lumpish dough-­faced man-­boys.”

  I dropped my eyes and looked down at my shoes thoughtfully. They were damp and muddy.

  “Do you love Renn?” he asked. “Am I right? If I am, I’ll never bother you again. Angel?”

  “Yes?”

  I forced myself to raise my eyes. Trey stood before me. All Renn’s interesting darkness now looked like no more than moodiness. Renn was probably a good man, but I didn’t know him at all. Love him? No.

  I looked closely at Trey’s face. Marred, imperfect, broken. I would have given anything to put him back together again.

  I still understood nothing.

  As I saw Trey now, standing before me, I also saw all the years we’d spent together. I found I was thinking of his fine-­boned hands, and how he could use them to handle a horse, a thousand-­pound animal kept quiet, controlled and collected.

  I had known nothing about love; I had known nothing about my own desire. I had been stupid from the first moment of Trey’s rescue, when I had thrown myself into his arms and let him take me off into the unknown.

  For the first time since we had been children, Trey and I were completely alone with each other. And I knew, suddenly, what chaperones were for.

  I released his hand and reached up to his face. At first he flinched, and then he caught my hands in his.

  It was almost dark. A light breeze ruffled my hair, and from somewhere came the scent of wild roses.

  “It’s all right,” I said.

  “What do you want, Angel?” He was hesitant, uneasy. And then he let me touch him.

  I touched the shiny new scar tissue with the tips of my fingers. Then I leaned up, and I kissed the edges of the marred space beneath his right eye. What to do next came as naturally as Silky’s aim with a crossbow was true. I kissed the left side of his face—­here, and there, and there. And then I kissed his mouth.

  The voices of my chaperones and tutors and friends and family and Arbitrators were utterly stilled.

  At first I could feel him hesitate, and then he pulled me to him, and I grabbed a handful of his thick hair as he kissed me softly, deeply.

  I started unbuttoning my shirt, and he put his arms on my shoulders and looked into my eyes.

  “Is this what you want, Angel?” His breath was short, and so was mine.

  “It’s what I’ve wanted for a long time,” I said. “I’ve just been too stupid to know.”

  He finished unbuttoning my shirt and then pulled it down, partway down my arms. Then one of his hands was around my waist, and he kissed my throat.

  A shock of pleasure ran through me. We were near the bank of the dry riverbed, and he pushed me, gently, against it, and then we were both pulling up my skirt as he kissed my forehead, my eyes, my cheeks.

  “I love you, Angel,” he whispered hoarsely, and I was about to reply when out of the darkness a form in a flowing white shift materialized.

  “Angel?”

  It was Silky.

  We scrambled. I buttoned my shirt while Trey tried to pull down my skirt and do up his pants at the same time.

  “Just a moment, Silky,” I called. I was having a little trouble breathing.

  That’s when Trey and I started laughing softly. Trey’s hands shook with laughter as we both realized that my shirt was misbuttoned.

  “Are you all right?” asked Silky. She was fully visible now, which meant that we were visible to her. Trey and I looked at each other, realized that we were too close together and frantically backed away.

  “I’m fine,” I said to Silky. “And Trey’s fine, too.”

  “Are you two fighting? It looked like you were actually fighting.”

  With that, the laughter bubbled up again.

  By the time we got back to the clearing with Silky, Trey and I were both suitably serious and covered in all the right places.

 
“You’ve been a while,” said Renn, and I thought that maybe he knew. He sounded casual, as if something had happened, but that, whatever it was, it didn’t matter much to him. I had never felt farther from his world.

  “I needed the air,” I said, which was so patently absurd that I almost began laughing again. There was, after all, air all around us.

  “Well,” said Silky. “This time I’m not the one wandering off somewhere.”

  I felt flustered. I needed something to sew. Something to clean. Something to occupy myself with. I found Jasmine’s bridle and started rubbing it with a soft cloth. Trey went to look at the horses.

  Silky came up beside me. She was close. So close that Renn and Trey couldn’t hear, and I feared, for an instant, that she had understood what had happened between Trey and me. But she was a young fourteen, and, besides, what we had been doing was so impossible and taboo and, well, unlikely, that—­

  I started to laugh again.

  “What’s happening, Angel?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said, muffling my laughter. “Maybe it’s anxious laughter. I was talking with Trey, you know. He’s upset about his face.”

  I suspected he was less upset now.

  “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” said Silky.

  “Go ahead,” I said.

  “I feel bad.” She lowered her voice. “Because I think Trey’s face is so horrible. He frightens me. He looks like a monster. He—­“

  “Come to the point, Silky,” I said crisply.

  “Well,” she said. “I just realized something. Just now. And I wanted to check with you that I’m right. Because it’s still Trey, isn’t it? And his face won’t be so scary when I’m used to it.”

  “Oh, honey,” I said. “Soon it won’t be scary at all.”

  “At least it’s gotten better.”

  I stopped fussing with Jasmine’s bridle and turned and looked closely at Silky.

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s getting better. His face isn’t nearly so stiff, and the shiny bits look softer, and—­“

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure,” said Silky. “Or I wouldn’t say it. The Aman fungus must still be working, don’t you think?”

  “Maybe.”

  Getting better. For a moment I could visualize such a scenario, and then I stopped—­because it didn’t matter.

  “You two are full of secrets tonight,” Renn called out to Silky and me.

  “We’re sisters,” I said. “What do you expect?” And I moved toward the horses then to be with Trey.

  “I wish we could race,” said Trey. “What do you say, Angel? A race in the dark with unknown obstacles ahead taken at a pace we can’t control. What could go wrong?”

  “You could break your necks,” Renn’s disembodied voice called out from the darkness. No privacy. No doubt my father was listening too.

  “If there were just a little moon,” I said, “I’d take you up on it.”

  “Bran’s faster than Jasmine,” said Trey. “I’d win.”

  I moved until I was as close as I could be to Trey without touching.

  “We’ve both already won,” I said.

  Chapter Thirty-­four

  Road’s End

  Zinda and Lark and a dozen of their sisters guarded Kalo and Leth all the way into Southern Arcadia. We moved quickly and, many times, ate in the saddle.

  When we were two days out from home, I finally asked my father.

  “Did you kill Gwen Pan?”

  “I—­no,” he said. “She died of the shuddering sickness a month after Kalo was born.”

  I nodded. He was lying of course.

  He wouldn’t have done the killing himself; his Steward probably arranged it. But it didn’t matter in the end: Father knew that I knew.

  It had been a long journey.

  Then we were one day out. We sat around the fire. Renn sang. He was looking forward to seeing Niamh and Jesse in Arcadia—­and Silky had already asked me if we could invite Jesse to our House. Even my father deferred to me now.

  Silky put her head on my shoulder, as my father took his time ringing the fire with stones. Trey was next to me.

  “Will you and Trey get married as soon as we get back?” asked Silky.

  “I suppose so,” I said.

  “Yes,” said Trey. He took my hand, and I didn’t pull it away.

  A wedding.

  I had been branded a harlot, and I had brought down both Leth and Kalo. I had seen pain and death and courage and heart. I had been wounded, and the pain from that wound would probably never entirely go away. I could bear all these things.

  But a big, arbitrated ceremonial wedding?

  I didn’t know.

  I wound my fingers through Trey’s, and, for the moment, that was all that mattered. The flames grew and danced and flickered. My father went to find more stones.

  After a while, I stroked Silky’s long golden hair. She would be all right. Much as I had always loved Silky, I had never given her enough credit for her strength and courage.

  Father rejoined us.

  “So while the door was coming down, you finished reading The Book of Forbidden Wisdom,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “So you know it all,” he said. “Your forever-­memory is still there.”

  “Yes.”

  “You read it to the end?” he asked.

  “We don’t have to talk about it right now,” said Trey.

  “We certainly don’t,” said Silky. She lifted her head from my shoulder and glared at my father.

  “I just want to understand,” he said. “What was the wisdom? Why was it forbidden? Did The Book ever say? Was there no wisdom at all?” He looked at me with a kind of desperation.

  I looked into the flames of the fire.

  “There was no wisdom,” I said.

  My father sighed, but it was a sigh of relief. I had mentioned Gwen Pan, so he must have known that I had garnered knowledge from The Book. Wisdom? Wisdom came with time. I had the knowledge to destroy my father’s House, and so my own, and also many others’, but I didn’t yet have an idea of what I should do. Whatever I did, all Arcadia would change.

  “We came a long way for nothing,” said Silky, but she was looking at me suspiciously.

  Trey laughed softly. He knew that I was lying outright, and he knew, too, that I would tell him about The Book. I would tell Silky, too. I would tell a lot of ­people. I would have to reshape our world—­because I had read a book.

  At the very end, The Book had asked a question.

  Who owns the land?

  We live on it for our time, and then we fade. Other men and women come to live on it for a while. Who owns the land?

  Call that question wisdom.

  But it wasn’t really true that I had read The Book to the end. After all, the last page had been missing, torn from the binding a long time ago, if the brown and stained ragged edges were anything to go by.

  “Of Love” was the title of the missing section—­the title that came before the page that had been ripped away.

  I thought I would never know what forbidden wisdom was there. As I watched Silky gazing into the fire, as I raised my eyes and caught Trey looking at me, eyes brimming, as I felt his hand still in mine, I wondered if the kind of wisdom that is truly forbidden could go in books. Perhaps it couldn’t be spoken or read; it could only be felt.

  Perhaps that was the meaning of the missing last page. Perhaps there had been nothing written on it at all.

  The next morning we crossed into my father’s estate.

  Chapter Thirty-­five

  Wild Roses

  Silky woke me up.

  “How can you sleep so late?” she asked. “It’s the most important da
y of your life.”

  “Again.”

  “That is not funny,” said Silky. “Leth does not count.”

  “Not anymore,” I said grimly, but Silky didn’t catch my ironic tone. One has to be a little mean to use irony, and Silky didn’t have a mean bone in her body. Not one.

  “I don’t even want you thinking about Leth or Kalo,” said Silky. “Or worrying about anyone showing up and claiming you.” We both knew whom she meant, but Renn and I had become good friends at the end. There would be no challenge from him. Kalo and Leth would be imprisoned for a time and then sent, stripped of Arcadian land, to Shibbeth. I was sure that they would find trouble enough to start there, but first Kalo would have to keep an eye on his lands—­his status was now so unsteady that the ‘Lidan Lords would be watching his estates like crows waiting for pickings.

  Silky threw my wrap to me.

  “Time to get ready,” she said. “You haven’t even had your Ceremonial Bath yet. And wait until you see the roses. This time, they’re perfect.”

  I had almost come full circle. But no Leth was waiting for me. No soft, spoiled, lazy landowner about whom I cared less than I cared for my horse.

  This day was very different.

  “Where did the roses come from?” I asked.

  “He brought them,” said Silky.

  They would be wild and fragrant cups of scent and color. Blush roses.

  “All right,” I said, grabbing the wrap. “I’m up. Nervous, but up.”

  “You weren’t nervous last time,” said Silky critically.

  “I had nothing to be nervous about. I didn’t care.” I saw that Silky had already been to the hand and throat painters. Her loose fair hair set off the dark markings, and I had a glimpse of what she would be like on her own wedding day.

  Silky went to the closet. My mother’s wedding dress had been ruined during our escape, but this one was a miracle, with portions of the old dress sewn in and the whole softly lit by pearls embedded in silk. Silky gently touched the lace.

  I had long ago thought Silky wanted to wear our mother’s wedding dress because it was beautiful and because it was our mother’s. I had been wrong. She had known I would inherit the dress.