Rereading the Rules might help settle her mind, at least for the moment. Inbecca bundled the rest of her goods back into the saddlebag and went back to the firelight.
The knights, all but the sentries and Tildi’s guards, had gathered in a double circle around one of their number, a tall man with an austere, bony face. He opened a book and began to read from it in a low voice. The others murmured in unison at intervals. Magpie tried to read the title he could just see embossed in gold on the leather cover, but it was obscured by the silvery rune. That said book. He knew that symbol, at least. Nothing extraordinary there. Inexorably, his eye was drawn back to the one book within his vision that was extraordinary, down to the name it wore. The enormous scroll, set on the outspread blanket on the ground, shimmered with the rune book, but that pictogram was as ornate and intricate as a piece of lace that one of his mother’s ladies might create. More so, probably.
Its protector was the most unlikely person possible, a smallfolk. Amused, he watched her trying to bed down in some semblance of privacy. The girl had dignity befitting a queen. If he didn’t know smallfolk, he would have assumed she was a titled lady with a large estate and many servants. Probably she came from a tiny cottage, the only child of elderly parents who had passed away, leaving her adrift in their unforgiving society. In his fancy she had grown up surrounded by books and tutors, gravitating toward magic as the best outlet for her intelligence, curiosity, and undeniable courage. Lakanta would know the girl’s story, Magpie thought, glancing at the dwarf woman, who was bustling around making herself comfortable. He hesitated to ask, since the girl’s real history could not be as luxurious or as sheltered as he might have wished her to have had.
We put such importance on our little doings, he thought wryly. None of it matters at all to the stars or the trees. Unless the Shining Ones meddled with them, too.
He had to believe now that he saw what Tildi saw. The runes were an unmistakable sign he couldn’t ignore. He felt a song starting to write itself. He felt deep pity for the young knight. What was his name, Bertin? He must get it right. If he was allowed to sing of these deeds, and he was by no means sure that he would ever do, the names of those who had sacrificed to restore the book to its hidden niche deserved to be remembered. In his heart he knew that it would be restored, no matter what the Scholardom thought. They wouldn’t have things their own way forever.
Glints at the edge of his vision caught his attention: the eyes of someone looking at him. He didn’t have to turn is head all the way to know it was Inbecca. He smiled at her. It gave him a warm feeling to know she was nearby.
She sat down about a quarter of the way around the big campfire, warily, as though she were a half-broken colt. The expression on her face was far from welcoming. Magpie dropped his head, ashamed.
I deserve that, he thought.She has been through a great deal, and it is all my fault.
But Inbecca’s attention was not long claimed by him. When he looked up, she was studying Tildi. The smallfolk girl had settled herself, and was scrolling through the enormous parchment roll as though it were a bedtime book. She stopped now and again to admire a golden rune that seemed to glow with its own internal illumination in the twilight. Every so often, she would smile with wonder. After a time, she appeared to bid the book good night, rolled it up, and settled down to sleep with one hand on it.
“She is amazing,” Inbecca said, surprising Magpie by speaking. “The book favors her.”
“I am sorry about Bertin,” Magpie said.
“I didn’t know him,” Inbecca said, not looking at him. “I admit, I scarcely paid attention to my aunt’s attendants. They all seemed so interchangeable.” She paused, then shook her head vehemently. “Silly boy! He died because he believed nothing bad could happen to him. I think we were all shocked. They wouldn’t listen. But I am the only one who saw what happened to you. I know, and even I can’t believe it. I told them, and they said I was blaspheming.”
“They probably thought I had lured you up there as a joke. It’s a shame that they arrived too late to see the whole matter unfold. Though it was not the greatest example of my diplomacy.”
“Don’t joke about it,” she said severely. “You don’t know what you looked like. Are you all right?”
“I am well,” he assured her, rejoicing inwardly at her concern. “Tildi’s handiwork undid not only the effects of Nemeth’s spell, but all the months in between as well.”
“All of it?” Inbecca asked, looking up at him through her eyelashes. He thought he detected a bit of impishness.
Could she be forgiving him?
“Only the physical effects,” he said. “My thoughts are the same. My feelings are the same.”
“Mine aren’t,” she said, her voice thickening. She sat up straighter and seemed to inhabit the blue-and-white costume more thoroughly. “The world has changed, Eremi. All at once, in a night. We rode out so fast that I haven’t had time to think. But today, in the aftermath, I . . . it’s hard to have you near me. If you only knew how angry I felt, sitting there in your father’s court without you!”
He took her hand. She started to pull it away, then let it lie limply in his palm. He put his entire heart into his words, willing her to understand.
“You can see now why I had to go. I am sorry—a lifetime will not suffice to make it up to you, but that is all we have. Please, forgive me.”
The hand tensed a little. She did not look up at him.
“Eremi, I don’t know if I can.”
The rustle of leaves attracted their attention. Magpie looked up to see the girl wizard, Serafina, shuffle into the firelight. Her usual self-possession had been replaced by distraction. Her cloak and her long black hair was disheveled, the jeweled pins that usually held the tresses hanging loose, and a tendril of leaves clung just above her ear. Without seeing them, she walked between them and the fire and settled with a thump on a large stone nearest the spot where Tildi and her guards sat. She stared into the flames, not seeming to see anything.
“Are you all right, honorable?” Magpie asked gently.
“Of course not!” she snapped, then tightened her lips. Tears formed in her large dark eyes. “I apologize, Your Highness. It has been a most . . . eventful day.”
Letting go of Inbecca’s hand, he rose and knelt beside Serafina. He took both her hands in his. He fixed his eyes on hers. “I doubt any of the Scholardom will have thought to say it to you, but we respect and honor the sacrifice your mother made to save all our lives. I will never let her name be forgotten. I’m composing a song about her. I hope you will allow me to play it for you when it is finished.”
“She would have liked that.” The tears spilled down the girl’s golden cheeks. She suddenly looked very young. She wet her lips with her tongue tip and shook her head. “All these years I have known that I must lose her. I braced myself against the day. And now that it has happened, I don’t know what to do. I was never ready. I am not ready now. Yet I must assume her responsibilities.”
She was not asking for help, only for understanding. Magpie nodded. “Tell us about Edynn. I met her first in Olen’s study. I had heard of her, of course, but she retired from the world before I was born.”
“She chose to have her family then,” Serafina said with a small smile. “She had had too much of war. She wanted to see things burgeon and grow. The lords for whom she had done service gave her a fine estate in the hills of Ivirenn. It had wonderful gardens, most of them planted by my mother. A stream flowed north through the land from a source in the Quarters, I believe. My father was a local magistrate, with no talent in the mystic arts, but a kind and loving man. I did not know him long; he died when I was a child. My brothers are much older than I. They chose not to study magic. Mother did not mind. I believed that she was glad I did. She encouraged us to follow our hearts. She was . . .” She halted, searching for words.
“She seemed wise and kind,” Inbecca said. She came over to sit on Serafina’s other side and put her
arm over the girl’s shoulders.
“More than that,” Serafina said emphatically, pulling back from the ministrations. However kindly meant, she still had her dignity. “She was a great teacher. I had other masters when I began to study, but she could put a task before me that I would understand all the better for her guidance. I learned more from her than from anyone else.”
“I think,” Magpie said, “that I will remember the twinkle in her eyes.”
Serafina looked at him solemnly. “She admired you, Prince. She kept your secret where we traveled. She said you did important work. I thought you a clown.”
“Don’t put too much importance into my small tasks,” he said hastily, with a glance at Inbecca. “She was the one who was doing the real work of the world. I was only a messenger.”
“That’s not true!” Inbecca said. “If you hadn’t stood up to Nemeth, who knows what he might have done! You persuaded him to stop his destruction.”
“In my capacity as clown,” Magpie said with a warm smile for Serafina. She seemed embarrassed to have admitted her feelings. “You were in control of the situation, much more than I could have been. If I served in any way, it was to allow you room to exercise your talents. I am sure your mother would have been very proud of you.”
Serafina stared into the fire. “I hope so,” she said quietly.
“Depend upon it, she was,” Magpie assured her, squeezing her hands tightly. “She put you in charge. She trusted you, no one more. In that moment of crisis, it was you in whom she put her faith. When that castle door closed, I feared we would be finished, but thanks to both of you . . .”
Serafina could hold back no longer. The tears fell down her face like a rivulet streaming down a granite cliff face. She wept silently, blinking long black lashes like wet silk strands.
“Ah, now, now, now,” Magpie said, reaching into his belt pouch. He brought out a linen cloth and dabbed her cheeks. It was clean. “Don’t make me break into song now. Think how many people I would wake up!”
“You . . . I know you do not mean to be frivolous,” Serafina said, taking the cloth and drying her face carefully. “I have not lived much in the world, I know. People make light of issues they ought to treat seriously.”
“It is like the face of the sun, Mistress Serafina. We find them hard to look upon directly, so we find oblique ways to deal with them. We know we can’t ignore them,” Magpie assured her solemnly. “My admiration for you and your mother is as great as the sun. If I can serve in any way, you have but to ask.”
Inbecca watched Magpie focus his yellow-green eyes intently upon the girl’s. His gaze was full of understanding, caring, and deep sympathy. His regard was so worshipful that Inbecca felt jealousy well up from the center of her soul and overflow in a black wave. She knew she shouldn’t be upset or angry. He was just being kind because she was grieving for her mother. That was all, wasn’t it?
You have no claim on him any longer, her inner voice told her. You have another calling now.
Inbecca rose suddenly. When Magpie glanced up at her questioningly, she raised the small scroll in her hand.
“I must study,” she said, and left the two of them alone by the fire.
Chapter Three
he dark-winged creatures swirled around the high ceiling of the enormous, windowless stone chamber. They were agitated and fearful, wheeling to stay out of the gaze of the angry man on the floor. Though he was small for a human, wizened and white-haired, he showed no lessening of strength as old ones usually did, making them easy, tasty prey. If anything, they were his playthings, and they feared him. They would never think of swooping down upon him and rending him into gobbets of flesh. Their instinct told them the mere taste of his blood would poison them. It didn’t matter that his limbs were thin, or his spindly neck looked as if it could be snapped with a quick flick of the wing. Experience had taught them that trying to kill him resulted in death. Their death. He was like no other species they knew over the face of Alada. Their slick, green-black skin was nothing like his, furrowed as it was into myriad tiny wrinkles, like the trunk of an ancient tree. If his face had had any color at all, it had leached away long ago, leaving it the sickly hue of a mushroom that had never seen sunlight. In contrast, his irises contained every shade of the rainbow. Those eyes had a force of their own. Once pinned by the gaze, whatever he was looking at lost the will to move. To fall into that gaze was to risk death. They moved, hoping to keep ahead of it.
“How could you have missed your goal?” he demanded, following their frenzied flight with amusement and irritation. “You had the strongest possible spoor to follow, and what have you to show me? A corpse. A much abused, scorched body.” He gestured at the sad heap on the floor. It stank of decay and ashes. He shook his head. “So that is my namesake Nemeth. Thanks to his gift I was able to see the world as I have not in countless years.” He surveyed it and sighed. “I feel as if I have lost my only friend, even if I could only speak to him when he let his guard down. He is the only human mind I have come to know in many, many years. He kept out from my reach a very long time, and out from yours, too. I must know how. How I regret I cannot ask him.”
The thraiks shrieked a protest.
“No, children, no,” he said, waving a hand at them. “I know you are not to blame for his death. That responsibility lies elsewhere.”
Wrinkling his nose in distaste, he pointed a finger at the body and drew a sign on the air. The corpse shrank in upon itself slightly and turned paler. The clothes crumpled together, the fabric gathering closer to the cold flesh. Knemet nodded. Now the body would last until he could study it further.
The book—where was it? Only a short time ago, Nemeth had possessed it. Somehow he had discovered its hiding place. Knemet himself had given up hope of ever finding it. It had been hedged around with spells until it was entirely invisible to divination, physical searches, or intuition. The ones who had taken it from him had done their work so well that he had wasted hundreds of years searching for it.
He set the thraiks a geas to find the Compendium. They knew its magical scent, and how it transferred to anyone or anything that touched it. They were to bring back those people and things for Knemet to examine. Yet none of their discoveries ever led to the book itself. Minor wizards had been permitted to make copies, each of which possessed a touch of the original’s magic that allowed the copies to change to reflect the world around them changing. In the early years his hopes were raised falsely countless times, as the thraiks brought home pieces of scrolls and bemused scholars who were terrified to be torn away from their studies by the black-winged beasts. The book itself was nowhere to be found.
Life had become too long. It was a terrible thing for a scholar to admit, but all subjects that he had once found fascinating had palled. Every exercise of his mind or his powers felt as if he had done it before, over and over, and the result would be no different in the thousandth trial as it had in the fifth or fifteenth. In the end, he had returned to one of his private places of study and made it comfortable enough to sustain him without requiring him to venture forth for his minor needs.
The thraiks still served him. They brought him food, and news if he asked for it, which was seldom. He languished in this underground fastness, waiting for the death that would not come. Knemet felt as if he had grown dust and cobwebs inside his skull.
Then, after untold years had passed, a tickle of magic that he thought never to feel again had come to him. It was unmistakably the Compendium. It still existed! Where? Where?
He felt it. The book was in the south. Knemet was outraged. He had searched Sheatovra for years! The Compendium must have been concealed there while Knemet was weakened and almost blind to magic. Whoever had unearthed it must have been aware that the Compendium was a prize beyond all prizes, and concealed himself immediately. All the thraiks had found were traces of his passage, intermittent exercises of creative power that could only have been accomplished by one of the Makers, and Knemet was c
ertain the bearer was not one of his old fellows, or one who possessed the book.
Knemet had sought without luck to track him. The wizard had warded himself with spells, of course, but his gift as a true-seer left his mind open to the unseen world, a tiny keyhole that Knemet had exploited, insinuating himself into Nemeth’s consciousness. He could not see where Nemeth was going. When the book had been taken from him, all those years ago, he felt the same. To hunger for, not the blood, but the humiliation and abasement of others was a sensation he knew well. His friends and enemies alike were all dead. To obtain the book was his only remaining goal. To his surprise, the next time he managed to see into Nemeth’s mind, he discovered that he had returned to Niombra. The book was safely in his hands. Where he went from there, Knemet did not know until he felt the book reappear in the distant north.
He had felt it the moment Nemeth’s spell of concealment had been broken. For a short, glorious time, Knemet had sensed the book’s beauty. He could see the rune in his mind’s eye. It lay far to the north. It was surrounded by a crowd of beings, their runes too unimportant to distinguish. At the moment of its revealing, Knemet had called every thraik from all points around Alada to hurry to that place. They had gone, but only half had returned to him, and those had returned empty-handed. Knemet could not contain his fury. Someone had wrested the book from Nemeth, killed him, and destroyed numerous thraiks, then disappeared into another enveloping spell. Knemet could not see the conqueror. He had only the impressions that the unfortunate wizard had had, and those were confusing. Males, females, tall, small, dark-skinned, light-skinned, were all jumbled together in his thoughts. It had often been difficult to tell Nemeth’s dreams from visions or what he actually saw with his eyes. How disorienting it must have been to live his life. Knemet would have felt sorry for him, if he was not so desperate to find the treasure that his prey had carried until so recently. The thraiks could have obtained it for him! They should have! Knemet could have torn himself apart from the frustration that he felt at his failure. So close! So close!
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