Alphabet of Thorn

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  Is the queen in the wood?

  Forever passed, it seemed, before he answered. She paced the tower roof, waiting, while banners from the Twelve Crowns whipped around her like snakes. What would Tessera be doing in the wood? she asked herself impatiently. She had never shown any interest in it. But if not there, then where?

  The answer from the Floating School came finally in the form of Felan, who fashioned himself out of cloud and light to stand with Vevay on the tower.

  “No,” he said, his habitual calm shaken, though his face did not show it. Vevay could feel the perturbed air between them. “The queen is not in the wood. You don’t know where she is.”

  “I don’t,” Vevay agreed grimly. Then she saw the tiny figure, far down on the face of the cliff, as far as the ancient outermost stairs led, which was, to all but the most knowledgeable eye, nowhere. She sighed. “Yes. I do. Thank you, Felan.”

  He rubbed a hairless eyebrow, gazing down. She saw his expression before he vanished, and she thought darkly: you can laugh.

  She met the queen halfway down the steps, as Tessera made her painstaking way back up. The queen reeled at the unexpected sight of a body on her next step, but Vevay had expected that. A solid, invisible wall of magic protected the young queen from any danger, including an errant wind or her own clumsy steps. Vevay sat down on the weathered, crumbled stairs; Tessera stood still, gazing at her perplexedly.

  She was slight, with lank hair, pale gold like her lather’s but lacking its exuberant curls. She had his almond eyes, too, though hers were a more watery blue, especially now after her trek in the raw wind. A quiet, seemingly unimaginative child, she was growing into a pallid young woman, with powdery skin and uncertain expressions. She looked apprehensive now, thin lines appearing and fraying above her colorless brows.

  “What,” Vevay asked, trying for calm on the deadly face of the cliff, with the wind roaring around them and the sea wrinkling and snarling below, “are you doing here?”

  “Just—I was just—” She shrugged slightly, shivering at the same time, for she had come without a cloak. “It was something I always wanted to do.”

  “What?”

  “Go down far enough to hear the sea.”

  “She is utterly exasperating,” Vevay told Gavin that night while he laughed. “And what’s so funny? She has no direct heir. If she had fallen into the sea, the Twelve Crowns of Raine would be spending the next century bickering over who should inherit the realm.”

  “She didn’t fall.”

  “She’s not a child anymore; she can’t just go off looking for seashells whenever—”

  “She is grieving, too,” he reminded her gently. “She’ll learn. I have faith in you.”

  “I don’t,” Vevay said bleakly. “I don’t understand her at all.”

  “What were you like at that age?”

  “How should I know? I barely remember the last century.” She stiffened then, pulled away from him. “I shouldn’t say such things to you. You’re still a child.”

  He dropped an arm over her shoulders, pulled her back. “Don’t be absurd. You enchant me.”

  “Still?”

  “Always.”

  Content in his hold, she didn’t pursue the matter, though she knew she would never be entirely secure. “You could help,” she suggested. “You were her father’s greatest general; he always looked to you for advice.”

  “I’m an old man,” he reminded her. “I could fight and die for her sake, but I can’t protect her from whatever Crowns might conspire against her.”

  “She doesn’t even understand such threats yet. The kingdom of Raine is very old, but she hasn’t learned that it is not immortal. She has no idea what brute forces and subtleties hold a realm together. Maybe you could explain more clearly than I can.”

  Gavin was silent a moment, savoring some memory of the dead king; Vevay felt him sigh noiselessly. “Her father spent his life eluding rebellion and war precisely because he constantly anticipated them. He understood how precariously this palace sits on the edge of the world. How do I begin to explain that?”

  “I don’t know,” Vevay said tautly. “Someone must.”

  “She needs to study the history of her realm.”

  “She needs—” She shook her head helplessly. “So much. I don’t even know where to begin.”

  He drank wine, set his cup down. “Tomorrow,” he suggested. “You’re tired now. Begin again tomorrow.”

  He eased his long body beside her, one arm loosely across her, the other crooked beneath his head. He had held her lightly through the years, she knew, because he had never been entirely secure either, during the long, busy, unpredictable life they had made together. She seemed, he had complained more than once, always at the point of vanishing.

  But I am here, she thought. Now. This is what we have now, this moment of peace. Humans die, mages vanish…

  “You’ve gone somewhere,” she heard. “I am holding you in my arms, but you have disappeared.”

  She came back, glanced up at his strong, craggy face, with its grizzled brows and slackened skin, the faded scar on one cheekbone from when he had turned his head during battle and an arrow had skimmed across his skin instead of striking him. He met her eyes. His own were light blue. She had seen that blue blaze like sun-struck ice; they were mild now, quizzical.

  “Where were you?”

  “I wandered off into a tale,” she answered. “The tale I told you last night. Human and mage…”

  “Axis and Kane.”

  “I was putting a different ending on it. Only slightly different,” she amended. “In the end, all endings are the same. Even for those two.”

  “Are they?” he murmured, as though there could be some question about the matter. He settled himself to listen. “Then tell me the different story.”

  FOUR

  He fought his first battle at the age of seven. He fashioned his army out of river mud and spit, causing the poets of Lower Eben to write later:

  Out of earth and water he made them,

  Out of his breath,

  They rose up from the mud in endless multitudes,

  His killing army,

  There on the bank of the Serpent that rings the world.

  He fought his father. Centuries later, the poets would say that he slaughtered his father’s army, that the Serpent turned red with death, that when he faced the last man alive on the riverbank, it was his father.

  They fought under the full moon rising out of the water

  Under the Serpent’s eye.

  Axis slew his father,

  The good, the just.

  The Serpent swallowed his bones,

  And the bloody-handed child became king.

  It was actually a tranquil afternoon beside the river. Axis’s father, hiding from his own kingdom for a couple of hours, helped his son daub the minute heads of his foot soldiers blue and attach plumes of milkweed seed to the heads of the horsemen, whose horses were left to the imagination. The child who called herself Kane in their secret language made the blue dye out of the brilliant wings of dragonflies she captured with her hands. She whispered to them through her fingers, and their twig-bodies vanished, leaving behind their glittering cobalt wings. Axis did not notice then how Kane did what she did; that came later.

  “My army is numberless as the grass in the fields,” the king said to his son. “As grains of sand. How will you defeat me?”

  Axis considered. Even then he was a burly child, snub-nosed and fair; he had his father’s heavy-lidded eyes, as green as the Serpent on a lazy afternoon. Light could glance off them, as off the river water, without penetrating their secrets. The king waited, gazing fondly at his son, twirling his coronet of gold and bronze idly on one forefinger. His sandaled feet were muddy; so were his hands and the hem of his short tunic. He wore a light shirt of metal scales and a gold sheath for his knife in his belt. These things were magnificently transformed later into elaborate armor and a sword that had drunk the
blood of thousands. The knife, lying on a sacrificial stone, had drunk the blood of one small hare: a gift, the king explained gravely to the children, for the Serpent, who long ago had acquired a taste for things of the land and needed to be fed now and then so it would not crawl out of its path to come looking for them.

  Axis opened a hand above his cavalry. “I will fight grass with fire. These will ring your army with torches and set you ablaze.”

  The king grunted. “And your foot soldiers? What will they be doing?”

  “They will stand along the riverbank and kill everyone who tries to escape the fire by water.”

  “Show me.”

  Axis lifted one of the stubby blue-capped soldiers, who were barely the size of his thumb and mostly resembled a standing army of cocoons with heads. He set it at the water’s edge. The Serpent, a muscle rippling beneath its glassy surface, sent a wavelet rolling over it. The soldier melted into a lump of mud. Axis stared at it, his eyes round. The king laughed.

  “Remember that whatever weapons you possess may also be used against you. And that it was I who gave the Serpent a gift.”

  Axis considered again, then gathered foot soldiers in both hands and stood up. Ankle-deep in drying nubbins of plumed and dragon-scaled warriors, he sent handsful of mud-men plopping into the water. They dissolved as they fell, leaving a tiny floating memorial of seed-plumes and crushed wings.

  “This is my gift to the Serpent,” he called to it. “Life to make death. Take my living and send me death to fight my battle.”

  The king cocked an eyebrow at the odd request and gave another spin to the crown dangling on his forefinger. “The Serpent is both,” he reminded his son. “It gives life as well as—”

  The water bubbled up in a mighty wave and a hissing bellow. Kane screamed, dancing away from it. Axis, ankle-deep in water now, was stunned motionless. Death, attracted perhaps by the glint of light from the king’s hand, opened a great, green maw and heaved itself out of the water at the gold. Blood spattered over the army. Most of the king vanished instantly. The remainder—a muddy hand relinquishing the crown, a sandaled foot—left an imprint on the memory as they were dragged through Axis’s army. Then they disappeared into the churning Serpent. Axis shouted then, a sharp, wordless cry, wading deeper into the water, which frothed red around his knees. Kane splashed to him, dragged him back to shore, both of them trampling his army underfoot. Axis, trying to speak, seemed stricken dumb; he could only hiss like the river-beast that had eaten his father. The circlet of gold caught his eye. He picked it out of the mud, turned it mutely in his hands, looking, Kane thought, bewilderedly within it for his father.

  Thus they were found a moment later by alarmed guards left by the king to idle out of eyesight.

  The knife on the stone, the bloody water, the heir holding his father’s crown in his hands: all became, in the confusion of the moment, shadowed with ambiguity.

  “We were fighting,” Axis told his mother, when he could finally speak. “I called death out of the water, and the Serpent ate him.”

  Kane, questioned thoroughly, gave a detailed version of events that made more sense than the impression Axis left. But while events were sorted in a haphazard fashion to a coherent conclusion, impressions lingered and turned, long past memory, into myth.

  Kane remembered.

  He was born speaking the language of stars

  The Emperor of Night,

  The language of thorns,

  The language of the fiery serpents of the sky,

  And of the thunderbolt.

  It was Kane who devised the alphabet for that language, when they were old enough to learn to write. The daughter of one of the queen’s many sisters, she had been born and raised in the royal palace in Great Eben. Thrown together with her teething, wailing, babbling cousins, she and Axis performed the ancient ritual of flinging their toys at one another’s heads, and in that moment recognized a common destiny. They became inseparable. The language they spoke before they learned their common tongue was their way of keeping secrets in front of the horde of curious, chattering cousins. We are one, each private word said. We alone understand. Later, when Kane learned to write, she formed their language into brambles, perhaps anticipating their secret life together in that script of warning and protection. In her riddling way, she placed herself in each cane of thorns; every letter said her secret name.

  At the time of the king’s abrupt and peculiar demise, Kane was a slight, quiet, observant child who followed Axis everywhere. Like her own mother, she was dark-haired and delicate, with great eyes the color of smoke. She followed Axis because he wanted her with him; when he did not see her, he searched for her or sent for her. Their childish friendship seemed harmless; it was assumed that they would grow out of each other eventually. They never did.

  At his side the Hooded One

  At his side always

  The One who walks in shadow

  Whose face is never seen,

  Kane, who opens doors between stars,

  Who points the way.

  Axis’s father had spent most of his life extending the borders of his kingdom; he was a great general himself, worthy of poetry. He taught Axis to play war-games at an early age. The concept of battle interested Kane only because it interested Axis. The king became the first to die on Axis’s battlefield. The event shocked and grieved the boy enormously. But instead of giving him a horror of violence, it turned his interest in war into an obsession. He had had a stunning glimpse of power on many levels, which he examined in dozens of half-coherent messages written to Kane in their private language. It had become what he wanted above all else: that power, that mystery. And so, whatever this nebulous thing was that had its bloody birth at the river’s edge, she wanted it for him.

  The dead king’s brother became regent for Axis. For a while, until it came time for him to relinquish power, all was peaceful in Eben. While Axis learned how to rule, Kane educated herself in other ways. They were secret, like the language, like her letters, full of riddles, odd juxtapositions, ambiguities, correlatives. She came to her knowledge, her power, in odd places: in a line of poetry, in a tale the gardener told, in musty scrolls that made her sneeze and always began with dire warnings to the uninitiated. A bird in flight taught her many things: about air, time, coincidence, the nature of movement, the moment when the breath indrawn at the beauty of flight becomes the spellbinding moment of human flight. She did not tell Axis everything she learned, for she did not know then why she wanted such knowledge, or even what it was. She recognized it long before she knew its name.

  The Sorcerer,

  The Magician,

  The Hooded One whose eye is magic,

  Whose spoken word becomes the word:

  Kane, the left hand of the Emperor

  Whose right hand was war.

  The second moment in Axis’s life that came out of nowhere to stun him to the heart was when he learned he must marry. Not only must he marry, and then and there, he must marry the daughter of the king of a neighboring land, whom he had never met. This would ensure the loyalty of that kingdom, whose younger generation was getting restless, and provide Eben with a wealth of goods and warriors, which would otherwise go elsewhere if Axis did not marry or conquer it.

  “I’ll conquer it,” Axis offered immediately.

  To which his mother replied, “I am tired of war. Your father fought enough of them. I hardly saw him; it’s a wonder he stayed in bed long enough to produce you. Stay off the battlefield and give me some grandchildren first. Then you can conquer the entire world if you must.”

  “But Kane—” Axis began blankly, catching his first glimpse of life without her. His mother, who was embroidering something, snapped a thread between her teeth, then studied him silently.

  “Did you think,” she asked, not without compassion, “that you could marry her?”

  “No. I never thought—I never thought about marriage at all. But if I must—”

  “There would be no
advantage to marrying your cousin. Think, Axis. You are King of Eben. Kings marry to the advantage of their realm.”

  “But—”

  “No. You cannot marry with her beside you. She cannot sleep under your bed. You must leave her outside of your marriage. She will have her own life to lead.”

  “I am king,” Axis said mutinously. “I say what she will do with her life.”

  His mother rifled through her thread box, chose a different color. “Perhaps you should talk to her,” she suggested. “Before you make choices for her.”

  “She wants what I want. She always has.”

  “Tell her,” his mother said. “Then ask her what she wants. Young women see far more clearly than young men. I doubt that this will be the surprise to her that it is to you.”

  It was not, for Kane had already recognized the patterns of life around her, and what they might mean for her and for Axis. She saw the messengers from Cribex coming before anyone else did. Hers was the shadow mingling with the shadow cast by the half-drawn tapestry across the window while Axis spoke to his mother. So she had time to think before she permitted Axis to find her.

  Still, there were tears on her face, for his mother was right: there would be places in his life where she could not come.

  She took him to the most private place she knew, a tiny garden full of weird, thorny succulents that loved the sun. There she sat on a sandstone bench, while Axis knelt on the hard ground, his arms across her knees, his face buried in them. They had not yet become lovers, which is why legend was silent about their early relationship. Until she masked herself, Kane remained simply unseen. Until the cousin vanished, presumed lost in an unremarkable life between the lines of history, the magician, the lover, the Hooded One, could not exist.