Alphabet of Thorn

by Patricia A. Mckillip

“What’s it saying? It’s a wedding gift?”

  “Seems to be… Go and ask—No. She’s at the wedding, too.”

  “I’ll ask outside, see if anyone can understand this.”

  The guard took the letter, went into the courtyard. Kane watched a ring of heads gather about him. The remaining guard watched her narrowly. She bobbed her head several times, indicated her heart and then the tables full of gifts.

  “Yes, yes,” the guard muttered at the eerie, hidden face, “I know. You’re a present.”

  The first guard returned finally, said to him, “The captain recognized the seal. It’s from Ilicia, over the southern mountains. He’s sending for a friend of his, a scholar. Somebody who didn’t get invited to the wedding.”

  “What should I do with it? Are we at peace with Ilicia?”

  “We’re at peace with everyone today.” He gave the message back to the mute figure. “Put the gift over there in the corner, and if it does anything suspicious, arrest it.”

  “It already looks suspicious,” the guard grumbled.

  But he led Kane into the room and positioned her against the wall, where she waited for the scholar to arrive. The wedding gifts shone dimly on the other side of the black silk over her eyes: jeweled saddles, tapestries, fine mirrors, sumptuous robes, swords, alabaster vases, and birds with brilliant plumage pecking at the bars of gilded cages. She gave them scant attention, just stood stiffly, watching birds flick in and out of the sunny courtyard, listening to the tranquil fountains and hearing, now and then, within chambers on the other side of the courtyard, the ceremonial music of tabors and trumpets.

  The scholar arrived finally, a chubby, sweating man who looked as though he had run all the way to the palace in the dust. The captain of the guards led him to the silent figure. He grunted at it in surprise, then said something in what Kane vaguely recognized as the language of Ilicia. She did not speak, only offered him the letter. He carried it to a table, shifted a gold tray and a birdcage out of the way, and took his tools out of a leather case: pens, paper, ink. There were no chairs. He unfolded one of a pair of stools of ivory and red leather embroidered with gold thread, and sat down to write.

  The guards watched over his shoulder; he explained, erratically, as he translated, “In Ilicia it’s not uncommon for servants who have special talents to be given as gifts. Cooking, for instance, or a way with horses… If they aren’t freeborn… The hidden face is explained… So is the muteness. There is a suggestion of occult power in the staff. Not a great deal, I would guess—no ruler would give much of that to another. But enough perhaps to amuse the children… It ends with an odd symbol, but the rest is clear.” He blew on his hastily scrawled translation and handed it to the captain. “Give that to the king. It is definitely a gift, and probably valuable.”

  He wrapped up his tools, folded the stool, and returned the sealed letter to the wedding gift. Smiling, he suggested his payment.

  “A glance, perhaps, at the wedding feast?”

  “I’d like one myself,” the captain said fervently. “I’ve been smelling it for three days.” He handed the translation to one of the guards and nodded at the other. “Take him down to the kitchens.”

  Kane, left alone in the corner, heard the triumphal march of the king and the new queen of Eben. She bowed her head against the staff in her hands and prepared to wait through the endless wedding feast.

  She had bought the staff from a peddler weeks before the wedding. A shaft of ebony higher than her head, it was intricately carved with long-jawed, lozenge-backed lizards that spiraled up the length of it. To Kane, they looked not unlike what had eaten Axis’s father. The object of their sharp-toothed smiles was the crown on top of the staff, which Kane had had fashioned out of a bracelet of garnets and gold that her mother had given her. The black, voluminously hooded cloak, which covered her from head to foot, she had found at the bottom of a clothes chest; judging from the musty smell it had been there for decades. Her hands were hidden within great leather gauntlets that kept threatening to fall off. The oversized hands coupled with her height and slenderness made the faceless figure look bony, awkward, unthreatening, perhaps not quite human. So the guards must have thought, for they didn’t give the peculiar gift another glance, not even when platters were sent up from the kitchens of meats and savory pastries from the wedding, and they lounged, munching, in front of her.

  Finally, the sky turned a tender lavender above the palace walls, and in the gardens the night birds began to sing. The wedding couple arrived to pay due attention to their gifts before they retired. Kane, her mouth suddenly dry, clung more tightly to the staff. The bride entered, twittering and chirping over the riches even before she got through the door. The groom followed, hardly seeing anything. He looked, Kane thought with sympathy, as though he had been clubbed. A river of aunts and cousins from both families followed them, headed by Axis’s mother and her own. Kane stared numbly ahead. All the bright silks spilled through the room, rivulets of color, murmuring and cresting over one gift, then another. Axis moved silently among them, borne hither and yon, the young Lion in his white and gold silks uninterested in anything he saw, including his placidly chattering bride.

  Axis’s mother saw the dark figure first.

  “What is that?” she demanded, gripping the nearest arm, which belonged to Kane’s mother. Kane’s lips tightened behind her silk; she felt her lace grow taut and chill. But not even her own mother recognized her; she only fanned herself with gilded feathers, staring speechlessly. Around them, little pools of silence grew, as guest after guest turned at the sound of it. Finally, even the bride noticed it.

  “What is what?” she asked. Axis, glancing toward his mother, saw the hooded figure.

  He blinked, finally interested in something. Beside him, his bride grew suddenly inarticulate. Axis’s mother, closest to the apparition, examined it with amazement.

  “What—Who—Is it a gift?”

  Mutely, Kane proffered her letter. Axis’s mother looked at it bewilderedly, then at the guards.

  “From Ilicia,” one explained.

  “I recognize the seal,” she said, at which Kane loosed a shallow breath. The crowned and coiled serpent had been mercifully easy to duplicate. “But what kind of gift is it?”

  “Let me see,” Axis said, stepping to her side. Belatedly, the guard remembered the scholar’s translation. But not before Kane saw Axis’s eyes find the little familiar twining of thorns, barely noticeable among the unfamiliar words.

  She saw his eyes close briefly; the flat lion’s face gave nothing away. Without looking at her, still gazing at the canes at the end of the letter, he held out his hand for the scholar’s translation. By then his wife had made her way to his side, and was looking in blank astonishment at the wedding gift. She gripped her husband’s wrist for reassurance.

  “My lord, whatever is it? And who has sent it to us?”

  Kane began to read the translation. It was hurried and somewhat clumsy, but then Kane’s message from the ruler of Ilicia was not exactly polished, either.

  “‘To Axis, Ruler of Eben, on his wedding day:

  ‘I am a gift to you from Marsyas, Ruler of Ilicia. I cannot speak, nor will you wish to look upon my face, for I am grievously deformed from birth. My powers lie in my heart and my staff. Both I pledge you, as the king commands me: To serve you and yours faithfully and well all the days of my life. Say my name and I will show you what I can do. My name is Kane.’”

  Such was her name in their secret language: no one else knew this. Her given name vanished with the young woman who had erased herself from history. Only Kane was left now, a curve of brambles on the king’s letter, an exact translation on the scholar’s. She held her breath, the silk motionless above her lips. Axis, his face expressionless and oddly colorless in that gold-laden room, seemed also to be holding his breath. His bride, regaining composure, tugged at his arm.

  “My lord, what does it do? Does it do tricks? Magic?” When there was no re
sponse from her bridegroom, she spoke the word herself: “Kane.”

  The ebony lizard curling around the top of the staff came to life and seized the gold crown in its jaws. Axis, recognizing his own history, gave a startled cry. His queen clapped her hands and laughed with delight.

  “It is a human toy!”

  The faceless figure knelt on both knees and bowed its head. There Kane remained, staring blindly at Axis’s sandals, feeling the weight of his gaze, while the queen laughed again and whispered above her.

  “Make it show its face. How dreadful could it be?”

  But the young queen’s own mother came to Kane’s rescue, nipping the notion in the bud. “You must not look upon such things. If it frightens you, your unborn children might come to resemble it.”

  “Oh,” the queen cried, stifling the sound in her horror. She recovered quickly. “But it must show us what else it can do. Do another trick for us, Kane.”

  Still on her knees, Kane pointed the staff; the cluster of guests shifted out of its aim until a wedding gift appeared in front of it. By then the lizard was lifeless wood, and the crown, disgorged, was back on top of the ebony. The staff trembled only slightly in Kane’s hold. The gift, wrapped in tapestry and tied with braided ribbons of gold, unraveled itself to reveal a matched pair of goblets carved from solid amethyst. The bride clapped again. Kane bowed her head again.

  Axis spoke.

  “Rise, Kane. And welcome.” Like the staff, his voice trembled only a little. “We will explore the extent of your talents later, at our leisure.”

  The Shadow of the Emperor

  The Hooded One

  Who unmasked night

  Who laid the stars like paving stones

  Who rode the Thunderbolt

  Down the star-cobbled path into day

  Was Kane,

  The Emperor’s twin

  Silent, as lightning is silent,

  Before the thunder speaks.

  EIGHT

  Bourne sat alone in the wood, trying to lift the Floating School.

  The students had been sent outside the school for no particular reason that he could see. To learn something, Felan had indicated, though exactly what seemed nebulous.

  “You will find your way back when the wood has revealed its nature to you,” he told them. “In revealing its nature, it will also reveal yours. You will not see the school once you have left it. The wood will become the world; it will become your vision; you will not see your way beyond it. If you need help or become frightened, I will find you.”

  They had all looked back at the school once the outer gate had closed behind them. Green wood was all they saw: the tangled weave of ivy and ancient, twisted branch, shrub and brush and flowering bramble growing around and into and through one another, moist and sweet, and so still that the briny wind churning the grasses on the plain might well have been in some distant country.

  “Will the wood feed us?” one of the dozen students wondered wistfully. No one laughed. They had all been at the school too long to expect anything predictable or comfortable.

  For a few moments they stood aimlessly, talking and waiting for something to happen. Gradually, in boredom or curiosity, or for less obvious motives, they began wandering away in no particular direction, just wanting, Bourne thought, to begin the exercise so that it would come to an end.

  He began walking, determined to find his way out of the wood. It might be futile, he thought, but at least it was a purpose, a goal. The wood, after all, was small; he could have ridden around it in an hour. Later, he sat sweating on an old stump, watching a dank little pool overgrown with water lilies for a frog, a fly a minnow, anything to disturb the utter stillness around him. He felt he had walked all morning. It might be any hour of the day. The damp, shadowy mistiness of a wood not yet found by sunlight remained unchanged; he might have just left the Floating School.

  Thinking of it, for he was beginning to be hungry, he remembered the task they were given a week ago: to lift the Floating School above the trees while sitting within it. It seemed beyond impossible. “You will,” Felan had promised them. “It is simple. A child could do it with one finger.” They had strained their brains to the utmost; none of the students could lift so much as a brick.

  Maybe, Bourne thought, it would be easier to do it outside. It was something to do, at any rate. He settled himself cross-legged on the stump, let the silence of the wood seep into him, like an old toad drowsing in the moss, until his thoughts were formless and pellucid as air. After a time, he let the image of the school drift into them, a floating island of walls and towers, a dream, an airy construct of space and light, weighing nothing, no more than a memory, no more than an imaginary world. It hung there, suspended in his mind above the trees, immense and serene, the old stones butter-colored in the sunlight, as solid and as insubstantial as cloud, there and not—

  “Bourne!” his uncle exclaimed. He jumped like a frog, then wondered with horror if he had truly heard what he thought: the sound of something unimaginably massive shaking the earth as it dropped.

  But the wood, except for his uncle, was still soundless. No birds scattered, crying, out of the trees; he heard no human shouts.

  I dreamed it, he thought confusedly. His bones felt surprisingly stiff as he straightened, sliding off the damp stump.

  “Uncle Ermin,” he said, feeling less than his usual composure. “What are you doing here?”

  “I rode over from the palace to see what you are learning,” his uncle said. “They told me you were out here.” He dismounted, leaving his horse to snort suspiciously at the bracken. “What were you doing sitting on a stump and doing nothing?”

  Ermin of Seale was a big man, like Bourne’s father had been, his yellow hair graying, his eyes restless and piercing, a predator trying to run down his prey before time ran him down. There were many like him, Bourne knew, in the palace above the sea. But no one else had thought to place a nephew in the Floating School to make a warrior mage of himself to aid his uncle’s ambitions.

  “We were sent out here to perform a task,” Bourne explained. “I’ve been waiting for mine to come along.”

  “What kind of task?”

  Bourne shrugged. “Something the wood dreams up. I don’t suppose you have anything to eat.”

  “I’ve just sat through another endless meal,” his uncle said pitilessly. “This one to honor a delegation from Almorania. They all wear beads in their hair and smell like sheep. They only want to be left alone; no help to us there. Show me what you’ve learned lately.”

  Bourne turned away from the Lord of Seale, shifting his thoughts with an effort out of the tranquil nothingness in which they had been drifting. He had to kindle fire from cloud, from the quiet wood around him, from his own toad-stupor. When it came finally, the sudden, vivid red-gold flash did little more than leave a blackened scar across a hoary tree trunk. But his uncle was impressed.

  “I saw that,” he said, “in your eyes before it came out. That’ll be useful. Can you take down a wall with it?”

  “It should be possible,” Bourne said. He felt suddenly weary, something damp and smoldering, without true heat or warmth, just a lot of smoke pretending to be fire. The effects of twiddling his thumbs in the wood for hours on end, he thought. He added, with an effort, “I learned something even more interesting, though I can’t show it to you now. I traveled from the Floating School to the library in a single step, the other evening.”

  “The library?” His uncle took a step toward him, astounded. “You don’t mean the royal library?”

  “Yes. I was here in one breath, there the next, in the refectory where the librarians were eating supper.”

  His uncle thought for a breath, color mottling his face. “Can you make yourself invisible and do that?” he demanded sharply.

  “I thought you’d see where it might lead,” Bourne said evenly. “Not yet. I haven’t been taught to make myself invisible, and I can’t control the traveling. It—” He pause
d; his uncle watched him narrowly. “It still depends.”

  “On what?”

  “On what I travel toward. It depends on what—on how much I want to get there.”

  “And what book did you want that much in the palace library?” the Lord of Seale asked shrewdly.

  “It wasn’t exactly a book.”

  “I imagined that it wasn’t exactly a book.” His uncle sighed. “You’re doing well with this. But be careful. Don’t get yourself into trouble with anyone I’ll have to fight or pay to get you out of.”

  Bourne shook his head. “It’s no one like that. She’s an orphan. A transcriptor.”

  “An orphan.” The Lord of Seale touched his eyes. “Well, at least she inspired you to make use of your talents. Just guard your words around her.”

  “Why? Do we have anything to keep secret?”

  His uncle glanced around them, as though wondering if the trees were listening. Probably, Bourne guessed, but they seemed to guard their words quite well.

  “Not here,” the Lord of Seale said abruptly, “not in a wood full of mages. It’ll wait. Just keep working. Be ready when I need you.”

  He mounted. Bourne watched him ride away, but not far. The trees and brush closed around him quickly; even his horse’s steps faded soon in the underbrush. Bourne sat down to wait again. Some time passed, only a moment or two, perhaps, but who knew in that timeless place? Then he felt his entire body prickle eerily. He raised his head, the breath flashing out of him, to stare at the place where the shifting branches had hidden his uncle as he rode away from Bourne.

  His uncle, Bourne remembered clearly, had already returned home to Seale. He had taken his heir with him, and left his other sons and nephews to celebrate the event and make what they could of the political winds pounding across the plain. “I’ve seen the young queen,” he had said grimly to Bourne, visiting the school before he left. “And I’ve seen the gathering of wolves around her. I’ll leave them here to howl at one another, while their own Crowns lie unguarded. I have work to do in Seale. And you have yours here. Do well for me, Bourne. We’ll use all you can learn.”