Both sides were to blame, but Lina couldn’t get over the fact that the Merrow Kingdom had started the fight. They’d thrown the first punch, so to speak, launched the first attack against the Dragonfly territories. Maybe if they hadn’t, the two kingdoms could have eventually solved their problems peacefully. But King Easmon had been too greedy and heartless. He’d wanted to conquer Dragonfly, to take its land and iron by force. Lina had just assumed that the rest of his family would be equally cruel.
Yet Ozben was polite and kind, at least to her. True, she’d only just met him, but somehow she sensed he didn’t have a cruel heart. The difference threw Lina into confusion. How could a man like King Easmon have a grandson like Ozben?
“So, if you don’t mind my asking,” Ozben said, interrupting her thoughts, “why were you spying on me up there?” He pointed to the ceiling.
Lina blushed furiously. “Spying” was such a harsh word. “I found your bandages,” she said. “I realized you were trying to disguise yourself, and I wanted to know why. It was curiosity.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Most people I know wouldn’t be curious enough to crawl around in a dirty ventilation shaft. Speaking of which, you have a smudge on your cheek,” he said, pointing to the left side of her face.
“Oh, but I do that all the time.” Lina licked her palm and scrubbed at the dirt on her face. “Can’t say I’ve used the shafts in this part of the stronghold much, but once you’ve seen one ventilation duct, you’ve pretty much seen them all.”
“Um, okay.” Ozben smiled wryly. He shifted on the floor and stretched out his legs. “So you’re an apprentice?”
Lina swallowed the last of her juice before replying. “That’s right.” She fiddled with her glass, striking her fingernail against the rim to listen to the ringing sound. “You know, it’s not that bad here,” she said.
“What do you mean?” Ozben asked.
“Earlier, Nirean said you felt like a prisoner, but you shouldn’t,” Lina said. “This is a good place.”
“I’m sure it’s great,” Ozben said. He shivered then and rubbed his hands up and down his arms. “Maybe a little cold. Really cold. Look, I don’t mean to be rude, but what has it got that the Merrow Kingdom’s capital doesn’t? Besides being its own ice chest?”
“What does it—” Lina couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “Do you know what the archivists do here?”
Ozben shrugged. “They study the junk that comes down in the meteor storms.”
“Junk?” Lina repeated, incredulous. Oh, she wasn’t about to let that pass. “You think we collect a bunch of junk and pick through it for fun? Three strongholds, thousands of people working together, and you think we just play with meteorite rubble all day long?” If that was what he thought of the archivists, no wonder he felt cooped up here.
“I didn’t mean it in a bad way,” Ozben said, raising his hands in defense. “It’s just, isn’t that stuff all broken and smashed when you find it?”
“Some of it is,” Lina said. Thinking of the Merlin, she flashed him an enigmatic smile. “But not all of it.”
And then an idea began to take shape in her mind, an idea that made the hairs on the back of her neck prickle with excitement and trepidation.
Lina studied Ozben. He was small, just as she was—maybe an inch taller but easily as skinny. His shoulders were slightly broader—he might have a rough time of it at the beginning of the passage, though she thought he would fit. But once she got him to her workshop, would he be strong enough to help her move the boulders? It would be tricky, but with two pairs of hands instead of one, they could use certain tools Lina hadn’t been able to try before. Yes, they might just be able to pull it off.
I’ll offer him a trade, Lina decided, her heart thumping excitedly in her chest. A secret for a secret.
She stood, dusted off the seat of her pants, and motioned for Ozben to get up too. “Come on,” she said. “I want to show you something.”
For an instant, Ozben’s eyes brightened, but then he frowned and shook his head. “I can’t,” he said. “Someone might recognize me, and I can’t let Nirean catch me outside my room again tonight. If she does, she really will lock me up.”
“That’s why we’re going to use my way of getting around,” Lina said, pointing to the ventilation shaft. “And anyway, it’s the middle of the night. Where I’m taking you, there won’t be any people.”
“That’s what I thought, too, but then you turned up.” Ozben hesitated. “Why do you want to show me around anyway? Shouldn’t you be busy—I don’t know—being an apprentice?”
“This is part of what the archivists do,” Lina said, smiling at him. “We share the things we’ve discovered.” Though in her case, that wasn’t strictly true. Ozben would be the first person with whom she’d ever shared her secret. “Trust me, there are things in this mountain that will make your jaw bounce off the floor.”
Ozben’s brows lifted. She’d made him curious. “All right,” he said finally. He stood up and went over to the bedside table, where there was a roll of fresh bandages. Lina thought he intended to repair his disguise, but instead he turned to her and motioned to the bed. “First you need to let me clean and wrap those scrapes on your shoulders,” he said. “They look awful.”
In all the excitement, Lina had completely forgotten about the injuries, though now that Ozben mentioned them, she realized the stinging had gotten worse. Much worse. Lina twisted her arm to get a look at the scrapes and saw that Ozben was right. If they weren’t cleaned and bandaged soon, she risked an infection.
“I have some medicine you can put on the bandages,” she said, fishing in her pocket. She pulled out a tube of ointment and handed it to Ozben before walking over to sit on the edge of the bed. “I can show you how to put the bandages on,” she said. “I get banged up a lot, so I’m getting pretty good at patching myself up.”
“So am I,” Ozben said, measuring out a length of gauze. “Not for myself, though. Back home, I’d treat my sister’s wounds all the time when she was training to be a soldier.” He stood up and went over to the small washroom adjacent to the bedchamber. A moment later, he returned with a bowl of water.
“So your sister’s fighting in the war?” Lina asked. She scrunched up her face against the pain as Ozben dipped a washcloth in the water and began cleaning dirt from the scrapes.
“She’s a general,” Ozben said. “I don’t know exactly where she’s stationed, but I don’t think she’s seen much fighting. She can’t, really, being second in line to the throne.”
“I’m glad she’s not in danger,” Lina said.
“I’m sure Elinore hates it,” Ozben said, chuckling. He applied the medicine and carefully wrapped the first bandage around Lina’s arm. “She always wants to jump into the middle of a fight. Makes my parents crazy.”
Ozben moved to Lina’s other side to bandage her left arm. He seemed to be concentrating awfully hard on his work. Lina angled toward him so he could wrap the bandage, and for a second their eyes met. He tried to hide it, but Lina saw the pained expression in Ozben’s face. And who could blame him? His parents were far away, his sister was fighting in the war, and his grandfather was ill, maybe seriously. If he died, it could cause dangerous instability in the kingdom. Ozben was here alone while the rest of the world went on without him.
“Done,” Ozben said, pulling Lina out of her thoughts. “The bandages aren’t too tight, are they?” he asked.
Lina flexed her arms and rolled her shoulders back and forth experimentally. The bandages held, and the ointment was already taking away the sting. “Perfect, thanks,” she said, and stood up. “So, how about it? A late-night tour of Ortana? I promise it’ll be worth the lost sleep—and the cold,” she said, grinning. “You’d better wear the heaviest coat you have.”
Ozben glanced up at the ventilation shaft above their heads and laughed uneasily. “Good thing I’m not claustrophobic,” he said, then added, “at least, I don’t think I am.”
—
On hands and knees, Ozben crawled through the narrow tunnel and tried to ignore what sounded like a large rat scratching at the other side of the wall. “Did you hear that sound?” he asked Lina, who crouched a few feet in front of him. She’d poked her head out of the hole at the end of the tunnel and was looking around to see if anyone was in the hallway.
“Probably a poscil rat,” Lina whispered, pulling back from the hole. “They can be pretty loud.”
“Loud because they have strong voices,” Ozben asked, “or loud because they’ve grown to an unusual size?”
“Just their teeth,” Lina said brightly.
“Oh, well, if that’s all.” Then Ozben heard her soft giggle echoing in the tunnel. She held up her arm, which glowed with a strange silver light, and allowed him to see her grin. He shook his head. “You’re kind of diabolical, you know that?” He considered for a moment. “I like it.”
She grinned wider. “Come on. The path’s clear ahead.”
“Right behind you.”
Truly, this was the last thing Ozben had expected to be doing at this hour of the night. Earlier, his best hope had been that he would escape the stronghold and bribe his way onto a caravan headed for the nearest city, where he could then catch a train to Ardra. He’d never dreamed he’d be crawling around secret tunnels with a strange girl.
Strange but fascinating, he had to admit. He’d been skeptical at first, but she seemed to know exactly where she was going, as if she’d done this kind of exploring every day of her life, just as she’d claimed. She talked about animals he’d never heard of and wore a bracelet of light that he was dying to ask her about. This whole night had been one surprise after another.
Was it possible she knew a secret way out of the stronghold itself? A tingle of excitement ran down Ozben’s spine, and his mind spun with the possibilities. If she could sneak him out of the stronghold in the middle of the night, he’d have a solid four- or five-hour head start before anyone found out he was gone. Maybe it was fate that had brought her out of nowhere in the Heart of the Mountain. Fate smacking him in the chest like a club, but still. He could take a hint.
Ozben crawled out of the hole behind her and stood up. By the light of her bracelet, he could see they were in what looked to be a small closet. Lina crouched down and shoved a large box full of cleaning supplies and old filthy rags in front of the hole.
“Won’t whoever cleans this place eventually find the hole when they come back to get their supplies?” Ozben asked.
“Nope,” Lina said confidently. She stood up and wiped her hands on her pant legs. “The cleaning stuff’s mine. It’s good for covering up the hole, but nobody uses this closet anymore anyway. Come on.” She headed for the door. “We’re on the fourth floor of the museum—Special Collections. It’s my favorite wing.”
“Why’s that?” Ozben asked as Lina opened the closet door a crack and peeked into the hall beyond.
“Because of the staircase,” Lina said. Ozben thought she sounded a little awed.
She led him out the door and left down a short hallway that spilled out into a large circular room. Evenly spaced along the walls were colorful murals of stained glass, each one standing about ten feet tall and as wide as the span of his arms. Lanterns burned behind them, illuminating the room in a soft, vibrant rainbow. Ozben stopped to examine the closest picture. It depicted a forest of lush green trees with leaves in shapes he’d never seen before. They looked like oversized clovers. In front of the trees was the figure of a sarnun woman.
During his short time in the stronghold, Ozben had seen several sarnuns among the archivists, though there were even more in Ardra, the capital city of the Merrow Kingdom. Unlike humans or chamelins, the sarnun species communicated telepathically, exchanging thoughts with each other instead of words spoken aloud. Their form resembled that of a human, but like the woman in the mural, they had blue skin and chalk-white eyes, and in place of hair, they possessed long, thin, filament-like feelers that they used to express emotion and recognize scents. The woman in the mural was bent at the waist, pointing her feelers at a row of white flowers growing at her feet.
“It’s a scent window,” Lina explained. “A sarnun artist named Kessel makes them. He donated a set to the museum. If you lean in close, you can actually smell the glass flowers.”
“I’ve heard about these,” Ozben said excitedly, “but I’ve never seen one in person.” He bent closer to the mural. He didn’t have a sarnun’s keen sense of smell, but he detected a faint whiff of sweetness, like a lily, coming from the glass panes. “That’s amazing,” he said. “I know the sarnuns lock the scent into the glass during the foiling process, but I never understood how they make it last so long.” Etched in the bottom right corner was the name of the piece. “ ‘Forests of the Mind,’ ” he translated. “Good title.”
“Wow, you can read the sarnuns’ language?” Lina asked, sounding impressed. “I could never manage that—the vowels are too complicated.”
Ozben laughed. “Not as complicated as the chamelin tongue,” he said. “I’ve been studying that one for years, and I still can’t understand it, but then I’ve heard that most humans can’t.”
“How many languages do you speak?” Lina asked curiously.
Ozben looked up as he tallied them in his head. “Five—six, if you count the dead languages and the chamelin tongue. Nirean doesn’t, though. She says my accent is terrible.” He chuckled again.
But Lina didn’t laugh. Her mouth had dropped open. “You’re full of surprises,” she said. “What else have you studied?”
He shrugged. “Odds and ends like geography, political history, and economics. Bit of sword fighting. The usual stuff.”
“Usual sword-fighting stuff?” Lina said, laughing. “I like your kind of classes. The archivists don’t offer courses in actual sword fighting, only theory.”
“It’s not as exciting as it sounds,” Ozben said. “I never wanted to be a soldier, but I asked my sister to teach me to fight anyway, just to keep ahead.”
“Ahead of what?” Lina asked.
“Just ahead. I don’t know.” Ozben felt a little flustered. He wasn’t used to talking about himself like this, but Lina looked at him with such an earnest expression, as if she genuinely wanted to know. Most people weren’t that interested in him. “It’s hard to explain,” he said, “but when you’re the spare heir, like me, you have to find ways to make yourself stand out, to be important. Someday I want to be able to contribute to the family legacy—that’s what my grandfather calls it. So I’ve tried to learn as much as I can about as many things as I can.”
“Sounds like that could be exhausting,” Lina said, “especially if you’d rather be doing something else.”
“It’s not so bad,” Ozben said, “and the sword fighting is kind of fun, at least the way Elinore teaches it.” He glanced up at the mural, memorizing the vivid colors of the forest scene and the faint scent of the white lilies. “This is better, though. Thanks for showing me,” he said. “So not everything in the museum comes from another world?”
“Most of it does,” Lina said, “but we’re in a unique part of the museum, one that’s off-limits to the public. Apprentices aren’t allowed either, but I like to come here.”
“Of course you do,” Ozben murmured, smiling to himself. He had a feeling that no amount of locked doors and OFF-LIMITS signs could keep Lina from going wherever she wanted to.
“Come on. There’s a lot more to see,” she said, tugging gently on his arm. He allowed himself to be led away from the murals and across to the center of the room. A staircase led down to another level of the museum.
“The archivists sometimes call this area The Art of the Unknown,” Lina explained as she guided him down the stairs, which curved slightly, revealing a series of alcoves set into the left-hand wall. “Mostly we call it Special Collections.”
Ozben stopped at the first alcove. A sphere of interlocking metal rings covered in holes enclo
sed what looked like a tiny candle flame, no bigger than his thumbnail. The flame appeared to float in midair. A plaque beneath the piece read SUN SPHERE. “What’s holding up the flame?” he asked.
“We don’t know,” Lina said, “but it never goes out, even if you touch it or squeeze it in your fist. It just stays. Go ahead, try it.”
Fascinated, Ozben reached out a hand and flicked his finger at the edge of the hovering flame. A flash of heat caressed his skin, and the fire trembled for an instant before stabilizing. Then it burned on like a tiny star.
“I’ve never seen anything like that before,” he said in a hushed voice. “This comes from another world—it has to, doesn’t it?”
Lina nodded. “All these artifacts were scavenged from the meteor fields. And none of them are junk,” she added significantly.
Ozben wasn’t about to argue. He followed her down the stairs to the next alcove, where a large leather-bound book rested open on a stone pedestal. Dividing the book’s two halves was a tattered green ribbon. The pages themselves were gold-leafed and looked as if they had once been very fine, but age and water damage had made them crinkled and brittle, so that in some places the text was unreadable.
“This is one of my favorite books,” Lina said. “It’s called The Ever Story. The pages are so old and fragile, the archivists turn only one each month. But the book is amazing. It tells a different story for each person reading it, and the words appear in their native language. Isn’t that wonderful?”
Ozben blinked. “A different…Wait a minute, what?” He must have misunderstood her explanation. He squinted at the tiny writing on the page closest to him and read the first couple of lines aloud: “ ‘Delia woke up with her cheek pressed against burning hot sand. Salt water dripped from her hair. The Gauntlet had sunk in the storm, but what had happened to her friends? Had they perished?’ ” He stopped reading and glanced up at Lina. “Is that what your words say?”
Lina smiled and shook her head. “Nope. My story’s about a magic wardrobe—can you believe that, a magic closet?—that’s a portal to another land. I didn’t think I was going to like it, but now I can’t stop reading. It’s hard getting to read only a page a month, but at least it makes the story last.”
The Secrets of Solace Page 8
