The Bird and the Sword (8 page)

“Sit.” He extended his hand toward the chair I’d just vacated and pulled out the one across from it, clearly settling in for further discussion on the matter. I did as I was told, my back stiff, my hands folded demurely in my lap. I eyed him warily, and he stared back with frank curiosity.

“What is your name, Lady Corvyn? Your given name?”

I touched my throat impatiently. He knew I couldn’t respond. He seemed to have forgotten that.

“Write it.” He shoved a blank sheet of paper toward me.

I shook my head and shrugged my shoulders, indicating I could not.

“You can’t write?” his voice rose in incredulity. “How will I talk to you?”

I tugged at my ear. He could talk to me just as he was doing now. I could hear just fine.

“You can hear me, yes. But you can’t respond.”

I shrugged once more.

“What do I call you?” he asked, irritated. “I refuse to call you Milady forever.”

I picked up a piece of charcoal and the paper he’d provided, and began to sketch rapidly.

“A bird?” He was confused.

I nodded and tapped the page then pointed to my chest.

“You’re named after a bird?”

I nodded again, eagerly. I added details to the small bird, so he would recognize it.

“A lark?”

I nodded once more.

“Lark? That’s not a name,” he argued gently, almost as if he were offended on my behalf.

I lifted my eyes to his, because it
was
a name. It was my name.

He must have seen my affront and been amused by it, because his lips quirked infinitesimally.

“Why don’t you know how to write? You are the daughter of a nobleman. You should know how to read and write. Why did no one teach you?”

I drew my father’s face, crude but recognizable. I’d had practice drawing him. I tapped it. Tiras stared at it thoughtfully.

“Your father wouldn’t allow it?”

I nodded. I turned to the paper again and drew a quick image of myself in chains. I set the charcoal back down.

“You were a prisoner?” he guessed hesitantly.

It was the most accurate response I could give, and he understood well enough. I was
still
a prisoner. I nodded at his question but raised a disdainful eyebrow, spreading my arms to indicate my surroundings.

“You are still a prisoner,” he murmured, as if he’d plucked the words from my head.

I held his gaze and inclined my head, indicating that he was correct.

“But you are
my
prisoner now. Not your father’s. And I want you to read. And write.” He pursed his lips thoughtfully.

I pulled the paper toward myself and began to form the letters I’d been taught long ago. A, B, C, D and L for Lark. An old woman in the village had taught me L and told me my name began with that letter. My father had discovered I was being taught and sentenced her to twenty lashes in the village square. No one else had attempted to educate me after that.

“You know these?” he asked, his eyes on my ill-formed letters.

I nodded.

He took the charcoal from my hands and drew a straight line with another line laid above it. “This is a T. For Tiras.” He wrote more letters and tapped them. “Tiras.” He wrote an L and an A followed by shapes I didn’t recognize. “Lark. This is the word Lark.”

I couldn’t pull my eyes away from my name. My name! I traced it reverently.

“Practice your name. Practice my name. I will be back tomorrow to teach you more.”

I hurried to get in front of him, not wanting him to leave. He looked down at me in surprise. I grabbed his left hand in both of mine and pulled him back to the table. His hand was thick and warm and calloused and made me think of the bark on the trees near my home, but I pushed the awareness away and tapped the paper.

“I can’t teach you everything now,” he protested in surprise.

I tapped the letters I had made. A, B, C, D. I picked up the charcoal and urgently tapped the space after the D. What came next? I wanted all the letters. All the shapes. I wanted to write them all, to practice them all, so that when he came back I would recognize them.

“You want to know what follows?”

I nodded eagerly.

He took a quill from my supplies and dipped it carefully in the ink. Then using a fresh sheet of parchment, he started at A and continued on for several minutes, creating lines and squiggles and curved edges that looked both familiar and forbidden. I clapped gleefully, and he looked at me in surprise, a smile hovering around his lips. He put the quill down. I picked it up and handed it to him again, pushing it on him.

“All of them?”

I nodded so hard my jaw ached.

He laughed out loud this time, and the action made his black eyes crinkle at the edges and his lips turn up in a way that was terribly attractive and impossibly infuriating. I glared at him and tapped the paper insistently. It wasn’t funny—
I
wasn’t funny. He’d been given every word he needed, and every word had been stripped from me. I wanted them back. All of them.

He took the quill almost meekly, though his eyes gleamed with suppressed mirth. He continued for several more minutes, forming each letter in a strong line. I hoped he wasn’t trying to fool me with symbols that meant nothing, simply so he could laugh at me when he returned.

When he finished, he laid down the quill and sprinkled the ink with a dusting of sand from a little corked vial, setting the ink. Then he looked up at me.

“This is every letter of the alphabet. Every word in our language is made from these letters.”

I could hardly breathe. I clasped my hands against my chest to calm my heart and stared down at the beauty he’d created. Then I raised my eyes and it was my turn to smile. I couldn’t hold it in. I wanted to. I didn’t want to reveal my wonder and the thrill that coursed through my veins. But I couldn’t hold it in. So I smiled at him and did my best not to cry happy tears.

He seemed almost stunned by my joy and rose slowly. He tipped his head to the side as if he couldn’t quite figure me out. Without further comment, he turned and left the room.

I
realized after the king left that I hadn’t asked about Boojohni. I was ashamed of myself and waited eagerly for the king to return, like he’d said he would so I could draw him pictures and thereby demand answers. But he didn’t return. Not the next day or the next.

My fingers grew black from practicing the characters he’d written out for me, copying them carefully. I found the letters in Lark and the letters in Tiras, but didn’t know what they were called. They were simply shapes. Lines. Symbols that were completely meaningless. But I had a plan. When Tiras came back, I would have him write out the words for every object in my room on separate pieces of paper, naming each one. Chair. Table. Floor. Bed. Candle. I would put each paper in its proper place, and I would learn the words and decipher the sounds of each letter, every combination.

But Tiras didn’t come back.

I tried to convince the maids to write the words they knew. I also showed them the picture of Boojohni, but they all shrugged and shook their heads. They didn’t know much, and I didn’t trust the one who seemed to dislike me more each day. The others called her Greta, and I got the feeling she didn’t know how to read or write any better than I did, though she wouldn’t admit it. She just stomped around and pushed me away when I tried to communicate. Then there was Kjell.

Four days after Tiras had shown me how to write my name, Kjell returned to drag me from my room in the middle of the night, just like before. I went with him willingly, eagerly, though his promise to help me had been a lie. I didn’t do it for him. I didn’t do it for the king, who’d lied to me too. I did it for the words he’d said he would teach me.

Kjell didn’t take me into the bowels of the castle this time. We went to another tower, a tower directly opposite mine, and I marveled that the king had been so close all this time. I wondered if he’d seen me standing on my balcony, waiting for him to return. But when Kjell shoved me inside the chamber and slammed the door, locking it behind me, I found myself completely alone.

The king’s bedcovers were tangled, his clothes discarded on the floor, but he was gone, and though I pounded on the door, Kjell did not return to explain what I was doing there and what was expected of me. Stepping out onto the balcony, I discovered the night was incredibly bright, the moon almost full, just like it had been the night I’d found the eagle in the forest. But there were no birds to save in Jeru City. Or kings, for that matter. I was lonelier than I’d ever been, and that was a feat in itself. I pulled my dressing gown around my body and returned to the richly appointed chamber.

There were books on the shelves and several lay open on a table not so different from the one in my room. My father kept the books at the keep locked in his study. I had never seen one up close. I turned the pages, studied the words, and tried to make sense of them, tracing the shape of each letter with my finger, the way I’d traced my name. I’d determined that the S at the end of Tiras looked and hissed like a snake. I studied the page and found all the words with an s in them. I’d also compared the R shape in our names and determined its sound. Of course the T made a tapping sound at the beginning of Tiras’s name. T-T-T-T. I liked to focus on the sound, making it stutter in my mind like a woodpecker. I was going to take one of the books. When the king came back and found me in his room, I was going to fill my arms with books and refuse to give them back.

I kept the candles lit and pored over the pages until my eyes would no longer focus and my head began to droop. I curled up in a corner of the king’s bed, trying not to notice how the covers smelled of fresh air and cedar. Then I slept, heavy and hard, dreaming of the shrieking of birdmen and the words that danced on the pages of the king’s books. The letters shifted and reformed, whispering their names in my mother’s voice. I heard a cry, piercing, louder than that of the Volgar, and a desperate fluttering, like a dozen flags whipping in the wind. It was so close, so present, that I opened my eyes blearily, reluctant to abandon sleep so soon.

Dawn was breaking and grey light had just begun to spill through the open balcony doors and sneak across the king’s chamber. The doors had been open when Kjell had pushed me into the room the night before, and it hadn’t felt necessary or even right to close them, as if the king himself would use the balcony to reemerge from the night. But morning had returned without the king, and I blinked wearily, caught in that drowsy place where sleep and wakefulness become a strange blend of both.

The eagle from the woods, no sign of the arrow buried in his chest, perched on the balcony rail. I watched him through glazed eyes, my lids at half-mast, unalarmed and completely unconvinced that I wasn’t still sleeping. He was aware of me, of that I was sure. He cocked his head and shrieked, as if warning me away.

The door of the king’s chambers burst open, and Kjell erupted into the room, making me bolt upright, sleep abandoned, the eagle forgotten.

“Where is he?” Kjell growled, as if I’d spun the king into gold while he slept. I shook my head helplessly and extended my arms, indicating the empty chamber. He turned in place, his hands on his hips, frustration oozing from every pore. The word
hopeless
flitted in the air around him, and this time I didn’t just hear the word, I saw it, recognizing the S—a pair of curling snakes that hissed with sound before disintegrating with his movement.

He grabbed for my arm, and I wriggled away, darting to the table where the king’s books were spread. I grasped the first one I touched, scooping it up and clutching it to my chest.

“Put it down,” he roared.

I danced away from him, flitting to the door he’d left gaping beyond him and dashing out into the wide hallway. I would return to my room, gladly. But I was taking a book.

I ran with the livid Kjell bellowing behind me, and when I finally stopped in front of my tower door, after easily navigating the corridors, he drew up abruptly, gasping for air, eyeing me like I was completely daft.

I thumped the book at my chest fiercely so he would understand why I had run. Then I pounded the door to the room where I’d been held for two long weeks. With a shake of his head and an impatient curse, he pushed me aside and unlocked my chamber door. I was shoved inside once more—an infuriating pattern emerging—with no explanation of what he’d expected from me and no enlightenment as to the king’s whereabouts. But he didn’t take the book.