The War With The Mein (60 page)

Aliver stooped down and peeled a piece of fabric away from the ground. He held it in one hand, snapped it until it flapped loose, spun it so that the unsoiled orange caught the sun. He said something else to the antok. He let the fabric drape over his chest.

This was an invitation the vile thing understood. It roared and ran forward, limping but intent now, looking as fierce as ever. Aliver waited until it was only strides away, and then he flung the fabric up into the air. The antok lifted its head to follow, jaws open, body rearing up. Aliver ducked beneath it. He jabbed his sword into the creature’s underbelly and sliced it open from chest to abdomen. He was out from under it by the time it began to collapse, spilling its insides around it in a flood of viscera.

It had not been particularly hard to get into the palace, although—as with the clue about The Song of Elenet that drove him here—Thaddeus had learned how only because of something Dariel had casually uttered. One evening shortly after he had joined Aliver in Talay, the younger prince had spoken about how he had come to meet Val of the Verspines, the raider who became his surrogate father. He had detailed what he could remember of the subterranean regions of the palace. Much of what he described was rendered in vague terms. Where he did have details, they sounded skewed by childish imaginative flourishes, filled with eccentric characters who inhabited labyrinthine tunnels that, by the sound of it, looped out through miles unimagined by the palace dwellers above.

But Dariel was both specific and credible about the time he had almost been swept out to sea. It was a memory not blurred by the passage of time. There was a platform just above the water level, he said, at the northern edge of the island near the Temple of Vada. It was a small flat area cut into the rock for some long-ago purpose. Just above it, set at an angle into the stone that probably made it hard to see from the water, was an entry point. The passageway it opened into led upward through hidden regions that wormed all the way into the palace, even as far as the nursery chambers.

Thaddeus committed the description of the entry point to memory. After departing without ceremony from Aliver’s camp he marched his old man’s body north a few days. Then he angled off to the west to avoid Maeander’s massing army. Arriving at a port town on the coast, he bought the smallest sloop he could imagine risking the seas in. He sailed at sunset that very same day. The wind was with him for most of the night journey, and the graying light of predawn found him bobbing in the waves near the temple, just out from the rocks that marked Acacia’s northern coastline.

He searched for as long as he dared in the coming light. Eventually, he committed himself to making landfall. Knowing he could not leave the boat to be discovered, he set its sail to angle out to sea, jumped overboard, and watched it slip away on the breeze. He swam for the rocks and clawed his way back, for the first time in many years, onto the island of Acacia.

It still took him longer than he wished to locate the entry point. By the time he did he was awash with sweat, breathing heavily, and fearful lest he be in the midst of yet another great folly. He thanked the Giver profusely when he found the slit in the stone. He slipped out of the light into environs that were, in fact, every bit as forlorn and eerie as Dariel had described.

For all the risky faith of the journey he was amazed at the ease with which he climbed up into the palace. He was slipping through the halls so suddenly that he was not actually prepared for it. It was hard not to step out into the center of the familiar corridors and walk as if he still belonged within them. He stopped himself. He had to be careful, especially now. He withdrew and kept to the shadows throughout the daylight hours. He could not always tell the abandoned corridors from the passageways still used by servants, but he placed himself at cracks in the walls through which he could see and hear the goings-on of the palace. It amazed him to think somebody could navigate unseen this way. He wondered if anybody had during his tenure here.

He knew the answer as soon as he formed the question. His skin crawled with the certainty of it; of course he had been spied on before. The leaguemen: if anybody used these corridors it would have been them. Weren’t they known for their nearly clairvoyant anticipation of coming events, decrees, opinions? Perhaps they still used these regions to observe Hanish as well. Thaddeus redoubled his efforts at secrecy, only moving at all so as to place himself where he could observe the pattern of Meinish palace life.

What struck him was that there was no pattern to it. The place hummed with disarray. There was a bustling energy in the staff and servants, an undercurrent of excited confusion that had a singular quality, as if it marked the approach of an unprecedented event. His command of the Meinish language was tolerable. From snatches of conversation, he pieced together that Hanish had been away from the island but was soon returning. As night settled down on the palace, he decided that this accounted for the level of excitement. It did not feel quite complete, but he wasn’t here as a spy.

His mission was a singular one. If what he had finally figured out from clues that had lived within him for nine years was correct, The Song of Elenet had resided in Leodan’s library all along. It had, in a way, never been lost. And if the room had not been disturbed, the volume would still be sitting in the same place it likely had for decades. All he had to do was get to the library unseen, find the book, and then extricate himself from the palace and the island, still unseen.

In the still hours of that night, Thaddeus crept toward the library, half focused on his stealth, half reliving the distant moments that had planted the clues that had led him here. It pained him now to recall that last exchange with Leodan. It had pained him every day and night since, but now he understood it differently from the way he had before. When he remembered Leodan’s face gazing at him, he was no longer sure that the dying man was recalling the life they had shared together. He was not even sure if Leodan had been looking at him with love or with mistrust or hatred. He wasn’t sure of any of this because Leodan had spoken to him in code. He had specifically not told him where the book was. He had not entrusted it entirely to him or to the children, who would have been too young to know what to do with it. Instead, he had placed the clues to its location between them. Clearly there for them to see once they were ready to see it, once they really needed to see it.

Leodan had written: Tell the children their story is only half written. Tell them to write the rest and place it beside the greatest story. Tell them. Their story stands beside the greatest tale ever told. It was as simple as that. He had told Thaddeus that the children’s story should be beside “the greatest story,” and he had told the children that the greatest story was that of the Two Brothers. Put them together and the answer was obvious. Their story was not just the story of their lives. It was not even just the history of the Akaran line. It was a longer narrative of human folly. It was the tale of how humans had learned to become gods, to control language, how they had angered the divine, enslaved the Giver’s creatures, and secured their dominion over the world. It was the story of Elenet’s betrayal.

The library door made far too much noise in opening. The hinges creaked from disuse. The smell was just as he remembered, dusty and heavy with mildew, oily with the scent of sandalwood. The moon cast its white light through the large windows, several of which were open enough to let in a breath of night air. Thaddeus navigated beneath the moonlight. He knew his way through the tall stacks of books by heart, and he found the book exactly where he thought he would. The ease of it amazed him. The book The Two Brothers was just where it was supposed to be, and beside it was the plain spine of an ancient volume. He knew the instant he cracked it open that it was the book he sought.

It was The Song of Elenet, the dictionary written in the first sorcerer’s own hand. His eyes, drifting over the cover, found nothing on it that named it explicitly. Its cover was plain worn leather. It had a utilitarian look to it, as if it might be a record book for a minor government official. Flipping it open, nothing in the appearance of the lettering or the opening headings suggested the import of the contents. It seemed crucial that he read enough to prove he was not mistaken. Just enough to confirm that he had the right book. He sat down with it in one of the window bays and leafed through it, feeling a breath of stale air brush his face with each passing leaf.

Each page prompted him to turn to the next, but not because of what he read. He turned pages because he could not, in any real sense, read it. He found his mind could not hold the words for any longer than the second his eyes took to pass over them. He was reading, and yet he wasn’t. There before him was a page full of script, and then another, and another. Plain letters and words, written in an innocuous hand on paper that showed its age in its coarseness. It was a page like any other, filled with words he almost recognized. But try as he might he could not comprehend even a single sentence of what he read. He could not hold a phrase, a thought, an impression even, of what was right there before him. He lost himself in the effort of it, flipping page after page, always feeling he was on the verge of cracking its meaning. He lost himself in the attempt, without realizing how much time was passing.

Eventually, infuriated, he hissed, “What good is such a thing?”

The sound of his voice jolted him. He looked around the library, watched dust float in the air, listened to the silence, and searched for any sign that he might have been heard or seen. The chamber was still and empty, but he realized that it was not night anymore. It wasn’t even early morning. The full light of a clear day cascaded through the windows. Hours had passed while he sat with his head in the book. He had been so preoccupied someone could have walked in and tapped him on the shoulder. He could hear voices in the courtyard outside, the click of shoes passing in the hallway, a grinding sound as somebody moved a heavy piece of furniture in a nearby room.

And then he felt the weight of the book, as if it consciously pressed against his thighs, taunting him to try again. He snapped it closed. He was not, of course, meant to read it. He had not intended to try. It could only be understood with close study, and should only ever be examined by one who would commit his life to learning it, to accepting the magnitude of what such knowledge entailed. Thaddeus was not that person. He jammed the volume under his arm and moved for the door. He was very tired, dull with hunger. It would take all his strength to get out of this place alive.

As he approached the door, a voice flew through the opened window just to his left. A woman’s voice, calling to someone. He did not hear the spoken words clearly, but something about them hooked him with a curiosity to see who had spoken and to whom. He stepped closer, craned his neck to see. The view spread out before him slowly, each portion of it taking his breath away with its grandeur.

A group of three women stood with their backs to him. One of them motioned across the courtyard at another young woman. This one seemed to have been stopped in her progress. She hesitated a moment, then turned and proceeded toward the others. Watching her draw nearer, Thaddeus realized who she was. Corinn. It was Corinn. Bits and pieces of Leodan and Aleera were there on display, as were various shadings of resemblance to Aliver and Mena and Dariel. She carried all their traits with a grace beyond any of them. Her posture was upright in a courtly manner, her waist slim, breasts and shoulders snug within a sky-blue dress. She was a part of Acacia’s splendor, he saw, in a way he no longer imagined the other siblings could be.

Having thought this, though, he knew it was only partly right. She belonged here but not like this. Not as a prisoner; not as mistress to Hanish Mein; not as a living, forced betrayal of all that she held dear. He could see all of this on her face as she spoke with the other women. She was stunning, but that did not hide the misery residing just below the surface. Her face had about it a brittle aura, a crystalline fragility. She looked as if she could explode into a thousand pieces at any moment.

Thaddeus surveyed her for as long as she stayed in the courtyard. It was the second time he forgot his need for stealth. He viewed her and her surroundings from various windows, learning all he could from what he observed. It did not take long to confirm that she was under close surveillance. People spying on one person may hide their actions well from that person, but they are often as obvious as the sun to others. Guards watched her covertly. Passing officials viewed her with sidelong glances. A servant walked into and out of view several times, holding a basket that she neither dropped off nor added to. In all of this Thaddeus observed hidden signs of her captivity. Because of it, he decided to rescue her.

This thought had already crossed Thaddeus’s mind. He had rolled it over as he marched across northern Talay. He had dismissed it, though. Everything depended on his retrieving the book, and rescuing the princess added layer upon layer of complexity to the mission. It provided many more opportunities to fail. And he could not fail. He had even gone so far as to imagine conversations with Hanish in which the still-captive Corinn was used as a bargaining point. He doubted Hanish would hurt her. Not after having kept her alive and in health for so long, not after lying night after night in the same bed with her. She’d be safe enough, he had thought, until the conflict reached its conclusion.

But that was before, when Corinn had been but a notion, a phantom he thought of daily but had not laid eyes on in nine years. How different he felt now that he saw her. If he managed to escape this island with both The Song of Elenet and with Princess Corinn, he would have made great strides toward redeeming his earlier sins. All the children would be safe. The future of the world would lie in their capable hands. The fact that he might be able to make this happen meant that he had to try. Of course he did.