Palace of Stone (13 page)

How could the guards hear nothing of it? Indeed, how did the stones themselves not rend and tear? But even as Miri thought it, she noticed small vibrations through the soles of her feet.

“Is Britta within?” Miri asked the guard. “Or—”

Steffan walked by. He started to smile and then seemed to sense her anxiety.

“Miri, is everything—”

“Oh Steffan, help!” she said. “I think Esa is trapped somewhere. Tell the guards—”

“Let them in,” he said.

Miri took Frid’s hand, and they ran.

At first she thought she could follow the vibrations in the stone to Esa, but they seemed to radiate in every direction. Corridor after corridor, through large chambers and narrow rooms, it all seemed the same in their rush: linder floors, linder walls, finery that tired their eyes. Miri wanted to see Esa, not another sofa.

“Did her quarry-speech make you think about a bookshelf?” said Miri.

“Yes, the time it fell at the academy,” said Frid.

There could be a bookshelf anywhere. Surely the king could afford as many books as he wanted.

Miri rubbed her face. Her bones no longer shook from the ferocity of the shout, and that was so much worse. Esa’s voice was dimming.

Steffan jogged around the corner, following after them.

“A place with books,” Miri said. “Somewhere in the king’s wing?”

Without wasting time to ask why, he ran forward, motioning them to follow.

What a marvelous boy!
she thought.
No wonder Britta loves him.

The quarry-speech was so faint now, Miri felt only a thin, dry wail. She quarry-spoke a memory of Frid, Esa, and Miri together at the academy, hoping Esa would understand they were coming.

“Esa!” Frid shouted. “Esa!”

“The palace library,” Steffan said over his shoulder, and he pushed two great doors inward. Miri cursed herself for not thinking of a palace library. The Queen’s Castle library had seemed large enough to support the entire kingdom.

Down a row of shelves, a massive bookcase lay toppled, and the ends of Esa’s yellow-brown hair splayed out from beneath it. Frid seized the case and inched it up. Esa took an audible gasp. Steffan helped lift while Miri pulled Esa free. Frid and Steffan, groaning at the weight, let the case thud to the ground behind them.

Esa breathed and coughed. Miri smoothed the hair off Esa’s forehead. It was the same color as Peder’s, and she imagined their mother, Doter, touching their hair like that when they were sick or hurt. Doter always knew what to do.

Mount Eskel had never felt so far away.

“Don’t die,” Frid said, her bottom lip trembling.

“All right,” Esa croaked.

Steffan was hurrying out and called back that he’d find a physician.

Moments later the door opened to Queen Sabet. Her gaze took in Esa and the upset case, books strewn about.

“I’m sorry, Your Majesty,” Esa said. Her voice trembled. “I reached for a book and the whole thing came down.”

“Well,” the queen said in her slow, high voice, “books can be dangerous.”

She motioned to someone in the corridor. Several black-clothed servants appeared. They righted the case and began to reshelve the books.

“I’m sorry,” Esa repeated. “I won’t come here again if you don’t want me to.”

The queen frowned with a press of her chin. “Someone may as well use this room. It
is
pretty.” Her hands fluttered, unsure, and she left.

Miri and Frid had helped Esa move to a library sofa when the physician arrived.

“The longer I lay there, the harder it was to breathe,” Esa said as the physician examined her. “I thought I was dying.”

“Yes, when the breath stops, death usually does follow,” said the physician. “But you got out in time. I spy nothing worse than two broken ribs, and if you don’t bother them, those bones will knit themselves back together.”

He gave her a dose of something for the pain. Esa thanked him, but as soon as he left, her face scrunched up and tears fell.

“Does it hurt too much?” Miri said. “What can I do?”

Esa shook her head. “Nothing. I just … I’m angry. I’m so angry!”

Miri and Frid took a step back and looked at each other. Esa was not one to yell, and especially not minutes after her life’s breath had been nearly squashed out of her.

Then Frid said in one rush, “I’m sorry I ate your roll this morning, I was hungry and I didn’t think you wanted it and you can have mine tomorrow!”

Esa laughed softly, as if the effort hurt.

“I’m not angry at
you
, Frid.” She was still clutching a book with her right hand, her limp arm lying on her lap. “The other day, the queen saw me reading one of Miri’s books in the conservatory and said I could use her library. I thought, how pleasant it will be to browse stories, but do you know what I found?”

She held up the book. Miri read the spine:
Maladies
.

“There are herbs for pain and others for heart palpitations and some to bring on sleep,” said Esa. “There are things you can do to help get a baby out right and keep the mother safe, and make sure a cut doesn’t go bad—and if it does, it tells how to cut off a limb and save the person from dying.”

“That’s some book,” Miri said.

“I remember a little brother,” Esa continued. “He had fat cheeks. My ma lost four babies, Miri lost her ma, but in the lowlands they’re off at horse races and plays and banquets while their libraries hold secrets about how to help keep a person alive. Why didn’t they bother to tell us?”

“There’s so much distraction here,” Miri said. “I guess they don’t think about us much at all.”

“I guess.” Esa took back the book and spoke softly, the anger fading. “But
I
won’t get distracted.”

Miri had been studying in the grandest school in the kingdom, but she did not think she’d learned anything so important. Esa would go back to Mount Eskel and save lives. Meanwhile Miri still did not know if she would save the painting or the prisoner.

“You can have my roll tomorrow anyway,” Frid said, paging through a book called
Anatomy
.

“Thanks,” said Esa.

Frid snickered. She held up the book, open to an illustration.

“The artist forgot to draw some leggings on this fellow.”

Esa barked a laugh and then schooled straight her expression. “If I’m going to learn doctoring, I’d better get used to it.”

Miri left Esa and Frid studying Anatomy and wandered the stacks. It was so quiet compared to the Queen’s Castle library and its constant rhythm of footsteps, whispers, and flipping pages. This room had an air of abandon. Rain-gray light seeped through the high windows and dusted the books below.

On the back wall a small bookcase stood alone, proclaiming its significance. Miri examined several of the books, realizing with dawning awe that they were the actual diaries of kings. She picked up one covered in gray, cracked leather, but it slipped. She lurched and caught it just before it hit the floor. Some things could never be replaced if lost: a king’s diary, the history of a mountain village, a painting of a girl looking at the moon.

And my mother, and Esa’s fat-cheeked baby brother
, Miri thought.

The queen offered library access to all the girls, and Miri meant to return soon, but it proved difficult to find time between the Queen’s Castle and Sisela’s Salon. She missed her nightly chats with the academy girls, but she just had to meet up with her Salon friends. Protests had begun to crackle around Asland. Angry over the rising cost of food, commoners gathered at the roads into the city, where officials exacted tribute on incoming wagons of winter vegetables. They complained, they hollered, and sometimes they fought.

“It
is
beginning,” Timon said, seizing Miri’s hands. “At last.”

Miri squeezed his hands back. Each protest was a tiny spark, and they believed the revolution would explode any day now. Miri longed to be in the middle of it and planned to accompany Sisela and Timon to the next protest, but that morning she’d woken up congested and sore.

“I never get sick,” Miri said when Britta brought her juice and toast. Her voice sounded loud in her stuffed-up head and made her ears squeak.

“No one gets through an Aslandian winter unscathed,” Britta said.

Britta dodged officials and appointments for a week, sneaking to Miri’s bedside to help her keep up on her studies and bring gossip. Demonstrations continued, and Miri realized there must be dozens of Salons full of rebellious commoners. But the royal guard always quelled the protests, and no mobs neared the palace.

One morning Inga delivered a package that had come for Miri. The box held twenty-five books, many times more than currently existed on all of Mount Eskel. Miri inhaled the sweet and dusty smell of ink on paper, rich as the air in a bakery.

“They must be worth a wagonload of linder!” said Esa.

There was a note.

For Lady Miri,

Who deserves a library of her own. May these serve as a humble beginning.

Timon

Miri passed the books around but held the note to her chest.

What if …
Miri shied away from the thought, but it had already started to form. She saw herself in the black robes of a master, showing young scholars the Queen’s Castle library and nodding demurely that
why yes
, she had read every volume. She imagined standing on the bow of a ship, skimming over foreign seas, carrying the message of freedom won in Danland.

Timon had said first Asland; the rest of Danland would follow, and then all the world. His promises felt as real as paper in her hands, just awaiting the ink strokes of action.

But Miri was not the only one who took sick that winter, and revolution proved no match for a head cold. Salons emptied, as did the Queen’s Castle. Now Miri found time to haunt the palace library.

Master Filippus had said they needed to study History to understand what had worked in the past. Miri found the Librarian’s Book of the palace library and started to read all she could on tributes, hoping for clues on how to defend Mount Eskel. There were laws that limited how much tribute nobles could take from commoners, but as Miri had seen from the Grievance Official’s ledger, if they took more anyway, no one could stop them. And no laws limited the king.

Discouraged, she moved on to any mentions of Mount Eskel or linder. She read a curious entry in the diary of the previous king, the father of King Bjorn and grandfather of Steffan.

Sweyn’s cruelty toward Bjorn has grown worse. He torments the boy and says his brother has no business inside linder walls. I regret telling Sweyn about linder wisdom so soon, but after my illness in the spring, I feared my own mortality and wished to pass on the secret before Sweyn became king. Now it seems I was premature.

I will send Bjorn to the Summer Castle to keep him safe from his brother. Besides, Bjorn need not be raised inside linder walls as he will not be king.

But Bjorn did become king, and now he did indeed live inside linder walls. Surely the passage she had read in the Queen’s Castle suggesting linder was toxic had been wrong. But what was the royals’ secret connection with linder?

Linder wisdom
, Miri repeated to herself. Could the royals have quarry-speech?

Impossible. Although Steffan did not share Esa’s exact memory of a fallen bookshelf, surely he had experienced something similar enough to understand. If the royal family could quarry-speak at all, Esa’s quarry-shout would have nudged a similar memory in Steffan or the queen. But they had heard nothing.

Miri read the diary and pieced together the story of the two brothers. Sweyn, the prince heir, harassed Bjorn from a young age, threatening and striking him. On one occasion he locked him up and would tell no one where. It took nearly a day to locate the boy in a storage pantry. Bjorn did not call out or even cry—just shivered till his teeth clattered. It was soon after that Bjorn and his mother moved to the Summer Castle in Lonway.

The king’s diary ended abruptly, so Miri found a historian’s account to learn the rest. The king grew ill, and Sweyn ruled as prince regent. Sweyn attended the ball of a princess academy in Hindrick province and chose his bride. Just months after his parents had died and he had been made king, Sweyn was racing carriages and was killed in a crash. He had not yet married.

And so Bjorn—the shivering boy locked in the pantry, raised in the country, kept away from the palace and politics—became king.

Whatever linder secret the king had passed on to Sweyn the prince heir, Bjorn likely had never learned. What was this knowledge royalty took to the grave?

The rest of the dreary winter afforded Miri many more afternoons of reading. Esa was rarely in the library anymore. A palace physician had taken her on as an aide.

All the ladies of the princess kept busy. When they were not helping Britta memorize names of nobles and rules of court conduct, Frid was at the forge, Gerti at her music, and Bena and Liana on social visits.

And Miri kept reading.

Whenever Britta was free, she joined Miri with a book of her own, resting her head on Miri’s legs. Sometimes the queen sat nearby, flipping through books with illustrations, humming to herself when she discovered something she liked.

Royalty is the enemy of common people
, Sisela had said, and Miri suspected it was true. But the sentiment was hard to hold when the queen directed a servant to take Miri a tray of mint tea and snacks.

“I felt you were thirsty,” the queen said, not making eye contact before leaving the library.

She
felt
I was thirsty?
Miri wondered. Her thirst could not have been obvious. She had not been panting like a dog.

The phrase reminded Miri of something she’d read. She looked back over a previous king’s diary:
The ambassador from Rilamark was all pomp and swagger, but I felt his insecurity tinged with fear.

It was an odd note, but Miri dismissed it, thinking perhaps the royals had their own peculiar way of speaking.