The Twelve Kingdoms: The Mark of the Tala (6 page)

I imagined Rayfe in a cell, stuck back in one of these corners. All these cells, filled with the tortured, the ones unwilling to give up their secrets, the others too dangerous to release and yet not important enough to execute outright. Surely that would never come to pass.

“I don’t think I could stop King Uorsin from reclaiming his dungeons. Perhaps you overestimate my influence.”

“No, Princess, I feel sure you’re correct. But if you could put in a word for the library. Ask for space for us. We’ve never really had a champion at court. It’s a great deal to ask, I know, but perhaps now you see how important these stories are.”

“Well, I haven’t seen yet, have I?”

She flashed me an unexpected grin, a dimple gracing one cheek. “Leave your men here and I’ll have one of my girls provide them refreshments. Follow me.”

The guards didn’t complain. Though it was a warren of rooms and cubbies, the former prison possessed only one way out. With grave bows and assurances of my honor staying safe in their hands, the men settled by the fire to wait. I followed the librarian.

“Never before have so many been so interested in my honor,” I muttered to myself.

Lady Mailloux cast me a look over her shoulder. “Your people love you and wish to protect you—would you throw that back in their faces?”

Are you kidding me? The people barely know I exist.
But I couldn’t say that. “I beg your pardon, Lady, I did not intend to sound ungrateful.” I had to duck under a low archway. Ursula would have had to bend almost double.

“No, I beg your pardon, Princess. I was out of line. It is a failing of mine.”

“Well, this particular failing makes you the ideal person to help me now.” She didn’t comment. I didn’t blame her. Before yesterday morning, I’d never thought about treason. Now it seemed to become an issue in every conversation. And here I was, making my way through a maze of rooms I’d never known to look for. “I won’t betray you. I feel like I should say that out loud. I appreciate the risk you’re taking here.”

She stopped to pull a lantern from a cubbyhole and lit it. The waxing flame cast an odd shadow across her face. “My risk is also yours, Princess Andi. That evens out the obligation. Besides”—she gave a one-shouldered shrug—“you’re promising to help me save the library. Nothing is more important to me than that.”

“Nothing?” It sounded good, but really? “Your own life? Family?”

She laughed, sounding genuinely amused, and handed me the lantern. She shoved aside some dusty crates—now her dirty trousers seemed most practical and I regretted letting the ladies dress me up in their idea of innocent-victim-princess—and wedged open a creaking door.

“There’s something unusual about you, Princess Andi,” she said, taking the lantern back. She preceded me into the room and hung the lantern on an overhead hook. “Princess Ursula would know that I am a ward of the King’s, since I lost all my land and my family in the wars, and Princess Amelia would have pretended to know and offered kind words. It’s far too damp in here, Moranu curse it.”

“I’m sorry,” I offered, unable to think of kind words and feeling like a lame horse. “I didn’t know.”

“Damp is our eternal enemy. But it’s hard to keep something both dried out and secret with these accommodations.”

“I meant about your family. I’ve lost only a mother—I can’t imagine what it would be like to lose everyone, along with your home.”

Lady Mailloux lit the little fire already laid in the woodstove. “There’s not much good ventilation in here, so you’ll have to be careful. I miss them, but over time you forget the details, which is a mercy, and very little looks the same. I remember your mother, the Queen. She was kind to me. Her death grieved us all.”

“Did you know she was . . .”

“Tala?” Lady Mailloux squinted at the shelves as she drew on a pair of soft leather gloves. With nimble and unbearably gentle fingers, she pulled a scroll down and laid it on the table. She kept working, finding and laying out for me books and parchments organized according to some arcane system of her own. “Yes, I knew. Not everyone did, I don’t think. High King Uorsin, even during the Great War, didn’t like it to be discussed. But because I grew up here, bordering the Wild Lands before the war, I knew more than most. I remember my father saying that the Tala and Uorsin both had made a deal with the devil.”

“You said you grew up here—at Ordnung?”

She cocked that eyebrow at me. “At Castle Columba, on whose ruins Ordnung was built.” Her gaze wandered over the old walls. “In some ways, I never left home.”

She drew down a large and dusty tome, reverently setting it on the table. “I built this collection from my family’s library. If you were one of the young scholars come in here, I’d threaten to break your fingers if you so much as smudged a page.” She studied me, chewing her lip.

I held up my hands. “I value my fingers. May I borrow your gloves?”

Lady Mailloux smiled, drew them off, and handed them to me. “I’d like to sit here with you and guide your research, but I’d best oversee my staff—and make sure your sentries don’t feel the need to check on you. This”—she pointed to the huge tome—“is an annotated history of the Tala. It’s quite dense and would take you weeks to get through. I suggest you use it as a reference. There’s an index in the back. For recent events, look through these scrolls. They’ll give you tales of Tala during the Great War.”

“What about any . . . contracts or legal treaties that might have been . . . drafted, here and there?” I picked my way through the question, but she raised her brows with a look that told me she knew exactly what I asked after.

“Derodotur keeps all treaty documents in the King’s study, Princess.” She had her formal demeanor back now. “You would have to apply to him or Lady Zevondeth for that information.”

“Zevondeth? Why would she have the information?”

“Why, Princess Andi”—Lady Mailloux widened her eyes, all innocence—“I thought you knew that Lady Zevondeth arrived here as your mother’s attendant. Indeed, she was your mother’s most devoted companion and was at her side even unto her death.”

My world shifted again, realigned.

“I’m indebted to you, Lady Mailloux.”

“Dafne. Call me Dafne, Princess.”

“Thank you. I’d tell you to call me Andi, but I imagine you won’t.”

Dafne glanced around the confines of the little room. “In here I will, Andi.” She turned to go. “It means a great deal to me that someone will see these documents. I want you to know—” She hesitated, made a decision. “No matter what you may read or hear, your mother was not evil. Nor do I believe the Tala are demons. Salena was . . .” Dafne trailed off, considered me.

“Sometime I’d like you to tell me more about her. I remember her as kind.”

Dafne laughed a little. “Oh, she had a temper; don’t mistake that. But she loved life, in this brilliant, passionate way, before she declined. And she loved you. She would be proud of you.”

That brought me up short. I’d thought before about making my father proud, and Ursula—though I had never really succeeded with either of them. But my mother?

“Proud? I’ve done nothing with my life.”

“Actions may speak who we are, but first we have to be that person. She would be proud of who you are. I suspect she would be proud of what you will do, too.”

“Hide in the castle and let armies die for me while I read books?”

She sobered. “Is that your plan?”

“In point of fact, I have no plan. Nobody seems to feel that I, personally, need a plan here.” The bitterness edging my voice took me by surprise. Hadn’t I always gone along with what Uorsin and Ursula recommended? What Amelia coaxed?

“It seems to me,” Lady Mailloux said thoughtfully, “that we drift along in life without particular plans until a point of crisis occurs. We find we want something we can’t have. Or someone wants from us something we don’t want to give. Only then do we have to really wake up and make decisions for ourselves.”

“The voice of experience?”

She nodded. “Unfortunately, yes. And if you want another bit of advice with that?”

I did.

“The people around you who are accustomed to you going with their plan won’t like it if you no longer are.”

“Duly noted.”

“Good luck with those documents. I’ll come back to see how you’re doing.”

I wanted to look for a name like the one Rayfe had said in my dream. It had sounded like “ohna-fn,” but I had no idea how it might be spelled, so I started with the longer ballads, thinking I might find the rhyme. These were the songs that had stuck in my head from childhood. The fierce battle tales set to music that left nightmare images in my head.

One song told of wolves pouring like black ink over the hillsides, tearing apart friend and foe alike. Another spelled out in gruesome detail how giant ravens descended on besieged castles, plucking out the sentries’ eyes or sometimes ganging up to knock them from the parapets. Sometimes wilder beasts, like the tigers of the tropics, only black on black, with blazing blue eyes, or even dragons, snarled and laid waste through the stories. Though these beasts seemed to behave in ways that showed more than animal intelligence, none of the ballads mentioned shape-shifters or demons. Nor did the more staid descriptions of the Wild Lands and the Great War.

Until I got to the history of Uorsin himself.

It’s funny: though I knew my father existed as a man before he was King or my father, I’d never quite conceptualized it. That he wasn’t from Mohraya because Mohraya hadn’t existed before he created it. Instead his history began in the least likely of the Twelve Kingdoms, in peaceful and pretty Elcinea, with its sandy beaches and fertile waters.

He’d been a sailor, which I hadn’t known—first for fish and then for treasure. When neighboring Duranor attacked Elcinea, he joined her defense. He sold his boat and all his equipment to buy himself a horse, armor, weapons, and a squire to feed. The history didn’t name Derodotur, but I knew that’s who it must have been, this “squire of uncertain lineage but excellent survival skills,” as my father had been quoted to say.

Uorsin rose in the ranks, though Elcinea quickly folded to Duranor’s greater might and avid determination. Instead of going back to fish and hunt treasure to fill Duranor’s coffers, Uorsin stayed with the conscripted army. It was unclear how much of that decision was voluntary, however, as Duranor cheerfully took possession of all Elcinea’s bounty, including the dubious cream of its military.

The soldier who’d found himself field promoted to lieutenant went on to captain the cavalry, and then served as general to defend Duranor when its vassal states rose in rebellion.

Ursula would likely swat me on the head for not really learning this history, but names, dates, places, and battles? Not so interesting. But now I followed Uorsin’s rise in the Duranor military with intense personal interest.

Especially when things changed.

Duranor had overreached, the supply lines failing and battles waging on all sides. Even Elcinea, encouraged by the success of its neighbors, had managed to generate credible difficulties for her liege-country by bottlenecking the ports. Uorsin lost a crucial battle—right on these very grounds, where Castle Columba had stood. The siege of Columba took too long, and though General Uorsin overcame the Mailloux family in the end, he and his forces found themselves besieged in turn. Uorsin was wounded in the final battle that broke the original siege, then disappeared from view—presumed dead or captured.

A seven-day later, he staggered out of the Wild Lands. With a bride.

“How’s it going?”

I nearly tore the scroll, Lady Mailloux’s voice startled me so.

“Moranu!” I exclaimed. “Don’t sneak up like that.”

“You were absorbed,” she said in a dry tone, “and your sentries wanted lunch, have been replaced, and now the new lot want to lay eyes on you, to ensure your safety and their duty.”

“Are there descriptions of Salena?” I held up the scroll. “This one goes right from Uorsin returning with a ‘bride,’ description apparently unnecessary, to him suddenly becoming a god on the battlefield, winning the hearts of young and old alike, then finally transforming himself into the High King of eleven kingdoms that had hated one another, but suddenly and joyfully proclaimed peace and carved out a new spot just for him.”

“With his Queen at his side, who gave him three daughters, each more beautiful than the last.”

“Apparently you’ve read this one.”

“I’ve read them all.” She held out her hand for the gloves and I stripped them off. “And no, there’s never anything more about Salena than that.”

“What about the Wild Lands? Nobody describes them. It’s like no one has ever been there.”

“I agree. And your men are waiting.”

“Yes, but I—” I sighed. It would be worse than unfair to Dafne if they should come looking for me. “May I come back tomorrow?”

“This is your library, Princess Andi. You don’t need my permission.”

“In this I do. I don’t wish to jeopardize your hard work. What you’ve done here—I admire your tenacity.”

She studied me. “You are very like her, you know. That same sense of being far away. Then suddenly your attention shifts and it’s as if a magnifying glass focuses.”

“I was told I look like her.”

“You do. More—you
feel
like her.”

“How so?”

“Can we walk and talk? I’m really worried that your men will—”

“No. It can’t be that long of an answer and everyone is ducking it. Just tell me and we’ll go.”

“It isn’t a short answer!” she flared. “There are no words for this. And it’s not . . . flattering, maybe.”

“Tell me.”

She pulled on the gloves and began efficiently returning the scrolls to their nooks. My fingers had grown chilled and numb, so I went to warm them by the stove.

“When I was a little girl,” Dafne said to the shelves, “I saw a butterfly feeding on a flowering vine. So beautiful, with great orange and black wings. I tried coaxing it onto my finger, though I didn’t think I could. To my utter delight, it worked. I held it up close so I could see the gorgeous colors. And it clutched my finger, crawling up my hand with those pricking hairy legs, this enormous insect. Before I thought, I shook it away as I would a spider.”