II
Yodren Kobold, Scribe of the Order of Divinators, pushed the untidy mound of scrolls aside, and letting out a sigh of exasperation he leaned over his desk until his feverish, throbbing forehead touched the soothing smoothness of the wood. At times like this, contemplating a life of herding sheep and churning butter almost made him cry out at the cruel perplexity of his fate.
Although deep down he knew he should be grateful for his gift; the haunted, ashen faces of the people in the marketplace, their guardedness and the fear in their eyes – an overhanging haze of premonition, that seemed to thicken every week – could only mean that things in the Farmlands and the Minelands were getting worse and worse.
And like smoke trapped inside a tiny room, the air in the Scriptorium was rife with rumour, speaking of indistinct yet certain troubling times ahead. The Shy Death seemed to have touched even the Cave of the Seers, or so the story went – for the last Seer had appeared on his own and vanished without a word, despite the offerings in clothing, food and gold. Talk of the Seventh Moon was equally widespread, even though Yodren privately dismissed it as an old folks’ tale that had been going around forever; unfounded fear was the spice of security, and Scribes were insatiable gossips, dispensing dread amongst them like wine. (And yet some nights, while sleep eluded him and dark thoughts flapped their wings in his head, Yodren couldn’t help wondering what would happen if the fable came true; if the first Disaster had rendered Feerien a speck of life surrounded by the immensity of the Dead Lands, the thought of what the Seventh Moon’s rising might result in was utterly inconceivable). And of course, as an imaginary savior much-needed in these dark times, the tale of Royen the Eternal, and his potential birth to their generation, was now more popular than ever.
What made matters worse, and drove the exhausted Divinators to daily bouts of despair, was King Fazen’s sudden, unrestrained desire to know what lay in store for him – an obsession that led him to give frequent, clandestine (though of course everyone in the Castle knew) audience to Spirit Servants, as if he were a common charwoman worrying if her homely daughter might fetch a prosperous betrothed. As for the root of this evil, it was equally unthinkable and humiliating for a King: because, as soon as the first wave of stillbirths had been acknowledged – and since the Queen was long past her childbearing years – King Fazen had begun hectically planting his ageing seed in the wombs of a horde of maids, ladies-in-waiting, palace concubines and alley whores, not one of whom had managed to produce a living bastard.
Thus for the past few months the Scriptorium had been in a state of unceasing hustle and bustle – Historians toiling night and day to find some precedent of the plague in their predecessors’ writings, Healers trying to concoct a potion that might restore the King’s fertility (and possibly save Feerien from dying out like a flame), and Divinators struggling to come up with an ancient prophecy, incantation or enchantment that could help fathom the cause of the Shy Death and hopefully predict a future rid of it. But whereas all other Scribes dealt with the common tongues spoken in Feerien, Divinators had to tackle the shifting, shimmering conundrum of the Divine Language, in which many of their arcane books and parchments were written.
Think of it as water running through your hands, the apprentice Divinators were told by the Master Scribe upon their first encounter with the language of the Spirits, whose quicksilver words had shaped the world. To grasp it is to accept that you can never truly grasp it. And to their young, excited eyes, those mysterious scribblings that glimmered as if the ink that formed them wouldn’t dry, and the fact that they followed no rules, but flowed in and out of their minds like vapors of knowledge and feeling, seemed like the greatest of miracles. It was only after years of agonizing work, steeped in frustration and bafflement at the infinity of riddles contained in a mere sentence, that they came to see their adeptness in the Divine Language was a curse in disguise.
Like the document Yodren had been struggling to decipher the entire afternoon, and which still refused to yield the least bit of meaning, its evanescent words forming new phrases every moment, ornate phrases speaking incoherently of a place that stood between life and death being at once everywhere and nowhere. At one point his tiredness was such, he thought he saw the name Royen near the bottom of the page – but of course by the time he put his finger underneath it, the word had changed to the name of his younger brother, for the Divine Language was as much a thing existing outside and beyond its reader as it was a product of his own fancies and longings.
Little Yonfi, whom Yodren had never seen, because the last time his parents were allowed into the Castle for the septennial meeting with their older son, Yenka wasn’t even pregnant yet. What did he look like, this six-year-old boy that shared his blood? Was his laughter as ringing as Yodren imagined it, his eyes as warm and kind? Though he shouldn’t indulge in such thoughts, for the truth might be entirely removed from them – sunken eyes and no reason or strength left to laugh; in fact, it was quite possible that he’d never have a chance to meet Yonfi outside the realm of painful dreams, in which case it would be as if the poor thing, the dream-child, had never existed.
But that was too awful to consider – for where would all his love go then? No, somehow or other he would make sure that Yonfi stayed alive, he’d spare no expense in the food he sent to his family, even if he had no way of knowing that it really did reach them and wasn’t consumed or sold by the shady messengers.
And then, suddenly overwhelmed with yearning for his childhood home and the simple pleasures of life on the farm, Yodren sat up, closed his eyes, and leaning his face against his crossed hands he did something that no Scribe would ever deign to do, much less confess to: he prayed to the Spirits that They keep his beloved family safe from hunger and harm, and fill little Yonfi’s heart with hope and happiness.
It was surprising, how easily the prayer’s words, taught to him by Yern, came back to him – and how sadly little he believed in them.