“So what do we do now? Where are we? Where are we going?”
Cadrach was still prodding at the dressings on his hands. “Well, as to where we are at this moment, Lady, I would say we were somewhere between Spenit and Risa Islands, in the middle of the Bay of Firannos. We’re most likely about three leagues off shore—a few days’ rowing, even if we pull oars the day long. …”
“There’s a good thought.” Miriamele crawled forward to the bench Cadrach had occupied and lowered the oars into the water. “Might as well keep moving while we’re talking. Are we facing the right direction?” She laughed sourly. “But how could you say when we probably don’t know where we’re going?”
“In truth, we should do well as we are headed, Princess. I’ll look again when the stars come out, but the sun was all I needed to know that we are pointing northeast, and that is as fine as we need to be for now. But are you sure you should tire yourself? Perhaps I can manage a little more. …”
“Oh, Cadrach, you with your bleeding hands!? Nonsense.” She dipped the oarblades into the water and pulled, slipping backward on the seat when one of them popped free of the water. “No, don’t show me,” she said quickly. “I learned how when I was little—it’s only that I haven’t done it for a long time.” She scowled in concentration, searching for the half-remembered stroke. “We used to practice on some of the Gleniwent’s small backwaters. My father used to take me.”
The memory of Elias on a rowing bench before her, laughing as one of the oars floated away across green-scummed water, blew through her. In that snatch of recollection, her father seemed scarcely older than she now was herself—perhaps, she suddenly realized with a kind of startled wonder, he had been in some ways still a boy, for all his manly age. There was no question that the imposing weight of his mighty, fabled, and beloved father had pressed down upon him hard, forcing him to wilder and wilder feats of valor. She remembered her mother fighting back fearful tears at some report of Elias’ battlefield madness, tears that the tale-bringers never understood. It was strange to think about her father this way. Perhaps for all his bravery he had been unsure and afraid—terrified that he would stay a child forever, a son with an undying sire.
Unsettled, Miriamele tried to sweep the curiously clinging memory from her mind and concentrate instead on finding the ancient rhythm of oars in water.
“Good, my lady, you do very well.” Cadrach settled back, his bandaged hands and round face pale as mushroom flesh in the swiftly darkening evening. “So, we know where we are—add or subtract a few million buckets of seawater. As to where we are going … well, what say you, Princess? You are the one who rescued me, after all.”
She suddenly felt the oars heavy as stone in her hands. A fog of purposelessness rolled over her. “I don’t know,” she whispered. “I have nowhere to go.”
Cadrach nodded his head as though he had expected her answer. “Then let me cut you a bit of bread and a cintis-worth of cheese, Lady, and I will tell you what I am thinking.”
Miriamele did not want to stop rowing, so the monk kindly consented to feed her bites between strokes. His comical look while dodging the backswing of the oars made her laugh; a dry crust stuck in her throat. Cadrach thumped her back, then gave her a swig of water.
“That is enough, Lady. You must stop for a moment and finish your meal. Then, if you wish, you may start again. It would fly in the face of God’s mercy to escape the kil … the many dangers we have, then to die of a foolish strangulation.” He watched her critically as she ate. “You are thin, too. A girl your age should be putting meat on her bones. What did you eat on that cursed ship?”
“What Gan Itai brought me. The last week, I could not bear to sit at the same table with … that man.” She fought back another wave of despair and instead waved her heel of bread indignantly. “But look at you! You are a skeleton—a fine one to talk!” She forced the lump of cheese he had given her back into his hand. “Eat that.”
“I wish I had a jug.” Cadrach washed the morsel down with a small swallow of water. “By Aedon’s Golden Hair, a few dribbles of red Perdruin would do wonders.”
“But you don’t have any,” Miriamele replied, irritated. “There is no wine for … for a very long way. So do something else instead. Tell me where you think we should go, if you really do have an idea.” She licked her fingers, stretched until her bruised muscles twinged, then reached for the oars. “And tell me anything else you want as well. Distract me.” She slowly resumed her rhythmic pulling.
For a while, the chop-swish of the blades diving and surfacing was the only sound except for the endless murmuration of the sea.
“There is a place,” said Cadrach. “It is an inn—a hostel, I suppose—in Kwanitupul.”
“The marsh-city?” Miriamele asked, suspicious. “Why would we want to go there—and if we did, what difference would it make which inn we chose? Is the wine so good?”
The monk put on a look of injured dignity. “My lady, you wrong me.” His expression became more serious. “No, I suggest it because it may be a place of refuge in these dangerous times—and because it is where Dinivan was going to send you.”
“Dinivan!” The name was a shock. Miriamele realized that she had not thought about the priest in many days, despite his kindness, despite his terrible death at Pryrates’ hands. “Why on earth would you know what Dinivan wanted to do? And why should it matter now anyway?”
“How I know what Dinivan wanted is easy enough to explain. I listened at keyholes—and other places. I heard him discuss you with the lector and tell of his plans for you … although he did not inform the lector of all the reasons why.”
“You did such a thing!?” Miriamele’s outrage was quickly dampened by the memories of doing just such a thing herself. “Oh, never mind. I am beyond surprise. But you must change your ways, Cadrach. Such skulking—it goes with the drinking and lying.”
“I do not think you know much about wine, my lady,” he said with a wry smile, “so I may not consider you much of a teacher in that study. As for my other flaws—well, ‘necessity beckons, self-interest comes following,’ as they say in Abaingeat. And those flaws may prove the saving of us both, at least from our current situation.”
“So why did Dinivan plan to send me to this inn?” she asked. “Why not let me stay at the Sancellan Aedonitis, where I would be safe?”
“As safe as Dinivan and the lector were, my lady?” Despite the harshness, there was real pain in his voice. “You know what happened there—although, the gods be thanked, you were spared seeing it with your poor young eyes. In any case, Dinivan and I had a falling out, but he was a good man and no fool. Too many people in and out of that place, too many folk with too many different needs and wants and problems to solve … and most of all, too many wagging tongues. I swear, they call Aedon’s monument Mother Church, but at the Sancellan she is the most babble-breathed old gossip in the history of the world.”
“So he planned to send me to some inn in the marshes?”
“I think so, yes—he spoke in a general way even to the lector, with no naming of names. But I am convinced I have it right because it is a place we all knew. Doctor Morgenes helped its owner to buy it. It is a place closely entangled with the secrets Dinivan and Morgenes and I shared.”
Miriamele brought the oars to an awkward stop, leaning on the poles as she stared at Cadrach. He gazed back calmly, as though he had said nothing unusual. “My lady?” he asked at last.
“Doctor Morgenes … of the Hayholt?”
“Of course.” He lowered his chin until it seemed to rest on his collarbone. “A great man. A kind, kind man. I loved him, Princess Miriamele. He was like a father to so many of us.”
Mist was beginning to hover above the surface of the water, pale as cotton wool. Miriamele took a deep breath and shivered. “I don’t understand. How did you know him? Who is ‘us’?”
The monk let his gaze pass from her face out onto the shrouded sea. “It is a long story, Prince
ss—a very long one. Have you ever heard of something called the League of the Scroll?”
“Yes! At Naglimund. The old man Jarnauga was part of it.”
“Jarnauga.” Cadrach sighed. “Another good man, although the gods know, we have had our differences. I hid from him while I was at Josua’s stronghold. How was he?”
“I liked him,” Miriamele said slowly. “He was one of those people who really listen—but I only talked with him a few times. I wonder what happened to him when Naglimund fell.” She looked sharply at Cadrach. “What does all that have to do with you?”
“As I said, it is a long tale.”
Miriamele laughed; it quickly turned into another shiver. “We don’t have much else to do. Tell me.”
“Let me first find something else to keep you warm.” Cadrach crawled back into the shelter and brought out her monk’s cloak. He draped it around Miriamele’s shoulders and pulled the hood over her short hair. “Now you look like the convent-bound noblewoman you once claimed to be.”
“Just talk to me—then I won’t notice the cold.”
“You are still weak, though. I wish you would put the oars down and let me take a turn, or at least lie down under the awning, out of the wind.”
“Don’t treat me like a little girl, Cadrach.” Although she frowned, she was strangely touched. Was this the same man she had tried to drown—the same man who had tried to sell her into slavery? “You’re not going to touch the oars tonight. When I get too tired, we’ll drop the anchor. Until then, I’ll row slowly. Now talk.”
The monk waved his hands in a gesture of surrender. “Very well.” He fluffed his own cloak around him, then settled down with his back against a bench and his knees drawn up before him, so that he looked up at her from the darkness of the boat’s bottom. The sky had gone almost completely black, and there was just enough moonlight to show his face. “I am afraid that I don’t know where exactly to begin.”
“At the beginning, of course.” Miriamele raised the oars from the water and slid them back in again. A few drops of spray spattered her face.
“Ah. Yes.” He thought for a moment. “Well, if I go back to the true beginnings of my story, then perhaps the later parts will be easier to understand—and that way I can also postpone the most shameful tales for a little while longer. It is not a happy story, Miriamele, and it winds through a great deal of shadow … shadow that has now fallen over many people besides a drunken Hernystiri monk.
“I was born in Crannhyr, you know—when I say I am Cadrach ec-Crannhyr, only the last part is true. I was born Padreic. I have had other names, too, few of them pleasant, but Padreic I was born, and Cadrach I now am, I suppose.
“I stretch no truth when I say that Crannhyr is one of the strangest cities in all of Osten Ard. It is walled like a great fortress, but it has never been attacked, nor is there anything particularly worth stealing in it. The people of Crannhyr are secretive in a way that even other Hernystiri do not understand. A Crannhyrman, it is said, would sooner buy everyone at the inn a drink than let even his closest friend into his home—and no one yet has seen a Crannhyr-man buy anyone’s drink but his own. Crannhyr folk are close; that is the best word, I think. They talk in few words—how unlike the rest of the Hernystiri, in whose blood runs poetry!—and they make no show of wealth or luck at all, for fear that the gods will become jealous and take it back. Even the streets are close as conspirators, the buildings leaning so near together in some spots that you have to blow out all your breath before you go in and cannot suck in more air until you come out at the far end.
“Crannhyr was one of the first cities built by men in Osten Ard, and that age breathes in everything, so that people talk quietly from birth, as though they are afraid that if they speak too loud the old walls will tumble down and expose all their secrets to the light of day. Some people say that the Sithi had a hand in the making of the place, but although we Hernystirmen are never foolish enough to disbelieve in the Sithi—unlike some of our neighbors—I for one do not think the Peaceful Ones had anything to do with Crannhyr. I have seen Sithi ruins, and they are nothing like the cramped and self-protective walls of the city in which I spent my childhood. No, men built it—frightened men, if my eye tells me anything.”
“But it sounds a terrible place,” Miriamele said. “All that whispering!”
“Yes, I did not like it much myself.” Cadrach smiled, a tiny gleam in the shadow. “I spent most of my childhood wanting to get away. My mother died when I was young, you see, and my father was a hard, cold man, fitly made for that hard, cold city. He never spoke a word more to me or my brothers and sisters than was necessary, and did not embellish even those words with kindness. He was a coppersmith, and I suppose that hammering at a hot forge all day to put food into our mouths showed that he recognized his obligations, so he felt bound to do no more. Most Crannhyri are like that—dour and scornful of those who are not. I could not wait to make my own way in the world.
“Strangely, though—and it is often the way—for one so bedeviled by secrets and quietude, I developed a surprising love for old books and ancient learning. Seen through the eyes of the ancients—scholars like Plesinnen Myrmenis and Cuimnhe’s Frethis—even Crannhyr was wonderful and mystical, its secretive ways hiding not just old unpleasantness, but strange wisdoms that freer, less arcane places could not boast. In the Tethtain Library—founded in our city centuries ago by the great Holly King himself—I found the only kindred souls in that entire walled prison, people who, like myself, lived for the lights of earlier days, and who enjoyed running down a bit of lost lore the way some men revel in chasing down a buck deer and putting an arrow in its heart.
“And that is where I met Morgenes. In those days—and this is almost two score years ago, my young princess—he was still inclined to travel. If there is a man who has seen more than Morgenes, who has been to more places, I have never heard of him. The doctor spent many hours among the scrolls of the Tethtain Library and knew the archives better than even the old priests who watched over them. He saw my interest in matters of history and forgotten lore and took me in hand, guiding me toward useful paths that I would otherwise never have found. When some years had passed, and he saw that my devotion to learning was not a thing to be sloughed off with childhood, he told me of the League of the Scroll, which was formed long ago by Saint Eahlstan Fiskerne, the Hayholt’s Fisher King. Eahlstan inherited Fingil’s castle and his sword Minneyar, but he wanted nothing to do with the Rimmersman’s heritage of destruction—especially the destruction of learning. Eahlstan wanted instead to conserve knowledge that might otherwise vanish into shadow—and to use that knowledge when it seemed necessary.”
“Use it for what?”
“We often argued about that, Princess. It was never ‘for Good’ or ‘for Righteousness’—the Scrollbearers realized that once such a broad ideal is in place, one must meddle in everything. I suppose the clearest explanation is that the League acts to protect its own learning, to prevent a dark age that would bury again the secrets it has so laboriously unearthed. But at other times the League has acted only to protect itself rather than its products.
“However, I knew little of such difficult questions then. For me, the League sounded like a dream of heaven—a happy brotherhood of extraordinary scholars searching out the secrets of Creation together. I was deliriously eager to join. Thus, when our shared love of scholarship had ripened into a friendship—although on my part it was more like a love for a kind father—Morgenes took me to meet Trestolt, who was Jarnauga’s father, and old Ookekuq, a wise man of the troll people who live in the far north. Morgenes put me forward as fit for the League, and those two took me in without hesitation, as wholeheartedly and trustfully as if they had known me all their lives—but that was because of Morgenes, you see. With the exception of Trestolt, whose wife had died a few years before, none of the other Scrollbearers was married. This has often been the case throughout the League’s centuries of existence. Its members are
generally the kind of folk—and it is true of the women who have carried the Scroll as well—who are more in love with knowledge than with mankind. Not that they do not care for other people, you must understand, but they love them better when they can keep them at a distance; in practice, people are a distraction. So for the Scrollbearers, the League itself became a kind of family. Thus, it was no surprise that any candidate put forward by the doctor should be warmly greeted. Morgenes—although he resisted any move to grant him power—was in a way a father to all the League’s members, despite the fact that some of them seemed older than he did. But who will ever know when or where Morgenes was born?”
Down in the darkness of the hull, Cadrach laughed. Miriamele slowly dipped the oars into the water, listening dreamily to his words as the boat rose and fell.
“Later,” he continued, “I met the other Scrollbearer, Xorastra of Perdruin. She had been a nun, although by the time I met her she had left her order. The inn at Kwanitupul that I spoke of earlier belongs to her, by the way. She was a fiercely clever woman, denied by her sex the life she would otherwise have led: she should have been a king’s minister, that one. Xorastra also accepted me, then introduced me to a pair of her own candidates, for she and Morgenes had long had it in their minds to bring the numbers of the League back up to seven, which had traditionally been its full measure.
“Both of them were younger than I was. Dinivan was a mere youth at the time, studying with the Usirean brothers. Sharp-eyed Xorastra had seen the spark in him, and thought that if he were brought into contact with Morgenes and the others, that spark might become a great and warming fire by which the church she still loved could greatly benefit. The other that she put forward was a clever young priest, just ordained, who came from a poor island family, but who had made his way into a small sort of prominence by the swiftness of his mind. Morgenes, after much talk with Xorastra and their two northern colleagues, accepted these two new additions. When we all met the next year in Tungoldyr at the longhouse of Trestolt, the numbers of the League of the Scroll were seven once more.”