If only all her troubles could have been solved by the application of a stricture written by a man who lived a life of simplicity far away from troubles such as hers.
She heard voices approaching, so she quickly looked for the nearest place to hide. She found nothing, so she simply flattened herself against the wall and hoped she would be overlooked.
The brothers had come to the end of the passageway, but they turned right instead of left, something for which she was extremely grateful. She watched them walk off, discussing something she couldn’t see.
“You’re mad to have it.”
“And I should have instead left it in that damned library of Simeon’s? I shudder to think who would have filched it at some point—or, more to the point, returned for it.”
“I’ll allow the thought is sobering. Very well, who do you think this belongs to?”
“I don’t recognize the hand, which I suppose doesn’t mean anything. I would hazard a guess it’s one of the lads, though—”
Aisling heard nothing after that, though she was half tempted to follow them to find out who the lads were. She had the feeling she knew the book they were discussing, that horrible book that Rùnach had been looking at the day before. She wondered who had taken his spells out and replaced them with marks that had created something evil right there in front of her.
Well, she didn’t know that, but what she did know was that Rùnach was dabbling in things she had absolutely no ability to face. She couldn’t even face the thought of going back toward her past. It would have been worse than going to prison, she supposed, not having gone to prison before. At least with a dungeon, it was only one’s imagination that conjured up scenes of torment and misery. With the Guild, she knew exactly what she would face.
And if she crossed Bruadair’s thin, glowing border, she would be caught, taken back to the Guild, and then her parents and the Guildmistress would put their heads together to invent a way to keep her there for the rest of her life. She would never again see Rùnach, never again see the stars from the back of a pegasus, never again hear the delicate rustle of flowers in an elven king’s garden or listen to the deep, endless dreams of trees that bloomed with gladness because they loved the queenly mistress who tended them so faithfully.
She continued to walk aimlessly, trying to keep some sort of respectable distance between her and her thoughts, until she realized she was standing in front of King Sìle’s library without really knowing how she’d gotten there. She supposed it was distraction enough. Heaven knew she needed something to do besides wallow in her own terrible thoughts.
She put her hand on the door and opened it slowly. She looked inside but found it empty. Well, the spots in front of the fire were empty, as were the tables where more serious scholarship could take place. The librarian—she couldn’t remember his name at the moment—was most definitely in his place, though she suspected he never left that place. Perhaps elvish librarians took naps whilst their patrons were engrossed in whatever texts they were reading so they could always be ready and waiting to direct newcomers to what they were looking for.
She didn’t have the courage to simply stride back into the stacks as if she knew where she was going, so she sidled up to his table and looked at him.
“Um,” she began.
“My lady,” he said inclining his head.
She didn’t want to tell him she was no lady and ruin his graciousness, so she simply nodded. That was all she could manage though, because she wasn’t quite sure what she wanted. All she knew was what she didn’t want, and that was to read anything about a country she had no desire to save or see saved.
“Is there something I can find for you?”
She shifted uncomfortably. “I’m not sure.”
“Then if you’ll permit me the liberty of selecting something for you, I believe I have just the thing.”
It wasn’t long before he returned with a rather large book that looked less like a book and more like a collection of pages contained inside sturdy covers and kept there by string and insistence alone. She accepted the burden and looked at him in surprise.
“What is this?”
Leabhrach smiled. “A collection of paintings done by Her Majesty the Queen. I could provide you with a history as well, but if your time is limited and you want to know how the country feels to those who live there, I recommend this.”
“What country?” Aisling asked.
He looked at her in surprise. “Why, Bruadair, of course.”
Aisling supposed it wouldn’t serve her to fall over in a faint at the mere hearing of the word. The librarian didn’t seem to find the saying of the word to be dangerous, which she supposed was one more bit of proof that curses were the stuff of legends.
And then she realized what he’d said. To know how the country felt to those who lived there? It took her a moment or two before she thought she might manage speech.
“Have you looked at these?” she asked.
“Occasionally,” he said, “when my memory of them fades.” He hesitated, then looked at her seriously. “It is a place of deep magic, my lady. Magic that lingers on in dreams long after mortal sight has faded.”
Aisling could hardly believe they were talking about the place where she’d spent so much of her life, but Leabhrach seemed to think they were.
“There is a table over there you could use, if it suits you.”
Aisling nodded, clutching the collection to her. She managed to get herself over to the table indicated and set Queen Brèagha’s sketches down before she dropped them. She sat down, then looked at what was in front of her.
The coverings were fairly nondescript, dark brown leather that folded in half and shielded the contents from dirt and questing fingers both. It was tied shut with a simple silk ribbon in the same color brown as the leather. Aisling pulled one end of the ribbon to undo the bow, then she undid the half knot before she thought better of it. She opened the cover and turned the whole thing so the pieces were facing her in the position they were meant to go. How bad could it be to see her country there on the table in front of her? She knew what it looked like.
Or perhaps not.
The first was a simple landscape with a road running through it, a road that disappeared between two sheer sides of mountains. It wasn’t particularly welcoming, that scene, and Aisling thought that there was a place on the mountain to the left where it looked as if a doorway had been carved into the rock, but what did she know? Perhaps the queen had looked at it and found that doorway to be an interesting bit of scenery. Aisling didn’t care for it personally—there was something about it that left her with the faint impulse to look over her shoulder and see who might be lurking there—but she was no artist, so her taste was not to be trusted. She lifted the page and set it aside carefully, then looked at the second picture there.
And she caught her breath.
It was Beul, though as she’d never seen it before. She looked closer and realized that they weren’t sketches with colored pencils but some sort of colors that had to have been blended with magic. It was, she was quite sure, impossible to capture those images on paper without both amazing skill and a useful amount of something extra. She ran her fingers over the paper and was almost surprised to find that the scene felt as real as it looked. If she could have looked closely enough, she was fairly sure she would have seen the handful of wonderfully dressed people strolling down that street, breathing and talking and laughing.
Was that how her city had looked before Sglaimir?
She could hardly believe the colors, not only on the inhabitants and the flowers, but shimmering there in the air as well.
Astonishing.
She set it aside and continued to look deeper into the small stack of paintings, feeling herself being pulled into her country in a way she had never imagined possible.
It was breathtakingly beautiful.
By the time she had turned the last sheaf, she couldn’t decide if she was overcome or dev
astated. She sat back in her chair, stunned. To think she had lived her entire life in a place that beautiful, yet she had never seen anything but dingy grey.
How was that possible?
She stared off into the fire, trying to reconcile what she’d seen with what she knew. When she moved finally, she realized that she had obviously been still for too long because she was stiff. She looked at the queen’s final picture, a haunting view of a forested bluff on the edge of the sea. She looked at the path that led down to the sea, something she hadn’t noticed the first time she’d looked at it. She wondered how many people had walked along that path to reach the shore and couldn’t help but wish that she had been one of them.
Perhaps the path had lain fallow since Sglaimir had taken over the throne.
She sighed, then turned the pages back one by one until she was left looking at the pathway past the mountain with the sheer face. She closed the cover, because the sight of that unsettled her, then retied the ribbon the way she’d found it. She rose, stood for a moment or two until her foot that had fallen asleep woke up, then carried her burden back to Leabhrach. He was waiting at his post, apparently as usual.
“Did you enjoy them?”
“Very much,” Aisling said honestly. “The queen is a marvelous artist.”
“She is,” he agreed. “I would wish for the chance to actually see for myself the views she has painted, though I’m not sure they would be any more beautiful than what Queen Brèagha has done here.”
Especially not now was on the tip of her tongue, but she let the words go without speaking them. She nodded, thanked Leabhrach for his aid, then left the library. She wandered through the passageways slowly, looking around her and feeling as if she were seeing things for the first time. The elves she passed were more arrestingly beautiful than she remembered them being. The flagstones beneath her feet spoke of the quarry from which they’d been mined, the wood of the doors told of the forest from which it had been hewn, the walls whispered of those who had adorned their surfaces with scenes to please those who would walk past them. She smelled flowers she hadn’t smelled before, heard songs of Fadaire sung in gardens she hadn’t paid heed to until that moment, felt the faintest hint of Sìle’s spells of protection and peace as if they were exceedingly fine mist on a morning after a good rain.
And all because she had seen her country as it once had been.
It occurred to her at that moment that no one she had known in Bruadair would ever see anything like what she had seen, not their own country, not Seanagarra. Not only that, they would never experience anything like it in the future. There were girls much younger than she who had been given to the Guild at an even younger age than she had been. There were women who were older than she was, women without families, women without anyone to rescue them who were so poor that there was no choice but to stay in the Guild and live out the rest of their lives without any hope of anything more beautiful.
Yet there she stood, her hand on a marble pillar that supported the roof over a pathway that was open on one side to a garden full of such beauty, she could scarce look at it. She, who was not even a particularly good weaver, had seen things with her own eyes that her companions in the Guild couldn’t possibly imagine. She, who was no one, had seen creatures from myth. She had ridden on the back of a dragon and watched magic trail from his wings. She had stood in Seanagarra’s gardens and listened to trees singing in Fadaire. She had been witness to things she wouldn’t have thought even to dream of three months ago.
And now, just that morning, she had seen pictures drawn and colored by an elven queen’s hand, paintings that showed her country to have a breathtaking beauty all its own.
She looked into the garden full of morning light, heard the laughter of trees in the rustling of their leaves, saw the flowers lifting their faces to the sun in delight, and wondered if perhaps her own country might once have had an equal amount of magic and loveliness.
No other Bruadairian might have wondered that, but she did.
The question was, what was she going to do with that knowledge?
She caught sight of someone and turned her head to see Rùnach standing some ten paces away from her, looking at her as if he’d never seen her before.
“Are you unwell?”
She took a deep breath, then turned and walked over to him. And into his arms, it had to be said. She wasn’t sure what his family would think, but he seemed to think nothing of it for his arms went immediately around her. He held her in silence for so long, she began to wonder if they might be finding themselves turned into statues by an elven king who had somehow caught wind of what his grandson thought to do and supposed that keeping him immobile was the best solution.
“I’ve been looking for you,” he said finally.
“I was in the library,” she croaked. She cleared her throat, because apparently it was full of things she wasn’t quite ready to say. “Master Leabhrach gave me something to do.”
“Hopefully it didn’t involve shelving his books.”
She would have smiled, but she wasn’t sure her face was equal to it. “Nay,” she said. “It didn’t.”
“Are you going to tell me what it was you were doing there?”
“Just looking at art.”
“Do you like art?”
“I don’t have enough experience to judge,” she said, her words somewhat muffled against his shoulder. “I’ve only seen what was on the walls at Tor Neroche. Well, and here. And now down in the library.”
“Did you like what you saw?”
“It was breathtaking,” she said. She took a deep breath, then pulled away. “They were paintings your grandmother had done.”
He blinked. “She paints?”
“Apparently so.”
“Tell me it wasn’t of me and my brothers in short pants.”
She smiled. “Nay, it wasn’t. I’ll show you later, if you like. Master Leabhrach was very kind to me.”
“Then I imagine you’ll be doing my requests for me from now on,” he said. He reached for her hand, then frowned. “Your fingers are like ice.”
“I forgot to sit near the fire,” she lied. In fact, she thought the whole of her felt like ice, but perhaps that was something she didn’t need to say. “I think I am nervous about such a small gathering. I’m not sure I’ll know what fork to use when at luncheon.”
“’Tis a pity my cousins aren’t coming,” he said, “for they would simply eat with their hands and take the attention off the rest of us.”
She looked at him in surprise, then almost laughed. “You don’t care for them?”
He nodded down the path. “I just feel compelled to warn you about their atrocious table manners and other glaring flaws lest you think you might want to spend more time with them than is polite.”
“But they are quite handsome.”
“Skin deep, as they say, and no further.”
“They dance very well, though,” she pointed out. “Not that I have much experience in that area—”
“But I do, so let me warn you that more than one maiden has limped back to her bedchamber sporting sore toes thanks to their stomping about. I think even Mansourah of Neroche might surpass them in many areas.”
“Shocking.”
“Isn’t it, though?”
She wasn’t sure if she should laugh or scold him for being so hard on his kin, but she was also not exactly sure if he was being serious or simply mocking them for sport. She glanced at him.
“Are they truly so awful, or are you having me on?”
He smiled, a hint of a smile that was there and gone before she could mark it properly.
“I think, Aisling, that I’m trying to discourage you from looking too closely at them lest you compare them to me and see only my flaws.”
“Do you have flaws?”
He stopped in mid-step, then continued on. “Now I believe you are making sport of me.”
“I’m not sure I know how.”
“And I
think if I think on that any longer before this endless luncheon we’re about to attend, I will spirit you off into some secret garden where I can have you all to myself and beg you to distract me with tales of pointy-eared gnomes before I do something to frighten you off.”
“I’m not sure what that would be.”
“I know,” he said, shooting her a quick smile. “I know that as well as I know anything, which is part of your charm. And here we are at my grandfather’s most exclusive of chambers, just in time.”
“For luncheon?”
“Nay, to save me from making an ass of myself.” He embraced her briefly, then looked at her, his smile fading. “He can be rather loud when faced with things that he hasn’t planned himself.”
“Such as quests?”
Rùnach nodded. “Such as quests.”
She would have told him right there in a passageway flanked by walls covered by intricately carved wood that spoke eloquently of the glories and triumphs of the house of Seanagarra that perhaps Sìle didn’t need to shout, because if she could, she would force Rùnach to stay behind and take up her quest herself. But she had the feeling Rùnach wouldn’t stay behind, no matter what she said to discourage him. She took a deep breath, then looked up at him.
“Why are you doing this?”
“Doing what?” he asked. “Standing here?”
She suppressed the urge to frown at him because things had now become all too serious. “Nay, taking on this quest.”
He opened his mouth, but before he could say anything, the door had opened and Sìle stood there, a grave yet welcoming smile on his face.
“Come in, children,” he said, standing back to allow them to pass. “Come in and take your ease.”
Aisling wasn’t sure she was going to have any ease at all any time soon, but she supposed no poor fool did who was contemplating the doing of impossible deeds. She would have found a way to escape if—
Nay. She wouldn’t have. It was difficult to even allow that thought to linger for any time at all in her mind, but she realized with a startling flash of clarity that she could run no longer.