Chapter Eighteen Cleves
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Cleves
Three days
Cleves’s library is ill-equipped for telling her of the magic of Elben.
Her knowledge is rudimentary. When she came from Ezzonid, she had learned only what was necessary.
Her focus was and is ever on the matters she can influence.
Divine power had never helped them much in Ezzonid.
How could the immortal ever be expected to have compassion for the transient?
By the time she began to wonder if she was wrong, it was too late. She was a finished sculpture, a dry oil painting. Her talents and interests lie in the practical. She was and is and will be this way.
She writes a list to impose some order upon her thoughts:
What exactly is the bordweal?
How might we control it?
These two questions feel insufficient, so she adds one that has nothing to do with the matter at hand, but nevertheless may be significant:
What is the meaning of lidi?
The word that neither she nor Clarice could translate from the ancient Elbenese. The missing meaning spoken from the Medrenkynd’s sanctuary in Perfugi: The queen returns to the castle.
At least that is easily solved, for she does have a primer of Old Elbenese in her collection. Her library sits in a turret in the third courtyard of Cnothan. She can see it from the window of her study: two towers standing side by side like stern old men conversing.
Lelij trips at her heels with his uneven gait as she passes through the pigs’ paddock to reach it. The animals, thinking she is there to feed them, crowd around her, shoving their snouts into her hands and nuzzling at Lelij’s scaled body.
“You were fed not an hour ago,” she says, slapping their hairy backs to make them move. She has to lift Lelij out of their throng entirely, and the two of them reach the door at the base of the tower ruffled and smelling of shit.
Cnothan’s library is not a single room, but a stairway that spirals up and up, every wall lined with books and punctuated with windows.
Wealthy Elbenese and Quistoans have a habit of lighting every room with lantern dragons, even libraries where such a tradition is positively dangerous.
It seems like an unhealthy obsession, this tendency to cage animals in small spaces for their entire lives.
It is one of the many reasons Cleves dislikes staying at High Hall – Henry may hear only pretty ditties from the songbirds he keeps there, but she hears pleas.
The particular cruelty of hanging those cages beside the windows, so that the birds can see freedom but never attain it.
In any case, Cleves will have none of it at Cnothan.
She brought with her from Ezzonid a great number of viggas: blocks of pebbled sap from the vinogl tree, which feeds on starlight.
The glowing amber is set in brass struts nailed into the shelves.
They cast a pooling light, like sun in a forest.
Cleves selects an armful of books as she climbs, and emerges at the apex of the turret into a round reading room studded with views of the sea, where the amber stones’ clouded light gives way to clear, cold daylight.
“Well met, cousin,” a voice says from the single reading chair, which faces away from the stairs.
“You become more like my animals every day, Johana, following me around after scraps,” she says. She quietly slides the books she was carrying into an alcove, where she hopes he will not see them.
Johana stands and makes a grand gesture of surrendering the chair to her.
“On the contrary, dear cousin. I have no interest in scraps. I enjoy a full belly.”
He saunters to the top of the staircase, and bends to examine the pile of books she secreted in the alcove. Her heart stills. He will see the titles engraved upon the spines: all of them examinations of Elben’s history and ancient language. Surely he will not know, from those alone, what she seeks?
“Hmm,” he says. It is quite remarkable how Johana can imbue a single sound with so much meaning.
Pleasantry; a question; an assurance; a hint of a taunt.
Then he is gone, whistling an old Ezzonid tune as he wends his way down the stairs.
She shivers. The last time she heard that tune, it was used as a lullaby to drown out the sound of battle.
Two days
“Heart,” she mutters to herself for the hundredth time.
The unknown word – lidi – spoken from the Medrenkynd’s sanctuary was heart.
A queen returns to her castle’s heart. Perhaps it means nothing.
Most likely, it means nothing. But if it means nothing, why speak it so urgently through a locked door to an exiled Queen of Elben?
Even if Seymour could return to Elben safely, Hyde is lost, broken, its ruins flooded. She is a queen without a castle.
Cleves presses the side of her fist into the surface of her desk.
She should be turning her attention to the bordweal, yet she cannot rid her mind of those words.
A queen returns to her castle’s heart. Maybe it is because she cannot conceive of leaving Cnothan, let alone destroying it as Seymour did Hyde. This castle is her heart.
She spies movement in the courtyard outside her study’s window, and curses.
“If you are seeking to leave, I will gladly provide you with a ship, cousin,” she says moments later, staring up at Johana as he clambers up a crumbling series of stones which protrude from the highest wall of Cnothan; a makeshift and dangerous set of steps up to the battlements.
“I would not dream of leaving you, Your Majesty,” he calls out, catching his cloak beneath his foot and almost toppling over the edge. “I merely wanted to find the best view of your bordweal.”
“You will break your neck, you droltz. Come back down and I will show you a safer route.”
“Oh, thank the gods,” Johana says, returning to the ground with the relief of a sailor reaching land after a tempest.
“Why do you wish to see the bordweal so urgently?” Cleves asks as she leads him away from curious servants to an inconspicuous wooden door at the base of the castle walls.
“It reminds me of home,” he says.
“Indeed. Has Ezzonid acquired Cernunnos’s protection since my marriage? Do you have your own bordweal now?”
They climb a narrow flight of steps and emerge through a trapdoor onto the battlements.
“No, no, Elben remains its own very special little kingdom,” Johana says. Did she dream it or did he place an unnatural emphasis on king? “It puts me in mind of your royal mother’s obsession, after … the Tilhepf.”
They look together over the battlements, across the sea, where on a sunny day the coasts of Lothair and Capetia can be seen as a grey line on the horizon.
Today, clouds obscure that view, but the bordweal remains, an ever-watchful cloak surrounding the island.
Was it always the colour of a dying bruise, or did it only become so when Cernunnos wrested control of it from Medren?
She does not want to talk about her mother’s frenzy in the aftermath of the Tilhepf. It was one of the reasons Cleves was content to accept when her late father told her that Henry was interested in marriage.
“Does she still have that chamber full of relics?” Cleves asks Johana, nudging him and grinning. They can laugh over his foolish aunt together. But he offers her only the ghost of a smile.
“She is quite dedicated to crafting protections for our family. She is a very knowledgeable woman, you know, cousin. She has taught me much these last moons.”
Cleves goes still, keenly aware of Johana’s probing gaze.
Is he trying to tell her that he can help her?
That he has the knowledge she requires? She opens her mouth, but the only sound that comes out is a laugh.
He may be willing to help her now – her kingly brother, too – but at what price?
And what danger would she place Johana in if she were to confide all in him?
Best to attempt it by herself. No confessions.
“And what exactly did my mother teach you?” she says.
Johana shakes his head as he turns back towards the stairs. “No, no, dear cousin. I do not accept scraps, remember?”
One day
Her horse master leans in the doorway of her study, his arms crossed. “A Perfugian ship has been sighted a day’s sail from the bordweal, Your Majesty,” he says.
“I see. Probably a trade vessel. Any others?”
He shakes his head and she dismisses him.
Her people are accustomed to her asking strange questions and making unusual requests.
He did not show the slightest curiosity when she asked him ever so casually to let her know what vessels were passing close to her territory.
Eccentricity makes for an excellent disguise.
If only it made an excellent teacher, also.
None of them have made headway in their pursuit of knowledge about the bordweal. The lack of cyphers sent by pyttelwyrm confirms it, for even sending the smallest of dragons is risky and they cannot afford to communicate unless they absolutely must.
Her thoughts stray to Johana. He wants to be her confidant. If he truly has the knowledge she needs – if her mother did find more than empty relics and thin superstition – then she has a choice: risk her secrets for a chance to save Seymour, or protect herself and let Seymour die.
She sneered at Aragon for even asking the question. Is she, Cleves, as cold, as selfish as the Queen of Daven?
The thump of blood, of soldiers’ armour, throbs through her as she summons a servant and tells them to fetch Johana. He arrives too quickly, as though he has been waiting nearby. It suggests that she is predictable, and predictability when one is plotting treason is a hangman’s noose.
They sit opposite each other, and wait for the servant’s footsteps to recede.
“Everything?” she says at last.
“A full meal, cousin. A feast.”
“And in return?”
He leans back and looks away from her, towards the wall where their family crest is painted in stately fashion: a castle upon a green field rampant.