The Border Rhyme

Solaia was on her feet before she knew she had decided to be.

"Wake him," Berylla said, low and fast. "He must be seen. A man who is hiding does not receive visitors at dawn."

"He isn't going to be seen. Look at him."

They both looked. The Emperor of the Ice Kingdom lay on his back with one hand still curled where her wrist had been, and he was as gray as the light at the curtains. He had been awake for perhaps an hour in the last ten. If she shook him now, he would sit up and smile and stand, because that was the sort of man he was, and then he would fall down in front of an inquisitor.

"Take the hatchling," Solaia said.

"My lady?"

"Put him under the bed. Under the blankets, wherever he'll stay quiet. Then tell the guards the Emperor is asleep and that I am receiving callers." She was already pulling the coverlet up over the sleeping man's shoulders, to hide the black coat folded on the chair, the basin, the bloodied linen. "Then give me a comb."

Berylla's mouth thinned. But she took the hatchling, who woke and protested in a cloud of smoke the size of a walnut, and she did not argue. She was a practical woman. She had spent thirty years in a house where the person who looked least afraid was the one who won.

Four minutes later Solaia stepped out into the garden with her hair combed, her sleeves down over her wrists, and a face as bland and bored as a plate of boiled milk.

Lucan Verre stood waiting among the winter roses.

He was alone. He had left his silver-masked retinue at the gate, and he held his little leather notebook in both hands in front of him, like a hymnal. In the thin morning light he looked less like an inquisitor than a clerk who had mislaid his office. He had a pale, patient, narrow face, and ink on his fingers, and a nose reddened by the cold.

"Lady Solaia." He bowed. "I beg your pardon. It is an uncivil hour."

"It's an uncivil hour to be anywhere," said Solaia. "Do come in out of the cold. Though not into the house, I'm afraid. The Emperor has a headache."

"So I have been told." Verre's eyes were mild. "By Commander Crane, at the gate. And by two of the guards, and by a maid. The same headache, in each case. It is very consistent."

"It's a very bad headache."

"I am sure it is." He smiled, apologetically. "I do not wish to trouble His Majesty. The Cathedral only wished to be assured of his health, after the unpleasantness at the banquet. I am to say that the Holy Father is gravely concerned."

"How kind of him."

"He is a kind man." The notebook did not open. "Might I ask, my lady, what you saw?"

She had expected the question. She had spent the walk from the door deciding what her face would do. "Wine," she said. "A bad cask. People fell down. The Emperor was sick, and then the room was dark, and then Crane carried him out. I was frightened."

"You did not look frightened."

"Is that a crime?"

"Not at all. I merely observe." He tilted his head. "You walked toward it, my lady. The dark. Two hundred people ran from it, or fell, and you walked into the middle. I have been trying to understand that all night."

"I thought he was dying."

"And did that frighten you?"

"Of course it did." She let a thread of real temper into it, because the truth was easier to carry than a lie. "He holds the keys to my cage. If he dies, I don't know what happens to me. Do you think I'd stand there and let the only man in this palace who needs me die on the floor?"

For a long moment, Verre only looked at her.

"No," he said, softly. "I do not think that."

Then he did something she had not expected. He closed the notebook, and put it away inside his coat, and for the first time looked directly into her eyes.

"I will tell you a thing, my lady," said the inquisitor, "that I would not say if Cardinal Vessarian were here. I examined the Emperor's dragon yesterday. The collar was cool. Not cold. Cool. As though someone had laid a hand on it, a very gentle hand, and taken the fever out. I have been examining collars for nineteen years. I have never seen one do that." He paused. "I thought you should know that I know. And that I have written nothing down."

Her heart gave one hard thump.

"Why would you tell me that?"

"Because I am a servant of the Church." Verre bowed again. "Not of everything it does."

He left her standing among the roses with her hands cold inside her sleeves, and she watched him go down the gravel path, a small ink-stained man in a gray coat. She could not tell, at all, whether she had just made a friend or been handed a rope.

…

The Emperor slept through the rest of that day and the night after.

She did not leave him. Berylla brought broth and she drank it; Crane came and went, and said nothing, and stood at the foot of the bed for a long time looking at his sovereign with the stricken face of a man watching a house he loves. On the second morning, Kieran woke clear-eyed and ravenous and furious with everyone for letting him sleep. He ate eggs standing up. He dressed. He swept out of the pavilion without so much as a glance at her, and she thought, well, that's that.

At noon a page arrived with a heavy iron key on a black ribbon.

"From His Majesty, my lady," the boy said, breathless. "He says you're to have the Lower Archive. He says," and here he recited, with great care, "the third clause was not a joke."

Solaia turned the key over in her palm.

It was very old, and the ribbon was new, and the faint chill that clung to the iron said that someone had held it for a long time before sending it. She put it in her pocket. She did not smile, because Berylla was watching.

But she felt it for an hour afterward, warm against her hip, like a coal.

…

The Lower Archive lay beneath the east wing, down three flights of stairs that grew narrower and colder and older as they went.

Berylla would not go further than the second landing. "I am a servant of the household," she said stiffly, "and I will be dismissed for what I have already done. The rest is yours to answer for." But she lit a lantern from the sconce and put it in Solaia's hand, and for a moment her fingers rested on her wrist, very briefly, with a pressure that said what she would not.

"Mind the third stair," she said. "It sticks."

It did stick. Solaia went down alone.

The door at the bottom was iron, banded with black, and the key turned in it with a sound like a stone dropped into a well. It swung inward on a smell of dust and old paper and cold. Beyond it, lit only by the swinging circle of her lantern, the dark opened out into a hall so vast she could not see the far wall.

Shelves. Rows upon rows of them, going up into the shadow, packed with scrolls and bound books and heaps of loose paper tied with string. Ladders on iron rails. Long reading tables under sheets. Everything stood in the stillness of a place that had been left alone for a very long time.

"Don't touch the blue ribbon," said a voice from the dark. "It is a decree of the old Chancellery and it will fall to powder."

She nearly dropped the lantern.

A light bloomed between two stacks, and a small, bent figure came shuffling toward her with a candle in a saucer. It was an old man, so old and so thin that his robe seemed to hang from him by habit alone. He had a wisp of white hair, round spectacles with one cracked lens, and a pair of the most alert, round, delighted brown eyes she had ever seen in a human face.

"You're the girl," he said. "The one from the tower. I've been told to expect you since yesterday. Nobody has come down here in six years. I made tea." He peered at her. "You do drink tea?"

"I do," said Solaia, faintly.

"Excellent. Osric Wenn. Master Archivist, Keeper of the Lower Vaults, and, I am proud to say, the single most neglected man in the Empire." He gave a creaky bow. "I understand you are looking for something."

"I don't know what I'm looking for."

"Ah." The old man's whole face lit. "Those are the best sort of customers."

…

He gave her tea in a cracked cup, at a table he had cleared of dust with his own sleeve, and for an hour she asked questions, and he answered them with an enthusiasm so unguarded that she felt, for the first time in months, almost safe.

What was the Plague? A war. Probably. The Church had a version, and the version was in the upstairs library, in gilt. The Lower Archive had other things. Tax rolls. Grain ledgers. A census of the northern provinces that stopped, mysteriously, five thousand years ago, in the middle of a column.

Five thousand? She put her cup down. That's older than the Church.

"Is it?" Osric said, with great innocence. "Dear me. How odd."

Where did the dragons come from? He did not know. Nobody did. The scrolls in the main hall began, politely, at the Cleansing, as though nothing had existed before it. But the old man had spent sixty years in these vaults, and he had a way of noticing what was not in a document. A hole where a name should be. A date smeared over with fresh ink. A whole shelf of histories in which every mention of one particular word had been scraped from the vellum with a knife.

"What word?"

"Ah." He folded his hands. "It seems to have been scraped."

She laughed. He looked pleased. Then he looked at her over his cracked spectacles, and the laughter went out of the room.

"My lady," said Osric Wenn gently. "May I show you something that is not in any book?"

He led her to the back of the hall, past the last row of shelves, to a wall of bare gray stone. In it was set a low arched door, no taller than a child, with a small iron ring. He opened it with his shoulder. Beyond was a cell the size of a closet, lined with cheap wooden boxes, each stuffed with scraps of paper and bits of cloth and slates, all in different hands and different inks.

"The nursery rhymes," he said.

She stared.

"The Church burns books. It cannot burn mothers." He smiled, and his smile was sad. "For sixty years I have gone out to the border villages every spring, in a donkey cart, pretending to be a collector of folk songs. The old women sing to me. They do not know what they are singing. They only know their own mothers sang it to them." He lifted a slate from a box, rubbed his thumb along it, and handed it over. "I wrote this one in the year of the long frost. A woman in a village called Harrow Ford. She was ninety-one."

Solaia took it.

The words were in a cramped, careful hand. A child's song, simple and sing-song.

Under the snow, a heart.

Under the heart, a drum.

Don't wake the Mountain, little one,

Or the Mother will come.

She read it twice. Her pulse did something odd. A slow, deep, heavy beat, rising up from nowhere she could name, so low that she felt it in her teeth.

Thum.

She went very still.

"Do you feel that?" she whispered.

"Feel what, my lady?"

"The—" She stopped. The beat had gone. The room was silent, and the dust was falling through the candlelight in a long slow shimmer, and the old man was watching her with an expression of patient, scholarly wonder.

"It is often so with the rhyme," he said. "One of my informants told me she heard a drum whenever she sang it. I thought it was poetry." A pause. "There are thirty-one versions, you know. In every one, the Mountain sleeps. And in every one, someone is waiting for her to wake."

"Her?"

"Always her." The old eyes were very bright. "Never it. Isn't that curious? One would think a mountain would be an it."

She turned the slate over in her hands.

On the back, in the same careful script, were three more lines. A different verse. Older, he said, from a woman in the far northeast who had refused to give her name.

The Queen went into the dark with her child inside her,

And the world forgot her name to keep from weeping.

She said: when the sky is gold again, I will come home.

The cell was very quiet.

"Master Osric," said Solaia, in a voice she did not recognize. "Why are you showing me this?"

The old man took off his spectacles, and wiped them on his sleeve, and put them on again.

"Because I am eighty-four," he said, "and have been waiting sixty years for someone to ask me the right question. And you walked in and didn't ask it at all." He smiled at her, tenderly, as if she were a grandchild. "You just stood there, with that look. As though you knew the tune."

She opened her mouth to deny it.

Out of her throat, instead, in a low and tuneless whisper, came the next line. A line that was not on the slate. A line she had never read, in a language she had never learned.

Sleep, my heart. The white fire keeps the door.

The candle flame leaned sideways. All the paper in the little cell stirred, as if a breath had gone through it.

Osric Wenn did not move. He did not gasp, or fall, or cross himself. He stood perfectly still in the stirring light, with tears running quietly down his creased cheeks, and he smiled the smile of a man whose long watch has just ended.

"There you are," he said. "I thought it must be you."

"Who?" Her voice cracked. "Who do you think I am?"

"I think," said the old archivist, "that you had better not say so out loud. Not here. The walls of this palace have ears, and some of them are made of silver." He pressed the slate into her hands and folded her fingers over it. "Come back tomorrow. And the day after. There is a great deal I have been saving."

She nodded. She could not speak.

When she climbed the stairs at last, with the slate inside her gown and the hatchling-warm weight of the key against her hip, the third stair stuck under her foot, and she nearly fell. Berylla was waiting on the landing. One look at her face, and the older woman's own went still.

"My lady?"

"I'm all right," Solaia said.

She was not. Somewhere beneath the palace, far below the Archive and the cellars and the cold black rock, something enormous had turned over in its sleep and begun, very faintly, to count.