She turned slowly on the stool, scanning the shadow-filled room. Her eyes lingered on the tapestry and the hidden door. But that was no use. Not without the key. She had inserted every quill knife and bit of broken kindling she could find into that lock; nothing would make it give.
Suddenly she frowned, her attention caught by something that had somehow escaped her notice. She hopped down from the stool, took up her candle, and hastened across the chamber.
How silly of her not to think of this before! In her mind, the library loft was the Chronicler’s private space, a haven she dared not enter.
But the Chronicler was gone. And she was here. And she was bound to die come dawn, when she confessed to Corgar that the library documents held nothing of interest to him. Before she gave in, she might as well thoroughly examine this room that had become her prison.
Her candle casting long shadows, she climbed the spiral stair to the humble space where she found, as she’d expected, the Chronicler’s sleeping pallet and, naturally, even more piled scrolls and documents.
“Silly girl,” she scolded herself, kneeling by the nearest pile haphazardly tossed in a corner. “You should have guessed. Who knows what you might find in here?”
Her spirits higher, if only a little, she set down her candle, took up the nearest scroll, and unrolled it across the floor, pinning it in place with her knee. Looking at it, she frowned. The handwriting was familiar, but she wasn’t entirely certain why. It wasn’t the Chronicler’s, and it wasn’t old Raguel’s. Chewing the inside of her cheek, she leaned down and read:
I carry the future in my womb. I carry the king who will open the House of Lights. My only sorrow is that I shall never meet him, that he will never know how I loved him.
Be bold, Smallman! Claim your right and live as you were meant to live.
Leta stared. She read it again and a third time, hardly believing what she saw. Then she sat back, pushing her straggling hair out of her face.
“You knew,” she whispered to the darkness. “You knew all along.”
The hand was Lady Pero’s. She recognized it now from the poem she had read earlier that year, the poem which the Chronicler had so meticulously copied.
Leta’s fingers shook as she rolled up that scroll and reached for the next one. It too was in the ornate, difficult-to-read hand of Earl Ferox’s dead wife. Leta read:
I have heard the Spheres singing. I have seen the House of Lights. What I know I cannot share with others; I write it here now for your eyes, my child. It is near, nearer than you think. And you will see it one day. You will open the doors. But you must see for yourself. I cannot show you.
I wish I was there with you now to guide you. But I know, from the failing in my own body, that I shall not live to meet you face-to-face. My last request to my lord is for him to see to it that you are brought up with letters. One day you will read these words of mine, and I pray they will guide you.
All this, hidden away in the Chronicler’s alcove.
“You knew,” Leta said aloud this time as she let the second scroll snap back into its comfortable roll. “You are the Smallman King! Why have you denied it? Are you really so afraid?”
Then she shook her head, her forehead wrinkling. “He’s dead. The goblins killed him. How can he ever be king?”
Though the little chamber above the library was cold as ice, Leta felt sweat forming on her upper lip. Wiping her face, she reached for a third scroll. On this was inscribed only:
Ceaneus told me. Look to Ceaneus.
This was the most enigmatic by far of all Lady Pero’s writings. Leta stared at it, whispering the name to herself. “Ceaneus. The blue star.”
Taking the third scroll, she went back downstairs, set aside her candle, and approached one of the narrow windows to gaze upon the cold world below, at the broken walls and piles of rubble, the ruins that Gaheris was swiftly becoming under Corgar’s direction.
The sky was overcast. But Leta thought she saw faint light, like moonlight, gleaming through the heavy clouds overhead.
Then, rather suddenly, there was a break. Rather than the moon Leta saw a single star, the blue star. Ceaneus, as the North People called it. It was bigger by far than she remembered it being, shining down upon the mortal world with an intensity like magic.
“Ceaneus told me,” Leta muttered, clutching Lady Pero’s scroll. Then, feeling more than half a fool, she called out in a meek voice, “Will you tell me too?”
There was no answer. Not that she expected one as such. Nevertheless Leta waited, her ears straining.
You’re going mad, her practical side said. Lady Pero went mad before she died. That’s why she wrote these things. She went mad, and now you are too.
“Be still!” Leta growled, and her practical side was shocked into silence. A silence that lingered under starlight, wrapped in the coldness of winter.