He should have known better than to confide in the Chronicler.
He opened the volume to the required page and stared at the words scribbled there. He pulled the candle closer, then reached for another. The added light did nothing to help.
“I can’t read this,” he said.
“Yes, you can,” said the Chronicler.
“I don’t know this piece.”
“You know all the letters, and you know the sounds they make.” The Chronicler, bowed over his work, did not bother to look around. His quill scritched away at a flimsy parchment as he made a copy, using the pumice stone to hold the page in place rather than risk greasing the delicate fibers with his fingertips. “Sound it out.”
Alistair’s scowl deepened. He did not recognize the hand in which this unknown text had been written. Everything put down on paper within the walls of Gaheris was either in the Chronicler’s hand or that of his predecessor. But this hand, this wavering, watery script in faded ink, was not one he had seen before.
“I have time,” the Chronicler said. “I can wait all day if necessary.”
Alistair swallowed, trying to wet his dry throat, then took a hesitant stab at the first word. “Ta-hee.”
“What sound does a ‘th’ make?”
Blood rushed to Alistair’s cheeks, turning their chalky pallor bright and blotchy. “The!” he read, as though he could kill the word with a single stroke.
“Go on,” said the Chronicler calmly.
Setting his shoulders and rolling his stiff neck, Alistair drew a deep breath. “The kin-gee . . . No, king. The king will find his . . . his way to the—”
He stopped suddenly. Within that short phrase he recognized what he was reading. His embarrassment tripled, and he clenched his fists, glaring round at the Chronicler again. “I’m not reading this,” he said.
The Chronicler continued writing without a pause.
“This is a nursery rhyme,” Alistair said. “I’m not a babe in my nursemaid’s arms!”
“Shall I bear word to your uncle that once again you have given up intellectual pursuits for a pack of sorry dogs and a still sorrier fox?”
“Intellectual pursuits? This?” Alistair threw up his hands, leaning back in his chair. “Anyway, Uncle Ferox doesn’t read. Neither does any other earl in the North Country. That’s why we keep men like you.”
The Chronicler said nothing. But he said it with such finality that Alistair sighed, knowing he’d lost the fight, and turned back to the book. He might as well ram his head against a brick wall as challenge the Chronicler.
Between them remained the unspoken truth: Earls may not read, but earls were not kings.
Well, neither was Alistair, but this argument would gain him no ground. Not with an entire nation’s expectations resting on his young shoulders. So he bent over the old book again and strained his eyes in the candlelight to make out the scribbling scrawl.
“The king will find his way,” he read slowly, like a blind man feeling out an unfamiliar path, “to the sw—swar—sword? ”
“Yes,” said the Chronicler.
“The sword beneath the floor. The nig-hit. The night. The night will flame again.”
“Good,” said the Chronicler, though Alistair knew the effort hardly merited praise. Even the simplest words gave him difficulty. He’d started learning too late, he thought. It came easy for someone like the Chronicler, who’d been apprenticed to old Raguel from the time he could speak. Alistair had always had more important matters to occupy his mind, and only the daft whim of his uncle could have driven him to letters so late in his education.
“Continue,” the Chronicler said.
Alistair ground his teeth. Then he began:
“The night will flame again
When the Smallman finds the door.
The dark won’t hide the Path
When you near the House of—”
“Do you really think I am so easily fooled?”
Alistair stopped. He did not raise his head, but his eyes flashed to the back of the Chronicler’s head. “I’m reading the rhyme,” he said.
“No,” said the Chronicler, still without looking around. “You are reciting the rhyme. You know it by heart. You’re not reading at all.”
With a curse, Alistair slammed the book shut and stood, nearly knocking the nearest candle over into its pooling wax. “If I already know the dragon-eaten thing, I see no reason why I should read it.”
“Neither do I,” the Chronicler replied, “so long as you are determined to be less of a man than you could be.” He shook his head and assumed a patronizing tone, one that Alistair knew all too well and hated for the familiarity. “Do you not realize, my lord, that you only limit yourself by this stubbornness? Can you understand the wealth of worlds and lives available to you through the written word, waiting to be discovered?”