Mouse came to the end of her story. Other than when speaking of the unicorn, she’d kept her eyes downcast to her folded hands, as though afraid of seeing the Haven around her, of glimpsing too much of this strange half-light world.
Or she might be feeling the pressure of Alistair’s gaze, which never once left her face.
“I think you know the rest,” she said quietly. “Even after returning to the mortal world, I followed the star as the Silent Lady had told me, all the way to Gaheris. And there you, sir”—she flashed Alistair the briefest of looks, though she did not meet his gaze and hastily lowered her chin—“you let me through your gates and established me in the castle keep. So I began my search for Etanun.”
Alistair nodded. “Did you find him?” he asked. It was a straightforward question, but Eanrin had to chuckle a little. Up until scarcely more than a few hours ago, Alistair had not believed Etanun existed outside fiction. But he was a straightforward individual, ready to believe much sooner than he was ready to doubt.
Especially if the girl is sweet, Eanrin thought, perhaps unfairly.
Aloud he said, “Of course she found him. Have you paid no attention to recent events? She found him, and in a dramatic twist of fate he told her the heir to the sword was your diminutive cousin. Not someone reasonable, no. Etanun couldn’t be bothered to pick an heir one might actually expect to . . .”
He trailed off and looked about the hall, as did Alistair and Mouse. For the Chronicler was nowhere to be seen.
“Dragon’s teeth and tail,” Eanrin muttered. “Where has the imp got off to?”
The corridors of the Haven were wondrous indeed, more wondrous by far than any description the Chronicler had ever read or copied. And they were far away from the strange tale being told, a tale that felt to him like chains as solid as Corgar’s clamping on his neck and weighing him down until he could scarcely move.
Smallman.
Flame at Night.
It was all too much, so he sought the soothing quiet of the halls, stately forests of shimmering green. Here sunlight touched the leaves and turned them golden, and sometimes they looked like colored-glass windowpanes. Not a single bird’s song disturbed the silence.
He came at last to the library of Dame Imraldera. There he stood, his breath quite taken from his body, and stared.
For many years, by the Near World’s count, the lady Knight of the Farthest Shore had been at work on this room. When she and Sir Eanrin, newly knighted, had made their way to the Haven of the Brothers Ashiun and rebuilt what had been left in ruin, they found the Wood encroached deeply on the once-solid structure. But the Haven was still there, beneath the growth, beneath the shadows.
So, Imraldera and Eanrin had set to work, binding back the trees gently, so as not to hurt them, but firmly, making clear that this was not their domain; it belonged to the Lumil Eliasul. The Wood had obeyed. Though Imraldera was no more than a slip of a mortal girl, the trees had backed away, drawing their shadows with them. Not even Eanrin, an immortal who had lived since before these trees put down their first tentative roots, could command their obedience as thoroughly as she did.
And so they reclaimed the Haven, and Imraldera built her library.
When she first entered the service of the Lumil Eliasul, she could neither read nor write in any known language. But she had quickly learned. “Records must be kept,” she had told Eanrin. “We cannot have the worlds forgetting as they are so inclined to do. And since you can’t be bothered to take time from your songster ways, I shall have to do it.”
Now the great pillared room in which the Chronicler stood was filled with scroll after scroll of her hard labor. Prophecies both fulfilled and unfulfilled, legends of heroes and monsters, true stories, false stories, stories that were both. All could be found in this library, where Dame Imraldera could always be found at her work.
Except today. As the Chronicler entered into that solemn glory of written words, he felt the lack of the dame though he had never met her. The lady knight who lay curled up in a dungeon crawl space, lost in the darkness of mortality, lured away, perhaps, by the cunning petitions of the Murderer.
For how could anything this so-called Etanun said be true? If all else proved real, and there was a sword and a lost House of Lights and a twice-dead dragon alive for a third time . . . if all that was true, how could it be that he, the rejected son of a mortal earl, was the heir to Halisa?
It must be a lie. And the Murderer, Etanun, must be no more than a wicked trickster playing games with mortal lives.
The Chronicler approached Imraldera’s desk with something close to reverence and fear. It was made of cherrywood, but the wood looked alive, a tree twined into the shape of a desk. The dame’s work lay across it.
Written in Faerie letters was the same rhyme he had found copied in Lady Pero’s hand.
The heir to truth, blest blade of fire
He finds in shielded shadow light.