The Pages of the Mind (28 page)

I unrolled the ones I knew, refamiliarizing myself with the drawings.

There a quiescent volcano, with its perfect dome. No broken lip. The jungle foliage I'd come to know. Paying more attention to the details this time, I noted that the lines seemed to continue off the top of the scroll. A thrill as keen as the brush of Nakoa's mouth on my skin rippled over me. Carefully I unrolled one of the other scrolls. It matched—not at the top, but to one side. Anchoring the curling parchment with other books to keep them flat, I lined up the images. The new scroll continued the scene, showing not just people, but animals in the . . . could it be rain?

Or a way of showing the magic barrier.

Excitement rippled through me. Forcing myself to work slowly and with care, I unrolled another, which matched the other side. It showed a landscape without the rainfall and, drawn in distressing detail, the limp bodies of dead dragons, wings collapsed, and people weeping. Having seen the dragon in flight, I nearly wept also, the corrosion of their glittering beauty so dreadfully clear.

Then, holding my breath and sending a prayer to Danu, who is also the goddess of wisdom and thus safeguards knowledge, opened the final scroll.

It fit to the top. And—blessings to Danu—was the one showing the dragon flying above the volcano.

Rendered lovingly in a metallic paint, which also served to contrast with the mortal gray pallor of the dead dragons, she could be our dragon. A surge of fierce, hot-blooded joy flooded me, much as it did when I joined with Nakoa and sensed the dragon. The night before I'd felt as if I looked through her eyes. Now it felt as if she looked through mine.

Impossible, but no more so than any of the rest of it.

I studied the script that circled the flying dragon, as if focusing my eyes on it could resolve the meaning. To no avail, of course. Still, I had ahold of a thread and would keep tugging. The key lay here, I felt sure of it. So many puzzle pieces. The dragon. The treasure. Dasnaria. Deyrr. Annfwn. The magic, coming and going. Lost N'andana.

I went back to the section of the library where I'd found the scrolls, sending Akamai to comb what had to be thousands of documents from N'andana, looking for anything related to dragons. On my authority, he recruited several other librarians to search—a job that could easily take months, if not years, even if any of us could read the texts we located.

Hours later, we'd covered every available surface with documents of all varieties, some with only fragments of the script, others with full pages. And nothing to match them with. I frowned at the one I studied, which looked to be a poem in stanzas, a dragon improbably holding a quill pen sketched in the margin. My eyes ached and I moved one of the lamps Akamai had lit to examine it more closely.

A warm mouth kissed my bare shoulder and I jumped, banging Nakoa in the nose. He rubbed it, giving me a look of mild reproof. “Tonight you do not like my kisses?”

“Sorry. No—I was ... far away.”

He surveyed the piles of books and scrolls with a bit of incredulity. “Did a storm hit the library?”

“Ha. It's in better order than it looks. And you have to see this.” Without thinking I grabbed his hand and tugged him over to the table with the original scrolls. Only when he gave me a bemused smile did I realize I'd never reached for him on my own before—and that one didn't drag a king somewhere, even if he was your lover. I tried to let go. “I mean, if you wish to.”

He held on, lacing his fingers with mine, smile moving into a tender affection that made my heart, which had settled down considerably until this, flutter irrationally. “I wish.”

In triumph, I showed him the scroll with the dragon. “See?”

He moved a lantern closer. Full night had fallen as I worked, and apparently all of my assistants had fled when the king arrived, as they seemed to have a habit of doing. Or he'd sent them off. I'd been deaf to the world in my concentration. Nakoa bent over the painting, tracing the design with a finger, and I had to restrain myself from saying he really should try not to touch it. He grunted and cocked his head at me. “You found it.”

Yes. Yes, I had. I beamed under his admiring gaze, delighted to have surprised him. “I can't read this.” I indicated the text. “Can you?”

He shook his head. “It is in N'andanan.”

“You know this place?”

“Yes. Though it has been . . . gone many years.”

“Gone?”

“Some say it was . . . never real, understand?”

A myth. My skin shivered with that intuitive sense that we drew close to the answer. I went over to the table with my journal and maps, opening the one I'd brought of the Thirteen Kingdoms. I showed it to Nakoa and laid my hand over the blank space at the border of the mountains, where Annfwn should be. “Here?”

He frowned at me in puzzlement, so I unearthed the big map that showed his island archipelago and Dasnaria, then lined up my map to approximate what I guessed the physical distance would be. The maps were drawn to different scales, but it should get the point across.

“Dasnaria. Nahanau. N'andana?”

His face cleared and, though his clearly interested gaze went to the rest of my map, he shook his head again. “Not there. Here?” He put his hand between Nahanau and where the Annfwn coast should be, narrowed his eyes, and moved the map of the Thirteen a bit farther away, and his hand another two lengths down. “Here,” he said, with more confidence. “A long time ago.”

“Long ago—before the dragons died?”

He gazed at me thoughtfully. “Perhaps. The tales say N'andana disappeared first. Much later the dragons began to die.”

It “disappeared” because of something that happened that resulted in the long-ago Tala sorceress creating the barrier. But what? My heart thumped with the excitement of discovery. If only Ursula hadn't told me not to discuss the barrier with Nakoa. Could I bend that rule? I shifted from foot to foot, both uncomfortable with my thoughts and abruptly aware of my aching feet.

Nakoa's eyes narrowed in suspicion and he reached for me. Had he discerned that I was lying to him by omission? But no—he simply picked me up and seated me on an uncovered corner of a high table. “Enough standing,” he told me, then used both hands to push my hair behind my neck, stroking it as he searched my face, thinking hard about something. Like this we were very nearly eye to eye. I held my breath, terribly afraid of what he would ask me and how I could possibly answer. “Dafne
mlai
. In all of this”—he waved a hand at all the stacks, which did indeed look as if a storm had blown through—“did you find your answer?”

Not at all what I'd feared. Except most of what I'd found pertained to answering questions for the Thirteen, not to solving the problem of finding and opening this treasure. Guilt assailed me and I glanced away so he wouldn't see it. “Some? Yes. I have more . . . pieces to the puzzle.”

“But no answer to the question in your heart.”

I frowned. I could make a long list of all the questions I had. “I am closer.”

He tugged on my hair to make me tip up my chin and nudged between my knees, moving close enough that I felt the heat of his skin like the wood stove in my old library at Ordnung. “I have an answer for you,” he murmured and brushed his lips against mine, soft and sweet.

My breath sighed out, and he kissed me again, breathing it in with a sound of pleasure. He deepened the kiss, bracing his hands on the table as I wound my arms around his neck, losing myself in the drowning sensual haze he drew me into with so little effort. My heart slowed, finding his rhythm and syncing with it. Even as I heated, longing for more and more and more, a kind of peacefulness settled over my mind. A nostalgic sense like the warmth of a summer day, a picnic in a meadow and Castle Columba in the distance. My brothers chasing my sister as she ran, deliberately slow, shrieking with giggles, my parents watching with indulgent smiles.

The last time I'd felt love.

26

I
awoke in the bright moonlight, Moranu's nearly full moon shining in the balcony windows with silver-bright brilliance. Beside me, Nakoa lay still and soundless. Too still. With a pang of dread—didn't people die in their sleep sometimes?—I reached out to lay a hand on his chest. It rose and fell, very slowly, the rhythm of deep sleep. Silly of me. Something about the dark hours before dawn always made me less rational. I hadn't had the nightmares for years, but I still came awake like this, full of worry, the memory of grief so sharp and fresh that it felt like a premonition of future tragedy, rather than memory of the past.

In my old life, I'd light a candle and read to distract myself until I could sleep again, but I didn't wish to disturb Nakoa. He'd carried me out of the library and back to our rooms, where we'd had sex as hot and driven as on the beach that morning. Then he had servants bring food, making sure I ate while we played
kiauo
. When I lost atrociously—I might have had too much of my mind on the riddle of N'andana and the dragon's treasure—he claimed a
kama
from me that had me blushing at the memory.

Better than remembering old things best forgotten. Or fretting over a future I had no good reason to dread.

I slid out of bed as quietly as I could and slipped on the gown I'd worn while we played and that Nakoa had tossed to the floor after. Something about that poem I'd been looking at when Nakoa interrupted me still niggled the back of my mind. I wanted to take one more look. Then I could tuck it to brew in my thoughts when I could fall back asleep. Sometimes the mind worked that way.

Nakoa's guards, playing some sort of game with tokens, looked startled that I'd unbolted and opened the doors, then came to attention, bowing to me.

“I wish to go to the library,” I stepped out and said, once I'd closed the doors behind me. They conferred, the leader sending two men with me, keeping two behind on the doors. It seemed overkill to me, as I hadn't needed to be escorted by guards on other trips to the library, and the palace always seemed to be such a peaceful place, but I didn't mind their silent company on the way through the empty halls, and it paid to be cautious. A few shielded torches remained lit here and there, probably for midnight wanderers such as me. For the most part, however, particularly in the outdoor courtyards, moonlight gilded everything in silver. Moranu's presence seemed quite near. A night for shapeshifters and magic.

The guards took up positions inside the library doors while I lit a few of the lanterns and found the poem that had been bothering me where I'd left it. Perhaps my fanciful mood would help unlock its secrets. If the people of N'andana were related to the Tala, as it seemed they would have to have been, given the proximity of the lands and the language similarities, then they would belong to Moranu. I didn't normally feel the presence of the goddesses as Ami claimed to, but I welcomed Her assistance in this. Moranu was also the goddess of intuition, which I'd need at full strength to penetrate this riddle.

I settled into studying the poem, looking for characters or whole words that matched those in the main drawing. The stillness of the palace lent itself to allowing me to focus on the documents without distraction. I very nearly had the key to understanding. It felt just outside the reach of my mind, as in when I wanted to remember some obscure fact and couldn't quite. Striving never seemed to work, only relaxing and biding my time until my memory offered it up. The quiet, shadowed night enhanced that mood, and I let the words drift through, waiting for them to reveal their secrets.

A whisper of sound caught my attention and I looked up, thinking that Nakoa had likely awakened and come to look for me. But no—the doors to the library remained closed.

And the guards were gone.

My tranquil mood shattered into full-blown panic. I'd heard their leader. The guards would not have let me out of their sight. The formerly peaceful deep shadows took on a malevolent feel, crowding in on my small pool of light where I sat for anyone to see and attack.

I started to put my hand to the dagger, only to remember I'd never put it—or any of the little ones—back on. Jepp would lecture me for years for this failure. Imagining her wrath gave me a small burst of courage and I pretended to return to my study of the poem, while I listened over the frantic pounding of my heart.

That sound again. The slither of a boot on the floor. Why hadn't they attacked already? I was easy pickings. Though maybe they didn't know that. This had to be planned by Chief Tane, and he thought I actually knew how to use a knife—not that I'd exhausted my one parlor trick. At least I could endeavor not to make this too easy.

I reached for a pen, then changed my trajectory at the last moment, snuffed out the lantern, and slid off my chair to the floor, crawling immediately under the table to another. Then sat and listened.

My skin went clammy. Crouching in a dark cave under the table, another memory came back to me. The roar of the catapults, the screams of the dying. Blood, hot oil, and pitch. I'd crawled deeper and deeper, rocks tumbling around me.

Nothing for a moment. My hunter listening for me. I breathed through my nose as Jepp had shown me, concentrating on keeping soundless and still. When they moved, I moved. They'd expect me to go either to the doors or away, so I went tangential.

A muffled curse. Two Nahanaun men conferring.
Don't light the lamp.

A whisk and click of flint.

No longer trying to be stealthy, I darted from under the table and ran full speed to the doors as a torch flared. They didn't shout and it hit me that I should. I wasn't a child hiding from pillaging soldiers. I was among friends who would race to my rescue.

Nakoa would.

I took a breath to scream and a weight hit my back, slamming me to the floor, a sweaty palm that stunk of fish oil clamping over my mouth, holding my jaw tight so I couldn't bite. Not that I could have screamed, bit, or even fought much, with my lungs frozen from the fall—and from the building panic. They'd found me. I'd die like my sister, Bethany. An image flooded my brain, one I hadn't understood at the time and had forgotten. The way the soldiers tore off her clothes and her screams as they hurt her. I'd fled our room, crawling out when they weren't looking. Leaving her in my terror and selfish determination to save myself.

I moaned. I hadn't wanted to remember that. One man held me as the other bound my hands and feet. They stuffed a cloth in my mouth and bound it with another length of rope, then rolled me in a rug. I didn't resist, paralyzed by fear, as I'd been that night Castle Columba fell and I abandoned Bethany to be raped to death.

After a while, I became aware that I rode on a swaying platform. My head ached and my gut roiled, while I sweltered in the claustrophobic heat of the rug. A heat I recognized, along with the sulfurous stink, and an angle that climbed.

Back up the thrice-damned volcano.

My captors moved fast. Not as quickly as the bearers who'd jogged with me to save Nakoa. At least I'd done that much. A bit of expiation for the guilt I'd blocked out all those years and yet still carried in my heart, waiting to burst out in fits of panic.
Oh, Bethany.

My captors stopped, rolling me off the litter and onto hard rock. I stayed limp, hoping to at least eavesdrop on their conversation if they thought me still in a faint. Or in whatever fugue state had taken me over.

By the sound of it, a knife cut more ropes, the heavy fabric fell away, and air flowed in, blessedly cool in comparison. I barely managed to resist drawing in a great lungful. They cut the ropes binding me and the gag, and I managed not to whimper with relief.

“She is no dragon queen,” Tane sneered. “Look how weak. A boneless infant. Addled in the head.”

Points to me for correctly identifying the culprit. Not that it gave me any advantage. A toe prodded me, then kicked harder. I had to bite down on the gag not to react.

“Now what?” one of his men asked.

“We wait for her to wake up.”

“Do we have time? It is nearly dawn. She will be missed.”

“True. Wake her, then, if you are so certain how.”

Quiet for a moment. Then cold water dumped over my head. Shocking enough that I couldn't disguise my reaction. No one would stay passed out through that anyway, would they?

Acting more confused than I was—if Tane wanted to continue to underestimate me, then fine, though he'd seen what Nakoa had not, that I was a fraud—I sat up and pretended to be terrified. Well, it didn't take much playacting. The bitter taste of fear and guilt still lingered in my dry mouth with the residue of the cloth they'd stuffed in there.

We'd gone much higher than I had before, the crumbled lip of the volcano not far above. And a cave opening before us about my height, the shadowed interior impenetrable after a few feet. My vision grayed at the edges, panic that hadn't quite receded fluttering in my chest.

“No, no, no,” I whispered, then realized I spoke aloud in Common Tongue.

Tane yanked me to my feet. “Go.” He pointed, in case I didn't understand. “Call the dragon, get the treasure, and you can live.”

Oh, right. I absolutely believed
that
. It would be very easy to pitch my body into one of the lava pits and return to the palace. There would be no sign of what had become of me. All Nakoa would know was that I'd risen from our marriage bed and disappeared. He'd likely think I left deliberately, that I'd escaped him at last.

At least the thought snapped me out of sinking into that place of formless fear again. Barely. “I cannot,” I told him. “I am afraid.” No playacting necessary.

His face contorted with contempt and he slapped me. Not terribly hard, but shocking tears to my eyes. “Infant. Put her in the cave. We'll block it up and only let her out when she says she has the treasure.”

The man hesitated, giving his chief an uncertain look. “That will take time and—”

“Did I ask for your opinion? Do as I say. You will stay here and I will go back to the palace, offer my services to help search for the queen.” His face split in a nasty smile. “So flighty, these foreign witches, running off like that.”

I considered bolting, nearly shaking with the need to simply run, even knowing they'd immediately recapture me and likely hurt me worse. But I couldn't be blocked up in that cave. I'd go insane. Felt like I was already, at the mere prospect. I had nothing left to lose. Time to stop dissembling about how much I understood.

“Chief Tane. If you let me go, I'll leave this island forever. I am protected by a wealthy and powerful ruler who will pay—”

He slapped me again and I tasted blood. “I care not. The treasure is in there with the dragon. Get it. If you don't, it will be your tomb. Take her.”

They seized me and I screamed, thrashing as I hadn't mustered the ability to do in the library. Not that any of it did the least thing to dissuade them. With grim efficiency, they ignored my struggles to escape. One man hauled me inside the cave mouth and held me there while twenty or so of his tribesmen gathered heavy stones, grunting with the effort of moving them. The one keeping me inside kept glancing nervously down the tunnel, as if expecting attack from behind.

The dragon?

“Please,” I tried. “My queen will reward you. Nakoa would reward you! Take me back and you'll be a hero.”

He ignored me as if I hadn't spoken. The wall of rock nearly filled the opening and one of the other men called him to come out. He pushed me aside with enough force that I fell, then climbed up and wedged out, the remaining hole barely big enough for him to squeeze through. I tried to follow, begging them not to leave me, no pride left. He kicked at me, knocking me back. Another banged my fingers with a rock when I tried to reach through, the pain brighter even than the terror.

In despair I watched as they sealed away the morning light, leaving me in utter blackness. Walled in. Outside, more rocks clunked, creating a barricade I could never hope to move.

My legs gave out and I collapsed to the floor.