I nodded, put my forefinger to my heart and to my lip, and opened my hand to him. He seemed to understand.
He said, “You have my word as well.”
Kamet and I crossed paths often, as both of us were exploring the palace anew. He was a thin, dark young man, though of course I did not see him as young at the time. Indoors, we passed without interacting. In the gardens, where he often walked, I spied on him from the shrubbery. I sensed in him a fellow feeling, of an ever-present vulnerability temporarily lifted.
To my tutor’s chagrin, my lessons had begun again. He liked me no more than he had before, nor did I like him. Kamet was sometimes moving through the library around us, examining its contents as my tutor sullenly went through the motions of teaching me and I entertained myself by confounding him. I laughed when Kamet pulled a scroll from the shelf and got a face full of dust. His expression was such a mixture of disgust and outrage it was impossible not to. My tutor hushed me.
After the lesson had ended and my poor tutor had left, Kamet approached very politely to ask if he could borrow my chalk and slate. I slid both across the table and watched with interest as he drew a cat and a bird with a few expert strokes. He added neat letters in a row underneath them. Then he pointed to the bird and looked at me expectantly. “Which letter?” he asked. When I pointed to the one that made the sound peh instead of bah, he raised his eyebrows.
I pointed to peh again, hoping he would give up. Much safer to enjoy my private jokes . . . privately.
Kamet’s hands were slim, carefully kept, the only marks on them those of ink and a callus from a pen. Very gently, he tapped one finger on the slate. “Am I like your tutor, that you lie to me?” He sounded so disappointed that I apologetically took back my chalk and made two more letters, barely legible. My spelling was as bad as my handwriting, but he studied the marks, his head cocked to one side, and conceded.
“Indeed,” he said, “it is a pigeon.” Then he wrote out the word with the correct spelling for me.
At my next lesson, when I pulled my stool out from under the table, I found what I thought at first was just a rude picture of myself; I had found similar things before, with hex marks drawn across them, although not recently. When I picked it up, I was surprised to see that it was an entire scroll, folded into a codex. The first picture was indeed of me, but not meant to be unkind, only to be easily identified. Inside was a wealth of words with pictures beside them. Cat and dog and pigeon, but so many more as well, an entire vocabulary at my fingertips. Until then I’d been guessing at how letters might be assembled into words. Because my tutor was still trying to get me to identify individual letters, he’d never shown me any texts I might read. I went back to study my image, guessing that the marks underneath it spelled out my name. When my tutor came to the lesson, I hastily stuffed the codex into my vest, my secret and Kamet’s.
Kamet did not speak to me again, but he nodded politely when he saw me, and I nodded back.
It was some weeks after Kamet had left Attolia that I arrived for my lesson in the library to find my tutor absent. Someone else was waiting there for me. Lightly built and very handsome, with distinguished gray patches at his temples, he wore a fine tunic with the frogs at his collar embroidered in gold thread.
“Do you know who I am?” he asked.
I nodded, my heart in my mouth. He was Relius, the former secretary of the archives and disgraced master of the queen’s spies.
He said, “The king has asked me to oversee your education.”
Chapter Eight
I already knew a great deal about Relius, all of it unsettling. Accused of treason, he’d been arrested, tortured by the king, pardoned by the queen, and somehow, if rumors were true, become the confidant of both. He had no official position in the palace.
“Sit,” he said, waving at a stool.
I didn’t want to stare at his hands, mottled with purple scars, missing several fingers. I looked at his face instead to find him watching me, eyebrows raised. Hastily, I sat. I tried to play the same tricks I had used on my tutor, but Relius would have none of it. Where Kamet had been gentle and mildly reproving, Relius was frankly intimidating.
“You don’t seem to have any of the intelligence Kamet described,” he said. “No, don’t hunch like a turtle, just answer the question. The letter that represents the sound at the beginning of the word ‘king’ is what? Point.”
Melisande’s warnings thundered in my ears. Staring at Relius’s mutilated hands, I couldn’t have pointed to the correct letter if my life depended on it.
“Hmm.” Relius expressed his displeasure with a delicate grunt. Then he stood, pushing the stool away from the heavy table with a scraping sound that made me flinch. “Follow me,” he said, and walked out of the library. I trailed after him across the palace to the cramped but light-filled room that was part office, part study, and anteroom to his private apartment. His own collection of scrolls and books filled a shelf, and a number of beautiful maps covered the walls. I later learned that he was a cartographer and had drawn them himself. These had been his rooms all the years he had served the queen as her secretary of the archives. Baron Orutus, the new secretary, had rooms that were larger and better located, but he still resented that he’d never been offered Relius’s office and that Relius still resided there. Relius might have had no official position, but his unofficial position was unassailable: he was a royal favorite.
Closing the door, he said, “Now it is just the two of us. Sit,” he said, and pointed to the stool sitting next to the worktable.
I stared at his hand despite myself. He demonstrated that his misshapen fingers could still snap sharply, and I hastily moved to the stool. It was as high as my waist. Relius watched and did not offer to help as I struggled onto it. He pushed papers around on the table until he found one that was mostly blank. He dipped a pen into an inkpot and wrote out a series of numbers.
“You recognize these?” he asked, and I shook my head. I knew my letters, but the only “numbers” I’d ever learned were hatch and strike marks. Relius poured out a pile of small black pellets, the playing pieces for a game. He asked me to count out four of them, then ten, then fifty. He watched while I made five groups of ten each in order to make the counting easier, but said nothing. He walked around the study for a while, staring at the ceiling as if he were reading some messages written there.
“How old are you?” he asked. Obediently, I counted out the little black stones.
“Ah,” he said. “You seem much younger.”
I shrugged my shoulder and he snorted. “Yes, I can see that’s no accident.”
He went to stare out the window for so long he might have forgotten me. The rungs on the chair were set for people taller than I was, and my feet didn’t reach them. Finally he turned around. “You may go. I will speak to the king later. Come here next time, not to the library.”
Getting down from the stool was more difficult than getting up. Relius watched with no comment. When I was back on my feet, he waved me to the door and returned to looking out the window as I limped away.
A week passed, and the time for my next lesson arrived. When I rose to leave the king’s waiting room, Xikander said, “I heard your tutor gave up on you and is back in the tax office. Are you still going to go to the library to pretend to learn?” I lifted my chin and stalked away, but his snicker followed me down the passageway.