Pen thought this an unjust description of Jurald Court. Or at least, it ought to be large, sprawling fortified farmhouse.
“My brother is at loggerheads with the city, which covets his lands and rents and rights,” Clee went on. “The city fathers grow big in their own esteem. They’ve bought out a dozen minor lordships already that fell into their debt. I think the merchant guilds conspire to net the foolish that way.”
Pen remembered the ruins on the road in, and thought the city’s outlying district might have grown as much by force of arms as mercantile trickery. Although, he supposed, wealth must come first, before arms could be bought. Martensbridge was a royal free town, its charter making it unbeholden to any lords except the Hallow King of the Weald himself. It stood oddly balanced between its distant lord, and its treaties with its nearer neighbor cities with their more varied allegiances. Pen’s impression was that Martensbridge felt itself a lot more free than royal, and recalled the joking prayer an acolyte had told him over dinner: Five gods bless and keep the Hallow King—far from us!
“What about the princess-archdivine?” Pen asked. “I’ve never met a princess. Or an archdivine, for that matter. I hope I might get a chance to see her before I go home. Is she very beautiful?”
Clee vented a laugh. “She’s fifty.”
Pen supposed princesses in tales always seemed to be young and lovely because when they grew older they became queens. The princess-archdivine’s title was more political, and unrelated to her marital status. “I suppose even royal princesses can have callings.”
Clee shrugged. “The archdivineship of Martensbridge has been a dumping ground for Wealdean royal spares for centuries. I’ll give this one credit, though, she’s powerfully shrewd. Besides managing Temple lands, she’s fostered the silk makers here, which has brought even more coin to her hands, which has allowed her to buy yet more territory. No one knows what will happen when the city and the princess run out of other fodder, and have to start in eating each other.”
With that ambiguous remark, Clee blew out the candle and rolled over. Pen, eyelids weighted with exhaustion, did not even attempt to talk to Desdemona.
For the next two days Pen sat in the library and read, trooped downstairs to eat, and smiled shyly at people who all seemed too busy to talk to him, save, sometimes, Clee, when taking a stretch from his scribal work. The locked cabinet was an itch at the corner of his eye.
Pen supposed even librarians had to go to the garderobe sometime, but this one never left the room unless there were other persons present; another copyist or two, or dedicats or acolytes reading and taking notes. None of the valuable books were allowed to be removed and read elsewhere save by divines of the highest ranks, of which there seemed to be three or four here besides Tigney, and even they received stern looks and admonitions along with their volumes.
Pen finished the fascinating Cedonian chronicle, and started another in Darthacan. He discovered his reading in that language had somehow become far more fluid and swift—he didn’t have to stop and think through the sentences, and he seemed to know many more words than he’d ever learned in the Greenwell Lady-school. A slimmer chronicle in comfortable Wealdean supplied a short history of Martensbridge. The marsh hamlet at the outlet of the long lake had acquired its name when an earlier lord of kin Martenden had built the first stone bridge, the text asserted, convincingly enough. The improved roads had brought increasing wealth. Somewhat unfairly, Pen thought, kin Martenden had lost control of the growing town when their own overlord’s family died out, and the greater territory fell to a prince of the Weald. The town had bought or won or bribed—on this, the chronicle was unclear, but it seemed to involve lending money to the right lords with hungry armies—its first royal charter soon thereafter, swept in under the cloak of the princess-archdivine, and never let to lapse thereafter. Glass- and silk-makers came down from the north over the high passes from Adria and Saone, metal-workers from Carpagamo, and settled in the new free town. Caravans arrived from as far away as the reduced modern descendant of the Cedonian Empire, ah! Pen wondered if he might meet such travelers in the marketplaces or counting houses, and test his new tongue.
The chronicle claimed that Great Audar had once resided here, and told a legend of a bargain he made with a helpful talking marten that somehow resulted in a blessing for the locality, and a more exciting source of its name. Pen had read of that legend appended to at least two other towns, one with a snake and one with a hawk, though both with Great Audar, which made him distrust the book’s author just a little. Apart from the talking animals. While there were rumors about the Hallow King’s strange, secretive cadre of royal shamans having some special understanding of the kin animals of their land, Darthacan Audar had been the bitter enemy of the Old Weald and its forest magics in his long-ago day, so Pen didn’t think this could be some oblique reference to those mysterious practices.
By the third day, although his mind was still wildly excited by the written riches in the room, Pen’s eyes were burning, and his not-well-padded haunches were rethinking his calling as a scholar much as they had a career as a courier. Besides, for the first time this week it had stopped drizzling and the sun was out. Desperate for movement, he went down to see Tigney.
The divine’s door was open; Pen leaned on the frame, cleared his throat, and ventured, “How goes it, sir? Is there anything I can do here? To help? Any task at all?”
“A task . . . ?” Tigney leaned back from his writing table and regarded Pen thoughtfully. “I suppose you are a mountaineer. Not used to being cooped up all day, I daresay.”
“The library is very fine, but that’s so, sir. Even in the winter, we hunted in the lower forests every week, or ran the trap lines.”
“Hm.” Tigney drummed his fingers on the scarred tabletop, then gestured to a neat stack of clothing folded on a chair. “Ruchia had no heirs of the body. Often in such cases a Temple sorcerer’s possessions are willed to their successor along with their demon, but Ruchia left no directive with me. You cannot wear her clothes, but if you would like to run an errand, you could take them to the garment merchant on Elm Street, and turn them into money for the Order.”
A modest task, but it would allow Pen to walk about the town. And, if he performed it well, Tigney might find other work for him. Being the errand boy of this house couldn’t be worse than being the errand boy of Jurald Court. He’d never felt a calling before to serve the gods, but who knew? “Certainly! I’d be glad to.”
While Tigney gave him more precise directions to Elm Street, Pen went to tie up the bundle. His hand hesitated.
“I think you do not want to sell this one, sir.” It was an elaborate, embroidered skirt. Pen shook it out, puzzled. It seemed just a skirt, if heavy. Why had he said that?
Tigney’s brows rose. “I thought I’d checked them all. Ah—was that you, who spoke just now?”
“Not sure, sir.” Pen ran the long hem through his fingers, which found an unsewn slot. Poking within, he drew out a folded length of thin cloth. He shook it free to find it covered all over with fine writing, in none of the languages he recognized. No, it is a cipher. What?
Tigney held out his hand in demand; Pen delivered both skirt and cipher. “Ah!” said Tigney. “Cloth, not parchment. No wonder I felt nothing. Clever Ruchia!” He glanced up rather sharply at Pen. “Are there any more like this?”
“I . . . don’t know.”