That was the easiest promise she had ever made.
24
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Kyrtian's nose tickled, and he rubbed it absently. Why is it that in spite of decades of practice, the Ancestors had handwriting that was uniformly atrocious? The tiny words not only looked as though they had been written with the aid of a lens, they conformed to no school of calligraphy he 'd ever seen.
Kyrtian labored his way through yet another personal journal, making notes on sheets of foolscap for later transcription in his own neat (and extremely legible) hand. This business of concocting a "personal" script-style must have been a common affectation among the bored. But why they should choose to also write as if paper was more valuable than gold was beyond his comprehension.
Here in Lady Moth's library, it was so quiet he could almost hear dust motes falling out of the air to add to the accumulation on the books. Lady Moth had brought back all the volumes that she had extracted during the time that the Young Lords were using the place as their headquarters. The situation was reversed now, and she commanded her late husband's estate and holdings as she should have done some time past. With no army to command and no war to fight, the Young Lords were hardly in need of a command-post, although they were still full of an impotent defiance.
Kyrtian reached for a glass of water and absently took a sip.
For the moment, the Young Lords were living on the grounds of the dowager-estate, Lady Moth's Tower, hiding in the one place where no one was likely to come looking for them. Wearing illusory disguises to make them look like human slaves, it was unlikely that even if a search was made there for them that they would be found.
As long as they can hold together, and not have someone get a change of heart and defect, they should do all right.
He'd talked to them all, and at the moment, he didn't think that likely. Not while they were safe and not having to suffer any serious hardships.
Not even Moth's own slaves knew who they were—the story was that they had been part of the Young Lord's army, and that Moth was sheltering them to keep them from being punished for having been conscripted in the first place.
It was a situation that made it hard for Kyrtian to keep a straight face whenever he thought about it. Living among the slaves was going to do them a world of good.
Already he'd seen signs of a change in attitude towards the humans from some of them. He had every confidence that if— or when—the Revolt started again, it would be on a very different footing.
If it happened, they already counted on it having a very different ending. Their plans called for him to either join them openly or permit the Great Lords to place him back in command of the army and proceed to actually do as little as possible. Then, at the right moment, he could turn the Council's army against the Great Lords themselves.
But I don't want to do that if I can help it. Such a war—because it would be a war, and not a revolt—would be bloody. Most of the casualties would be human; there was just no getting around that. And although—if the Young Lords had changed their attitude towards slave-owning by then—the humans on their side would have an active stake in the outcome, they would still be the ones taking the full force of the fighting. There were far more of them than there were Elves, and as physical fighters—well, the Young Lords were not very good.
Kyrtian's plan, which he hoped to talk the Young Lords into, was more subtle. He wanted them to creep back to their august fathers one at a time, in secret, and grovel. They would still have the iron jewelry that kept their fathers from working magic on them; that was key.
After they returned, and once they managed to regain some freedom of movement, he hoped they could work their own
way back up through the hierarchy, and attrition among the Great Lords would eventually put them in the seats of power.
Such a plan, however, did have a number of drawbacks, not the least of" which was that there were plenty of the Great Lords who would quite readily slay their rebellious sons and underlings out of hand if they ever so much as showed their faces. And once back in a father's good graces, there was always the chance that someone would turn traitor. That would be ... awkward.
So for now, they were in hiding, and if they weren't accomplishing anything, at least they weren't getting into trouble either.
Meanwhile—as the Council debated the next use they were going to make of him, and his erstwhile enemies cooled their heels in circumstances he hoped would teach them some empathy, he was using his enforced leisure to get back to the search for his father.
The answer to his father's whereabouts was in this room, somewhere, he was sure. The trouble was that there was so much to wade through, and none of it had ever been properly cataloged. Personal journals were crammed in next to the sort of romantic novels considered appropriate for ladies to while away their hours with—books on flora and fauna were piled atop maps and volumes on magic.
His nose tickled again, and he unsuccessfully tried to suppress a sneeze. Moth or her friend Viridina were in here a dozen times a day, trying to clean out the dust magically, but every time he opened a volume more of it flew up into the air in clouds.
Moth's family had a mania of their own—for collecting. Most of this library had come to her from various family members. They were, however, indiscriminate in their mania. In the case of the ones who'd acquired books and manuscripts, the definition of a "book" seemed to be "any collection of paper with covers on it" and the definition of "manuscript" was "any collection of handwritten paper." As far as he could tell, there was no method in what they'd selected, no categories, no attempt to place a value on anything.
Perhaps, if he'd been in here before the Young Lords took residence, he'd have been able to find the things his father had studied that had given him his real clue. But they had simply shoveled everything they found to the side in heaps so that they could use the room for their own purposes, and Moth hadn't helped when she extracted the books that she thought were important. Moth, bless her, had been under the impression that she had kept some order and cleanliness to the library.
Yes, well, that was before we found the boxes in the storage-chamber. Moth's husband had maintained a "show" library, with things he thought worth keeping attractively shelved. The rest—which amounted to four or five times the volume of works on show—had gotten packed into boxes and stacked up in a storeroom behind the library itself. Moth had thought that the storeroom was empty until they'd opened the door. In their search for maps they could use to plan their campaign and the plans of manors and estate-houses, the Young Lords had rummaged through it all, bringing some things into the library and leaving them, removing other things to make room for what they brought in. Whatever order had once been here was gone completely. Now the storeroom had shelves, and so did the unused office next to it, and the unused reception-room next to that, and Kyrtian was trying to bring some order to the chaos.
Kyrtian, however, was fast becoming convinced that his answer lay, not in printed books or illuminated manuscripts, interesting as those might be, but in the personal journals kept often by elven ladies, and infrequently by their lords.
His father had almost certainly divined the location of the Portal from something in here. That location was lost, and what was more, there seemed to be evidence that the Ancestors who had built the thing had engaged in an active effort to hide that location from their descendants—and even from some of their own who had come through the Portal.
Why? That was a good question. Perhaps they feared a traitor in their midst who would re-open the Portal to their enemies. The Portal itself had cooperated in erasing memories; it was fairly clear that the Crossing was such a traumatic ordeal in and of itself that a substantial number of those who Crossed could
not remember a great deal of what happened immediately thereafter.
And perhaps some of those folk were "helped" to forget.
None, not one, of the Great Lords that had created the Portal and survived the Crossing left any substantive records about it. That much was fact. Nor did any of the historians—another fact. So with no official records, he was left with only one other source, the unofficial ones—and of those, the best would be the records of those who were considered too insignificant to matter.
The ladies . .. ah yes, the ladies.
And the eccentrics.
Some of those journals were attractively bound and might at one time have been shelved in the main room—and that might be where Kyrtian's father had gotten his information.
Or he might have found something in official records that Kyrtian had somehow completely overlooked.
Kyrtian ran a dusty hand through his hair in frustration, then told himself sternly not to get so impatient. After all, his father had been hunting for the Portal for decades before Kyrtian was born; by the time he found what he was looking for, he had probably gotten to the point that he was so familiar with the Ancestors and the way their minds worked that he was able to intuit things that weren't obvious.
So he was wading through everything handwritten that Moth had in this library, with the Great Book of Ancestors beside him. Before he could eliminate any manuscript or journal, he first had to figure out who wrote it, or at least who the author's contemporaries were, then discover whether or not the author lived far enough back to have made the Crossing.
Since it was almost a guarantee that most of the manuscripts he found would be from too late a period to mention the Crossing except in passing, he would then try to find every other manuscript that could be attributed to that person. Most people who were addicted to journal-writing had produced multiple volumes over the course of their very long lives. If the author was of too late a period, well, it helped to be able to weed out everything that could be attributed to her pen.
It was a painfully logical and methodical plan of dealing with the situation. It was also very tedious, very time-consuming, and very, very dusty.
Kyrtian had two helpers at least—Gel, and that little female concubine that Lady Triana had been so considerate in planting on him. He'd sent for her a-purpose once he'd turned over his commission to Lord Kyndreth while the Council debated. If Triana was so interested in what he was doing, he was inclined to allow her more information than she could comfortably digest. He had a notion that she was working with Aelmarkin, at least for the moment. Lady Moth had been very helpful in presenting him with a summary of her past behavior, and from that he'd formed the opinion that whatever game she played, whatever alliances she made, her ultimate goal would serve no one but herself.