The best shot I have at a home now is finding the other human women. Making sure they’re safe, and figuring out how we’ll all survive without being under the thumb of the ship’s military crew...
“So, tell me about the library, Ashken!” I said, my voice high and sounding overly cheery as I changed the subject.
“Of course, of course!” he said, turning and brandishing his silver crystal cane around the space. My gaze followed the sweep of the carved silver stick.
It was a truly massive room. It was about halfway up the Day Tower, and unlike other lower, wider floors of the house which were broken up into more than one chamber, the library dominated the entire floor. The ceiling was also much higher than most of the other floors, and unlike the tower I’d been staying in, this one was green, giving everything a rich verdant hue. A massive fire rock blazed in the centre of the room, and it took me a moment to realize it was encased in a sort of crystal grate which hardened into a chimney that arched up towards the ceiling. The silvery crystal was so thin around the fire that it was nearly invisible, allowing the golden-orange light to disperse around the space. Arranged in a circle around the fire were cushions, large crystal chairs, and fur throws.
Apart from the fire and the furniture, though, there wasn’t much more I recognized in the room. There weren’t bookshelves like a human library. Instead, the entire circular perimeter of the room had massive rectangular frames jutting out from the walls, with what looked like fabric stretched over the frames. Some of the rectangles were pressed close together, obscuring the fabric on them, others were splayed wider apart. It reminded me of rug stores back home, where the rugs were stretched and suspended in transparent plastic rectangles that you had to turn on the walls like pages of a book. Or, like how posters were displayed and sold in shops, if posters were more than ten feet tall.
“This is amazing!” I said, completely fascinated. If Orla were here, she would lose her fucking mind. Orla was our resident linguist among the kidnapped women on the ship. I wondered grimly if she would have seen this anyway, had Wylfrael not returned when he did. If we would have found and taken over this property and hurt the Sionnachans.
Knowing humans, probably.
But that reminded me...
“Why is this place invisible?” I blurted, distracted from the library. “Is that another one of Wylfrael’s powers?”
“Oh, no,” Ashken said. “Lord Cynewylf had trading relationships with the warlords of Riverdark. A mage who owed him a favour cast that protective spell over the property so that only those who knew the correct phrase could find it and enter. Oh, I rather suppose I should tell you, if you do not know it already. The word is mirreth. It’s the Riverdark word for home.”
Ashken needn’t have translated it for me. In the bizarre way of the webbing, I both heard the phonetic sounds of the word and instantly understood it. I really can understand any language...
“So, the warlords of Riverdark... Who are they? Stone sky gods?”
“No, no,” Ashken said. “They are a completely separate people. Although, there may be a stone sky god who is half Riverdark out there. But the warlords of Riverdark are mortal. They are mages, and one of the few races who can travel between worlds.”
“One of the few? How many have achieved space travel?” I asked. My voice had grown intense, my hands curling tightly into fists. But I couldn’t help it. It seemed that every moment I spent here, I learned something completely life-altering. I’d spent my entire career dreaming about space travel to places beyond the moon, not even knowing that humans had already achieved it in a secret program. Now, I was finding out there were other beings apart from the stone sky gods who could do so?
“As far as we know, only four races can travel between worlds,” said Ashken. “The stone sky gods, the warlords of Riverdark, the Tvarvatra, and now your kind.”
“Incredible,” I whispered. “Do they use ships – machines – like humans?”
“Only the Tvarvatra. The warlords of Riverdark have enchanted creatures who can travel between stars.”
“Creatures?” I gasped. “Like, animals that can fly through space?”
“I do not know many of the details, but I believe the creatures crawl rather than fly.”
They... What?
OK, I would definitely have to ask Wylfrael about that, too. How would that even work? Crawling through space? There was nothing to crawl on!
All I wanted now was to keep grilling Ashken about whatever he knew of these other aliens and their space travel, but I could tell that he was dying to show off the library, and I wanted to learn about that, too. I nodded and smiled in encouragement, and he launched into a tour of the space.
He and Aiko shared a talent for giving tours. Though he was clearly aging, his voice was strong and his mind most definitely sharp. He rattled off facts with the detailed precision of an encyclopedia and the enthusiasm of a young professor. As if having heard this speech many times before, Aiko said something about starting dinner preparations and disappeared.
Ashken leafed through the massive frames along the wall, like pages in a binder, explaining the Sionnachan writing system. Stretched in the large frames weren’t sheets of paper, but giant rectangles of pale silk. Instead of words written or painted on, the silk was embroidered. Unfortunately, the amazing powers of the translator in my head did nothing for written communications, and the threads looked like a jumble of little lines with no discernible patterns, broken up with the occasional sparkling bead. I decided I would learn how to read it, then remembered with something that felt a lot like disappointment that I probably wouldn’t be here long enough to do so.
And the time I do spend here will be dominated by Wylfrael, I’m sure.
“Where is Lord Wylfrael?” I asked Ashken. We’d moved on from the big frames on the wall that Ashken explained were archives and historical data, and he was now showing me much smaller rolls of embroidered silk – Sionnachan poetry and even some stories of stone sky god history that had been recorded by previous staff members.
“I believe the lord has travelled into one of the nearby villages today.”
I nodded, then blurted, “Doesn’t it feel weird to call him a god?”
Ashken cocked his head the same direction he leaned on his cane, giving him the appearance of a long, fluffy, orange reed blown sideways in the wind.
“No. We have our own gods, of course. There is Nacha, the ancient creator who moulded Sionnach from a ball of snow, for example.”
“Well, right! Exactly! Gods are supposed to create things, right? Where I come from, people pray to them. They’re supposed to help people.” I decided not to mention that the gods from some pantheons were as likely to be capricious or violent towards humans as they were benevolent. Looking at you, Greece.
“The stone sky gods perform a similar function,” Ashken said. “At least, they have in our world. They cannot hear prayers spoken from afar, but I know of many, many instances, too many to relay, where Cynewylf or Wylfrael used their immense power for the good of Sionnachans.”
“Really?” I asked, honestly shocked by this. All I’d seen Wylfrael do was stomp around this castle so far.
“Oh, yes,” Ashken said earnestly. “You are marrying an extraordinary being, Torrance. Why, I cannot even count the number of things he’s done worth noting. There was the time he saved an entire village from an avalanche, standing between them and the mountain’s rage, holding back the onslaught with nothing but his own raised hands. There was the merchant, whose sled went through an area of too-thin ice. Not only did Lord Wylfrael save the Sionnachan man, but he also saved the two sontanna, and then dove to the bottom of the ice-cold lake to collect the sled and all the merchant’s wares from the bottom so that his livelihood, as well as his life, was saved. There was the child, what was his name... Ohko! Yes, Ohko, who was separated from his hunting hound and got lost during a terrible snowstorm. The Sionnachan search parties could not find him, his tracks completely erased by the falling snow and the wind. But Wylfrael used his power to scrape snow away from every spot on that mountain, never faltering, never tiring. Two entire days and nights of flying and moving vast amounts of snow, long after the storm ended, until Ohko was found, cold, and very hungry, but alive, in a cave whose entrance was almost completely hidden by large drifts. There is even more than that!”
