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The whole outing was because of the Festival of Three Rivers, which no one in the palace at Belisaere had ever heard of. A disgruntled man, apparently the mayor of some quite peripheral town in the far northwest, had arrived with a formal letter of protest at the Festival’s discontinuation and the accompanying slur on the traditions and values of the northern provinces. Ellimere had heard him at an audience— she was the only one, it appeared, who actually liked taking them— and had promised to correct the oversight at once.
But it hadn’t been as easy as all that, as they all heard over dinner five or six days in a row. The old records of the Kingdom feasts recorded a Festival of Three Rivers, certainly, but it had no fixed date, or indeed relative but consistent date, that anyone could find.
“The books say it’s to be celebrated when the Great Wheel of Thirty Unbowing Stars is in the second day of antrodeflection from the Inturning Serpent." This was delivered all in one breath— a virtuosic performance, Nicholas Sayre thought, even for Ellimere. "Only the scribes say they can’t find any of those names in the annals of stars in the library, and even if they did no one knows what an antrodeflection is. It’s not one of the astrological movements in the Great Treatise of Calculations, or if it is it’s under another name and it doesn’t match up well.”
“Maybe you need Charter Magic to calculate it,” Sabriel said. “If it were a spell that adapts to the time and place, it might be impossible to record in pure mathematical notation.”
“But in that case we’d have to find a record of the Charter spell somewhere,” Sam put in, “and more of those books got looted and burned than anything else, especially right away.”
“You know,” Touchstone said, “I think I vaguely remember this festival. I don’t remember there being some great fuss about calculating it, though, we just had different forms of the dance if we were in winter instead of summer uniform.”
“In your time,” Ellimere said, “there was an entire separate court apparatus of scholars and professional charter mages just for astrological work. It says so in Judicial Excerpts. Right now we’ve still barely got enough mages scraped together to keep the circuit courts running and the palace guarded. I have no doubt that two hundred years ago it was trivial.”
Nick was still rather amazed at the way Ellimere talked to her parents. He had his own share of powerful guardians, of course, and he’d been rather impudent even to his own uncle at times, when he’d got in a scrape he didn’t want to talk about or had some bullheaded notion of his own. But Ellimere’s attitude of absolute confidence in her own expertise at her father’s job— of being King— was still something else entirely. If he’d talked to his father like that, even now, he’d have been sent out of the room. Possibly her time as Regent had given her some extra piece of authority; possibly her relationship to her parents was just very different from Nick’s.
He had no particular desire to speak up in these discussions— any setup where magic had to be used to predict the movements of the stars, because math didn’t work, was obviously far beyond him. (Or vastly ignorant and wrongheaded, but he liked to imagine he could occasionally learn a lesson about making assumptions once it had killed him and nearly destroyed the world.) He occasionally wondered whether the Old Kingdom had never received news of Galileo, but this seemed altogether too tactless to ask, especially since three of the four members of the royal family had had educations more or less identical to his own.
Nonetheless, the problem of the Festival was apparently no closer to resolution at the end of the sixth day than at the beginning of the first; and Sam, at least, was starting to sigh and leave the room whenever anyone mentioned stars or timekeeping, so Nick would rather have liked to be helpful if he could manage it.
Eventually, after a lot of thought, he came up with the idea of asking Lirael for advice. In case I haven’t felt embarrassed and ignorant enough lately, he thought ruefully. She was very sincerely helpful, though, even if also very strange and remote; and after she’d rescued him from so many assorted perils he hoped they were something like friends.
She’d been living at Abhorsen’s House for the last few months, training in swordsmanship and unearthing some of the House’s features that Sabriel, a monarch trying to reunite the Dead-ravaged provinces into a country, had never had time to find. It took five days to get her reply, but when it came it was very helpful indeed.
Abhorsen’s House has an adequate collection of scrolls and early codices on astrological symbology and mathematics, though not as much contemporary, Lirael wrote, and I happen to know that the Compendium of Avrahel of Chertrey says there was a particularly large and detailed celestial globe brought here five hundred years ago, though I haven’t looked for it yet. It’s meant to be annotated in four languages, so even if it doesn’t turn out to have useful enchantments you might learn which stars you’re looking for. You’re welcome to come if you’d like to help search for it.
She’d written, under that, that if they couldn’t find it, or the House was too out-of-the-way for a visit, the Clayr’s Library also held at least forty celestial globes and astrolabes. But he’d detected some hesitation in her tone— maybe because it picked up in a slightly different color of ink, like she’d put the letter aside for a while before adding that note, and had only blotted it after. Maybe she still wasn’t especially enthusiastic about visiting the Clayr herself— but that was probably reading far too much into it. Maybe her reluctance was just because, as she went on to explain, the Clayr’s Room of Astronomical Devices was behind a barrier of corrosive and Charter-inimical copper fencework. The librarians had placed it there a hundred years ago, she said, to contain the neighboring Room of Blood-Measuring, and it was tremendously tedious to take down and put back up without risking the blood-measuring instruments getting out.
The first time she’d said something like that in a letter, he thought she was having him on. Now he mostly just tried not to contemplate it too deeply.
But he brought the letter to Sam, first, who found the prospect of some kind of mechanism all that was necessary to make him a cheerful proponent of the plan; and then mentioned it, tentatively, to the rest of them, whereupon Ellimere was immediately taken up by grand schemes to cross-correlate the Palace records with the Abhorsen library, Sabriel was optimistic that a globe would be useful for all sorts of other timekeeping they didn’t yet have the right spells for, and Touchstone seemed mainly to hope that it would allow for some other discussion topics at dinner.
In the end Sam and Nick were deputized to go, being the world’s greatest artificer and largely superfluous to any practical requirements, respectively. It was reasonably comfortable to sail down the coast nowadays, since the coastal towns had been one of the easiest places to get Dead-free and benefitting from trade after Touchstone took the throne. They had all sorts of things, like reasonably modernized plumbing, and more than two dishes available at waystations. Nick tried to enjoy it. But he kept thinking of seeing Lirael again: whether she’d want to see him; whether he’d have anything to say to her at all.
She was busy, actually, when they finally arrived at Abhorsen’s house, which felt fitting somehow. They were shown in by Charter-sendings, who took their coats and their baggage firmly, and sent the knot of Guards with them into the kitchen to warm up, and shuffled Nick and Sam through a brisk dinner and to bed. She wasn’t back when they woke up, either. The Charter-sendings pointed them helpfully to the new wing that had opened up behind the dining rooms, where the library lived now that Lirael had... unearthed it. Or something. The rooms were paneled in dark wood, and low-ceilinged, lit mainly by oil lamps and windows rather than Charter-spelled lights. In the front room, with six doors opening into six shadowy halls, there was a catalog of the Abhorsen’s archives laid out on the table, and a much older manuscript describing the celestial globe they were looking for, with spidery illustrations picked out in red and black.
One didn’t, unfortunately, actually learn to read medieval manuscripts in the best boarding schools. Even knowing enough of the current ceremonial script of the Old Kingdom to muddle along wasn’t a great deal of help with scribal hand of five hundred years ago. Sam gave up quickly, and went off into the archives on his own, to see if he could track the globe down himself; Nick stayed behind, telling himself it was merely efficient division of resources and not cowardice.
He was focused enough he didn’t hear Lirael come in. Then she laid a hand on his shoulder and he jumped half out of his chair.
“Careful!” she said, sharp, and pulled his hand away from the manuscript, where he’d nearly knocked into it. Once he was steady, though, and had turned to look at her, her face softened into something a bit less hostile. More wood than metal, he thought, if no better than wood.
“Sorry,” she said, “for startling you. I didn’t mean to miss the two of you arriving; there were Mordauts in amongst the farmers in the Lower Tyrvees, and I was longer than I expected coming back. Sam’s with you?”
Nick jerked his head, not taking his eyes from her still, impassive face. “He got a bit bored with our difficulty deciphering this old script. He’s in there, poking around.”
“Difficulty with the script in that?” Lirael murmured, then shook her head. “Well, it’s not anything like the Clayr’s Library in there— nothing buried or even under spelled crystal, I’m not sure how they managed it— but let’s go find him, all the same.”
She swept on past him, assuming he’d follow, and he did. As they went, the spaces for windows shrank, and the glass went from panes to the wedged, bubbled diamonds he was used to in the old buildings here. He noticed, now that he could see her fully, that Lirael was still in her armor, and her hair was only half in its braid. She must have come straight to the library as soon as she got back, he thought. Perhaps she had even rushed a little. That made him smile to himself, just a little.
Sam was, in fact, fine; better than fine, he’d found a star globe.
“Oh, good, you’re back,” he said, once they were all the way in, and the door fully closed behind them. “Not sure it’s the one you were talking about,” he said to Lirael, “this doesn’t quite seem old enough to be already well-attested five hundred years ago, but I don’t see why it wouldn’t work for our purposes. There’s already ten or twelve astrological conjunctions I’ve never even heard of in here.”
“I’m glad it’s been so helpful so quickly,” Lirael said, sounding a bit bemused, watching him work at it.
“I’m very glad you’re here,” he said. “I can already tell we’ll want a Clayr at some point if I’m going to get this working. Just the casting style, of course, not the bloodline magic— I mean. Not that you don’t count as a Clayr.” Lirael’s mouth was pursing a bit. “I just mean we won’t need future watching. Just someone who knows the Clayr formulas. Which I certainly don’t. And you do.”
“I do know them,” she said. She turned quickly away, to look at one of the books stacked in the low boxes in the shelves; this was one of the rooms not yet reorganized into the modern storage style, with the spines outward. Nick went to do the same— but these books were even worse, written in what looked like one of the lowlands languages, as well as a script so odd he wasn't absolutely sure it was still the usual alphabet. He gave up and got out his pocket microscope instead; things in the Old Kingdom were made beautifully, and aged strangely, with magic preserving delicate features that ought to have vanished in five years of regular use, or wearing away stone with the continual passage of energies over its surface.
“I didn’t realize there were such great differences in how people used the Charter until very recently,” he said, trying to fill the silence, when Sam didn’t pipe up with any more commentary on timekeeping. “You all talk about the Charter like it’s one thing, but then Cassana can’t undo Mereid’s lock-spell in less than fifteen minutes because Mereid trained at White Winds in the east, or it turns out some people draw signs others only speak, or someone will tell me a spell absolutely needs a drawn element and the next person will tell me it’s purely somatic unless the wind is in the south. Is it a training thing, do you think? Or practice? Or is the Charter”— this possibility rather haunted him—“just different for different people, like other magic is?”
Sam hummed and didn’t answer. Whatever tool he was using was making ringing little metallic taps, every few seconds, and the sound seemed to fill the room all on its own. Nick shrugged mentally and moved from studying the bookcase to the binding on one of the older books, more or less forgetting he’d asked a question. The binding was quite interesting. It was sewn, but with thread that seemed far too smooth unless it was a single silk filament, and it didn’t have the luster of silk. Perhaps it was cotton, unified by magic rather than spun—
“You know,” Lirael said abruptly, “I don’t actually think it’s very nice to raise a child to value only those skills conveyed by her magical innate inheritance of a bloodline it’s not even clear she actually possesses.”
Nick put the lenses away rather quickly, and looked at her. She was gazing at the carved relief framed on one wall, in a clearly purpose-built break in the bookshelves. He’d looked at that one with the microscope already; it bore the clear signs of a piece of wood once regularly exposed to saltwater. There was still a good amount of paint and even gold leaf clinging to it, too, highlighting in tremendous detail and uncertain anatomical accuracy an image of a woman in a sort of short robe. She had a deep wound in one knee, from which blood ascended into the air to form charter marks, a square around a circle. He’d hoped to ask Lirael what, exactly, it signified, but now didn’t precisely seem like the right moment.
“Oh, all right,” Lirael went on, crossly, as if to an unspoken rebuttal. “They had no precedent and nothing else to go on, and perhaps they even thought it would be worse for me, to mark me out as odd from the beginning, and not give me even the chance to grow among the other Clayr. Certainly they couldn’t have sent me off to be raised by the Librarians much before they actually did. But my mother had a vision of me! All sorts of visions of me, presumably, who knows what she got up to after she vanished. But she saw me at the Wall, from just before Sam and I crossed over, and she was still in the Old Kingdom then. She was living at Abhorsen’s House! She couldn’t have told my aunt Kirrith, the last time she came by, this one is never getting any blonder, teach her some other job skills? Or, you know, I foresaw my child in the surcoat of an Abhorsen, and since I conceived her with an Abhorsen, possibly I should combine those facts and mention them to someone so she can be prepared for the possibility. I can imagine her saying all sorts of things.”
“Were you wearing the surcoat, when you crossed the wall after Orannis?” Nick said. He had had a lot of practice saying the name, by now, and managed to not shudder, though he did not-shudder rather noticeably. Lirael ignored this.
“Probably I was,” Lirael said. “Surely. I don’t think I had any other clothes left by then, so— oh, I don’t know. Perhaps not. Maybe she foresaw me looking exactly like an Ancelstierran soldier with a massive head wound.”
“Or an owl,” Nick offered.
“Or an owl,” she said, and put her head in her hands. She put on a lilting voice. “‘Kirrith, someday my daughter will take the form of a great owl, a gargantuan owl, an owl the size of an ox. You must tell her that she is no less a daughter of the Clayr for this.’”
“You were ox-sized?” he said. “I really don’t remember that day well.”
“Different owl,” she said. “I had to be a bigger owl later. It was tremendously difficult Charter-work, actually. Sam still can’t do it.”
“Thanks,” Sam said, from his seat in the far corner. Lirael started. She’d obviously entirely forgotten he was there.
“Well, you can’t,” she said.
“No,” he allowed. “I might try for a properly reusable one at some point, though. It would be good if we could use them for infrastructure maintenance or something, if they were less delicate.”
“I think you’ll be able to read the book about them all right,” she said. She had an air like she was perhaps a bit relieved to discuss something else. “I found it for mysterious Library reasons originally, but I don’t think it’s bound to me in particular.”
“There are books only one person can read?” Nick said. This violated his sensibilities rather thoroughly. What on earth was the point of binding something into a codex in the first place if not for people to read it? For that matter, how did any such book survive for a meaningful amount of time, if exactly one person at a time was the only audience and the only possible copyist?
“Oh, yes,” she said. “Usually just by hiding in the library until the right person finds them, but sometimes they’ll actually obscure the contents. I think most of the time that’s a breakable spell, actually, it might be interesting seeing if we could get it off some of them again. —I wouldn’t like to try anything on Remembrance, or the Book of the Dead, but that’s not just Charter magic anyway.”
“The books… hide,” he said. “They know how to hide.”
“Yes,” Lirael said. She had an air like she was being very patient, and a little entertained. “And Charter-sendings can sense new Abhorsens or catalogue books or have traditionalist opinions. You can put quite a lot of information into a Charter-spell.”
“Huh,” Nick said. He glanced over at Sam, still making one infinitesimally minute motion at a time as he rotated knobs on the celestial globe. “Does that thing already know what time things happen? Magically, I mean?”
“It must,” Lirael said, “or else why bother putting so much Charter magic into it? It’s not all preservation-spells, you only need three standard ones to keep gold happy.”
“But there’s eight other spells that make it properly invulnerable to heat instead of just nearly,” Sam said, not looking up. “You’re right, though, it’s not all preservation. This thing ought to know what time it is, what time every major celestial event in the next thousand years will be, and all sorts of other things besides. It’s just— quiet.”
“We could try telling it the time,” Lirael said. Sam hummed again, thoughtful, and nodded.
The two of them spent a long while crowding around it together, whispering marks or drawing them. Nick tried to focus on the spells, but even the brief snatches of song or wisps of smoke all blended together after a while. He still didn’t know anything about how Charter Magic properly worked, really, and he wouldn’t be guessing it like this. Once Sam sent Nick out of the room for an hourglass; when he’d managed to blunder into a Charter-sending, ask for one, and come back with it, Sam poured all its sand out into a thin smooth surface, and the two of them started again, gently blowing it about with their breaths, tracing symbols with their fingers in it.
Finally Lirael did something. Nick didn’t know what, but he felt it: a shivering in the air, and then a crack like breaking ice, right up his arms. He looked over at them. The two of them had drawn back a bit from the table in surprise; the globe was unchanged, but the sand was a dark, shining sheet of perfectly smooth glass.
“Huh,” Sam said. He stared at it. “Can you… See anything in this?” he said to Lirael, apologetically.
“Nothing,” she said. She pressed her lips together for a while. Then she looked up at him. “Nick?”
“Me?”
“Yes, you,” she said, exasperated. “If you don’t we’ll try bringing in other people, or Sam can call Mogget or something. But you’re here.”
This logic was unassailable. Nick came forward more cautiously than he wanted to admit. The desk was dark, rather worm-eaten wood, and the glass was even more incongruous against its pitted surface than he’d first thought. Actually, even more incongruous than that; it was reflecting the light from the window in it, he’d seen that from across the room, but as he came closer, the reflection didn’t actually move.
Finally he was near enough to look straight down at it. He hesitated. Lirael was giving him her wooden look, not her metal one, but that was stern enough. He looked down.
The light in the glass turned in on itself and all at once became stars. “That’s the Tent,” he said, startled to see constellations he recognized, and beside him Sam drew in a breath. Lirael did, too, though of a rather different character.
“Hang on,” Sam said, “if it’s actually working I’ve got to get the rest of the globe in place—” and as he moved the rings on the globe the stars blurred and wheeled sickeningly in front of Nick’s eyes.
“Try for the festival,” he said, on a vague feeling, “Acamar and Achernar, for the River, and Athafi for threes— I think I’ll see it—”
Sam muttered a spell, and the globe turned faster, though still not very fast. “There’s a lot of stars here to sort through,” he said, apologetic.
Lirael was feeling apologetic too, apparently. “I’m sorry I— spoke so oddly,” she said. “I haven’t actually had a conversation with anyone outside being Abhorsen in nearly two months. And the farmers kept asking why I had a Clayr symbol if I wasn't a Clayr.” Then she coughed, apparently noticing that that admission was, itself, rather odd.
“It’s all right,” Nick managed. It was, in fact, all right, but also the wheeling had only gotten worse with Sam’s spell. Even if it were entirely illusory, it couldn’t be good for the inner ear for the mind to be this disoriented.
“You look pale,” she said, and gave him a brisk, awkward pat on the hand. “He’s nearly done.”
“I’m really—” Nick started to say, and just then Sam’s spell stopped and all the stars anchored at once into place, and the sun started proceeding down through them, very clearly giving a date and a time. He patted his pockets for pen and paper— he hadn’t been that good at outdoor navigation in Scouts— but no, it was coming back to him after all. Or possibly the magic was changing his brain to be better at astronomical reckoning.
“December fifteenth,” he blurted suddenly. “December fifteenth, at least six hours before sunset. And then I don’t think the next one’s for over a year.”
He found he could look away at last. When he focused his eyes on Sam, though, he was at least as pale as Nick must be.
“That’s not even two weeks from now,” Sam said, horrified. “I can’t tell Ellimere she’s got to put an entire festival on in two weeks and get the Northerners to Belisaere in time for it. She’ll kill me.”
Nick head a sound beside him. An almost entirely unfamiliar one, high-pitched and wheezing. He turned his head. Lirael had started to laugh.