Law of the Broken Earth(128)

She lost track of Gereint Enseichen, only noticing occasionally that he had seized her wrist to hold her back. Once when this happened, she stepped sideways and around in a neat circle that took her out of his hold and let her walk forward again, only then she found that Tan had not come with her, so she had to turn back to find him.

She neither noticed nor remembered to wonder whether any of the Arobern’s men or townspeople had come with her. Tan was the only person she really noticed, and then only in his absence. She needed him to come with her, and when the world bent around her and behind her then she knew he had paused. If he would not come with her, then she, too, was constrained to pause. In those moments she tried to find him, take his hand, pull him forward after her. But he resisted her tug.

There was shouting, she noticed vaguely. And then she thought so again; she did not know if time had passed or if she was still caught in the same moment, but the shouting seemed to have become more violent and nearer at hand. Tan was refusing to follow her. Mienthe blinked, confused by the sweep of motion and color all around them; nothing would resolve to sensible form. She turned her head, but nothing she saw made sense. But Tan had a hard grip on her hand, and the book was now very close, it was right over there. She closed her own hand on Tan’s and pulled him hard, around and into a circle that led around the violent motion and through brilliantly colored shadows, and there was the book—She pulled back the rug and shifted the wardrobe out half a step, leaned into the gap, tapped firmly against the upper edge of one panel of the wood that decorated the wall, and the panel swung open just a crack, and she pried it open just that little bit farther and reached into the dark gap behind the panel and the book fell neatly into her hand.

And the moment crashed into time, or time expanded to engulf the moment, and Mienthe found herself standing in her own apartment, her own bedchamber, with the last of the afternoon sunlight slanting in through her window, and the smell of smoke and dust hanging heavy in the air, and, not so far away, a clamor of shouting and screaming and the clash of weapons. Startlement made her gasp, and then rising fear might have made her cry out in earnest, only when she whirled about she found Tan standing in the middle of her room with a finger held to his lips and an expression of stifled hilarity in his eyes.


For a long, stretched moment, Tan was absolutely certain that Mienthe, having brought them by some strange mageworking right past who knew how many Linularinan soldiers and straight into the great house and her own room, would at this inopportune moment recover her senses and cry out some word of triumph or even, given her dazed expression, astonishment. As he could quite clearly hear the loud, authoritative voices of Linularinan soldiers directly without the room, this would hardly serve.

He had, however, for the first time in days—for the first time since Ehre, indeed—a wild desire to laugh. He felt very alert, and tremendously alive, and terribly frightened. He tried hard not to laugh. He bit his lips instead, and held out his hand.

Somewhere near at hand, a soldier called out and another answered: a formal sign and countersign, by the sound, as was the Linularinan practice in uncertain territory. Mienthe’s eyes widened at the sound. She glanced over her shoulder, hesitated one more instant, and then darted across the room to Tan. She clasped the book—the book for which they had spent so much effort—in both her hands. For a moment Tan thought she might fall back into that trance of movement and magic that had so recently held her. But then she blinked, life and awareness returning to her eyes, and instead offered the book to Tan.

He did not touch it, but took her by the elbow and nodded aside, at the farthest doorway that led out of this room, and raised his eyebrows.

“Yes,” Mienthe whispered, and ran that way.

The doorway proved to lead straightaway into a tiny, windowless corner room that was probably meant to be a maid’s room, but fitted out not with its own narrow bed and tiny dresser but with a neat little writing desk and shelves of expensive books and little keepsakes. An illustrated herbal lay open on the desk, undisturbed, as it had no doubt lain since they had all fled so precipitously from this house.

The tiny room was surely as far from enemy soldiers as they might well find themselves. Mienthe closed the herbal and set it aside, then placed the blank Linularinan book down on the desk. She ran a fingertip over the curves and loops of its tooled leather cover and then looked rather blankly at Tan.

“You know what to do,” Tan murmured to her.

Mienthe only shook her head. “I thought I would,” she whispered back—she did not know that a whisper carried better than merely a low voice, but it should not matter, back in this corner as they were. She looked frightened and uncertain, and that was much worse. She whispered, “I thought I would know what to do, but all I see now is a book! All the rest is like, like a dream—misty, fading—We’re here, we have this book, and now I don’t know anything—”