The Medievals 1, page 8
part #1 of The Medievals Series
But as Richard grew older, an awareness took shape: he began to understand the meaning behind his second name, the Poet Prince. At seven, it was an endearment. But at thirteen, it was a pillowed slight. And now at sixteen, the whispered sobriquet rings even louder within his ears.
For this reason, Richard has traded his time among the books for hours spent in Master Cheng’s training room. Instead of exercising his imagination, he practices his swordsmanship; he seeks to become a man of action. And, in balance, he has left behind those shelves of books that had once captured his most vital parts with so many stories.
But now, as they move through the north wing, there is only one story that Richard cares to know; one story that has taken his imagination prisoner. Richard begs to know the story of the dead man whose body lay on the table back in the Throne Room.
His father has remained silent since the Throne Room, leaving Richard to wonder with abandon what his father intends to show him. He has never known his father to be secretive. His father lives by a code of openness, which has gained him favor and trust among the citizens of the Realm. Richard’s mother often tells him that she fell in love with his father because when she looked into his eyes she saw that he was incapable of deceit. “Secrets and lies,” his mother has said to Richard, “can only hurry the night to your soul.”
And yet, there is an unspoken secret that pulls at his father this very minute.
As Richard and his father reach the top of the staircase, they step into the mouth of a long, dark hallway. At the hallway’s end, Richard sees the guarded entrance to the Scriptorium. Unlike the Royal Library, he has only been inside this room once before, a room crowded with ancient texts and transcripts of the King’s speeches, all protected from the eyes of even the King’s son.
When they reach the end of the hallway, the guard opens the heavy wooden door, revealing the Scriptorium within. Before entering, his father places his torch in a sconce on the wall, and Richard remembers that no candle or torch is permitted inside the room in order to protect its aged, dried contents from catching fire. Instead, the room is lit only by the natural light that comes in through the windows. For this reason, the room is only used between the rising and setting of the sun.
Inside the room, a hunchbacked scribe leans over a desk with a busy pen and a half-empty inkhorn, copying a text in the fading evening light while all around him the shelves spill over with vellum and parchment like an overgrown garden. This is Despen, the King’s Scrivener. He is a pale little man whose face is stamped with time; and he has giant black circles in the middle of his eyes that remind Richard of a possum.
“Despen,” the King says, and the old scribe suddenly realizes there are other people in the room.
Despen promptly stands and bows. “Your Highness.”
“The sun is nearly gone. Thank you for a good day’s work,” Richard’s father says to Despen. And he says it in a way that reminds Richard that his father has the unique ability to make people feel appreciated, even when he is asking them to leave a room.
Despen immediately understands that he is being politely dismissed. He bows once again, and then hurries from the room, his head kept low in a deferential tuck.
The moment Despen is gone, Richard’s father closes the door to the room. Then, he shoves the bolt across the frame and into a latch, locking them into the Scriptorium.
His father turns to Richard, his face caught in a half-shadow, hiding his mouth as he speaks. “Within the stone walls of this room, a man can find the history of our people. The story of the Realm. The creation of its laws. The maps of our lands. There is life on every page and parchment on the shelves you see here; if cut, these words will bleed. As the King’s Scrivener, Despen is the custodian of this room. And as King, I am the custodian of our people’s history. It is my obligation to decide just how much of this history is revealed to the citizens of the Realm.”
Richard’s father speaks in a hushed tone, perhaps an attempt to keep his words from reaching the ears of the guard outside the door.
“I do not understand,” Richard says. “If it is their history, shouldn’t the citizens of the Realm be privy to all of it? Why should the King -- one man -- make such a decision?”
“It is a deserved question. One that I asked my own father when he stood in this room with me and shared these very words. But I believe that, in time, you will come to understand the reasoning, as I also did.”
His father moves across the room, cutting through the light of the setting sun, until he reaches the far wall. There, he grips the side of one of the many shelves in the room. And to Richard’s surprise, his father pulls the shelf away from the wall completely, revealing the gray stones behind it. He then runs the palms of his hands along the stones, searching the surface of the wall for something. When he finds a loose stone, he removes it, and pulls a lever within. The wall begins to shiver.
His father looks to Richard. “What I am about to show you is known only to a chosen few. This secret was passed to me by my father when I became King. And it was passed to him by his father before that and so on, stretching through three centuries of Kings.”
Richard watches as a piece of the wall opens, a secret door revealing another room behind it.
His father turns back to Richard, who is speechless. “Inside this room you will find all of the history that has been hidden from the people of the Realm.”
Richard’s father disappears into the darkened room. After a moment, he reappears with an ancient scroll in his hand.
“It is all in here. The story you know, the performance at your Triumph Day. The Runes, Mount Saurian, the near destruction of the Realm in the Endless War. It all happened. But the piece that has been lost to time is the part that comes after the ending to the story you know.”
The hair rises on Richard’s arms as his father pauses. The thought that there is more to the story of Merlin speeds an anticipation within him.
“When King Avedon banished magic and mystical beings from the Realm, Merlin took it upon himself to leave as well, fearing that his presence would continue to endanger the Realm. He travelled to the Northern Barrier and left the Realm through the Mori Gates, and then he disappeared into the Beyond. Five years passed, and the King heard nothing from his old friend. Perhaps, the King thought, Merlin was no more. But then, as King Avedon was lying on his deathbed, a messenger arrived with a letter, insisting it was sent by Merlin.
“In that letter, Merlin told the King that he had married a woman named Vivienne, and together they had borne a child. Merlin’s power would live on. And if ever the Realm were threatened again, a descendant of his line could be called upon.”
Richard’s mind instantly brims with questions. What his father is saying is inconceivable.
“That is impossible,” Richard challenges. “If there was a descendant of Merlin, surely we would know about it. Everyone would know.”
“Time has a way of reshaping our understanding of history, and your ancestors worked in concert to quicken that process. Days and years and centuries piled atop the truth like fallen leaves from an aged tree until the people were finally convinced that Merlin’s legacy and his magic died with him.”
“But why? Why would they -- why would you -- want to hide the true story of Merlin?”
“It was the bidding of Merlin himself.”
Richard tries to connect his father’s story to the events of today, thinking of the bloodied stranger lying on the table.
“The man in the Throne Room? He is a descendant of Merlin.”
His father shakes his head. “Before Merlin died, he charged two magical races with the protection of his son, and then every descendant there following. In the East, they were known as the Shen. In the West, the Caemon. That man was a Caemon. He was a protector of one of Merlin’s descendants, a young girl that he was hiding in the mountains of Cumbria until she was kidnapped last night.”
“By who?” Richard asks.
“The Caemon described a tall figure donning a cloak, his face hidden by a silver mask. He said a name, one I did not know: Waldron.”
The name holds no meaning for Richard as well.
“But why would someone kidnap this girl? What use is she to them?”
His father unfurls the scroll, cracked with age, and its length rolls onto the floor. He holds the scroll out to Richard, prompting him to take it.
“There is more,” his father says.
Richard gently takes the aging scroll into his hands. He scans the faded ink, the script full of curls and flourishes that have fallen out of fashion. His father points Richard to a passage near the end, and Richard reads Merlin’s words:
“And with my descendants shall also pass the knowledge of…”
Richard’s eyes go wide. While he reads the rest of the sentence, his tongue stops him from speaking the words as Richard realizes the grave truth behind the missing girl.
{Wendolyn}
A low hum swims to the edge of Wendolyn’s hearing, her mind rising slowly out of the blackness. The hum grows louder as it curls around her ears, and then it seems to stretch and come apart into separate sounds:
...voices speaking in a language that is not her...slow and heavy footfalls...a swollen river raging far off in the distance...
Open your eyes.
Wendolyn convinces her eyelids to open, and she is confronted by a dark firmament salted with stars.
But there is something strange and unfamiliar in the spread of constellations above her. Wendolyn does not recognize the star patterns. She has spent years mapping out the night sky, remembering the names of all the constellations, creating a nocturnal compass that has guided her home when she is lost. She intimately knows the seven stars of the Northern Basket because it is the easiest of the constellations to find.
But the Northern Basket is nowhere above her.
How can that be, Wendolyn thinks. What sky is this that does not share her stars? Did she wake up in another world?
And then, as Wendolyn turns her head just slightly, she feels a cloth itching against her eyes. She is blindfolded. And the stars in the night sky are actually speckles of daylight winking through the imperfect fabric, creating the spurious constellations.
With her mind waking up, Wendolyn’s memory rejoins her:
She has been kidnapped.
At the moment, her body is being carried over the hulking shoulder of one of her captors.
Nightmarish images flash against the blindfold: the red eye burning behind the silver mask; streaks of flames coming from the mouths of beasts; her father’s blood staining the snow.
The images give rise to an ache in her head. The same ache that preyed on her for weeks after her friends fled from her in the woods, fear on their faces. And she feels the same pounding sensation at the edge of her skull, like something or someone is trying to escape.
But the ache also touches her heart as she wonders if her father is still alive. Before her world went black, the last thing she saw was his pale face, his eyes filling with an apology as his cheeks quickly drained of life. She hopes desperately that he is still alive, and that he is going to come rescue her. But hope is not enough to stop the tears that leak from Wendolyn’s eyes and wet the inside of the blindfold. She has lost her father, and she has lost her always-horse, Zongshi; and the thought of never seeing them again brings a crushing pain to her chest.
As she attempts to dam her tears by squeezing her eyes shut, she remembers her father’s face as he saw the cloaked figure for the first time. In her father’s visage, she could see the Nameless Fear. Whatever lies behind that haunting silver mask embodies the fear that has lived with her father since Wendolyn was born. It is the secret that filled her father’s eyes and swam in his throat. And it is the thing that her father has been preparing Wendolyn for with his tireless training.
Her father’s voice echoes in her mind. We must better your skills. I will not always be here to protect you.
She never believed those words until now. It is impossible for a daughter to think her father will not be there to protect her.
But that moment has come.
Hearing the echo of those words -- We must better your skills -- Wendolyn knows what she must do. She must escape. She must harness her training, and she must escape her captors. Then she will find her way back to her father.
But how? She is blindfolded. And she is just one girl against three inhuman beings.
No, you must never believe you are incapable of something, her father would say. You are a warrior maiden.
While the soothing ghosts of her father’s words should embolden her, they do the opposite. She feels weak. Alone. Helpless without him.
And her tears return.
Suddenly, the voices of her nameless captors come alive. Wendolyn quickly chokes back a snivel, not wanting to alert them that she is awake. If she is to escape, she must have the element of surprise.
Her captors stop moving, and Wendolyn silently hangs there over a foreign shoulder. She listens as they speak, hoping they might unwittingly unveil their intentions, pulling back the dark blanket that covers her fate. But they are speaking in an unfamiliar tongue, one that Wendolyn has never heard.
Wendolyn is acquainted with several languages. Her father’s lessons have always included learning different tongues, especially those from the Lands of the East. Wendolyn and her father rarely speak these other languages outside of the home, and never in the presence of villagers. This is his rule. People are afraid of things they don’t understand. Within the cottage walls, however, they would speak them freely, sometimes even switching languages mid-sentence.
Wendolyn often wondered why her father taught her languages that only she and he could speak in private -- or how he came to know the languages in the first place. But she knew better than to ask him. And she liked that they had a secret language they could speak in. Something shared only between them.
But while the languages from the Lands of the East flow with the gentle swish and shwee sounds that remind Wendolyn of the wind talking to the leaves, the unfamiliar language of her captors is much harsher. Their conversation is filled with gravel, and the words sound as if they are born at the root of the tongue. The language is marked by sharp edges, and Wendolyn imagines each word stabbing at the air as it leaves the mouth.
There are two voices taking part in the conversation. The voices are similar, so Wendolyn reasons they belong to the saurians. Without knowing the meaning of their words, Wendolyn tries to interpret the tone of the exchange. It is slightly combative. If she had to guess, they are arguing over which way to go before continuing.
The back and forth of words between the two saurians gets louder and angrier until a third disembodied voice -- one that could melt steel -- silences them. The voice, filled with menace, draws forth the image of the cloaked figure standing before her father as his body was pinned to the wall of branches.
Waldron. That was the name her father used.
And then, as if a candle has just been lit in the shadows of Wendolyn’s mind, a memory is laid bare:
So that is what she believes? That you are her father?
The words of the cloaked figure find the deep reaches of Wendolyn’s stomach, stirring it wildly, and she has to swallow back the suggested meaning: the man she has called her father for all of her life is not her father at all.
Wendolyn remembers her father’s reaction, the regret captured in his eyes. But more clearly, she remembers his silence. Why did he not strike down those counterfeit words? Or just shake his head to tell her, “No, it is not true”? Instead of denying Waldron’s claim, her father’s face simply bore an unspoken apology.
Questions invade her mind, one quickly following another and then another, until the questions feel like a string of noxious weeds that threaten to choke the life from a flower. Could her father be capable of such an ornamented deception? Such a many-fingered lie? Could the same man that cooed her to sleep with lullabies of Fire Fairies and talking trees actually be a father-pretender? Is it possible that the shape of Wendolyn’s head could so flawlessly match the indentation between her father’s shoulder and his chest if she is not of him? Who is she, Wendolyn wonders, if she is not her father’s daughter?
No. It is unthinkable. Wendolyn forces the idea from her head.
◆◆◆
They have reached the bank of a river.
It is the same worried waters Wendolyn has been hearing since she recovered her consciousness. For several hours, the distant river stayed only in her left ear as her captors trod heavily through a thick woodland. Leaves brushed against her. Sunlight flickered through the blindfold. And Wendolyn continued to feign sleep with her limp body folded over the shoulder of her captor.
Meanwhile, the sound of the racing current grew closer, and it bent around until she could hear it in both of her ears, the river now running right in front of them.
Her captors stop at the edge of the bank, perhaps searching for a lull in the rapids, intent on fording the river. As they consider their path, Wendolyn listens to the sounds of the water and the surrounding trees.
Every river has its own signature, its own way of carving through the landscape and cascading over the rocks. Wendolyn is familiar with all of the streams and lakes and rivers in the Cumbrian mountains. She has fished them all with her father. But this river is new to her ears.
And that means Wendolyn is no longer in Cumbria.
The saurian that is carrying her takes a measured step into the river, finding his footing. Then her captor moves his full body into the water. Rapids reach up and wet her face with a foamy splash, which tells Wendolyn that the water runs high and furious, and she can imagine it rising to her captor’s waist.
