the grave with him, along with a little children's story-book that Harv had given her for a present many years ago. Harv could not read, and many nights as they had sat round the fire in the courtyard of the Dark Castle, Nell had read to him from this book, and she supposed that he might like to have it wherever he was going now.
Filling in the grave went quickly; the loose dirt more than filled the hole. Nell left more lilies atop the long low mound of earth that marked Harv's resting place. Then she turned her back and walked into the Dark Castle. The stain-colored granite walls had picked up some salmon highlights from the western sky, and she suspected that she could see a beautiful sunset from the room in the high tower where she had established her library.
It was a long climb up a dank and mildewy staircase that wound up the inside of the Dark Castle's highest tower. In the circular room at the top, which was built with mullioned windows looking out in all directions, Nell had placed all of the books she had gathered during her quest: books given her as presents by Purple, books from the library of King Magpie, the first Faery King that she had vanquished, and more from the palace of the djinn, and Castle Turing, and many other hidden libraries and treasuries that she had discovered or pillaged on her way. And, of course, there was the entire library of King Coyote, which contained so many books that she had not even had time to look at them yet.
There was so much work to be done. Copies of all of these books had to be made for all of the girls in the Disenchanted Army. The Land Beyond had vanished, and Princess Nell wanted to make it anew. She wanted to write down her own story in a great book that young girls could read. And she had one remaining quest that had been pressing on her mind of late, during her long voyage across the empty sea back to the island of the Dark Castle: she wanted to solve the mystery of her own origins. She wanted to find her mother. Even after the destruction of the Land Beyond, she had sensed the presence of another in the world, one who had always been there. King Coyote himself had confirmed it. Long ago, her stepfather, the kindly fisherman, had received her from mermaids; whence had the mermaids gotten her?
She suspected that the answer could not be found without the wisdom contained in her library. She began by causing a catalog to be made, starting with the first books she had gotten on her early adventures with her Night Friends. At the same time she established a Scriptorium in the great hall of the castle, where thousands of girls sat at long tables making exact copies of all of the books.
Most of King Coyote's books had to do with the secrets of atoms and how to put them together to make machines. Naturally, all of them were magic books; the pictures moved, and you could ask them questions and get answers. Some of them were primers and workbooks for novices, and Princess Nell spent a few days studying this art, putting atoms together to make simple machines and then watching them run.
Next came a very large set of matched volumes containing reference materials: One contained designs for thousands of sleeve bearings, another for computers made of rods, still another for energy storage devices, and all of them were ractive so that she could use them to design such things to her own specifications. Then there were more books on the general principles of putting such things together into systems.
Finally, King Coyote's library included some books inscribed in the King's own hand, containing designs for his greatest masterpieces. Of these, the two very finest were the Book of the Book and the Book of the Seed. They were magnificent folio-size volumes, as thick as Princess Nell's hand was broad, bound in rich leather illuminated with hair-thin gilt lines in an elaborate interlace pattern, and closed with heavy brass hasps and locks.
The lock on the Book of the Book yielded to the same key that Princess Nell had taken from King Coyote. She had discovered this very early in her exploration of the library but was unable to comprehend the contents of this volume until she had studied the others and learnt the secrets of these machines. The Book of the Book contained a complete set of plans for a magical book that would tell stories to a young person, tailoring them for the child's needs and interests– even teaching them how to read if need be. It was a fearsomely complicated work, and Princess Nell only skimmed it at first, recognizing that to understand the particulars might take years of study.
The lock on the Book of the Seed would not yield to King Coyote's key or to any other key in Princess Nell's possession, and because this book had been built atom by atom, it was stronger than any mortal substance and could not possibly be broken open. Princess Nell did not know what this book was about; but the cover bore an inlaid illustration of a striped seed, like the apple-sized seed that she had seen used in King Coyote's city to build a crystal pavilion, and this foreshadowed the book's purpose clearly enough.
Nell opened her eyes and propped herself up on one elbow. The Primer fell shut and slid off her belly onto the mattress. She had fallen asleep reading it.
The girls on their bunkbeds lay all around her, breathing quietly and smelling of soap. It made her want to lie back down and sleep too. But for some reason she was up on one elbow. Some instinct had told her she had to be up.
She sat up and drew her knees up to her chest, freeing the hem of her nightgown from between the sheets, then spun around and dropped to the floor soundlessly. Her bare feet took her silently between the rows of bunks and into the little lounge in the corner of the floor where the girls sat together, had tea, brushed their hair, watched old passives. It was empty now, the lights were off, the corner windows exposing a vast panorama: to the northeast, the lights of New Chusan and of the Nipponese and Hindustani concessions standing a few kilometers offshore, and the outlying parts of Pudong. Downtown Pudong was all around, its floating, mediatronic skyscrapers like biblical pillars of fire. To the northwest lay the Huang Pu River, Shanghai, its suburbs, and the ravaged silk and tea districts beyond. No fires burned there now; the Feed lines had been burned all the way to the edge of the city, and the Fists had stopped at the outskirts and hunkered down as they sought a way to penetrate the tattered remains of the security grid.
Nell's eye was drawn toward the water. Downtown Pudong offered the most spectacular urban nightscape ever devised, but she always found herself looking past it, staring instead at the Huang Pu, or the Yangzte to the north, or to the curvature of the Pacific beyond New Chusan.
She'd been having a dream, she realized. She had awakened not because of any external disturbance but because of what had happened in that dream. She had to remember it; but, of course, she couldn't.
Just a few snatches: a woman's face, a beautiful young woman, perhaps wearing a crown, but seen muddily, as through turbulent water. And something that glittered in her hands. No, dangling beneath her hands. A piece of jewelry on a golden chain.
Could it have been a key? Nell could not bring the image back, but an instinct told her that it was.
Another detail too: a gleaming swath of something that passed in front of her face once, twice, three times. Something yellow, with a repeating pattern woven into it: a crest consisting of a book, a seed, and crossed keys.
Cloth of gold. Long ago the mermaids had brought her to her stepfather, and she had been wrapped in cloth of gold, and from this she had always known that she was a Princess.
The woman in the dream, veiled in swirling water, must have been her mother. The dream was a memory from her lost infancy. And before her mother had given her up to the mermaids, she had given Princess Nell a golden key on a chain.
Nell perched herself on the windowsill, leaned against the pane, opened the Primer, and flipped all the way back to the beginning. It started with the same old story, as ever, but told now in more mature prose. She read the story of how her stepfather had gotten her from the mermaids, and read it again, drawing out more details, asking it questions, calling up detailed illustrations.
There, in one of the illustrations, she saw it: her stepfather's lock-box, a humble plank chest bound in rusted iron straps, with a heavy oldfashioned padlock, stored underneath his bed. It was in this chest that he had stored the cloth of gold-and, perhaps, the key as well.
Paging forward through the book, she came across a long-forgotten story of how, following her stepfather's disappearance, her wicked stepmother had taken the lock-box to a high cliff above the sea and flung it into the waves, destroying any evidence that Princess Nell was of royal blood. She had not known that her stepdaughter was watching her from between the branches of a thicket, where she often concealed herself during her stepmother's rages.
Nell flipped to the last page of the
As Princess Nell approached the edge of the cliff, picking her way along carefully through the darkness, taking care not to snag the train of her nightgown on thorny shrubs, she experienced a peculiar feeling that the entire ocean had become dimly luminescent. She had often noticed this phenomenon from the high windows of her library in the tower and reckoned that the waves must be reflecting back the light of the moon and stars. But this was a cloudy night, the sky was like a bowl of carved onyx, allowing no light to pass down from the
