Xulai smiled a cat smile. “Clever. I hadn’t heard that.”
“It is said King Gahls brags of her heritage, but then, the king brags about many things of questionable provenance and doubtful value. It is certain, however, that both Prince Orez and Justinian are of the twelfth generation of Lythany’s line.”
Silence grew in the room, broken only by the crackle of the fire as four people pondered the possibilities inherent in what they had just heard.
Bear scratched his head, stretched his neck as though it troubled him, and said, “Possessing this thing, whatever it is, would be a . . . strong argument that one was the real inheritor, but in twelve generations, this thing has not been found?”
“Likely it has never truly been looked for,” said the abbot. “Remember: what Wordswell has told you is a story some hundreds of years old. Such stories grow in the telling. They are embroidered with fancy and colored with all manner of miraculous detail. When all who knew the heroes as mere men have died, the stories continue, swelling mere men into mythic heroes, expanding mythical heroes into demigods. Reasonable men who read history always discount about ninety percent as fiction.”
Brother Wordswell nodded. “This is true, but some of the facts are indisputable. Huold did vanish, and his daughter—”
“What was her name, again?” interrupted Precious Wind.
“Lythany,” said the old man. “Which is our form of her real name: Lythaiene, which means ‘truth prevails’ in the language of the time. Lythany took the lands and ordered the building of the fortress of Woldsgard. It was she who ordered the cutting of the Stoneway in order to make travel to Kamfels easier. She was a good steward of the land and an enlightened ruler of the people who came to settle it. She was the first who forbade slavery. She settled various lands, some of those now held by Prince Orez, on her nephews and nieces; she married a member of her own tribe; she had two children of her own. Her daughter was Yvein, called the Songbird, and her son was Harald Axearm. Harald inherited the lands of Woldsgard, and Yvein married into a great family to the west from which Prince Orez is descended. I have the family trees in my library . . .”
“Our library,” corrected the abbot with a chiding smile.
Wordswell’s lips crimped themselves into a deprecating moue. “Certainly, Eldest Brother, it is ours, except that I seem to be the only one who is dragged from his bed to answer questions about it. At any rate, Justinian, Duke of Woldsgard, is the twelfth generation in direct descent from Huold himself. He is also descended through both Harald and Yvein when the two branches of the family were united through marriage several generations later. And if you ask whether Queen Mirami’s claim to descend from Huold is provable, I can only say that it can’t be proven from any source we know of. In fact, no one even knows where she came from. She was first noticed as a protégé of that strange fellow, the one at Altamont . . .”
“The Old Dark Man!” said Xulai. “Great Bear has mentioned him.”
“And Huold came from where, originally?” asked Bear.
“There are as many stories as tellers,” said Wordswell. “He was born of the gods. He was born of a virgin who had been shut up in a cell for twelve years. He was born of said virgin because the sun god came in through the little window of the cell and impregnated her. And so on and so on.
“There is no record of the name ‘Huold’ before his time, so we cannot say what language the name comes from. It has no cognate in any language we know now. Ghastain was Angrian, a harsh people from the far southeast, far beyond the Big Mud, where the deserts are. It is possible Huold was also Angrian. Since the waters rising have changed things over the last centuries, we no longer see the Angrian people.”
Xulai said, “So, since we have no idea what this thing was or is, and yet the duchess is energetically seeking it, we must at least allow for the possibility that she has found out or has some hint of what it is or that it might justify her mother’s claim. I overheard her say something about things discovered in the Edgeworld Isles . . . in a library there . . .”
Wordswell shook his head dismissively. “Our scribes and copyists have been through all the island libraries a dozen times over the past two centuries. I doubt there is anything there that we have not copied and brought here.”
Xulai said casually, “They’ve seen the vaults below? Deep vaults?”
Wordswell laughed. “Oh, my gracious, that again! The deep vaults holding the last of the ease machines. My daughter, if I may call you that without offending you, the stories about vaults below this place and that place have been told for hundreds of years. The Edgeworld Isles are coral islands; do you know what that means?”
“Precious Wind taught me, yes. They are islands that grow on the shells of little creatures that build up over the centuries, often on the tops of old volcanoes. When the seas rise, they grow to the surface; when the seas fall, they protrude above the waves.”
“And where, in all this growing and sinking and unsinking, can vaults be created? Caves are found mostly in mountains where running water eats out caverns in the rock.”
“I see.” Xulai smiled. “I supposed that if they existed, they had been dug out in the Before Time, perhaps in the time of the Big Kill. I suppose even coral could be dug out and then the hole made waterproof.”
“It probably could, but I have heard the stories as long as I have lived, and as yet, no one has found such a vault. Just
