Beneath the Ink

by Tannara Young

Table of Contents parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

part 1

The stack of books teetered and fell over, one striking Lucas’s foot through his soft, embroidered slipper. The offending tome was one of Adrin’s dry biographies — the exploits of a long dead general — and hence several inches thick. Cursing at his husband’s messy habits, Lucas shoved the book aside, fumbling among the others for his book of poetry which had been at the bottom.

“I leave one book out, and he stacks nine more on top of it,” he muttered.

As he tugged the volume of poetry from under a history of the Souvish Queens, he noticed a piece of paper that had slid partly out of the history. He went to tuck it back in, but when his fingers touched it, faint magic unexpectedly tingled on his fingertips.

Curious, he opened the paper. It was a letter, addressed to Adrin and signed “Cousin Marcus” with a return direction indicating a villa on the mainland. The brief missive touched on the weather; the grape harvest; hopes for the year’s vintage; news of a wife and some children. There was a request for a pretty bauble from the city to surprise a sixteen-year-old daughter. Magic tingled on Lucas’s fingertips more strongly now that the paper was unfolded and, almost absently, he brushed his fingers across the thick white sheet.

It took him a moment to understand what his fingertips were telling him. Beneath the message of vineyard, home, and family, lay another message, a hidden message written unexpectedly in archaic night-writing.

As Lucas’s fingers touched the raised bumps, reading the words automatically, his mind flew back to his childhood, learning night-writing beside his twin sister, Alaya, who had been born blind. Though his parents had inquired, no mage-healer or priest had been able to undo her blindness. One priest speculated that it was Alaya’s own powerful gift that prevented his spells from being effective.

Alaya felt that not having sight was simply the way that she was made — and, indeed, she had no need of it because of her gift. In this she was correct. Not only had she a stronger version of Lucas’s ability to feel magic with her fingertips, but she could extend her own power beyond her fingers to touch the surfaces around her. Her perception of the world, enriched with smell and sound, was built on this tactile sensory field.

Her greatest frustration had been books. Though she could sense the difference between a printed page and blank one, she could not achieve the finesse to distinguish letters or words. However, a priest who knew of night-writing — a raised alphabet of dots and dashes — advised them to contact a librarian at St. Aurelia’s Library in Souvin. The librarian had written them that night-writing had been developed to pass covert messages which could be read at night with no light, but fell out of favor as swifter magical means of communication became commonplace.

However, the script had been adopted by folks who were blind or who for other reasons could not read the written or printed word. They and their supporters had copied many hundreds of books into night-writing, and St. Aurelia’s held the largest collection in the whole of the Empire.

After that, Alaya and Lucas spent many long hours together learning to read with their fingers. They then spent many more long hours passing each other secret notes or sneaking novels under their bedclothes to be read after the candles were put out and they had been told to go to sleep.

Since he had moved to the capital to become a poet, Lucas had had little cause to encounter night-writing. Letters from Alaya were few and far between. She taught music at a Temple School, and she and Lucas visited every year at their family’s small estate, which belonged jointly to them since their parents’ death five years before.

Even as the sensation of the raised dots filled his head with memories of his sister and his childhood, his fingers told him the text of the hidden message:

Needed: information to leverage Gov. of Dananovis. Rumors of payoffs from Minister Turell. Confirm? Silver hawk still in hiding — continued interdiction. Meet contact at Saint’s Masquerade. Midnight

Lucas snatched his fingers away from the paper and stared at it. The spell was clever. The night-writing was woven into the magic. To the naked eye, the page was smooth. To the magical eye, the page would appear enchanted, but only someone who knew the command word could activate and thus feel it — or someone with the unusual and nearly useless gift of feeling any magic with their fingertips.

The message was thrice hidden then. First, it was under an innocuous message between cousins. Second, it lay behind a magical veil and, last, it was written in a script few remembered and fewer read.

Almost against his will, his fingers brushed over it again: Leverage, hiding, interdiction, contact... silver hawk.

Lucas swallowed. Who didn’t know about the emperor’s diligent hunt for the rebels who gathered under the banner of the hawk? The Padronelle, the Emperor’s elite mage-guard had almost unilateral powers to find and arrest those sympathetic to the rebellion. According to rumor, those arrested were never heard from again.

Lucas’s hand shook as his fingers brushed across the page once more. Was this message for Adrin? Or for someone else? But who?

Adrin had a very small gift of power, enough to activate a sylphyl pearl, which would then be enough to power the command-word needed for revelation of this message. Could he have read it? Is Adrin one of the rebels? Lucas’s mind shied away from that. No! Surely, he would know if his own husband was part of the rebellion, wouldn’t he?

Lucas folded the paper, the book of poetry forgotten. He wandered out of their elegant library, down the hall and into the bedroom. That morning, they had left the crimson spread askew, the drapes drawn and an empty bottle of wine and two cups amid the melted beeswax candles. Now the room was in perfect order, and sunlight poured in from the huge glazed window onto the soft rug.

Lucas drifted to that window, staring blindly at the sight before him. He had almost become accustomed to the view: the sweeping walls of gold limestone and white marble, the filigree bridges between high towers, the shimmering Lorgren glass, which was mostly clear but here and there had tones of red and blue and gold. The city of Ocillias, the heart of the Empire, had been old five hundred years ago. Yet rivers of power — magical, political, religious — that flowed from her palaces into the far reaches of the Empire kept her vital and seemingly ever young.

All his life, Lucas had heard tales of the city and the court. It had been a dream of his to see it for himself and, when his poetry had won him a place in the School of Letters at the Imperial University, Lucas felt he had attained some sort of mythical prize.

He had thrived among the literati of that ancient city and the astonishing beauty that surrounded the center of the Empire. Then, once he finished school, he quickly gained three published volumes of poetry and a handsome husband, who introduced him to a whole new circle of witty, educated friends.

Lucas dropped his forehead forward onto the cool glass of the window. Didn’t the tales tend this way? The prize turns into a trick. Behind opulent masks lie dark stains of corruption and betrayal. Why should his tale be any different?

He looked down at the damning piece of paper in his hand. Could he believe this of Adrin?

A soft knock at the door made Lucas jump. His heart pounding, he folded the paper closed and slid it inside his tunic. “Yes?” he called.

The door opened to reveal their manservant, Dallan. “Your mask and cloak have arrived from the costumer, sir, and it is nearly time to get ready. Shall I have a bath drawn for you?”

For a moment, Lucas’s mind was blank. Costume? Get ready? Meet contact at the Saint’s Masquerade. Hells, that was tonight. The palace masquerade for St. Otheal’s Feast Day. Meet contact... Midnight.

Lucas cleared his throat. “Yes, thank you, Dallan. I’ll wear my silver tunic.”

“Very good, sir. Sapphires, diamonds, or pearls?”

“Diamonds. I’ll be out for my bath in a moment.”

Dallan laid the black and silver mask spangled with stars upon the crimson bedspread. Beside it, he spread the cloak, which had a black hood and then gradually lightened to a deep blue with silver stars about the hem.

Lucas fingered the cloak, thinking of the fun Adrin and he had enjoyed when picking out their costumes: night and stars for him and golden sunlight for Adrin. Meet contact at the Saint’s Masquerade. Would Adrin be meeting someone tonight?

The sound of his bath being filled down the hall shook him from his thoughts. He bit his lip and then came to a decision. He hurried back to the library. Picking up the history book, he tried to remember where the paper had been: in the front? Near the back? What did it matter? He stuck the paper into it at random, piled up the books again and headed to his bath.

A couple of hours later, he was transformed. He paused in front of the mirror to survey Dallan’s work. Over a silver silk tunic, he wore an indigo leather breast-plate. It was modeled after the skirted breast plates that the Imperial army wore, but it would do little to turn aside a blade. It was tooled with intertwined designs in silver. A diamond pendant glowed at his chest.

Below, he wore indigo breeches tucked into shiny black boots. His black hair had been styled in a tousled look, and the kohl rimming his blue eyes would blend into the black outlining the eye-holes of his mask. Diamond drops hung at his ears, and a large diamond ring glittered on his left hand. His skin looked paler than normal, and he was usually the palest in the room. He wondered if it was the effect of all that black and indigo, or if it was from the shock he had suffered earlier.

Dallan came to swirl the cloak about him and to pin the edges to his shoulders with silver, star-tipped pins. He then offered Lucas his mask.

“Thank you, Dallan.” Lucas took the mask and held it in place as Dallan tied the black ribbons and adjusted his hair over them, as Lucas studied himself in the mirror.

“My lips look too red with all this black and silver,” said Lucas. “Perhaps a little powder?”

“This might work, sir.” Dallan offered him a pot of a balm, that smelled faintly of beeswax, but shimmered silver.

“Perfect.” He pursed his lips to let Dallan deftly paint it on. Now he looked icy from head to toe. He even felt a little icy. Should he ask Adrin about the note? Should he pretend that he had never found it? What did it even mean to be part of the rebellion? Five years before he had been born, the Order of the Hawk had assassinated the previous emperor. Lucas shuddered, remembering studying in grammar school the violent riots and rise of the current emperor.

It had always seemed so far away, and so ugly. Thousands of rebels were arrested, and the rebellion was broken, his teachers had said. But even then, he had known that was not true. The Order of the Hawk lived far east in Hynovia and in the northern wilds of Ariceda. But here? Here in the City itself?

These thoughts swirled through his head as he went downstairs and stepped into the waiting carriage. He was glad that the ride to the palace would take a half hour or longer. He wondered what he would say to Adrin, who was meeting him at the ball. Would it have been better if Adrin had joined him in the bath or dressed beside him in the intimacy of their bedroom? It was certain Adrin would have noticed something was wrong.

By the time the carriage had its turn to pull up and stop before the east entrance of the palace, almost an hour had passed and Lucas had come no closer to a conclusion. While part of him wanted to forget the letter, another part of him wanted to thrust it in Adrin’s face and demand an explanation.

* * *

Proceed to part 2...

Copyright © 2024 by Tannara Young

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