house of leaves
(with apologies to mark z. danielewski)
The dark mages in Nohr graduate into the army by copying their own Nosferatu by hand: every mage worth their weight in grain knows the tome cover to cover, an intimacy that they regard as life-saving, or at least life-affirming. The cannon fodder march into battle on the front lines with mass-printed cantrips, candles against steel; the sorcerers who guard Windmere proudly carry their copies of Nosferatu.
No soldier would ever admit to carrying a forgery - despite the flourishing black market beneath Krakenburg's feet.
(The blasphemous historian Anirath had lost his head after publishing a thesis daring to suggest that the first book in Nohr copied by printing press had been none other than Nosferatu. He had also suggested that the tome was first brought to Nohr by dragon-men from the mythical domain of a god named Grima, but that was neither here nor there.)
Leo has his own Nosferatu mouldering somewhere, copied with nothing but a compass and straightedge and ink made with twenty-two parts nightshade to seven parts blood. Under strict tutelage and even stricter self-discipline he'd copied all of his tomes by hand - all but one, of course.
His first magic tutor had also taught him mathematics. Learning runes and learning calculus are one and the same, milord, she'd said. The power is in the translation.
So Siegfried went to the eldest son of Nohr, and Camilla politely turned her gaze towards Bölverk; Elise frittered away her time putting bandages on the dying, and Corrin lived a wasted life doted upon in a tower. Leo focussed his attention on the few things his brother was only excellent and not exemplary at. When he was ten years old he was granted audience with the king - his first - and received a gift.
"Do not disappoint," King Garon said, his voice edged with something dangerous. "That is all. For the glory of Nohr."
"For the glory of Nohr," Leo returned, and took his leave.
At first he thought it to be a joke: his studies were in dark magic, but this was no dark tome. Any mage with two weeks of training could wield it. He had accepted it, then, feeling deeply the unspoken caveat that it was second prize to the might and glory of Siegfried, that a book could never hope to hold a candle to the glory of Nohr. But damn it all, this son of a nameless concubine whose name King Garon had never spoken would master a tome if it was asked of him, even if it meant squirrelling further into his brother's shadow.
The language of tomes is the language of doing, of making and unmaking. The runes make demands of things more powerful than fate; one must not mince words when using magic. The moment he was alone in his study Leo set to translating the book, but immediately found the words unfamiliar, the parsing strange, the tome beautifully illustrated.
"This rune in particular," he says, pointing to a letter laid in bright red at the centre of an illumination depicting two crossed swords. His tutor is a whip-smart woman who is rumoured to have memorized thirty thousand runes and the four applications of each. "It looks to be the rune for brother or belief, but the turn at the end is oddly misshapen, as though it was written backwards."
"If I had to wager a guess, I'd say it was written in the past tense," she says. "To indicate one who once believed, or a brother who is no longer. But milord." She furrows her brow. "The page is blank."
Leo considers two separate translations, one in past tense and one in present tense; he keeps written notes, but makes no official translation. He is not afraid of its power but he is concerned that the book itself is keeping something trapped inside its pages, a malevolent force wandering the crowded corridors between lines of neatly produced script and scribbled marginalia, illuminations and things that appear to be doodles conceived by dipping a fang or a claw in a vial of blood. Out of concern or pity or both Xander teaches him horsemanship so he might one day ride with the mage-knights of his father's army.
On a moonless night at the wane of summer, the threat of autumn still only a vague sharp scent in the air, Xander takes him farther than usual, and the ride is brutal. Leo tastes sweat and bile and considers the broad shape of Xander's back. His handsome figure and unconquerable strength are made only more insufferable by his sharp wit and his great capacity for kindness; he has more suitors than Leo could care to count, women clamouring for the right to the first prince of Nohr. For all his hard work Leo is barely an afterthought.
And like the first snow it comes to him then, a bright blue moment of clarity: his tutor was right, the tome was written in past tense; the creature that stalks the pages is a monster called metaphor; language has more purpose than enunciating demands. For all its promises of making and unmaking, Brynhildr is a storybook.
The thought travels straight to the strap on his hip where he carries his tomes, and there is a great turning in him that is not the feeling of hooves clattering on cobblestone. Time slows, then snaps back like a whip; his horse spooks and throws him, and when he hits the ground he feels something crack. Something is broken. Xander is shouting. Leo heaves once, twice, vomits blood, and when darkness rushes up at him it is a great mercy.
He wakes in the dead of night in the castle infirmary, dressed in a nightgown, his right arm in a sling. There's a numbness in his face that must have been magical healing. He'd like to find a mirror to check for scarring, but there's barely any light to see by; he fumbles for his hip-strap and finds it gone. In a moment of panic his good arm strikes a night-table, upon which someone - likely Camilla - has left Brynhildr.
There's a shout in the hallway, a confused noise that is soon joined by others, the sound of feet on stone, and torchlight streams by the open door to the hallway. Someone cries intruders and someone else cries thieves and Leo supposes there's a first time for everything. He grabs the tome and murmurs the opening stanzas of a poem he'd found in there. Brynhildr glows with a deep violet and the surge of pride in him is only matched by the urgent need to dispose of whatever vermin have infiltrated his home.
("You looked haunting, milord," Niles confesses years later, in a rare moment of honest self-reflection. "Dressed in all white with your arm in a sling and the left half of your face still bleeding. It should have been a sorry sight, but there was something in your eyes - something in the way you held that book - well, it made me want to speak only the truth...")
Brynhildr tells a story of a long battle between brothers, wars of attrition, and political scandal; its concerns are the meaning of jealousy and the consequences of fratricide. Leo reads on, horrified that a book older than Nohr itself could be so intimately acquainted with his own deepest fears.
(Not that Leo would ever do such a thing, of course, but - well - there had been a few years when he was young and desperate, when he had perhaps considered such a thing. Then he had grown a little older and had seen the weight of the crown on Xander's head, looked at the safety that being third in line afforded him, and reconsidered.)
It also speaks in long and sweeping asides, in deep and unrelenting and unnecessary detail, of trees: bright gold forests, flat-leaf trees that keep their leaves in the winter, hardwoods that grow around the scars in their trunks, fires that spread underground passed silently from root to root. The author - whoever or whatever penned it - takes care to describe germination times and growing seasons, and they clearly cared more for forests than heroes.
For most of his youth Leo had thought the parts about trees to be garbage, distractions from important things about wars and tactics and skirmishes. He'd utter the name of the younger brother and Brynhildr would crackle with power; he'd say the same about a pile of sticks and nothing would happen.
After a particularly unproductive afternoon - he'd stood in a practice room reciting a passage describing a forest fire, enunciating every syllable perfectly with nothing to show for it - he's sitting in his room re-reading the passage for the hundred thousandth time by candlelight, tired and frustrated. Odin enters with a fresh pot of coffee. That contemptible, irreverent, irreplaceable fool. Just that morning he had returned with three scales from the tail of a whelp of a wyvern nesting on the edge of the Bottomless Canyon, just as requested.
"Those damn trees," Leo murmurs into his cup. "A waste of space, that's what they amount to. I can't believe how much time I spent translating passages about - about the texture of bark."
Odin clears his throat. "If I may, milord."
"Speak freely."
Odin speaks in grand, sweeping gestures. Leo had thought, at first, it to be some kind of ruse; that he was trained not in the mage schools in Nohr but on stage in Cyrkensia or in the brothels in Windmire; that this was all a test from Garon, on Leo's patience. He speaks with a strange but fading accent that Leo can't quite place, a foreign tongue that adds a little flash to all of his spells.
He hadn't even his own Nosferatu when Garon had first brought him to Leo, just bold words, a tendency towards the theatrics, and an unsettling fearlessness when facing death.
"Just like a sword, a tome is an extension of one's body, is it not?" He gestures outwards. "A direct link betwixt one's mind and the powers that control the world!"
"Get on with it."
Odin falters. "Well, uh. Maybe the tome can - it can tell that you don't respect it? The trees, at least."
"Brynhildr can tell that I don't like trees."
"Perhaps if you ask nicely, milord, the book will respond with kindness in equal measure?"
"Brynhildr can tell that I -" Leo furrows his brow, rubs his temple. "- Odin."
"Milord Leo?"
"Call for my horse. That's almost stupid enough to work."
Odin beams. "I live to serve, milord!"
Any reasonable third-in-line should have taken a full retinue of guards when riding out into the woods in the middle of the night, but Leo takes only his retainers; no need for an audience. As they get further away from the castle he feels his resolve waver.
Finally, when he can see city lights no longer, he pulls his horse to a stop. Niles and Odin follow, and Leo dismounts into a night as thick as soup, silence extending out from him in every direction. He pulls Brynhildr from his hip and whispers a few phrases, lighting it in a darker shade of blue.
"Milord," Niles murmurs, close at his heels. "This isn't safe."
"I know what I'm doing," Leo says, lying through his teeth. Niles knows, of course he knows, but Leo can't mind that; he finds a tree and sits beneath it, opens Brynhildr and reads by the light of its own power.
The trees native to Nohr all tolerate darkness, growing fair even in the most difficult circumstances - fir and alder and holly and beech, a species of wild cherry whose fruit can be made into a potent poison, elm used in the distilling poultices and shaping healing staves, yew trees so long-lived that some swear they witnessed the coming of the First Dragons. It's an old yew that Leo finds himself under, and he sits uneasily.
An hour passes, then two. Leo's mind wanders off the page. All parts of the yew are toxic, and it is considered a bad omen in the royal court: dried yew leaves crushed to a powder were said to have taken out all of Garon's brothers and sisters in a single evening meal. Clerics of the old religious order planted yew trees in graveyards to prevent livestock from wandering in and desecrating holy ground. The priests are gone now, but the trees remained even after the old graveyards were repurposed. Was Garon superstitious, or was he suspicious? Do trees remember the things they've witnessed?
(Of course they don't, says the pragmatic side of Leo, the side that knows that plants are just plants. But - there had been a Dragon Vein in the courtyard once, and Camilla had touched it gently, and the garden had cried out in fear -
- oh, he thinks. When all the books are gone only the trees will remain to bear witness to what happened, holding rings in their trunks like histories. Any idiot can pick up a sword. Brynhildr puts time and gravity in harmony, history astride hubris. Dark magic works in human time, Brynhildr is the ache that echoes across centuries. Brynhildr's power is in the woods. Nohr's real power is in Brynhildr.)
Niles mutters something under his breath and there's a strange sort of shift in the air, something charged and electric. His eye goes wide: every leaf on the forest floor suddenly leaps up. There's already an arrow notched in his bow. Odin raises a hand, points to Leo - he's standing now, holding the tome open to the centre, his mouth moving with no words coming out, and before him springs with fury and glory a great gold yew.
The child is small and sturdy, sleeps easily, cries infrequently. And look at those soft grey eyes! Leo cradles him and dreams of what he'll look like in ten, fifteen years, when he grows into those spindly limbs a little, when he copies his first Nosferatu. As handsome as his mother is beautiful, surely.
Xander taps him on the nose and Leo's son - oh, Gods, he has a son - gurgles and reaches out to grab at the first finger of the first son of Nohr. "Have you thought of a name?"
Brynhildr's heir needs a name as deep and as lovely as the book itself. Leo smiles.
I have great faith in you, Forrest. In my heart, I know that you would use Brynhildr wisely. Considering your compassionate nature and loving heart...
...You could do far greater things with this tome than I've ever dreamed of.