“No, Sire, I am not mad,” I say to the shadows. “I wish I were. It would be easier.” I rub my eyes, which burn from lack of sleep. “It would be far easier. . . .”
CHAPTER * 3
KAIRN TELEST, ABARRACH
EDMUND APPEARS ALONE, AT THE DOOR TO THE LIBRARY, WHERE I SIT recording in my journal the conversation that recently took place between father and son, as well as my memories of a time now long past. I lay down the pen and rise respectfully from my desk.
“Your Highness. Please, enter and welcome.”
“I’m not interrupting your work?” He stands fidgeting nervously in the doorway. He is unhappy and wants to talk, yet the basis for his unhappiness is his refusal to listen to what he knows I am going to say.
“I have just this moment concluded.”
“My father’s lying down,” Edmund says abruptly “I am afraid he’ll catch a chill, standing outdoors like that. I ordered his servant to prepare a hot posset.”
“And what has your father decided?” I ask.
Edmund’s troubled face glimmers ghostly in the light of a gas lamp that, for the moment, drives away the darkness of Kairn Telest.
“What can he decide?” he returns in bitter resignation. “There is no decision to be made. We will leave.”
We are in my world, in my library. The prince glances around, notes that the books have been given a loving good-bye. The older and more fragile volumes have been packed away in sturdy boxes of woven kairn grass. Other, newer texts, many penned by myself and my apprentices, are neatly labeled, stored away in the deep recesses of dry rock shelves.
Seeing Edmund’s glance and reading his thoughts, I smile shamefacedly “Foolish of me, isn’t it?” My hand caresses the leather-bound cover of the volume that rests before me. It is one of the few that I will take with me: my description of the last days of Kairn Telest. “But I could not bear to leave them in disorder.”
“It isn’t foolish. Who knows but that someday you will return?” Edmund tries to speak cheerfully. He has become accustomed to speaking cheerfully accustomed to doing what he can to lift the spirits of his people.
“Who knows? I know, My Prince.” I shake my head ruefully. ”You forget to whom you talk. I am not one of the council members.”
“But there is a chance,” he persists.
It hurts me to shatter his dream. Yet—for the good of all of us— he must be made to face the truth.
“No, Your Highness, there is not a chance. The fate that I described to your father ten years earlier is upon us. All my calculations point to one conclusion: our world, Abarrach, is dying.”
“Then what is the use of going on?” Edmund demands impatiently. “Why not just stay here? Why endure the hardship and suffering of this trek into unknown regions if we go only to meet death at the end?”
“I do not counsel that you abandon hope and plunge into despair, Edmund. I suggest now, as I have done before, that you turn your hope in another direction.”
The prince’s face darkens, he is upset and moves slightly away from me. “My father has forbidden you to discuss that subject.”
“Your father is a man who lives in the past, not the present,” I say bluntly. “Forgive me, Your Highness, but it has always been my practice to speak the truth, no matter how unpleasant. When your mother died, something in your father died, too. He looks backward. It is up to you to look forward!”
“My father is still king,” Edmund says sternly.
“Yes,” I reply. And I cannot help feeling that this is a fact to be deeply regretted.
Edmund faces me, chin high. ‘And while he is king we will do as he and the council command. We will travel to the old realm of Kairn Necros, seek out our brethren there, and ask them for help. You were the one who proposed this undertaking, after all.”
“I proposed that we travel to Kairn Necros,” I correct him. “According to my studies, Kairn Necros is the one place left on this world where we might reasonably expect to find life. It is located on the Fire Sea, and, although the great magma ocean has undoubtedly shrunk, it must still be large enough to provide warmth and energy for the people of its realm. I did not counsel that we go to them as beggars!”