Wolf Star Rise: The Claidi Journals Book 2, Tanith Lee [desktop ebook reader .txt] 📗

with him, like my mother with me. Ustareth.’ Poison in his voice as he said it. His eyes bleak as a desert. ‘Claidi,’ said Venn, ‘I envy your Argul. In several ways. He’s the sort of man I’d have liked to be – heroic – and yet casual. Honest. Good. Brave. Loved.’

‘Yes,’ I said, humble before this praise of my Argul. My lost, almost-husband. Then I said, quite rudely, ‘But come off it. Why would anything Hulta have power here, in this place?’

‘Because it’s strong,’ he said.

I remembered then the white light I’d glimpsed after the light from the topaz, in the kitchens. It hadn’t come from the opening window after all. The ring. Mine.

I stared down at it, bewildered.

The ring had powers I’d never known. Could I have learned to manage them, and used it to escape, long before all this entanglement happened?

He was envious of Argul.

Venn said, ‘I’ll bring that chair over, Claidi. Sit down and read the Tower book for a while.’

‘You know, Venn, I really don’t want to know anything about the rotten ghastly towers.’

‘Yes, Claidi, I understand that. But maybe you must.’

‘Why?’

‘I knew you were the daughter of Twilight Star from that flying letter.’

‘I may not be her daughter.’

‘How can you know, until you find out more? Twilight might be mentioned in that book, at least as a child. I’ve heard of her. She fell in love with her steward, who’d been a slave.’

‘You know that from my book, not—’ But he hadn’t. Even I hadn’t known my father – if he was – had been a slave.

And Venn was saying, ‘I know it from my mother, Claidi. She’d heard of your mother. I said, she told me stories, before she changed to me. One of those stories was about your mother. I know you’re younger than me – when I was two you weren’t even born, were you? But Twilight and your father – they were together for some time before you arrived. I can’t remember his name. She must have said. But she did say this, Twilight was strong, clever – different. That’s why Grem and I thought Twilight might have made your ring … Ustareth used to admire her. Ustareth said Twilight “Broke the rules”. I can recall Ustareth saying that, and her eyes were bright. She broke the rules, thank God for her. That’s what she said.’

He glanced at me. Away.

‘Claidi, a daughter might be like her mother. What did you do?’

I was trembling.

Slowly I answered, ‘I broke the rules.’

Before I start, I’ve written everything up. Mainly to put off opening the black book. The Towers.

Scared.

Afraid of my ring, too. My beautiful ring that Argul tried to give me in Peshamba, gave me in the City.

Argul’s mother was Zeera, a real Hulta name. And she was Hulta, wasn’t she? When I was with them, a couple of the younger women had that name too, called after her, I think.

Somehow it’s disturbing to think that she died when Argul was ten, just as Venn’s mother vanished when he was nine. Even so, Argul knew Zeera all those ten years. Venn only knew Ustareth before she changed towards him, stopped loving him. I keep thinking about this. Even while I’m getting ready to read this black book.

Before leaving me – going off into the depths of the library, I think he said to look for something himself – Venn said this:

‘Strange, Claidi. Where the library is now, between the sun and moon towers. There used to be an old expression, she used to use it. Being between the sun and the moon. It meant being between two vital things. Having to make a decision, a choice.’

As I am? Between my freedom and Their Law? Between my future and my past?

Between Argul … and Venn?

I just now opened the black cover of the book, and the first thing I saw was a printed drawing. Of a huge tower.

Not like these. Like the City Towers.

Like the Wolf Tower I thought I’d never see again.

Have I learnt anything?

I’ve sat here, more or less, reading for hours, almost all the long second half of the afternoon.

There are two bathrooms with the library (old cracked baths on rusted gilded feet), cupboards stuffed with ink pencils (I took one), shut wooden boxes, and brooms.

There’s a kitchen still attached that goes into a rundown yard …

It’s silly to start describing all that. Basically I still don’t understand much about the Towers.

Though not very old, the black book is one of those books that read like this: ‘And thereinunto they have done that which verily it please them that they do muchly.’ (!) (Sigh.) No, I’m not myself muchly pleased. So my dread has turned to exasperation.

Venn has vanished. There’s a high roof-terrace or something. I think he’s gone up there.

I wish he’d stayed to help with this.

I’m glad he’s gone away.

I’ll read a bit more.

The Towers weren’t there first. The Families were.

I remember those names, which I see again here. Wolf, Vulture, Tiger, Pig or Boar. And once there was a Raven Family and a Raven Tower, but they were destroyed.

Historically, the Families fight together. Then they pal up. They make alliances, swearing eternal friendship, and sons and daughters of one Family or Tower marry into another, to tie everyone together neatly. But then another quarrel starts, generally over something mind-searingly unimportant, and they’re off again, using cannon to blow each other’s Towers in pieces.

They were always fighting. In the end they were sick of it, and the harm they’d done to each other and themselves.

So then they thought of the Law.

The Law isn’t the same everywhere. I’d already realized that. At the House the Law was that we had endless stupid rituals which had to be followed.

According to the black book there are other cities, other grand houses or palaces – some called things like the Residence, or Sea-View. The Families, in one form or another, are scattered about through these places. They all have some