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

type of the Law, which must be followed. But not all of them call it Wolf Tower Law. Despite the fact that the Wolf Tower seems to have ended up the most powerful, and the WT Families are therefore the most important. (I remember the authority Nemian had for Jizania, once she knew who he was.)

If I’ve got it right, the Law, in whatever form, is there to use up the Families’ ‘fighting spirit’. Turn it away from war and argument. The Law seems to have been invented to stop them having the time or energy to cause trouble otherwise.

But of course, they do cause trouble. The Law itself causes trouble. (I’m truly afraid now I won’t have stopped it properly, in the City, and even if I did, only in that one place.)

The black book doesn’t say that the Law is, ultimately, just as cruel and senseless as war-making. The black book is all for the Law. This cunning and most absolute Notion is what the book calls it.

I don’t know. I don’t want to write any more about it, and there isn’t much more. It just goes on and on, endless histories of these impossibly terminally-useless mighty lords, ladies, princes and princesses, flomping about, basking in how fantastic they are.

But. I did finally find something. It’s two Family trees, tables of who married who – the ‘m’ means married, so far as I can gather. And what children – were then born.

I’ll just copy it in.

(Something I noticed from this one at once was how they hadn’t bothered to name two of the three fathers, only Ironel’s husband (Ironel married!!!!!), and the two sons.) Does Venn know she’s his granny? And Nemian – is Venn’s cousin! No wonder they sometimes have nearly the same voice. And Ustareth is Ironel’s daughter – one more unbelievable thought.

But then I saw the second Family tree, and my heart jumped and hit its head on the underside of my chin.

THE ROOF

‘No thanks. I really don’t want anything else to read just yet,’ I said, as Venn held out a slim pale-covered book the moment I emerged on the library roof.

I’d climbed up the stair from the galleries and now I was there, I stretched, shook my hair about, glad to be in the fresh air again. The sun was low. It would be a spectacular sunset from up here – the highest point now, from the look of it, of the whole Rise. I could even see the waterfall a huge distance off, at the other end of the cliff, shimmering like a curtain of lights.

‘This is different.’

‘It’s a book, Venn. That other book has probably put me off reading for ever.’

‘What did you learn?’

Cagily I said, ‘Not much. Couldn’t understand most of it.’ Then, ‘It did list Ironel Novendot.’ When he didn’t react I announced, ‘She’s your grandmother, Ustareth’s mother.’

Perhaps I shouldn’t have been so blunt – nor surprised when he laughed.

‘Is she? What horrors I’ve been spared, never meeting her.’

‘Did Ust—did your mother talk about her?’

‘She must have, a little. Never as her mother. I’m just going on your own intense description of the Old Lady.’

‘Right. Of course.’

‘Did it list your own mother?’

‘As I keep saying, if she was. Yes.’

I was sullen, and half turned from him. He knows too much about me. He’s got no right to know this. Which is unreasonable. He’d only have to fetch the black book himself.

‘Was it of any help?’

‘No.’

‘That’s very positive, Claidi.’

‘It’s very true.’

‘Try this, then.’

‘I don’t want to. What is it?’

‘Look and see.’

Nosiness, my strongest characteristic?, won over everything else. I took the pale book.

The instant I opened it, I saw it was another Journal. Not like mine. This one was hardly filled, mostly only a few lines or paragraphs here or there, then blank pages. One line was Why am I here? That did catch my eyes. Another: I’m tired of waiting.

Then a full page. I couldn’t read a lot of it – the light was going, but also the handwriting … and he’d dared go on about mine.

But, it was a woman’s handwriting, I thought. Who was this?

Over the page: I shall go tomorrow. And then nothing. The rest of the book, empty.

Ustareth?

Then I tried quite hard to read what she’d written. She was impatient, you could tell. Her writing was educated – she was a princess, a lady – but untidy and scrawly with anger and hurry – or perhaps tiredness.

I’d sat down, my back against the high railing around the roof.

I didn’t copy down what she wrote – there was too much anyway. I’ll just say what I found out.

She’d been sent here by someone she didn’t name – Ironel? Or the weird and worrying ‘We’ … She’d had no choice. Nor in her marriage. It was the Law. Her husband was called, I think, Narsident Vulture-Ax, from the fed-up scribble. (As I often do, she soon reduced him to NV.)

In the unhappy, forced marriage, she made ‘scenes’, so they’d sent her off here alone, to do ‘something’. She was, at the time, pregnant with Venn. Imagine that sea-crossing—She said she had to travel by sea, they didn’t trust the balloons over water. (I’d always rather wondered about that, why they’d put me off on to a ship.)

She didn’t say much about anything. She didn’t complain, although now and then she wrote some simply explosive swear-words, (typical of royalty). But though you couldn’t always read the rest, these words were always printed carefully, even sometimes ornamented with curlicues … I have to admit, I smiled once or twice.

The birth of Venn was by itself in the middle of one page. It said, ‘Free at last. I had the boy.’ (She knew he’d be a boy?) ‘My mechanical servants were useful, better than those idiots in the Tower.’

That was all.

I thought of Venn, reading this.

As he may have done, I scanned the next pages, which obviously covered months, years, for