Sword and Verse by Kathy MacMillan Page A

be part of the Arnath writing, because it appeared in my heart-verse. If it didn’t appear in the Qilarite writing system, did that mean that learning the higher order symbols wouldn’t help me read my heart-verse after all?
    â€œDon’t you like it?” Mati asked. “I know it isn’t anything special—”
    â€œI love it,” I whispered quickly. I came so close to telling him about my father then, but I was afraid to—or maybe I didn’t want to remind him how different we were.
    Mati drew me closer and kissed my neck. “Tell Laiyonea you found it on the beach,” he said, his words buzzing against my skin. “No one will know what it really is but us.”
    â€œWhat is it really?” I asked carefully. My skin seemed to dance up away from my bones, awaiting his answer.
    He looked right into my eyes. I very nearly melted away into nothing. “It means you’re mine, and I’m yours, Raisa. It means I love you.”
    I whispered it back, and smiled as he tugged my hair free of its braid and ran his fingers through it, his mouth bending to cover mine.
    Mati had been coming to my room nearly every night during the dark Veilings. But after he gave me the stone, we were both eager for more time together, and so he risked the climb at the beginning of the next Shining too, when Gyotia’s Lamp was not yet fully uncovered. That was probably why, five nights after Mati’s seventeenth birthday celebration, one of the guards saw a figure creeping along the wall and launched an arrow at him. The arrow missed, but Mati had to explain away the sprained wrist he got on his hurried climb to a hall window.
    The next afternoon, Mati couldn’t write because of his injury, so he hovered and distracted me by clicking his tongue at my sloppy strokes and generally making a nuisance of himself. I wished he would stop; I didn’t like the suspicious looks Laiyonea kept shooting at his bandaged hand. Clearly she didn’t believe his claim that he’d injured it during a sword-fighting lesson.
    â€œEnough, Mati,” Laiyonea snapped, after he started flicking leaves at the asotis, causing them to gabble and shriek. “You might behave a little more seriously, with an intruder on the palace walls last night.”
    I dropped a splotch of ink on my list of the eighty-seven uses of the sunamara plant. “Intruder?” I squeaked. I had an image of Jonis on the outer walls with a knife in his teeth, before I remembered that it had been Mati climbing to my room.
    Mati laughed. “Father’s just worked up over nothing. The palace has been searched top to bottom. That guard was seeing things. Maybe it was a salamander.”
    Laiyonea frowned. “You know very well that your fatherdidn’t imagine those attacks at the docks, or . . .” She pursed her lips. The fighting at the Temple of Lanea flashed through my mind.
    Mati nodded, sobering. “I know, I know.” He sighed. “Well, once the western vizier fills up Father’s coffers with gold, he can hire all the mercenaries on the peninsula to clear them out.” His tone was bitter.
    I frowned. Mati had made it sound like King Tyno needed Del Gamo’s money, but that couldn’t be. After all, he was the king.
    Laiyonea looked back and forth between us, her expression a mixture of pity and something else I couldn’t name—anger, maybe? But she didn’t leave us alone in the Adytum that day.

All that happened upon the earth appeared in the scrolls of the gods. Sotia gathered the scrolls and built a great library upon the mountain to house them.
    When first the other gods stepped inside the library, Gyotia scoffed at her efforts.
    Aqil looked around in puzzlement. “What is this place?” he asked.
    â€œIt is everything,” whispered Sotia.
TWELVE
    QILARA HAD ONLY two seasons: Lilana, when soldiers praised Lila, goddess of war, for the fine, dry weather