The Palace (Bell Mountain Series #6) by Lee Duigon

shook her head, completely baffled.
     
    The next day, late in the morning, Grammum came over to fetch Enith. “The baroness would like to meet you,” she said. “Your aunt never should have told you that story last night, so please act like you never heard it. Don’t ask any questions! It’s their personal family business, and we have no right to pry.”
     
    So Enith went across the yard with Grammum and was introduced to Baroness Vannett in the parlor. They’d been sewing, Enith noticed, but the baroness had put her work aside.
     
    “Thank you, Nywed,” she said. “And thank you for coming, Enith. I’m happy that you’ve come to live next door.”
     
    She was a very handsome woman, Enith thought, and a little dainty, birdlike, in her mannerisms. Ellayne had inherited most of her looks but little in her way of speaking or carrying herself. Enith remembered just in time to curtsey.
     
    “I’ll be going to the market now, ma’am,” said Grammum. “Lanora’s making tea.”
     
    Alone with the baroness, Enith answered questions about her home in Obann, and its neighborhood, and city life in general. The baroness admitted she had always hoped, someday, to have a townhouse in the city.
     
    “Usually, around this time of day,” she said, “I sit down with Ellayne and Jack, and we have a lesson from the Scriptures. We have one of the very first of the new copies that they’re making in the city—a present from Queen Gurun. Did you ever see her while you lived there?”
     
    “Oh, yes—she’s lovely!” Enith said—with a fleeting pang of homesickness. “Everyone in Obann loves her. She came to us across the sea.” That was something that people in Obann considered miraculous. No one ventured out on the sea.
     
    Vannett sighed. “You’ve probably heard that our boy, Jack, is in some kind of trouble and that Ellayne went out with a patrol the other night to try to find him. I hope you’ll pray for both of them.” With a visible effort, she set aside her fears. “I was hoping you wouldn’t mind reading the lesson with me today.”
     
    Enith had never read, or been read, anything from the Scriptures. She knew no one in Obann who had a book of Scriptures. Her tutor took the lessons from dull books about commerce and silly stories about talking animals. Not until after the Temple was burned down, and the new First Prester started holding assemblies wherever people could get together, had Grammum shown any interest in religion. None of it had ever made much sense to Enith; none of it had ever seemed to have much to do with anything. But of course she couldn’t turn down the baroness’ invitation.
     
    “Yes, ma’am, I’d like that,” she said. So Vannett got up and took down from a shelf a big, thick book with beautiful calfskin covers and bade Enith join her on the settee so they could look at it together. The baroness opened it to the flyleaf.
     
    “See? That’s Gurun’s own handwriting.”
     
    It was a peculiar kind of writing, very hard to read: something about “best wishes to my dear friends.” Enith had no way of knowing that Gurun was only just learning to write in modern Obannese script, which is very different from the islanders’ old-fashioned way of writing. The page on which she’d written was of the most beautiful, cream-colored sheepskin vellum. The book, thought Enith, must have cost a fortune.
     
    Vannett opened it to somewhere near the middle. “We’ve been studying the Book of Thrones,” she said, “and the life of King Ozias—our own King Ryons’ ancestor, and the last anointed king of all Obann.”
     
    Enith prepared herself to be politely bored. But when the baroness began to read aloud of the young king’s life in Lintum Forest and how he escaped his many enemies, Enith discovered that it wasn’t boring at all.
     

     
    Unknown to anyone else in Silvertown except for Mardar Zo, Goryk Gillow had received his coded message from the self-appointed Council