Yes, well, that was before we found the boxes in the storage-chamber. Moth's husband had maintained a "show" library, with things he thought worth keeping attractively shelved. The rest—which amounted to four or five times the volume of works on show—had gotten packed into boxes and stacked up in a storeroom behind the library itself. Moth had thought that the storeroom was empty until they'd opened the door. In their search for maps they could use to plan their campaign and the plans of manors and estate-houses, the Young Lords had rummaged through it all, bringing some things into the library and leaving them, removing other things to make room for what they brought in. Whatever order had once been here was gone completely. Now the storeroom had shelves, and so did the unused office next to it, and the unused reception-room next to that, and Kyrtian was trying to bring some order to the chaos.
Kyrtian, however, was fast becoming convinced that his answer lay, not in printed books or illuminated manuscripts, interesting as those might be, but in the personal journals kept often by elven ladies, and infrequently by their lords.
His father had almost certainly divined the location of the Portal from something in here. That location was lost, and what was more, there seemed to be evidence that the Ancestors who had built the thing had engaged in an active effort to hide that location from their descendants—and even from some of their own who had come through the Portal.
Why? That was a good question. Perhaps they feared a traitor in their midst who would re-open the Portal to their enemies. The Portal itself had cooperated in erasing memories; it was fairly clear that the Crossing was such a traumatic ordeal in and of itself that a substantial number of those who Crossed could not remember a great deal of what happened immediately thereafter.
And perhaps some of those folk were "helped" to forget.
None, not one, of the Great Lords that had created the Portal and survived the Crossing left any substantive records about it. That much was fact. Nor did any of the historians—another fact. So with no official records, he was left with only one other source, the unofficial ones—and of those, the best would be the records of those who were considered too insignificant to matter.
The ladies . .. ah yes, the ladies. And the eccentrics.
Some of those journals were attractively bound and might at one time have been shelved in the main room—and that might be where Kyrtian's father had gotten his information.
Or he might have found something in official records that Kyrtian had somehow completely overlooked.
Kyrtian ran a dusty hand through his hair in frustration, then told himself sternly not to get so impatient. After all, his father had been hunting for the Portal for decades before Kyrtian was born; by the time he found what he was looking for, he had probably gotten to the point that he was so familiar with the Ancestors and the way their minds worked that he was able to intuit things that weren't obvious.
So he was wading through everything handwritten that Moth had in this library, with the Great Book of Ancestors beside him. Before he could eliminate any manuscript or journal, he first had to figure out who wrote it, or at least who the author's contemporaries were, then discover whether or not the author lived far enough back to have made the Crossing.
Since it was almost a guarantee that most of the manuscripts he found would be from too late a period to mention the Crossing except in passing, he would then try to find every other manuscript that could be attributed to that person. Most people who were addicted to journal-writing had produced multiple volumes over the course of their very long lives. If the author was of too late a period, well, it helped to be able to weed out everything that could be attributed to her pen.
It was a painfully logical and methodical plan of dealing with the situation. It was also very tedious, very time-consuming, and very, very dusty.
Kyrtian had two helpers at least—Gel, and that little female concubine that Lady Triana had been so considerate in planting on him. He'd sent for her a-purpose once he'd turned over his commission to Lord Kyndreth while the Council debated. If Triana was so interested in what he was doing, he was inclined to allow her more information than she could comfortably digest. He had a notion that she was working with Aelmarkin, at least for the moment. Lady Moth had been very helpful in presenting him with a summary of her past behavior, and from that he'd formed the opinion that whatever game she played, whatever alliances she made, her ultimate goal would serve no one but herself.
Now, to his mind, the best possible way to handle her was to give her the information he wanted her to have. Gel had examined the girl himself, interrogating her to the point of exhaustion and even tears, and it was his opinion that Lydiell had succeeded in "turning" her. Whenever she reported to Triana— and Triana had been very interested to learn just where he was and what he was doing right now—Gel was there, making certain she stuck to the script they'd agreed on.
Nevertheless, she didn't know exactly what it was he was doing in Moth's library; what she didn't know, she couldn't be forced to reveal if Triana or Aelmarkin ever got their hands on her. She knew only what she saw—which was that he had ordered all the books down off the shelves to be sorted—that Moth's slaves had then reshelved and cataloged all of the printed material. While they worked, he examined the handwritten stuff, creating a second catalog, and she and Gel shelved what he was done with. She couldn't read elven hand-script; she didn't know what he was keeping and what he was rejecting. So although she now had a wealth of information about his movements, none of it was likely to do Triana any good.
He actually expected the infamous Triana to put in an appearance before too very much longer. He couldn't see how she could possibly resist trying to pry into his affairs in person. She would probably also try to seduce him; that was her pattern in the past. He had heard, even from Moth, that she was a great beauty, and not a passive, statuesque creature either, but lively, witty, aggressive, and not afraid to show her intelligence. Such a woman had learned how to turn her looks and fascination into a weapon long ago. She might even have approached Lord Kyndreth as well as Aelmarkin, prepared to use anyone and anything in her quest for personal power. If that was the case, she might well have met her match in Lord Kyndreth, who had been playing deep games for far longer than little Lady Triana.
Ancestors—I've turned into such a cynic—
There were times when he longed for what he had been— when the worst of his worries was working out little battle-plans and conspiring with Lydiell to keep Aelmarkin at a distance. To think that he had actually looked up to people like Lord Kyndreth!
Well, I know better now.
It hadn't just been his own experiences that had enlightened him, nor the night-long, acid-washed "frank talk" that Moth had had with him when he first arrived. It was the testament of these very manuscripts beneath his hands, that outlined the machinations and betrayals, the abuse of power and the use of it, from the point of view of those that the powerful considered too insignificant to monitor. Mind, some of them were no prizes, either, acting like chickens in the hen yard, turning, when pecked, to hammer on those beneath them. But it had been an enlightening, if distasteful education, wading through the pages they probably thought no one else would ever read.