Fortress in the Eye of Time Read Online Free PDF Page B

times until he made it right.
    Mauryl gave him such an important thing as this book, on which Mauryl said everything rested, and he thought only about shirts and candles, his thoughts skittering about as they always did, chasing down so many, many steps and stairs of his imaginings, into all the rooms that were there, that only had other doors behind the ones he knew. He tried not to go wit-wandering. He tried not to think of questions.
    He sat down at the study table, in the old chair that was most comfortable, except for Mauryl’s. He opened the book and smoothed flat the stiff pages. His own copywork, scattered all around him, was wearing the parchments down by layers in attempts at such orderly rows as this: he copied Mauryl’s mouse-track writing and his fingers found ways to ink not only the parchment but himself, the quills, and other parchments. His quills threw ink into small spots he never suspected existed until he put his hand on them. He could write Tristen and keep it straight. But line after line, this marched straight and true, in masterful strokes of writing so heavy and dark it drew the eye straight to it and did not let it go.
    This was wonderful in itself. Writing held Words, and one never knew when one might encounter such a powerful thing: writing like this was to fear, and hold carefully, and puzzle over, because some shapes were like Mauryl’s writing and many had tails and straight, strong lines where Mauryl’s had twists; and more had shapes he could not quite tell apart, or where one letter stopped and another began.
    Certainly it was not Mauryl’s writing.
    Someone else’s. Someone—of strong and straight strokes, lacking those whips and tails he’d thought were part of the letters, which he’d copied in his shaky attempts that turned the quill in wrong directions and spattered ink, or left a bead of ink that took sometimes a day to dry.
    Another wizard? he asked himself. Mauryl said he was a wizard, and he, Tristen, was a boy, and that being a wizard, Mauryl knew what a boy needed to know.
    Had he never heard what Mauryl had said? Not, The wizard; but, A wizard. Of course there was more than one of everything. Mauryl had always implied so. Mauryl had never told him there was only one.
    Mauryl had said there were dangers and they came from outside. As the shadows did. And there was more than one of them. There were many more things in the world than one of each.
    Mauryl spoke of this book as if it were a Word, filled with more and greater meanings than other books. This book was, Mauryl said, the source of what he needed. The Book itself might come from elsewhere and tell him what those other things were. Mauryl had said he need not go away if he could find the answers in this Book.
    But try as he would to hook the letters together into words, puzzling out the strange ones, and trying them as this letter and that—he found not one word in it he could read.
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    The pigeons held the floor of the loft, and the doves held the highest rafters, up by the roof, in nooks the pigeons couldn’t fit, living on different levels of the loft and filling it with theirsoft voices. The loft was a wonderful, dusty place. Shingles covered part of it. Slates covered one wing. Thatch covered some of the holes, but the birds that stole the blackberries stole the straw for nests, which they tucked into inaccessible nooks along the other rafters, and squabbled and flapped their wings along the dusty boards when they both wanted the same place.
    All the birds of whatever sort had learned that he brought crumbs. So had a furtive few mice, which dared the owl—oh, the owl!—that held sway in the west end of the loft. But an inside wall divided the two, and the owl, which ruled the sunset side alone and grumpy, seemed not to hunt among the mice and the pigeons on this side, although, Mauryl said, owls ate mice.
    That seemed cruel.
    But the owl would take nothing that he