His Majesty's Elephant Read Online Free PDF Page A

Greece—”
    He muttered something.
    â€œWhat language is that?” she asked him.
    He looked startled. Good. Men could never think of more than one thing at once: it gave them a headache. He blurted the answer before he could have thought. “Breton.”
    â€œYou’re from Brittany?” That explained much, including his dark hawkish looks and his dreadful manners. “That was Count Roland’s country. He died years before I was born, but everyone remembers him.”
    Kerrec went stiff. For a moment Rowan thought he was going to hit her. His hands were knotted into fists, and his face looked like a fist itself, clenched tight.
    Rowan kept talking. Babbling, really, but if she stopped, she did not know what would happen. “If you’re a Breton, you know about magic, yes? Brittany has magic in its bones. But not the kind of magic that’s in the East, so maybe it’s not going to help. What the infidels have—what’s in Byzantium—”
    â€œWhat do you know of Byzantium?”
    Rowan’s teeth clicked together. This was absolute idiocy, but it kept coming out of her. The whole thing. The garden, Gisela, the Byzantine with his soft voice and his slithery ways.
    It was Kerrec’s face, she decided while her tongue went on. It was a thoroughly dislikable face, but not the way the Byzantine’s was. That face made her want to hold tight to every secret. This one made her want to pry it open and let the light in, gather up the dry tinder that was inside and set it afire.
    And anyway, Kerrec was nobody. A stableboy who looked after an elephant. The Elephant. Who trusted him, and who talked to him, maybe told him stories in the nights, wonderful tales from places beyond the moon.
    The words ran dry. Rowan stood blinking. She was sickening for something, maybe. She felt dizzy, as if she had a touch of fever.
    Kerrec did not tell her that she was out of her head. She wished he would. He did not say anything for so long that she decided he was not going to, and moved to push past him.
    He caught her arm. She stared at his hand. His dark cheeks flushed; he let go. “Why did you tell me this?” he asked her.
    â€œI don’t know,” she said.
    â€œBecause you’re the witch’s daughter?”
    She was too tired to hit him. “She wasn’t a witch.”
    â€œI think maybe she wasn’t,” he said, “after all. But you—”
    â€œI’m not. I don’t have any magic in me at all.”
    â€œYou don’t know—” He stopped. “No, you don’t. What do they teach you here?”
    â€œGrammar,” said Rowan. “Rhetoric. Logic. Music, astronomy, geometry, arithmetic. Latin, a tiny bit of Greek, a little Arabic. Poetry, philosophy, theology—”
    â€œNothing,” he said. “Not a thing that you need to know.”
    â€œAnd I suppose you know everything?”
    â€œI know about magic.” He said it remarkably calmly. “We do know about that, in Brittany.”
    He was mocking her, but not enough to make her angry. “You’re not a stableboy, are you?” she said in realization that was not quite sudden; it had been growing for a while. “You don’t talk like one. You understand everything I tell you—empresses and caliphs and schools and all the rest of it. They don't teach such things between the hayloft and the stalls.”
    â€œUnless you mean monks’ stalls.” That was a flash of humor, so quick she wondered if she had seen it at all. “No, I’m not that, either. I didn’t run away from a monastery.”
    Rowan stared at him. For once she was empty of words.
    â€œDon’t let your sister get that Talisman,” he said, looking like himself again, dark and sulky and damnably arrogant.
    Everything in her said that he was right, but the way he said it, as if he had a right to order her about, made her go all contrary.