The Door Into Fire by Diane Duane

savoring that special joy that comes of having someone to listen, and care. Their friendship became a settled thing.
    Herewiss gave the scene a nudge of adjustment. They were in rr’Virendir, the King’s Archive in Prydon castle, sitting with their backs against one of the huge shelves filled with rune rolls and musty tomes. It was dark and cool, and the air was laced with the dry dusty smell of a great old library. The summer sun burned down outside, and in this weather the Archive was one of the few comfortable places to be. The assistant keeper was snoring softly in his little office down at one end of the long room; Freelorn, who due to a hereditary title was the Keeper of the Archive, was hunched up against the very last row of shelves with Herewiss.
    “I don’t want to learn all this stuff,” he was saying. “I’ll never learn it all. I’m a slow reader anyway; it would take me the rest of my life.”
    “Lorn, you’ve got to.” Herewiss was fifteen now, and feeling terribly broadened by his travels; this was his first trip to Prydon, and the first time he had ever been more than ten miles from the Wood.
    “I don’t need it!” Freelorn said, scowling at a pile of parchments that lay on the ground next to him. “Look at all this stuff. Half of it is so rotted away I can hardly read it, and the rest of it is in some obscure dialect so full of thees and thous that I can’t make sense of it.”
    “Lorn,” Herewiss said with infinite patience, “that one on top there is a rede that’s been copied over more times than either of us know, because no one knows what it means, and it’s tied to the history of your Line somehow. It’s Lion’s business, Lorn. That makes it your business. This whole place is your business. That’s why you’re its Keeper.”
    “Dammit, Dusty, I love my family’s history. Descent from the Lion is something to be proud of. But I don’t want to sit around reading when I could be out doing great things!”
    “What did you have in mind?”
    “Are you making fun of me?”
    Freelorn made an irritated face. “I don’t know what kind of great things. But they’re there, waiting for me to get to them, I know it! I want to see the Kingdoms. I want to take ship for the Isles of the North, and talk to Dragons. I want to climb in the Highpeaks and see what the lands beyond the mountains look like. I want to go into Hreth and kill Fyrd. I want to find out what the Hildimarrin countries are like, I want to—oh, Dark, everything! And you know what I get to do?”
    “You get to stay home and be prince for a while. Listen, Lorn, it’s not that long ago you were in the Wood with me. That’s not traveling? Almost two hundred leagues away? What about the mare’s nest we saw on the way back? That’s not adventure? You wanted the nightmare, maybe? She would have had you for breakfast. We saw three wind demons and a unicorn, and heard the Shadow’s Hunting go overhead, and you want more? Goddess, Lorn, what’s it take to make you happy?”
    “Danger. Intrigue. Hopeless quests. Last stands. Heroism! Courage against all odds! Valor in defeat!”
    “You remember when we used to play Lion and Eagle?”
    “Yes, but—Dusty, what’s that got to do with this?”
    “How many times did we stage Bluepeak out behind the Ward?”
    “Every day for a month at least, but—”
    “Did you notice something interesting? We always got up again afterwards. Earn and Héalhra didn’t.”
    “Yes, They did. They come back once every five hundred years—”
    “—and the last two times no one recognized Them until they were dead, because They didn’t come back as Lion and Eagle. That’s not important here, though. Lorn, I’m not—oh, Dark.” Herewiss reached over and took Freelorn’s hand, slowly, shyly.
    “My father,” he went on, looking at his boots, “keeps saying, ‘A king is made for fame and not for long life.’ Which is all right as long as it’s some other king—but Lorn, it’s