Page 143 of Into the Isle

Some things, even books can’t reveal for you.

I wrapped my arm around him, squeezing tight. There were so many mysteries about this man I didn’t understand, and wanted to unpeel. With each new discovery I made, two new questions sprouted up.

I still didn’t know how his runeshaping power worked, even. Only that it seemed powerful enough for important people to want to get their hands on it.

I gave a silent prayer to the mysterious rescuer who saved him as an infant. I hoped he’d somehow find out who he or she was, so he could thank them.

Learning about Magnus gave me a better appreciation for him and his emotional state. Or his lack of emotions, rather. Not only was he literally dead inside, his life had been founded on tragedy and betrayal. It really put my own life into perspective—him and Grim.

“I know you don’t want to hear it, Magnus, but I am so fucking sorry that happened to you.” My words came out before I could stop them.

He returned my embrace twofold. “Don’t be sorry, silvermoon. And don’t pity me. You’ve given me something real, when everyone else in my life just wanted me for what I possess—what I can give them. My blood. My power.”

His words brought tears to my eyes. I had to fight to keep them back. The lump in my throat grew to a point that it was impossible to speak over.

A moment later, he seemed to notice, taking the lead again. Nudging me toward the table, he said, “It’s time you get back to it, eh? I might have found what I’m looking for, but you haven’t. We’ve already wasted our first two hours up here.”

“I’d gladly waste the next three with you right here, until the Huscarls come and kick us out.”

I could feel his smile crinkling against my head. “I can’t let you do that, love.”

With a groan, I blabbed, “I know, I know.”

Slowly, I pulled away from him to get onto my hands and knees, planning to get to my feet.

He grabbed my arm before I could stand, yanked me back, and slammed a kiss over my bruised lips. I hummed in his mouth, eyes closed, until he pulled back.

“Thank you, Ravinica. For being something real.”

I gulped, searching his face and silver-flecked gray eyes. “Thank you for being you, Magnus. Don’t let these bastards win.”

His smile returned, another genuine one. “Never.”

I stood to my feet and groaned exaggeratedly toward the table, picking up the books along the way.

“Don’t sound so disheartened,” he called out. “You’re close, aren’t you?”

“Agonizingly,” I said.

I pulled out my three-page, taped-together family tree from the middle of a tome I’d been using as a bookmark. From there, I found a pencil and got to work, poring over the texts.

It took me a while to find the next name for my list, and the soft, heavy breathing of Magnus behind me told me he was snoozing. It made me smile as I jotted down some notes and got ready to write another name.

The name was underneath the coupling of Fell McKordan and his wife, who was related to one of the four families I had pinpointed as the ones to cause my ancestors the most grief.

It had all started with a few maids, butlers, and royals in King Dannon’s court. Friends of my ancestor on my mother’s side from that time during the Middle Ages.

The records Vikingrune Academy kept were impeccably complete. So finely woven together, I was amazed. Through family names and anecdotes about those times—stories from people inside King Dannon and Queen Amisara’s court, which covered two giant tomes entirely—I had traced back my lineage as far as it would go.

Now, I was back in the present, bringing those family names to modern times. It was miraculous, what I’d found with a few months of focused searching and studying.

Of course, it could have all been hearsay. I could have been wrong or led astray with a mistaken name, even though my gut was telling me I was right—that these were the families who had caused my family name to become less than nothing.

Some of my ancestors had been burned as witches. The Inquisition had gotten some of them. Yet, also just as miraculously, my bloodline was resilient. When one was burned, two more children had been left in secret as babies, only to pop up later in the tomes and histories as rebels and rabble-rousers of their own.

Some of my family names splintered off with aunts and uncles and cousins, into separate bloodlines I didn’t bother following. Otherwise, my family tree would easily be thousands of people and hundreds of pages long.

As it stood, I had nearly two hundred names on the list—more than thirty belonging to my own name, with the rest covered by the ancestors of our family’s tormentors.

---