Page 92 of Bound By Roses

“Quinn,” Abby says my name after a long moment of silence. I know what she’s thinking, but I don’t want her to say.

“Don’t. Just keep looking.” There has to be something here. There has to be.

“I know you want to believe we were sent here for a reason, but—”

“Please, Abby. We have to find the archive. It has to be here.”

She blows out a breath and lays her hand flat against mine over the rock wall. “This is the archive. This wall. These faces. I’m sorry, but there’s nothing here that we didn’t already know.”

My heart sinks at the realization that she could be right. After all, an archive is nothing but a historical record. This wall depicts Marein’s royal line as far back as to the first known queen and is therefore an archive in itself. But Evan wouldn’t have sent us here unless there was something we still needed to find, and the only clue he gave us was…

Mother.

I study her, looking for anything that doesn’t match my memory. Her hair is shorter than I remember her liking it, but the style is the same. Her face is younger, her eyes are brighter. But this is a depiction of how she would have looked when she lived here. Her clothing is different, but it fits in with the flowing robes that all the others on the wall wear. There’s not a single thing different about her.

That is, until my gaze falls upon her hand.

She wears the same ring she always wore, but that’s what’s different here. Aurelia’s words come flooding back to me.

The trouble with your mother started with a ring.

“I found it!” I sputter.

“Found what?” Abby’s gaze follows mine and then her eyes go wide. “Sirens don’t wear rings.”

My lips spread into a grin. “Sirens don’t wear rings.” I repeat her words before touching a finger to the stone ring. It feels loose under my touch and, with just a bit more pressure, something clicks into place.

The earth around us trembles as water in the tunnel behind us sloshes. I should be terrified the roof is about to collapse,but I’m too fucking happy for that. Too relieved that I wasn’t wrong. That there really was something here and answers are mere moments away. “Thank you, Evan.” My words are lost to the rumble of stone as the wall to our left cracks and then slides upwards in the same manner as many of the doors in Marein’s underwater city.

When the shaking finally ceases and the waters calm, Abby and I step into the dimly lit chamber. It smells of dust and salt and the answers to all our problems because sitting on the large table in the back of the room is a single tome displayed on a bookstand.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

ABBY

Ican see that Quinn is focused on the book at the back of the room, but I can’t pull my eyes away from the rows upon rows of books lining the walls. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many books in one place. Not in Rosewood, and certainly not in Lunae. As he moves deeper into the room, I pull one at random from the shelf and flip it open to a random page.

Swooping letters in elegant handwriting greet my eye as I scan the page and I immediately realize that it’s a journal. But not just any journal. A single sentence stands out to me and my heart jumps with excitement. “I had to weave.” Either I said the words low enough that Quinn didn’t hear me or he’s far too engrossed with the much thicker book in his hands.

This isn’t just an archive. This room is filled with the personal journals of the all of Marein’s weavers. The queens themselves. This is how they’ve kept track of how each of their choices changed history.

I flip to another page and read a detailed account of a vision predicting an illness that would spread through the city and wipe out half the people. The following pages consist of alternative futures and the change needed to alter the path of history. Igasp when I find the choice this weaver made to change the outcome. Instead of announcing that a young boy was going it inadvertently poison their food supply by adding the meat of a clam he found washed up on the beach, she told the boy’s father that he was ready for his first journey out to sea. He returned from his first successful hunt and the illness never came.

There’s something beautiful in that. To have the knowledge that a child would make a mistake and instead of holding them responsible for something what hadn’t yet come to pass, the weaver avoided catastrophe while imparting on him the required knowledge to prevent such a thing from happening at all.

And more than that, the weavers keep these secrets to themselves. Every possible future written in these books, every choice they made to choose the best path—including the sacrifices needed to get there—is a burden only they carry. My heart goes out to Kaylee for the role the people of Marein want her to fill. The choices she’ll have to make won’t always be as easy as imparting wisdom on a child. Some choices are paid in blood.

“Abby, look at this.” Quinn’s voice breaks through my thoughts, and the hint of fear lacing his tone has my pulse quickening. The book he’s reading must be exactly like this, but it was left on a stand while the others are shelved.

“Is that your grandmother’s journal?” I ask when I reach him.

He nods, too distracted by rapidly flipping pages to offer anything else. I can see that the entries end abruptly, and it must be because there was no weaver to take over when she died. And then it occurs to me. We don’t even know how she died. Or why she didn’t see the war with Marein coming.

Unless she did and she chose to allow it.

“What does it say?”

He flips to the page he must have been looking for and hands the open book to me. The handwriting is different, and it takes a moment for my eyes to decipher the scrawl. Quinn’s finger directs me to a passage about halfway down the page.

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