Page 71 of A Vow of Blood and Tears

There were no words for it.

I drew in a breath, then another, fighting back tears. To think that if I hadn’t been the first to answer the Eldest’s call that fateful morning… I would not have Bane.

I would not have a trove of the most rare and extinct language in the world to unravel.

Never would I have found my heart’s desires.

Chapter 18

Bane

My wife signed something to me, stopped, then tried to sign something else. She moved rapidly, so excited she kept cutting herself off—a stilling of the hands, followed by pressing them to her mouth, then attempting to sign again before they devolved back into excited flutters.

Finally, I had given her something that made her speechless.

With trepidation igniting into victory—and perhaps some small amount of smugness—I pulled the topmost book from the pile, opening it to reveal pages charred at the edges, the parchment scorched to a mellow golden tone.

But the ink was still legible, and that was what mattered. “I believe this one was about spiritual and holiday rituals… possibly used by the high priests of the royal line. I’ll be honest, I never made it that far into the translations, but it was recovered from a Bloodgarden altar. What else would they have stored there?”

Cirri started, giving me a scandalized look as I turned a rather crispy page, and then she reached out and gently took it from my hands.

She laid it on the table, cradling the book like it was an infant rather than an inanimate object, signing to me sternly. After a moment she yanked her journal from her bag, plucked the pen from behind her ear, and began writing under this morning’s conversation.

Bane, I will be FURIOUS if you crumple so much as a single page. That’s all we had in the Silver Cathedral—one page, and that’s considered an absolutely invaluable piece of history. The Librarians of Argent would sell their souls to you for a single line from one of these books.

“I already own all the souls I need,” I said with a chuckle, and Cirri surreptitiously nudged the ritual book out of my reach. “So you can read this? Or at least… some of it?”

She tapped the end of her pen, and wrote.I know twelve of the runes, since that’s all we had. The good news is that we already have what the Librarians referred to as a ‘parallel corpus’—a text in formal Veladari aligned with the existing High Tongue runes, so we could translate directly from our language to theirs. It’s called the Silversun Fragment, and it forms the basis of all our current working knowledge of the High Tongue.

What I would very much like to find within this is another Fragment-like parallel corpus, so we can add on to what we already know—so far, we’re aware that the runes tend to align somewhat with formal Veladari, to the point that it seems that one of the two languages was bastardized from the other, although I suspect the High Tongue came first. But we can’t simply assume that a similar alphabet implies direct translation. It would be like a modern-day speaker of Low-Country Nord trying to read the wyrd-runes; it’s mutated so strongly from its inception that it would read as gibberish.

I blinked. And here I had thought that I might just… get lucky and mysteriously develop the ability to read it overnight.Clearly I had been out of my depth, and Cirri was a gift from the ancestors I hadn’t even known to look for.

“So we need to find one with an entry written in Veladari?” I picked up a scroll, and quickly put it back down at the sound of crackling paper and Cirri’s wince.

Not yet. First of all, I’m going to take inventory of everything here and note its condition. Some of these, such as that scroll you were just mauling about, are going to require a very delicate touch. Then I’ll go book by book and make any obvious notations on their origin or contents, andafterthat I’ll begin looking for another parallel corpus in these documents. It doesn’t necessarily need to be written in Veladari, so long as it’s comparable text.

“This is much more work than I believed it would be.” I frowned at the pile of books, wondering if perhaps I’d given Cirri an insurmountable task, rather than a gift… but she beamed at me, bright as the sun, her green eyes sparkling.

Important work, she wrote, underlining the first word.And I’ll love every minute of it. Thank you for trusting me with this, Bane.

I reached out without thinking, brushing my fingers across her cheekbone and a silky curl of red hair. “Of course I trust you.”

My wife gazed up at me, and then leaned her head into my hand, resting her cheek on my palm and closing her eyes for a moment.

I savored those few seconds while they lasted, until she straightened and flipped to a fresh new page in her journal, writingInventoryat the top in her almost preternaturally-tidy handwriting.

She began with the first book, notating things I would never have considered beyond the contents: the wear on the binding, the material of the cover, even a small bloodstain on the titlepage. Even the gilded wreath of rose thorns embossed on the exterior made it into her notes, along with one pre-translated word in the title: the High Tongue rune for ‘blood’ was part of it.

I hovered around her, watching as she slowly but steadily examined the books one at a time. Cirri was in her own world, encased in a bubble of amber light, completely unaware of anything outside what was in front of her.

I knew perfectly well that I didn’t need to be here; if anything, my presence would only serve to distract her.

But I found myself sinking into a plush chair, entranced simply by watching her work. The gleam of her braid down her back, the careful movements of her hands, the way her lashes fluttered and cast shadows on her cheeks as she examined a book.

The only sound was the occasional scratch of her pen and her soft, even breathing. Soon I found that I could hear when she made a discovery exciting to her; her breathing would speed, ever so slightly, and the sound of her pen would become heavier and quicker.

Ancestors, I found myself jealous of the books. To be handled with such love and attention…

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