Page 8 of Her Shadow so Dark and Lovely
The look I give Lune when I look up must be desperate, because her face softens into something like pity. Ihateit.
“So you can’t make a noise. Since when?” Lune is using her healer voice.
Since I woke up here,I scrawl across the paper.
Lune frowns, which is preferable to pity. “When they brought you here you had broken ribs, broken fingers, dark angry bruises and little cuts dug deep into your sides,” she says.
This, at least, I knew. The cuts had been from my own fingernails. I just couldn’t understand why I would have done that to myself.
“Plus an awful fever.”
Do you know where they found me?
I hadn’t asked much when I had woken here. The fever had still been clinging, and I was lucky I could remember my own name. It was like something had taken a torch to my memories. They’d come back for the most part. Only one part was still missing. The gap between opening the book and waking in the infirmary.
“In your room,” Lune says. “You were found pressed against the wall, jammed into the corner. Or so I was told. I wasn’t onthe roster that day. If it hadn’t been for the fever burning you up, I think they would have thought you dead.”
I stare at her. How in the King’s name had I gone from the scriptorium to my room? I push my glasses up my nose and set to writing again.
And they didn’t find me with a book?
The writing is painfully slow with my off-hand, my bound hand trying to balance the writing board.
Lune shakes her head. “If she did, then it wasn’t passed on.” Cold dread rises up from the stones, chilling me from my toes and raising the hair along my arms.
She?
I already know the answer, even as Lune gives me a resigned look
“Librarian Sila is the one who found you. If you want answers, you should ask her.”
Chapter 5
Lorel
Lune sendsme back to the dorms to rest and so I cannot go and find the Librarian. She wouldn’t be pleased to see me back in the scriptorium, and I don’twantto go and find the Librarian. If I start asking questions, she’ll only grow more curious. There must be another way to find the answer.
I search my room, in case the book is hidden away somewhere. If I had been found here, crushing myself against the stone, then perhaps there is a chance it had fallen behind some furniture. I know even as I search that it isn’t. I sit on my bed and rub my hands down my face, thoughtlessly. The regret is swift and painful. Whatever salve Lune had used to numb the pain is starting to wear off.
The memory of the Librarian’s fingers pressing into my shoulders makes my heart race. Fear, probably. Definitely fear.
No, I could not ask her. I would exhaust all other possibilities first.
I wrack my thoughts.
That night, I had stayed late in the scriptorium to practice, preferring the silence there to the silence of my room. I had justset everything aside and tidied up, and there it had been. The book. A trap set to entice me. And I had fallen for it.
The book had been properly ancient. Slim with a red leather cover, the foil peeling, the spine cracking and threatening to crumble. By rights, I should never have touched such a book with my bare hands. I knew better than to open it. I had just wanted to have a peek, to see what kind of illustrations it held. It had been placed on my desk, after all.
It had no title, or if it did, it had long been lost to time. There was barely the impression of one, so old even the leather had forgotten the tools that had marked it. I had cracked the cover ever so slightly— and then there was nothing. No impression of what the book contained. No memory of leaving the scriptorium. Nothing at all about what had happened in my room.
But I could remember the book, and that was a start. It wassomething. I hadn’t seen any sign of it in the scriptorium. It was not in my room, and I refused to believe the Librarian had it. Perhaps even if she had it would have been returned to the Library. Tomorrow then, during the working hours whentheLibrarian would be watching the scriptorium, I would go findaLibrarian and see if they could help me find the book.
“You don’t know the contents of the book or its title?”
This Librarian looks over his glasses at me with clear disapproval. Dark-haired and dark-eyed, Librarian Mercias is tall, broad-shouldered and easily irritated. Under other circumstances, the latter fact would amuse me. Today though, it does not.
He towers over the raised desk, looking down at me. They’re all so cursedly tall, and I have to wonder if this is a boon given from the Library’s Heart. Perhaps it helps them reach the top shelves, or maybe it’s just for looming over scribes.
