Page 49 of Her Shadow so Dark and Lovely
When they found I had no magical gift, they called me a foundling. The Lightkeepers. The courtiers. The Dawn King. My parents had long been dead from the night cough, or I have no doubt they would have executed my mother for trying to pass me off as my father’s child if they could have. Except that they were wrong. He was my father.
Sila sits up, her frown only deepening as she makes sense of each hand sign. It isn’t done to speak of it outside the Keep. Even if the other factions suspect, they do not know. People rarely ever leave the Keep. I was still not entirely sure how I had been allowed. I often suspected that for all her protestations otherwise, Orielle had been involved.
My father is descended from the Dawn King. I am descended from the Dawn King. Who else would the Library choose in a room full of scribes? Of course it was me.
I stare miserably at my hands. Even now, even after so long, I can’t escape it. I try to steady the tremble starting in my hands and bite down on my quivering lip. I feel sick to think of it. Sila’s hand finds mine and her fingers run over my palm and grip my wrist. She runs her thumb over the veins, stark against my skin.
“We never found your book,” she says softly. I slip my hand from her grip with great reluctance.
I did. In the coffin. I read it and I have promised to speak it.
Sila is staring off through the doorway when I look up at her. She is a world away, her eyes focused on something that doesn’t exist.
“That’s why the Library tasked me with breaking your silence,” she says. “It wants you to speak it.”
I can see the way her mind is turning over, her thoughts flicking through every note she had ever made on curses and magical afflictions. Her expression fractures as she comes to the inevitable conclusion. She looks at me, stricken.
“Words once spoken, made true. A prophecy?” she asks. I nod. “Then—” She reaches out to tug down the collar of the blouse. The curse mark is as present as ever. It’s darkened at the centre, and it radiates heat. Like an ember dropped on my skin and pressing through it, burning through me.
“It’s eating you up,” Sila says. Her eyes go distant again. “Like your fevers.” She drops back against the pillows again, her arms going limp. She is wearing through what little energy she has recovered, her body still trying to pull itself back together again.
Does it usually take so long for you to heal? I watched the way you fought. You take hits like they’re nothing more than an inconvenient paper cut.
Sila gives me a sidelong look, and I think half of it is made up of the way sleep and recovery are trying to take her. “That cursed Lightkeeper and their sword. I should have known it was sanctified, since they’d sent a blood mage.” She hisses as she shifts.
I knew a little of sanctified weapons. Blessed by the Dawn King, to ward off evil, wielded only by a select few of his Lightkeepers. Of course, it would be like poison to Sila.
You need to rest.
“Only if you promise me you’ll eat,” she murmurs. I let myself smile, then.
I’ll eat. I promise.
She nods, satisfied, and allows sleep to take her.
Chapter 30
Lorel
I rummagethrough the kitchenette and find some pickles, stale bread and some of the salty powder that makes a clear soup that makes the bread edible. It’s a world away from that first meal from the Librarian’s mess hall, but since the last thing I ate was that awful bread in the Library, it tastes almost the same.
It’s quiet with Sila resting. Sila isn’t usually loud by any means, but when I’ve curled up to sleep in her bed, it’s usually to the scratch of her pen, or the dull soft sound of the blotter. The quiet rustle of turning pages. The smell of old paper and damp earth. The scent of blood still clings in the air, still marks the rug by the hearth. There’s no sound from the bedroom. Everything is still, and it makes me anxious. The curse stirs, restless.
I stand to go and check on Sila, when there is a gentle knock at the door. I still, my heartbeat kicking up.
“Lorel? May I come in?” Lune calls softly through the door.
Relieved, I open my mouth to call back a reply, close it with a grimace, and then turn myself reluctantly away from the bedroom door. Lune’s face is a picture of anxiety that eases only slightly when she looks at me. Sila’s mirror earlier had shownthe way dark shadows are pooling under my eyes. How I am starting to look a little worn and thin around the edges. The curse eating away at me to sustain itself, just as Sila had said. I step back to give Lune room to enter.
Lune lets out a relieved sigh as I close the door behind her. “I hate the Librarian’s quarters. I always feel like I shouldn’t be here, despite my special dispensation.” She drops her case to the floor and pushes a bundle of clothes into my hands, before she grabs my face with both hands, the tingle of her magic tickling my skin. Her frown deepens. “I can see something is wrong,” she says, clearly frustrated. “But it won’t show me anything.”
She lets me pull away to find something to write with in reply. I set the clothes aside, grateful for them, and also not. I’d liked what Sila had said before she’d kissed me, but I also can’t very well wander around in only a shirt and nothing else.
I’m fine.
Lune looks to the ceiling as if asking for patience. “You’re not, but if you’re not going to tell me, then I can only hope you know what you’re doing,” she says. Her eyes flick to the bedroom door. “And that it isn’t her doing.”
“I can hear you, you know.” Sila’s voice is weak, but clear as she calls out. I follow Lune into the bedroom, where Sila is propped against the pillows, almost exactly as I had left her. She looks worn still, but improving.
