˚₊‧✩ ˚₊‧꒰ა ʚིᵋº̣̥͙̣̥͙ᵌɞྀ ໒꒱ ‧₊˚ ✩‧₊˚
The library closed at the ninth bell.
Hayden Wolffe and Rex Marius had taken to arriving at the eighth, which gave them exactly one hour in the history wing before Mistress Calla began her closing rounds with the particular energy of a woman who considered lingering scholars a personal inconvenience. They had developed, over the course of four evenings, a routine: Hayden would collect the translation materials he had assembled from a handful of founding era linguistic texts, Rex would arrange the lamp and the two low stools they had quietly relocated from a reading alcove three shelves away, and they would work in focused silence, broken only by the occasional low exchange when one of them needed a second opinion on a word or a grammatical construction that refused to resolve cleanly.
The letter had given them a shape. What they needed now was the full text.
The full text had taken four evenings to locate. It was not in the neglected wing itself, which Hayden had searched with the methodical patience that Rex found admirable and occasionally maddening. It was in the council correspondence log, folded so flat and pressed so deep into the binding that it had effectively become part of the book itself, invisible unless you were looking for exactly that kind of hiding. Hayden had been looking for exactly that kind of hiding.
It was a scroll. Old, the cloudpaper brittle at the edges and darkened with time, the writing on it in the same precise hand as the letter but longer, fuller, the hand of someone who had more time and more to say. The language was the formal register of the founding era, an older dialect of Nephorian that required careful unpacking, which was why it had taken four evenings and would have taken longer without Rex, whose grasp of archaic grammatical structures was, Hayden privately admitted, better than his own.
On the fifth evening, they finished.
Rex read the final passage aloud in a voice that kept almost breaking and kept deciding not to. When he finished he put the scroll down and stared at it like it had personally wronged him.
The scroll said everything the letter had implied, and worse.
"Okay," he said.
"Okay," Hayden agreed.
Neither of them said anything else for a moment.
"He planned it," Rex said. "Brontes didn't just, I don't know, have a bad day and ruin his brother's life. He sat down and thought about it. He built it. Over years." He pressed both hands into his hair. "That is so much worse."
"I know."
"Four hundred years, Hayden. Four hundred years the Outcasts have been living down there because one man was jealous of lightning."
"I know."
"Say something other than I know."
"I don't have anything better to say," Hayden said honestly. "I've had five evenings to sit with this and I still don't have anything better to say."
Rex slumped back on his stool and looked at the ceiling of the history wing, at the old cloudwood beams and the single amber lamp throwing their shadows long against the shelves. Then he sat forward again, because Rex Marius was constitutionally incapable of being defeated by a ceiling for more than thirty seconds.
"Right," he said. "Plan. We need a real one. Not just where to hide it. What we actually do with it. Who we take it to. How we make sure that when we do, it doesn't just get buried again."
"That," Hayden said, "is what I have been thinking about for five evenings."
"And?"
"I don't know yet."
"Hayden."
"Rex, I found a four-hundred-year-old confession hidden in a library wing that nobody visits. I did not also find a step-by-step guide to what to do next."
Rex opened his mouth. Then the door opened.
Both of them moved at the same time, Hayden's hand slamming flat over the scroll, Rex stepping sideways to block the table with his body in a way that he probably thought looked casual and absolutely did not.
Paion Dmitri stood in the doorway holding a stack of medical texts and looking at the two of them with the expression of someone who has just walked into something and is now rapidly working out what that something is.
The silence lasted about three seconds.
"I was returning these," she said, lifting the texts slightly. "Mistress Calla asked me. I didn't know anyone was still in here."
"We were just leaving," Rex said, at the exact same moment Hayden said "We're doing research."
They looked at each other.
Paion looked at Hayden's hand pressed flat on the table. She looked at the relocated lamp. She looked at the two stools that she was fairly certain had come from the reading alcove around the corner.
"Research into what?" she said.
Another silence. Rex made a face at Hayden that meant: she's already suspicious and she's smarter than both of us so just tell her. Hayden made a face back that meant: I know, I'm thinking. Rex made a face that meant: think faster.
"Close the door," Hayden said.
Paion closed it. She crossed the room, set her medical texts on the nearest shelf, and stood at the edge of the table with her arms folded, waiting with the kind of patience that made it clear she was absolutely prepared to wait all night.
Hayden moved his hand from the scroll.
She read it without touching it, her eyes moving steadily across the old cloudpaper, her face giving nothing away. When she reached the end she looked up.
"How much more is there?"
"That's all of it," Hayden said. "We just finished the translation."
"And it says what I think it says."
"Astrapi was innocent," Rex said, and the words hit the quiet room like a stone hitting water. "The exile was a lie. All of it. Brontes built the whole thing from scratch because he wanted the throne and his brother had lightning and people loved him more." He gestured at the scroll. "It's all in there. Names, methods, which council members he worked on first. A junior archivist named Zephyrine Callas saw enough to write it all down and hide it well enough that it's survived four hundred years."
Paion looked at the name at the bottom of the scroll for a moment.
"She signed it," she said quietly.
"She hid it and signed it," Rex said. "Which honestly takes more nerve than I think I have."
"It takes more nerve than most people have," Paion said. Something in her voice was very serious. "That matters."
She straightened up. She looked at Hayden, then Rex, then back at Hayden with the expression of someone who has just done a rapid internal calculation and arrived at a conclusion.
"You can't tell anyone else," she said. "Not yet. Not until you know what you're doing with it and what happens to you if the wrong person finds out you have it." She paused. "Where are you keeping it?"
"Here," Rex said. "In the library. In the wing."
Paion's expression made it very clear what she thought of this plan.
"My workroom has a locked cabinet," she said. "Nobody searches a medical cabinet in a subject district. Nobody even looks twice at it." She reached out and began rolling the scroll with careful, practiced hands. "I'll take it tonight."
Rex blinked. "You'll take it?"
"I'm already holding a stack of medical texts. One more thing tucked underneath makes no difference." She looked at him. "Unless you have a better idea."
Rex did not have a better idea.
"We meet tomorrow evening," she continued, tucking the scroll into the crook of her arm, perfectly invisible against the medical texts. "My workroom. We make a list of everything we need to find out, everything we need to decide, and we agree before anyone does anything." She looked specifically at Rex on this last part.
"I'm very patient," Rex said.
The look Paion gave him suggested she did not believe this even slightly.
"Good night," she said, and walked out into the main hall, nodded to Mistress Calla, and was gone.
Hayden and Rex stood in the lamplight of the neglected wing and looked at the empty table where the scroll had been.
"She took it," Rex said.
"I noticed."
"We just met her twenty minutes ago in this context and she took our scroll."
"It's not technically our scroll," Hayden said. "It's four hundred years old."
"Hayden."
"She's right though," Hayden said. "The cabinet is better than the wing. And she rolled it properly, did you see? She knows how to handle old documents."
Rex thought about this. "Yeah," he said. "Okay. Yeah." He picked up his notes and blew out the lamp. "I'm just saying, she walked in here a stranger and left with the most dangerous document in Nephoria under her arm."
"I think that means we can trust her," Hayden said.
"Or she's extremely confident."
"Both," Hayden said. "Probably both."
They walked out into the cool Nephoria evening, the great library doors closing softly behind them, and somewhere across the city in a locked cabinet in a subject district medical workroom, the truth waited quietly in the dark.
Three people now.
Which was three more than it had been a week ago, and still nowhere near enough.
˚₊‧✩ ˚₊‧꒰ა ʚིᵋº̣̥͙̣̥͙ᵌɞྀ ໒꒱ ‧₊˚ ✩‧₊˚