Ferma touched her shoulder. “Come, there’s something I want you to see.”
Elena paused, hesitant. She knew this library as well as she knew the Desert Oath. What could Ferma possibly show her that she didn’t already know? But the Yumi was already descending, and after taking one last glance at the Immortals section, Elena followed her.
They walked along the eastern wall and then slipped down a corridor. Elena knew this entrance and the familiar ivory tiles interspersed along the walls. It had been her mother’s. But Ferma did not lead her to the room that had been Aahnah’s study. Instead, she stopped in front of one of the tiles.
When Elena peered closer, she realized it was cracked, the lotus leaves peeling back as if to reveal something within.
“What is this?”
Ferma beckoned to an orb floating along the wall as she sharpened one strand of her hair. “You’ll see.”
And then Ferma inserted her hair into the broken tile, like a key to a lock, and the wall opened.
Elena gasped, stumbling back as a door emerged. It led to a chamber, one about the size of her balcony. In the middle sat a heavy chest.
“Ferma,” Elena began.
“Your mother kept her favorite and most precious scrolls hidden within this chest. She swore me to secrecy. I had planned to show it to you as a coronation gift; then you decided to come to the library after so long. So. Surprise.”
Elena turned to Ferma. She felt a grin—her first true smile in months, it felt like—spread across her face.
“Oh, Ferma.” She grabbed the Yumi in a fierce hug, and Ferma wrapped her arms around Elena gently.
“I reason to myself that Aahnah would have wanted you to see this eventually,” she said, her chin resting on Elena’s head.
“Thank you.”
Elena knelt before the chest as Ferma opened it, again with a lock of her hair. A thick stack of scrolls sat within, along with notebooks and bound leaflets. Elena picked them up gingerly. As she opened one, she saw that her mother had marked it, too, with her initials scratched in the corner.
Aahnah liked to leave behind signs of herself. She used to scribble her name everywhere, from the inside lapels of her coats to the margins of historic texts. When Elena had asked her why, her mother had become silent, a distant look in her eye, as if to tether herself to some far-off point.
“Your name is important, Elena. It tells you who you are. It tells the world who you are,” she had finally said.
It had taken her mother’s death for Elena to understand why she had marked everything. It was not so much a claim of ownership but rather a quiet, desperate act to be remembered. To keep herself from disappearing by scattering parts of herself for others to find.
Elena rubbed her mother’s initials, wondering if Aahnah were here now, what she would say about the daughter who could not hold fire.
“What exactly are we looking for anyway?” Ferma asked. “Was His Majesty searching for something?”
Elena thought back to the metal ring on her father’s desk; the look on his face when he refused to teach her about the Eternal Fire, about her own kingdom. “He’s searching for answers. Which means he has even less time for me.”
She waved the floating orb down as she pulled out a scroll and unrolled it carefully. The paper crinkled at her touch. It was written in Herra. Carefully, Elena set it back and grabbed another. She flipped through the notebooks for some sort of guide or key, but she could make no sense of her mother’s atrocious handwriting.
Not all the scrolls were marked.Strange, Elena thought. And then the realization cut through her.
They were not all marked, because her mother had never returned to finish her reading.
I know the sorrow of it. I know her pain.
Or perhaps her motherhadfinished her reading and found the answer that had finally broken her. Suddenly, fear, cold and small, licked the underside of Elena’s belly. What kind of answer did her mother find that had driven her to jump into the flames?
“We should go,” Elena said.
“Are you all right?” Ferma said in surprise.
“I’m fine, I just need fresh air,” Elena said and began to rise. She didn’t notice the floating orb near her head, banging into it and sending it spinning.
“Ow,” she cried, rubbing her head. The light within the chamber wavered. And then Elena saw it. Movement.
