The private officeof Lord Paramount Leviathan Church smelled of ink. It was baked into the tomes shelved on the mahogany bookcases built into three walls of the room. It seeped from the scrolls stacked in towers atop every available surface, shoved into the spaces between books. It clung to the air with an almost metallic tang, as if it were mixed with something else.
And, most concerningly, it was scribbled across the pages and pages and pages of parchment littering the room—strewn across his desk, piled on the floor, crumpled pieces flopping out of the wastebasket.
“Your father’s a slob, Tenny,” Kit muttered, nudging a wayward piece of folded parchment with the toe of her boot. “Thisplace is a disaster.”
Tenny rolled her eyes as she crept farther into the room, bronze skirts rustling over the wooden floor. “He gets like this sometimes, whenever he’s buried a bit too deep in his work. He gets very singularly focused on things.” She gave Kit a lopsided grin. “We are alike in that way, I suppose.”
“He’s been in and out of the palace for weeks, barely in one place long enough to even have a meal with his daughter, let alone...” Tenny shrugged. “I’d guess that tidying his office is low on his priority list. I actually read once that slovenliness is a sign of high intelligence.”
Kit scoffed. “Well, if that’s true then Ellie’s a stars-damned genius.”
“Why wouldn’t he just let the servants do the cleaning for him?” Tenebris Nox asked, brushing a single finger along the dusty edge of one of the bookcases.
“He’s always been strange about that too. Every person in the palace knows better than to try and come in here. My father is a very private man.” Tenny swept over to her father’s desk, grinning back at Kit and Nox. “Luckily, that privacy has never really extended to me.”
Kit laughed. “Does he know that?”
Tenny’s shoulders rose in another shrug, her strawberry-blonde curls bouncing as her half-smile grew across her face. It morphed into a frown when she looked down at the state of the desktop. Pools of wax had congealed at the edge of the tabletop from multiple candles burning out. Inked quills were strewn across the table, every piece of parchment sprayed with dots of black ink. Missives lay open, their wax seals broken but the paper still folded neatly—discarded as if the lord couldn’t have been bothered to actually read their contents.
“I will admit, this is perhaps the worst I’ve ever seen it in here,” Tenny said. “It’s like he’s ransacked his own office.” She thumbed through some of the loose papers on the desk. “Or perhaps he was just in a hurry, like he always is lately.”
Kit didn’t miss the wistfulness woven through the words. “Do you think there’s anything in this mess that will tell us more about the sanctuary?” she asked Tenny, reaching for a small stack of notes. “Any more collections of sylvan fairytales?”
“Only the one that I know of, but if I remember correctly, my father did keep a rather detailed record of Arcanian books—ones we have athome in Seastone, ones kept here in the palace library, and ones held under lock and key in Paideus.” She crouched next to the desk, flinging open the already ajar bottom drawer. “He even had a few of them translated, kept them right next to where—hmm. That’s odd.”
“What is?” Kit and Nox both rounded the desk, coming up behind Tenny.
“I don’t see anything,” Kit said, peering into the empty drawer.
“Exactly,” Tenny said. “When I borrowed theSanctus Salutumfrom this very drawer, it was full of other things. Notebooks and scrolls and?—”
She stood, looking over the desk again. Moved some wrinkled pages aside, uncovering a layer of open journals underneath, line after line of text scrawled from edge to edge. “And they’re right here.”
Kit’s eyes scanned the words scribbled across the pages of the nearest notebook, something like a chill running through her. With trembling fingers, she flipped through half the journal, then dropped it and picked up another, doing the same thing.
Nox watched her with their head tilted, though their crimson gaze kept darting across the room, as if something else was calling their attention.
“Why does Cedric’s name show up so many times in these?” Kit asked.
Tenny’s brow furrowed. “What do you mean?”
“He’s mentioned time and time again. Look.” Kit offered one of the journals to Tenny—a particularly thick, leather-bound tome—bringing her attention to a page written in tidy penmanship that was dated over twenty years prior.
“ ‘Cedric has finally arrived,’ ” Kit read aloud. “ ‘I am impressed with how seldom he cries. Occasionally, I find him staring into the hearth, frozen with the painful memory of that last night. What little he does remember of it. I’ve offered to have a saint erase the scar on his lip, telling him it will help him find closure, but the boy refuses. I don’t think it is fear of further pain that is keeping him from taking me up on it. I will continue to work on him. He needs to move on if we’re to achieve what we need to.’ ”
Tenny’s brow creased. “A little bit insensitively written, perhaps, but what’s wrong with it? These must be my father’s personal journals. It makes sense that he would talk about Ric’s arrival.”
Kit shook her head. “It’s not just talking about him coming to stayhere, Ten. Listen.” She flipped forward a few pages. “ ‘There have been fewer and fewer signs from Cedric the more that time goes on. As if removal from that place, from those people, has sucked away his power. Or perhaps he never truly had any to begin with. At least I can recast the wards. We will change tactics, begin his training in earnest. He may prove useful yet.’ ”
“What power?” Tenny asked, reaching for the journal. “What is he talking about?”
Kit didn’t answer her, but did hand over the journal, letting Tenny flip through the pages of that first volume while Kit picked up another. Then another. They were out of order, entries skipping forward years, then back months, but a loose timeline formed in her head as she skimmed the pages, that tidy handwriting degrading as each journal progressed.
Lines slanted. Ink smeared. But one thing was the same: each and every entry was about Cedric in some way or another. Records of his height, his weight, his diet. His school lessons rigorously detailed. His training regimen, both in swordsmanship and in mana wielding, once he joined the knighthood. And then the increasing frequency of both as he officially started training to take on the Arcane Crucible.
“This is strange, right? It’s not just me? This isn’t just some human practice of, er, parental record-keeping?”
Tenny shook her head. “It’s not just you.” Her voice was low. “I’m barely even mentioned in these pages. It’s like he’s been obsessed with Ric from the moment he came to us. Why would he have all this?”
