Page 71 of The Unseen Hour

We would need to stay near the cottage until he was more mobile.

As anxious as I was to keep moving, there was something serene about staying in the small space with Orion.

“I think I may take up journaling again,” Orion said as I closed one of the books from his shelf.

When I looked up, he was grinning.

“Trying to win me over with your words?”

“Would it work?”

“It already has.”

Orion adjusted his position, grimacing as his leg moved. I got up to help, but he waved me off.

“I’ll be okay. I just need to be distracted. Tell me, how did you find my journal?”

“When I was first mourning my father, I used to go to the library. Unlike my home, there was no chance of my family stumbling upon me there. I didn’t want my own grief to make things worse for them. My mother, especially, had a tough time at the beginning. The library has patrons, of course, but I stuck to the Estates section. Hardly anyone goes there. My first foray was into a random stack, but after that I continued to return to the section housing ‘H’ papers, because it began to feel safe. It wasn’t near enough the beginning of the alphabet, or the end, to abut other sections of the library. That meant it was even more deserted than the other shelves.”

Once I started, the truth came out in a rush. How, in the fall before the ninety-eighth hour, I’d sunk to the floor crying. How I tried to pull myself up and sent books tumbling. How I discovered the diary, and then my own father’s writing in the margins.

“He was working for the queen? To find Emrys’s king?”

“Yes. I’ve kept an eye out for him as well but haven’t seen him down here. He was lost at sea, so it’s possible that he wasn’t a victim of the hour. Maybe he was a victim of the storms that plagued the Talwin Sea that year. The ship sank. Bits of wreckage were found later, but no survivors.”

Orion frowned, and rubbed the splint on his leg.

“I wouldn’t recognize the current king of Emrys, but I haven’t seen anyone with a crown. Nothing like that. Maybe he drowned?”

“It’s definitely possible. But from what I could tell, my father was less motivated by the thought of finding the king and more excited about making it to the Ether. Not that he knew that was his destination. He just wanted to uncover the secrets of the hour. The queen wanted to send an army down here.”

Orion laughed.

“Ah yes, overthrow a deity with brute force. Charon would at least have been surprised, but I doubt it would have been successful.”

“My father wasn’t certain, either, but he was driven to protect his family. If he could have the queen’s backing to look into the hour, all the better. He scoured all sorts of books and bits of history. I’m guessing that’s how he found your journal. He might have been one of the few individuals actually interested in the Estates section. He wrote his notes, and I found them. That’s when I decided I really could do something about my situation. Of course, I didn’t put the pieces together to realize that you’d made it here alive. But I knew Father was trying to work out the Thipp’s dosing and had his own ideas.”

Orion’s hands clenched his blankets.

“I tracked the doses my brothers and I were being given before our demise. It was sheer luck that I survived and my brothers did not. Good luck, or bad luck, is hard to say. I would have said the latter, up until recently. Now that you’re here, though … if I had to wait all this time for someone like you, then it was well worth it.”

I blushed.

“Your journal mentioned that you’d all been ill and taking Thipp’s to help you with insomnia. Did all three of you realize something was amiss?”

“We all knew something was wrong, but I was the one to suggest it was intentional poisoning. The first to become convinced that someone was sabotaging the three of us, although I never managed to figure out who, or why. But it made no sense. No one else on the estate was ill. Just us three.”

“Maybe someone wanted the estate? Wanted your money?”

“Always possible, but doubtful. The cousin who would have inherited was cordial with us and in no need of funds himself. And he was abroad during that time. He enjoyed Tang immensely, for all its winter weather. I doubt he’d have wanted to return, although he could have at any time.”

The more I thought about it, the odder it seemed.

Three prominent noblemen were targeted just before the hour began.

But they couldn’t be connected. No one knew the hour was coming. No one except Charon, and he’d already proven that his methods were less subtle than slow poisoning.

“Why were you out that New Year’s Eve?”