Page 6

I scrubbed my hand down my face and cleared my mind, bringing my focus back to the present.

The Masters believed the codex was a catalogue of everything the Annatalian scholars had found out about the curse. They hoped that once it was mended and the book magic of old restored, it would also instruct the reader on how to break the curse ravaging the phoenixes.

For centuries, when a Rider or phoenix fell in battle, both passed through the Otherworld and returned together, memories intact. The bond between them was unbreakable, and a Rider’s greatest fear was never death, but failing their phoenix.

The earliest records claimed the curse began so slowly that it took a long time for anyone to realise what was going on. The first hint was that some Riders became erratic and violent during Yule, and it was thought that Yule itself was tainted. By the twelfth night, everything was back to normal, and the Riders had no memory of what had happened. This steadily grew until one violent night, over a generation ago, an unprovoked Wilds Rider attacked a village, setting it alight, and the villagers shot down the phoenix. They expected retaliation when both Phoenix and Rider were reborn, but that didn’t happen.

The Phoenix and Rider didn’t return together from the Otherworld as they always had. For the first time, that Rider awoke alone. He had no memories, no bond, and his phoenix never returned to him. It was as if the Otherworld gods had decided that the Rider could no longer enter their sacred world and be reborn.

Over the years, as the phoenixes and Riders became more violent, the mortals started to retaliate with silver-tipped arrows. It was then that the curse became the Earthworlders’ blessing—a dangerous, dark-hearted Rider could be stopped if their phoenix was killed.

I had spent years researching the curse, and the codex was as close as I had come to finding a book that might hold a record of it. There were so many inconsistencies in the stories of the curse, and I wanted recorded facts. Surely someone had written down the day the curse was set, or which kingdoms’ witches set the curse in the first place. And yet nothing I had read told me those details.

All along, my instinct told me it didn’t make sense. For I had seen witches and mages hold back a sandstorm with a raised hand. The Celts had warhorses resistant to phoenix fire. The phoenixes ruled the sky, but the witches and mages ruled the land. There was a balance of sorts.

The rebellion believed that breaking the curse would return our phoenixes, our Riders, and with them, our power. For me, it would give me Lex, my older brother who was once a Rider, back. But it would also bring back Riders that no one wanted to see in the skies again.

This was the Yule that would change everything. No second chance. I sighed.

Nomad stilled as if he had heard me, but said nothing.

I took a deep breath and made myself focus. There was no way I would fail my younger cousins, Ember and Thorn now, not when I was so close to getting us all out of here. The dull hum of book magic gave me goosebumps, but the glass cases muffled most of its power. All those volumes were trapped just as the Barren Lands contained me. Safe and locked away… waiting. A rustling of pages came from my left, and I turned to see a visitor’s book. It was asking me to place my name inside—that wasn’t going to happen—but I knew books well enough to understand they needed placating.

Studying the gates we had just walked through, I checked for signs of movement. Years ago, I found the hidden staircase to the archives, and Aster and I had attempted to enter room one. He had stayed outside to keep watch, and afterwards he said he never saw me walking around inside or heard a thing. Those archive rooms had become a place for him and me to be ourselves.

A box by the gate contained white cotton gloves; I plucked the top set out and pulled them onto my hands before walking over to the Visitor Book and placing a hand on it.

“I’m sorry to enter without permission, but I need your help to find the codex from Annatalia. I need to take back what was once part of my people’s library.” It had worked each time I’d entered one of the archive rooms. The books in those rooms had both opened my mind and made me feel even more imprisoned. What I had learned had changed me, and as I taught others, including my cousins, it had changed them too.

The sconces down the corridor flickered to life, guiding me as they always had.

I grabbed some more gloves and held them out to Nomad. “Put these on.”

He straightened and cocked his head as if he were surprised. I wasn’t sure whether his surprise was over me talking to the books, or that I wanted him to put on gloves, or both. The fabric of the veil gave nothing away. I ground my teeth in frustration—it was hard to get a read on an opponent without studying their tells. I was a spy, and now a killer, but his stance seemed to imply that I had no ethics… no care for the books. Flapping the gloves at his face, I willed him to put them on, but in answer, he lifted his already gloved hands.

“Those can’t be clean.” I glared at his gloves, knowing the morally dubious world he lived in. “Put these over the top.” I shoved the gloves into his chest.

“That’s the first sentence you speak?” The Nomad didn’t take the gloves. “Your hands might be grubby after just killing…”

Hardened spite ignited in my blood. I wouldn’t entertain his judgement of me. “A monster who raped Annatalian women whenever he could… in the workshop, if no one was looking. We had a rota, so no woman was left alone with him.” My fists clenched around the gloves. If the Nomad was trying to make me remorseful, then I was going to prove to him that there was none in me. Anger consumed guilt. Every. Fucking. Time. He obviously did not know, or he didn’t care, what the men of Craven City did to Annatalian women, what we silently endured at their hands.

“I won’t be touching anything. You will.” He swept around, striding away again, as if he had been in the library and archives before.

“How did you know it was here?” I paused, wondering if I was actually going to follow him. There was nothing about him I trusted. I couldn’t even see his face. He had turned his back on me as if I were harmless, and it was an advantage I would take, so I checked that the pin was securely in place in my hair and strode after him.

Inside the first towering bookcase sat a large, worn book with golden corner protectors, a blood-red phoenix etched on the cover, and a sturdy lock securing the pages. It was large and ornate, exactly what people might believe the codex would look like, and I reached to open the lid—the magical climate control hissed as the lid came off, and a timer appeared. Each box could be opened for thirty minutes before an alarm sounded. Maybe I could convince him that this was the book he was looking for.

“Not there,” he called back. “Are you always this slow?”

I halted my pace on purpose and glared at his back. He wasn’t my master. No one was my master; I was once godsdamned Annatalian royalty. When Annatalia fell, the three of us—the surviving royal children—hid in the far south of the kingdom under false identities. For eight months we lived freely and happily as a farmer’s daughters before the Riders took us to Craven City. Even then, they had no idea who they had captured.

Within months of seeing the depravity of the city, I had decided to join the rebellion.

There were whispers of the rebellion’s elusive leader, who was once one of my uncle’s—the late king’s—Shadows. It wasn’t until I was fifteen that I realised the Shadow they all talked about was my brother’s best friend, Aster. That was also the year he finally agreed to let me join the rebellion. I thought I would go on missions across the kingdoms; that they would get me out of the city.

Instead, my mission was simple: become a library apprentice, get inside, and take back our books. But within weeks of spending late nights learning to be a bookbinder, I found that the world melted away when I was focused on stitching or foiling covers. Each part of the process had filled me with a sense of accomplishment I hadn’t known before. I easily got the position and thought I’d be in and out quickly. But the Grand Library was a rabbit-warren fortress, not just a library. The place was so old that the cataloguing had been incomplete.

After our castle was overrun, the Barren ransacked the Annatalian Central Library, but it had taken over a year for my people to discover that one of the archive rooms in the Craven City Grand Library had been filled with our books. Our literature had been taken from us, just like everything else had been. These cursed people had realised long ago that if you wanted to destroy a people’s identity, if you wanted to control the narrative, first take away the books.