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“No, St Iris. A coastal village.”

“Then you’ll see that you learn ’ow we do things ’ere in Eryssan.”

“Well, I do hope not,” Maia said and walked away before seeing his reaction. She loosened her shoulders, trying to shake off the injustice she’d just witnessed.

She’d only managed to get halfway back up the steps when she saw the Umbralyn again. He’d stopped at the end of the wall. He was standing quite still, facing north, looking at the sky in the distance as if he could see through the buildings. She couldn’t help but stare at him; to wonder what he was thinking and what he’d do next.

Before she could turn, his eyes found hers. She looked away instantly, embarrassed to be staring so intently at him, especially just after he’d been treated so poorly. She wrapped her shawl around herself tightly and scurried back to her quarters.

She made her ink that night, and it came out well, but she still did not sleep.

4

The Guardian

Work, at least, gave her somewhere to put her hands. Since she’d been offered the fragment and had been unable to prove her findings, she was back to ledgers.

“You’re doing that again,” Julen said, not looking up from his own desk. “The thing where you stare at a page like it insulted your mother.”

“It’s a shipping manifest,” Maia said. “Cod, salt and forty barrels of something the scribe couldn’t be bothered to spell correctly. And my mother’s dead.”

Julen blushed. “Oh, I’m sorry, Maia. I didn’t—” He paused as he spotted her smile. “Well, the rest of that sounds truly riveting.”

“It is, actually.” She turned the ledger slightly, angling it toward the light. “Look. Here and here. Whoever copied this did it twice, thirty years apart, and the second scribe changed the spelling both times to match how the word was said in their own district. It’s not an error. It’s an accent, just written down instead of spoken.”

Julen leaned over despite himself. “That’s— huh.” He squinted at it a moment longer, then handed it back. “You’re going to be insufferable about this, aren’t you?”

“I am.” She smiled.

She hadn’t meant to notice these finer details, but Master Orell had. He didn’t say anything - he never did directly - but he’d paused half a step longer at her desk than at others on his round that afternoon, and the following morning a heavier stack of the old commentary parchment appeared at her elbow instead of Julen’s. Still no fragments though. Julen noticed this, too. He didn’t say anything either, but his silence and the roll of his eyes were loud and clear.

Maia kept her head down and watched Orell from the corner of her eye. He had the bearing of a man who answered to no one in the room and everything above it. When a steward murmured something about the Elders, his whole posture changed: a small straightening, almost reverent. His only acknowledgment of Maia’s translation skills was to give her more work.

It was her father’s fault, in the end, that she was even here. He had never called it teaching. He’d called it listening properly.

He sat down with her when she was a young girl with a fisherman’s contract from three generations back and made her find where the scribe’s hand had slipped from the formal tongue into the coastal one his own grandfather had spoken, back before the Sanctum had smoothed every dialect on this stretch of the coast into one obedient shape.

Words don’t die all at once, he used to say. They go quiet in one mouth and keep living in another. You just have to know which mouths to listen for.

She’d thought, for years, that it was a game he’d invented to keep a motherless girl occupied on long winter evenings. It hadn’t occurred to her, until she was sitting in the Archive with a script that no living scholar could place, that he might have been arming her for something.

In the evenings when the light turned to gold and then nothing at all, she ate with Selinne, an apprentice she’d seen on the first day. Her room was two doors down from Maia’s and she had the enviable gift of finding almost everything funny.

“They tried to tell me willowbark tastes better boiled,” Selinne said, wrinkling her nose over her bowl. “It does not. It tastes like boiled willowbark. I don’t know what they thought was going to change.”

“Maybe they hoped you’d stop asking.”

“I’ve never stopped asking anything in my whole life,” Selinne said without any particular pride. “I’m so glad you’re here, you know. Half of the others, the men, talk about nothing but their father’s trade routes and which merchants’ daughters they’d rather see unclothed.”

“Julen talks about spices.” Maia shrugged.

“Julen is the worst offender. And I’d wager he’s half in love with you.” She was smiling when she said it, and Maia found, somewhat to her own surprise, that she was smiling too - the first time all week it had come without her forcing it.

It didn’t stay for long. Nothing here seemed built to stay for longer than an evening.

She thought again about the columns. About the shape that had stood between them and the eyes that found hers before she’d had the sense to look away. She told herself again, lying awake with the lantern guttering, that it had only been a trick of exhaustion and bad light. But in the same breath, she did not entirely believe that herself. And a small reckless part of her didn’t want to.

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