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“I’m looking for the name,” I said, because if he’d been sitting there long enough to hear me lose to the catalogue, he already knew that. “Æscholt.”

His eyes moved once, toward the arch at the far end of the room where the tidy catalogue gave way to older shelves.

“Try the old index.”

“There’s an old index?”

“Most things here have an old version and a version they show visitors.”

I looked toward the arch. It was dimmer there, lower, the lamps fewer and less polite, and a little draft moved out of it, carrying the smell of leather gone powdery at the edges.

“Are you going to tell me where in the old index?”

“No.”

“Helpful.”

His mouth ticked slightly at one corner as though the thought of a smile had crossed his mind but he hadn’t been willing to expend the effort to let it out.

“If I tell you,” he said, “you’ll trust the answer, which would be a mistake.”

“I don’t trust anything here.”

“Good.” He reopened his book. “Then you’ll be thorough.”

I should have disliked him for that, and I did, a little, but I headed toward the arch anyway. Part of me wanted to stay there talking to him, to listen to his quiet, soothing, if almost monosyllabic voice, but I pushed that thought aside.

The old index was not a card index like I was used to, that would have been too easy. This was a massive book that was chained to the cabinet it sat on, as though there was a real danger that someone would run away with the thing even though it was overly large and probably weighed more than any other book in the library. Then I realized that it wasn’t just one book. There were multiple volumes of it.

The information inside was hand written and made my eyes water to try and decipher it. The entries were cramped, crosshatched, and full of abbreviations that looked like someone had started writing a word, gotten bored, and expected future generations to apologize on their behalf. But it was an index made by humans, humans with terrible handwriting and a grudge against vowels, but humans. It did not require bloodline knowledge to begin, only patience, guesswork, and more patience. I could do that.

The chains were heavy and cold and left rust on my palm when I moved a volume as I worked toward finding my answers. It took longer than I would have liked, especially since I’d wasted time on the more current index before being pointed toward this one, but I found what I was looking for.

Æsc. Ash. The tree, the glossary said, but also ash as in the gray powder left after burning, living wood and burned remains in the same small word, which seemed unfairly efficient.

Holt. A wood, a grove, a stand of trees grown close.

Ash-grove. That was all.

After the wax seal, the magic and everything I’d seen, plus, the lack of social media presence or internet presence in general for that matter the mysterious school was named after something that was quite normal. The word meant a little wood of ash trees. It was almost disappointing.

I copied the entries into my notebook carefully and stared at the first one again until the two meanings stopped being two meanings and started being one. Ash. The tree and the burned thing. Green and gray. Living and after. The word held both without choosing, the way a body holds a scar and the day it got the scar in the same square inch of skin.

I thought of my own arm under a new sleeve, bare and whole where a burn should have been. A language could hide a warning in plain sight for centuries, if people just stopped asking why a thing had been named.

I sat with that longer than I meant to until something crossed the high window too, black against the gray light, there and gone. A bird. A shudder ran down my spine.

Old buildings had birds the way they had draughts. Except a bird passing a window moved like a thrown stone, and this one had moved like something pausing. I looked up too late to see it for myself, but I sensed it.

When I came back through the arch, my guide was still at his table. Books had multiplied around him, opened and stacked and marked with slips of paper, a small architecture of study. I could see the gilded titles winking in the light on all of them except one. The untitled one sat closest to his elbow, shut, one hand resting near it but not on it.

“Found it?” he asked, without looking up.

“Ash-grove.”

He turned a page. “Mm.”

“That’s all you have to say?”