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Lizette and I head to different ends of the room to scan the shelves, and Oryx plops himself into a lounge chair while we browse. My eyes glaze over the titles, most of them written in English with a few foreign ones mixed in.
“Do minotaurs have their own language?” I ask, eyeing a title I can’t understand. The letters look like runes, but I’ve never seen them before.
“A long time ago, we did,” Oryx explains. “It’s been lost over time. There aren’t many people now who can speak it. In fact, Nor is one of the only people I know who can even read it.”
“Really?” I run my fingers along the spine of the book, trying to commit some of the runes to memory instead of appearing impressed by Nor’s intelligence. “I’m surprised he can read at all.”
Oryx laughs heartily behind me. “Don’t let his arrogance fool you. Nor’s smarter than most of us. He’s probably read every book in here twice.”
I spin around to take in the room again. There must be thousands of books here.
There’s no way he’s read them all.
“Have you found anything on potions, Irissa?” Lizette calls from the opposite bookshelf. She’s bent down, running a finger along each spine as she glances over it.
Of course not. I’ve barely started looking.
After nearly an hour of perusing, I’ve only found two books that mention any kind of potion making or herbal remedies. I stacked them in one of the unoccupied chairs, and Lizette added her own find to the pile. All the letters are starting to blur together, making it hard for me to focus.
“Is this the book that Zenobios was reading?” Lizette asks, snatching my attention from a book written in runes.
When I look over, she’s holding up a tattered brown book.
“It looks like it.” I nod. “What’s it about?”
“Flowers.” Her brows furrow. “But he hardly seems like the gardening type.”
“He does look like someone who’d rather chop down plants than grow them,” I agree, even though he’d been sleeping in the garden after the royal ball. “I wonder what he was looking for.”
“There’s no telling,” Oryx says, hardly sounding concerned. “I stopped trying to guess his motives years ago.”
Lizette thumbs through the pages, her jaw hard as she focuses intently, and she stops halfway through. Her brows furrow before she looks up and catches my gaze. “There are pages torn out.”
I stare at her, speechless.
Coincidences happen all the time, but when something is too coincidental, it begins to look less random and more intentional. More suspicious. Coupled with the uneasy feeling I get around Zen, this doesn’t feel innocent.
“Some of these books are ancient,” Oryx explains, getting to his feet and stretching his arms over his head. “I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them are damaged.”
Despite his words, a strong feeling in my gut tells me Zen took them. I’m not sure what information could be so valuable that he felt the need to rip them out, but I doubt it’s simply due to his weirdness. I intend to investigate.
“Add it to the pile,” I say, pointing to our stack of books in the chair. “I’m in the mood to study shrubs.”
CHAPTERNINETEEN
Irissa
Over the next few weeks, Lizette and I painstakingly comb through the books we found, hunting for information. There are several useful nuggets about potion brewing and ingredient substitutions that we copy into a blank journal, but Liz already knows most of what we find. It’s comforting that she’s so well-versed, but also a little disappointing. I know she longs to learn more, to be able to conjure a potion for any situation that arises. Maybe we can find more information elsewhere–we just have to figure out where to look.
Unfortunately, no matter how many times we scanned through Zen’s book, we never found any clues as to what the missing pages said, but it looked like an entire plant description had been removed.
It’s weird but mostly unhelpful, and it leaves me feeling defeated. Something about him is off, I just know it. Whenever he’s near or even crosses my mind, I get an unsettling feeling in my gut that I can’t shake. Even though I only have whispers of evidence, I have a hunch he’s up to something suspicious, and I’d kill to know what it is.
I don’t plan to give up my investigation, but right now, I have nothing to go on.
“Maybe we’re overreacting?” Lizette asks for the tenth time as she gets me ready for my first royal portrait. “There could be a perfectly reasonable explanation for Zen’s odd behavior.”
“Doubtful. He’s up to something, and I’m going to prove it.” I scoff and glance down at my dress.
