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“I opted out. Thought you might try sneaking out of your room to stab someone.”
“Lovely. Want to show me where the library is?”
She arched her brow. “Not particularly.”
“Well, I’m going to go find it.” I started off down the corridor and shot my next words over my shoulder. “You coming?”
Fenella grumbled, but she quickly caught up to me and fell into step by my side. Neither of us spoke as we wound through the maze of passageways, mostly empty except for the occasional maidservant passing by with a pile of fresh linens or a broom in hand. Unlike the morning’s meal might have suggested, the castle was calm and quiet. Every now and again, the alluring sound of a harp drifted toward me, or the hush of distant voices. Mostly, though, these halls were as empty as those in Dubnos.
It was an aching reminder of how much this world had lost. The war had taken so many lives, on both sides. Even hundreds of years later, we were paying for it. Hatred and revenge, anger and chaos had wrought devastation. I’d let those emotions live in my heart for far too long, and I’d almost brought that destruction upon everyone I knew and loved. And, if my father was right, they could someday lead me to do far worse things.
After I found myself back outside my bedchamber door, Fenella sighed and motioned me to turn toward the opposite direction. “I can’t bear to follow you around in circles for hours. The library is this way.”
She led me back down the staircase to the Great Hall, but instead of turning right, we went left. Another set of double doors rose to the lofted ceiling. She took the handles and shoved, revealing a vast room with rows of shelves leading into darkness.
Dust swirled toward us and the familiar scents of parchment and ink almost brought me to tears. I stared ahead, awestruck by the sight, even in the dim lighting. There were so many shelves—so many mountains of books. I could get lost in here for weeks and still not look upon every cover.
Fenella grabbed a lamp from beside the door and dropped a silver gemstone into the center of it. The lamp glowed, spilling brightness into the room. “You look like you’ve never seen a library before.”
“I haven’t,” I said around a lump in my throat. “But it’s more than that. For as long as I can remember, I started every day by reading at least ten pages of a book. Without fail, no matter what was happening. Until that day.”
“That day?”
“When everything changed,” I said bitterly, “and Oberon chose me to become his next mortal bride.”
“Ah, so that’s why you wanted to come here.” She passed me the lamp and then lit a second one with another gemstone. “You know, I heard you stabbed Oberon too.”
“Twice. It didn’t work either time.”
She surprised me by letting out a laugh. “Just like you did to Kalen. Seems to be a pattern of yours. Let’s not make it a third time, though, yeah?”
“I would gladly stab Oberon a third time.” There was a viciousness in my tone that almost startled me. My anger was still there, boiling beneath the surface. Despite my every attempt to rein it in, it still bled through whenever I spoke of him, like my veins were full of poison. It felt as if the God of Death was corrupting me the same way she’d twisted the hearts of everyone else. It felt as if my father’s journal was right.
“Keep talking that way, and we might just end up being friends after all,” Fenella said with a smirk.
Instead of answering, I swept through the library stacks, angling the lantern toward the dusty spines. I found the fiction section and took two books that promised romance and adventure. Fenella seemed distracted by her own handful of books, so I kept searching, hunting the rows for historical tomes.
I moved quietly in the shadows of the stacks. Cobwebs stretched overhead, and the dust tickled my nose, bringing on a sneeze. When I reached the back wall, my eyes landed on the section I was looking for, but there was only one book on the subject. The history of the gods. No wonder Kalen’s mother had sailed the seas to find information on what had happened back then if this was all that was available.
Shaking my head, I added the book to the others and backtracked to where Fenella was waiting for me. She swiped a cobweb from her hair. “Damn library never gets cleaned.”
“Why not?” I asked. “Kalen said this castle is fully staffed.”
“The library is hardly used, and the maidservants have their hands full with everything else. It’s not a priority.”
I frowned over my shoulder at the darkened stacks. It was beautiful just for being a library, but it could be so much more. With clean shelves and lights spilling through the space, or a hearth blazing in the corner with a cluster of chairs around it…I smiled as the image filled my mind.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Fenella said, “but there are too few people left in this part of the world for us to devote time and resources to running a library.”
“Books are the boards beneath our feet. Without them, we risk wading in mud.”
“And I suppose you’ll stick around to get the library up and running yourself?” she asked as she pushed the doors open for us.
I paused, my hand on the door. “I wish. But I don’t think that’s what fate has in store for me.”
“Hmm,” was all she said.
Fenella led me back to my chambers and told me that dinner would not be as lively of an affair as the morning’s meal, which was just as well with me. Even though I’d recovered from my ordeal at the Tower of Crones, exhaustion had returned, as if my body still bore the weight of that encounter. After leaving her in the corridor, I climbed into bed and cracked open the first book. It did not take long for the words to blur. Sleep soon welcomed me into its embrace.
