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“The library at Fanghelm, perhaps. If there was anything at the observatory, I’d have found it years ago. Maybe in Books of All Things. But, Tyr—”
“Time is the one thing we don’t have,” he said quickly. “I’ll go into the village, into Books,and see what I can find. I’ll open every volume, shake out every page if I have to. You need to go home, to Fanghelm, and do the same. But Ana...” He reached for her face and cradled it in his hands. “I need to know you’re protected. Ludya. Grigor. Whoever else you can trust. Enlist them to keep you safe, until we’re together again. We meet back at my cabin at midnight, no matterwhatwe have or have not found.”
Ana tore away and turned her eyes on the ground. She pulled in a deep breath and released it, then again as a violent wave of nausea took hold. It had come on about a week ago and was worsening by the day. “Yes. All right. Midnight?”
“Midnight.” He crushed his lips to hers. “Volemthe.”
“Volemthe.” She didn’t tell him Mortain was there too, a whisper of death. He was always there—and always would be if she could not find a way to be rid of him.
And she must, for the kyschun and kyschuna had affirmed that the future of the Wynters was hers to sacrifice or save. The very thing she’d been fighting to protect all along hinged upon her own survival, changing everything.
“Midnight,” he said once more when she broke off for Fanghelm. “There is an answer. I believe it in my bones. We just have to find it.”
“Then we will,” Ana said. “Oh, and Tyreste... You’ll need a code if you want the scholar to grant you access.” She gave it to him.
Tyreste nodded and headed down the road into town.
Her smile died the moment he turned toward the village.
Ana rushed to a patch of bushes and retched.
Chapter25
Look to the Skies at Dusk
Tyr nudged his shoulder against the weighty entrance to Books of All Things.A series of bells went off in a shimmer of tinkles. Scholar Haldyr looked up from the tall, ominous counter—carved from a massive amount of ebony wood from the Great Darkwood—blinking dramatically as though the only light he’d seen in days was from the half-burnt candles huddled around the bulging tome he was reading. His spectacles slid to the tip of his nose as he cast a dark, suspicious eye on Tyr’s arrival.
“Hej, Scholar Haldyr, kahk si?” Tyr asked, giving the desk a wider berth than felt reasonable. The man had to be nearing a hundred years old.
Haldyr’s nose twitched at Tyr’s atrocious pronunciations. “Do I know you?” The man didn’t speak the words; he culled them, as though they’d been burned onto his tongue and needed excision.
“I’m here on behalf of Stewardess Anastazja Wynter,” Tyr said, with a cough in the middle, in case the scholar didn’t realize how unnerved he was. He glanced around at the endless rows of bookshelves with a pang of nostalgia for the days when he had so many works at his own disposal.
“Hmm.” The scholar slid his spectacles to the bridge of his nose and narrowed his eyes. “You’re no Wynter.” He sniffed. “Nor Vjestik.”
“You cansmellthat?” Tyr felt immediately foolish for asking. The man was clearly deriding him.
“What business have you undertaken for Miss Wynter?”
Tyr, not totally convinced Haldyrhadn’tsniffed out his foreign-ness, decided a lie would get him thrown out. But so would the truth. “She has sent me to study any books or papers written by her ancestors. Or... ones her ancestors took a particular interest in.”
Haldyr’s expression thinned to a dry grin. “Well, that would be all of them,stranjak, wouldn’t it?”
Tyr balked at stranjak, but at least he hadn’t said uljez, the slur many Vjestik still used for outsiders. “Of course, but—”
“Unless you have a more specific request for me to entertain...” The scholar gestured his robed arms around. “You can see I am quite busy.”
Tyr didn’t need to turn around to recall the place was empty. “I won’t require your aid beyond pointing me in the right direction. I can take it from there.”
Haldyr folded his wrinkled hands atop the desk and waited. Tyr, flummoxed, was lost for words, until he remembered what Ana had told him just before she’d broken off for Fanghelm.
Sceptre of Ilynglass.
Tyr coughed. “I, uh... Yeah, uh, Sceptre of Ilynglass?”
The old scholar’s brows shot up in a flash, widening his eyes to saucers. “Well then, stranjak. You must know a great many secrets you should not, but my charge does not involve the solving of such salacious conundrums. Follow me.”
The scholar shuffled out from behind the tall counter, his head down and his hands straight at his sides, as he moved toward the back left corner of the rows of shelves. He stopped and ran a bony finger across a line of books, before tapping three times on one with a blue spine.
