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“Not far,” he said easily. “A mile at most.”
Kerrigan nearly choked. A mile would have rendered him useless before becoming Daijan. Now, he managed it with ease. He wasn’t even breathing hard.
“Can we focus? I might have to jump you all out if it’s Vulsan.” He crossed his arms over his broad chest. “I haven’t worked with moving multiple people at once.”
“Slow down,” Vera said. “Let’s see who it is first before you get all dramatic.”
Fordham looked ready to argue with her when Keres’s voice came from outside. “We’re in the clear.”
His shoulders dropped with a sigh. Relief that it wasn’t the danger he had been anticipating. Kerrigan wanted to reach out and reassure him the way she had so many times, but he just took a step toward the door.
Keres strode in a moment later with a dusty Cleora and Danae behind her. “Our visitors have arrived.”
Cleora brushed off the shoulders of her cloak while Danae coughed around a mouthful of dust and waved at Kerrigan.
“We found something,” Danae said without preamble.
Cleora glared at the girl. “Danae.”
“Sorry. I’m allergic to something around here. Thought I would get to the point.”
“What did you find?” Kerrigan asked eagerly.
“Maybe nothing. It’s been incredibly difficult, wading through the magical volumes without alerting others to what we were specifically looking for,” Cleora said. “The cataloging at the academy is really a travesty. I should have someone reported for the idiocy of it all.”
“Cleora,” Keres said softly.
Cleora went silent and nodded. “My apologies. Not why we’re here. I’m sure none of you care about how card catalogs even work.”
“I have interest in that,” Vera said.
Cleora bowed deeply. “We’d be happy to have you come off the mountain and join the academy anytime you please.”
“Cleora,” Keres repeated. “Do you have information? We’ve been working with Kerrigan to see if we can ascertain what the problem seems to be, but we’ve gotten no further than that it isn’t a mental block or a binding, and neither of us has seen anything of its like.”
“Yes, yes,” Cleora said.
She reached into the leather pouch she had at her side and withdrew an old, crumbling book. The blue cover was tattered and barely legible. The pages were brown with age and torn across the edges. The binding looked as if it had been reattached more than once. As if at some point, the book had been meant to be preserved, but over time, it had been lost to the stacks of the academy.
“This was a stroke of luck,” Cleora said. She glanced at Danae begrudgingly. “Danae found it behind a much larger book.”
Danae beamed. “I didn’t know what it was. It didn’t even have a catalog number.”
“I’ve been painstakingly translating it into the common tongue.”
“What language is it in?” Keres asked.
Cleora sighed. “Ancient Alfheim.”
Fordham’s eyebrows rose. “Ancient Fae?”
Cleora nodded. “Indeed. It looks like one of their dead languages.”
“May I?” he asked, holding his hand out.
It looked like the last thing she wanted to do was give up her treasure, but reluctantly, she handed it over. Fordham cracked the binding carefully. He actually laughed when he looked inside. A noise she hadn’t heard in so long. His eyes finally slipped to Kerrigan’s.
“How rusty is your Ancient Fae?”
Kerrigan looked over his shoulder. Her eyes widened in shock. “That’s our Ancient Fae language.”
“You recognize it?” Cleora asked with excitement in her voice.
“It’s my native tongue,” he admitted. “My father believed that there was too much magic left in the ancient’s language to give it up for a more common tongue. So, I learned this first and common second. I admit, I haven’t had much use for it over the years.”
“Well, you have one today,” Keres said. “Even I don’t speak Ancient Alfheim.”
“Does this mean that Alfheim and Alandria are connected?” Fordham asked slowly. “Could our people have come from here?”
Keres sighed. “Much of Alfheim was lost in the wars. To that, I’m sorry, I don’t know.”
Vera raised her hands. “I was a child during the war and left before it ended. I know little about Fae here or there. Only the Leifs of Emporia.”
Fordham nodded resolutely. “Which page is it? I can do a full translation, if you’d like.”
Cleora took the book back and opened to a page near the middle. “I got as far as magic restoration and decided I needed to show you this in person.”
“Thank you,” Keres said. “We were going to come to you in a day or two if we hadn’t heard anything.”
Cleora flushed. “It is a great privilege to be able to help.”
“We should copy out the translation,” Vera said.
“I can do it,” Danae said, jumping to be included.
Vera went with Danae in search of paper and set her up at the table. Fordham sank into the seat next to her and began to read aloud from the old, smudged book. It was a slow process. Even with him fluent in the language, there were discrepancies between what Fordham had learned as a child and what someone who had lived when Ancient Alfheim was common.
